My friend Jessica Bassett told me that she had a spare ticket to see Dwight Yokakam yesterday night, and wanted to know if I wanted to go. This is evidence to support one of my hypothesis that I would love to be true — that life runs in a series of themes, sometimes subtle, sometimes not. This was one of the not-so-subtle times: my recent voracious reading of boys’ adventure fiction of the 19th century had led to voracious reading of adventure fiction in general, and so to Westerns; I’d just finished reading two Zane Grey books, (tip to the reader; don’t read two Zane Grey books back to back), which led to the purchase of a pair of ranchhand’s barbed-wire-handling elkskin gloves for my motorcycle, which led to going to go see a country singer belt out a song called “yippie kie-yay, yippie cow cow cow”.

Of course, the country singer was from Kentucky by way of California, there were only about three cowboy hats in the room (the rest seemed to be a mixture of subdued couples from Jersey and enthusiastic non-butch lesbians), and the opening singer who delivered the yodeling song quoted above had moussed hair and a big-collared shirt straight outta the N’Sync Wardrobe Manual. So if the theme of this past week was the Wild West, maybe the theme for the next week and a half will be Big Collars or something.