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Why is marijuana the only drug that leads to the fetishization and aestheticization of paraphernalia? Junkies don’t keep around hand-crocheted red-gold-’n'-green tie-off belts. Cokeheads don’t carry around tie-dye-colored blown glass snorting tubes. Methheads are far more likely to chase the dragon from a lightbulb than a $500 vaporizer they ordered direct from the Netherlands off the Internet. And no crackhead has ever collected enough pipes to fill a display case – and of the pipes they do have, not a single one has ever been named after a Hobbit.

Clearly, there’s a missed opportunity for merchandising here. Imagine, whatever mysterious company markets this shit: a junkie cooks a hit in his trusty spoon, and smiling out at him from beneath the bubbling black tar is the Grateful Dead teddy bear. Or Lou Reed’s face. The possibilities are endless!

I got a drink with a couple of friends tonight at the Spider House, a mildly-to-highly irritating Austin institution that serves as coffeeshop, restaurant, bar and hipster spawning ground in roughly equal measures. While trying to quietly get through my drink order (double espresso; Campari and soda), my line of sight was befouled by a pair of hipsters in pea coats, floppy haircuts, super-tight pants and extreme winklepicker shoes. And that’s when I made a terrible realization: hipsters, having exhausted the sartorial possibilities of the ’80s and ’70s, are turning into mods. The time to invest in Vespa is now – and that’s the only stock tip you’ll ever get around here.

But what truly frightens me is the possibility that once the hipsterati have, in their time-honored way, chewed up scooters, thin ties, and ska and spit them back out for the proles at Urban Outfitters and American Apparel, they will take the logical step backward in time, embrace the beat movement, and start pretending to like Charlie Parker. That is not okay with me. I love jazz. It is far too excellent to become 2009′s James Taylor mustache.

The only bright side, of course, is that eventually they’ll move on to swing dancing and ironic appreciations of Glenn Miller, and then I won’t have to care anymore.

How does a notably irreligious Jew wind up at the St. Mary’s Catholic Church Christmas barbecue dinner/country-western dance in a podunk Texas hills small town?

Extreme boredom, and a familially-obligated roommate who didn’t want to go alone.

I got to sit at the same table as the monsignor, a silent and wizened husk of a man in what appeared to be a Cowboys bib under his suit. I tried to keep my Star of David and the incipient flames of hellfire beginning to lick at my damned feet a secret, since I really wanted some brisket.

Four things:

1) Despite the fact that this was a Catholic party – with actual Irish people – the “open bar” served only boxed wine (Franzia, white and blush) and canned beer (Bud Lite, Coors Lite, Miller Lite). I made friends with the putative bartender, who gave me a couple of stowed-away Shiners and admonished me not to tell anyone. Seriously: what the fuck is Catholicism for if not copious Jameson at church functions?

2) Mixed dancing at a religious function. I’d forgotten how the other half lives.

3) Seeing, for the first time ever, a circle of 50 white people doing the “Chicken Dance” in perfect unison is profoundly terrifying.

4) Naturally, there was only one thing running through my head the entire time:

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Thanks for the beef, Papists!

I’m too tired to write the post I intended to write, but I don’t want to break my stride, so I dug through some old pictures…

Meet Menashe Stefan. Hebrew name, given name; last name unknown. I came to know the lad during a brief stay on a kibbutz in the Arava Desert, a sun-blasted sliver of mostly lifeless land along the border with Jordan in Israel’s extreme far south. I only stayed a few days, but the emptiness, the stillness, the immutable landscape and the mind-bending 110 degree weather made those days stretch onward endlessly, seventeen hours of merciless July sunlight in which all one could do was slouch motionless beneath thatched awnings and smoke dessicated, seed-filled bushweed between feedings of industrial chow and weak tea in plastic mugs at the dining hall.

Menashe Stefan was a slightly unhinged Francophone Belgian with mildly dodgy English and extremely dodgy Hebrew, who spent the day among the cattle in the refet – a job he performed with such diligence that he one day stayed late stroking and whispering to a dying cow in order to ease its passing. But outside the refet, he listened to Israeli indie pop star Mook-E, earnestly attempted to share the secret knowledge gleaned from a small book of Bible codes with anybody willing to listen, and diligently wrote down extemporaneous French rap verses in a small notebook. “Michael,” he said, “you must help me write rap. I will write in French, and you will write rap in English. We will rap together.”

He has of course been photographed in his element, shirtless and laughing on one of the kibbutz’s thin, stained mattresses, indulging in, as Isaiah might say, some Arava blossoms.

Ultimately, I believe, the kibbutz expelled him for overindulging in the harvest – which was odd, since it was an extremely local product. Beyond that, though, I don’t know what became of him. So Menashe Stefan, if you are out there…hip-hop, et vous n’arrêtez pas.

And here’s a picture of the neighborhood:

What’s the Darwinian adaptive significance of the odd human ritual in which a group of two or more women unleash such brutal rancor on the personality, traits and past deeds of another woman mutually known to them that, were the target of their attacks actually present, she would doubtless cast herself off the nearest promontory – and then, once she has been thoroughly denounced and exposed as the stuck-up pretentious wanton whore bitch Grendel’s mother she is, why do they cap off the ritual by convincing themselves that, actually, she’s “nice”? How did that help us forage for berries and take down mammoths?

Also, what’s the deal with the stock market?!?! Am I right????

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Girl, I see you and your sensibly sexy haircut checkin’ out the carrots.

Beta carotene is good for your eyes, girl.

That shows that you are mad aware of the virtues of fine produce.

Mmm.

Girl, your forehead must be a duke and your chin must be a lady, because between them they got some aristocratic cheekbones.

Mmm.

Yeah.

Aww, no, baby. Don’t play like that.

Don’t you head towards that TV dinner and frozen pizza aisle.

Girl, don’t you do it.

A fine lady like you needs for only the freshest of fruits and vegetables, and meat products within reason.

Girl, let me make you some yellowfin nigiri. I’ll even tone down the wasabi, because I can tell you don’t dig spicy, but you are so fine that I’m willing to overlook that.

You already fillin’ those jeans rightly, ain’t no room for palm oil, potassium citrate and “cheese powder.”

But there is room for me.

Mmm.

Yeah.

Baby girl, you don’t run a Maserati on recycled restaurant oil, you feel me?

Aww, girl, what’d I say?

Shit.

Baby, I hope your daddy’s a cardiologist, because you just broke my heart.

For this unprecedented moment in our nation’s history, can there be any song more appropriate?

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Actually, yes, there can:

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Get on the good foot, Mr. President.

The hamlet in which I live was battered last night by a series of storms, bruising thunderheads igniting the day-bright sky with great incandescent arcs of violet lightning, hail paradiddling on the roof, rumbles of thunder luxuriantly crescendoing towards mighty percussive barrages that rattled the windows and doors.

What was my reaction to all this elemental bluster? To lie in bed, wide awake, in my pitch-black room, my increasingly concerned dog beside me, responding to every thunderclap by yelling “OOOOOOODDDDDIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNN!” and improvising beatboxed death metal riffs before losing it in a fit of cackles.

Then I had an idea for a teen sitcom called “Poe Boy” which concerns a high school Edgar Allen Poe and the social awkwardness caused by his inability to go anywhere without the weather immediately turning into a violent, ambience-fostering thunderstorm.

The mind, when steeped in hermitage, is a consistently surprising place.

Welcome to Soul and Gone.

Why “Soul and Gone?” Swing your lookers over to the About page.

Yes, some of you may be wondering why I let my former blog founder before ultimately scuttling it. A fair question, and one that I don’t really feel like entirely answering. I’ll let a far greater man do it for me:

“Dig…dig, we’d like to get something straight. We, um, we got tired of the Experience and every once in awhile, we was blowing our minds too much. So we decided to change the whole thing around…”

Sometimes we need a change of pace, and if that change happens to be constructed out of blocks of solid Deco, all the better. But it’s not just a new template; Soul and Gone is largely the result of a decision on my part to focus less on the Jewish world, to keep my toes out of the rivers of its online Babylon, so that I can redirect my energies toward pursuits that don’t make me want go all Europa, Europa on my circumcision. It’s not a renouncement of my identity or of Jewishness, far from it – it’s a renouncement of any facets of those things that can be associated with the horde of glibly empty websites saddled with one of those monikers in which the word “Jew” is clumsily welded to a random adjective. That shit is Jewxhausting.

What I’m saying is, gentiles, prepare to begin understanding my jokes.

And while I’m still figuring out what course to ultimately set this blog on, y’all can expect a focus on music, on food, on drink, on all the things, from cynicism to caipirinhas, that make a man want to swing ’round the sun once again. Get some gin and vermouth communicating, slap down a hot platter of Yardbird on the turntable, and get ready to get your soul gone.