I was thinking today about one of the Keelhauler's primary irritating friends, a guy I'll call Ricky. Ricky is not, on the surface, a bad guy, but he has an ability to wear through good humor and hospitality like no one I've ever seen, largely due to his inability to stop talking, and the fact that his conversation invariably centers on himself. Whatever anyone has accomplished, Ricky has accomplished it ten-fold, and with the assistance of many famous people whose names he is happy to drop. Despite this, he has nothing to show for it, always needs a ride, and never picks up a check. And on top of that, when you do give in and give him a ride at 10:30 at night when he is drunk and on a mission to reconcile with his stupid blonde geek girlfriend you can't stand, he will find fault with your car and laugh about it the whole way. "Ha ha ha... need shocks much?" he will say, laughing and drinking your last beer, which you purposely hid from him. "Don't you keep an opener in the glove compartment? Jeez! Everybody knows you're supposed to keep a bottle opener in the glove compartment! Huh huh huh."

He has other talents--playing the guitar, small engine repair (I guess), and a capacity for memorizing large sections of dialogue. It's not that he is uninteresting, but I don't much enjoy spontaneous recitations of entire scenes from "Dr. Strangelove" --a movie that strikes me as a joke being carefully and repeatedly explained by a series of people who aren't listening to your protests that you've already heard that one. At any rate, he does like to recite scenes from various movies, and once did so while I was trying to show a boat for sale to a prospective customer. Perhaps the guy wasn't a fan of "Being There," because the sale did not go through.

Ricky drops out of sight from time to time, but periodically calls the Keelhauler to leave cryptic messages as to his whereabouts. Most recently, he called and explained, with great emotion, that he'd disappeared due to some trouble he'd been in. He claimed that he'd received a windfall inheritance, and foolishly fallen in with "some Colombians" who then turned on him--something about a drug deal gone awry. He had woken up, he claimed, unable to move, and recognized the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning, from which he was now recovering while he hid out at an undisclosed location. The fact that he called from his usual cell phone did not initially strike the Keelhauler as perhaps contradictory to the secret nature of Ricky's situation, but it set off my bullshit detector. Besides, I always associated Colombian druglords with "execution-style" murders, rather than long-term, boring poisoning endeavors.

It is one of my foremost irritations with the Keelhauler that he tolerates and even enjoys Ricky's company. I have a strict zero-tolerance policy on crazy people, partly because my dance card is already full of people I'm related to by blood. I don't have time for wild, emotional stories with no basis in fact (unless they are my own, of course) but the Keelhauler seems to have infinite patience for Ricky's brand of hysteria. Those of you tempted to draw parallels between me and Ricky may stop at this time.

At any rate, I was thinking about Ricky because I remembered a phone call I got from him about this time of year a couple of years ago. He was calling from a bar in San Francisco. It's not always easy to determine the reason for a call from Ricky, and this call was no different. I believe that his stated premise was to inquire about the lineup of a certain band--Wilco, or Uncle Tupelo, or something--but almost immediately, Ricky segued into his latest adventure--his ability to sense omens.

It seems that just moments before he called me, he had gotten "a feeling," and warned those around him, "BEWARE. THE IDES OF MARCH HAVE COME EARLY." Moments later, he claimed, his wallet had been stolen.

I thought about explaining to him that the ides of any month cannot come early. The "ides" are specifically the 15th day (or the 13th, for certain months), but they're not something that float about, surprising us by popping up at different times, like Easter does. But it didn't matter, really--I was splitting hairs anyway, because I knew what he meant. He meant, "I AM A MYSTICAL BEING!" which I was not thoroughly prepared to accept.

Growing up with parents who considered themselves in literal conversation with God has stripped me of any tolerance for magical thinking.

You know: in others.

Star of the day. . .Alan Watts