How I love my sweet new ride, with its sleek lines and functional rear windshield wiper. It’s vastly superior to my previous ride, the Goldy P. All weekend, I did little but cruise and cruise from the laundromat to the grocery store, luxuriating on the leather seats and listening to Serge Gainsbourg on the CD player, which works—another area of superiority to my previous ride. Yes, it is smooth as whipped cream cheese, my lovely black Volvo 940 wagon of love.

The opening line of “Histoire de Melody Nelson,” the Gainsbourg CD I played on endless repeat, whispers, over a slinky bass line, “The wings of the Rolls skimmed the pylons…” or something like that; it’s in French, but I think that’s what it says. Listening to it, I easily envisioned a silver hood ornament flying ahead of me as I negotiated the curves in the supermarket parking lot, imagining myself as a devastating French degenerate on my way to an impromptu tryst with an underaged girl. Such is the power of my new ride. Amen, amen.

I named my new car Inky, after a lanky and affectionate black kitten I once came across and also named Inky, rather than in reference to the ink in my fountain pen, which is chocolate brown. If this past weekend is any indication, then I foresee great things for me and Inky.

Inky and I went to our first meeting of a book club on Saturday, an assembly characterized by the common traits of hangovers and varying degrees of haven’t-read-the-book-ness. As you might imagine, I fit right in. The book we failed to read was A Million Little Pieces, and as I didn’t read it, I was forced to guess at its plot during the discussion. My oral report, in which I glibly described a book closer to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory than (as I later learned) the semi-fictional memoir of a drug addict, garnered much attention but little praise, and we were forced to move on to the next item on the agenda which was: Finding a name for my band.

The list of names was, I report, disappointing, and ranged from Lesbian Spank Inferno to Renee and the Tit-Grabbers. I was mollified by the giant vat of Mimosas on hand, but left without a suitable suggestion, a situation that will soon become untenable, as evidenced by the phone call I got from Anthony just as I was leaving the book club.

He called from the brewery where he and his fiancee Lara work, to tell me that a film crew was there getting footage for a reality series on microbreweries. “Yeah, it’s slightly weird,” he said over the clanking of the bottling machine in the background, “they’ve been following us around all day.” The footage is for a pilot, he said, which will be pitched to a cable network. The upshot of his call was that the film crew wanted to get some footage of the band, and could I come down to the brewery. His timing was perfect—I had nothing but errands on the docket, and several Mimosas under my belt.

Sadly, the shoot was postponed until Friday, which means that I have several days to contemplate important issues like wardrobe and oh, I don’t know, lack of overall singing ability. It’s perfect. By the time they’re ready to film me, I’ll be a complete neurotic geek, wearing a bathrobe over a stolen mink coat, mismatched false eyelashes hanging at odd angles, chain-smoking Mores and gibbering like Charo.

To disabuse myself of that notion, I spoke to my friend Al Perry, who gave me this advice: Get over yourself. I paraphrase, but that was the essence, and he delivered it with such casual certainty that I was forced to see his wisdom. He reminded me, not unkindly, that this proposed show on breweries by definition is not focused primarily on me, and at most, I might appear for two seconds in a segment that’s part of a larger work, if it airs at all.

“But I don’t feel ready,” I told him. “I’m concerned that I’m totally unprepared to perform in public.” I heard a slight laugh on the other end of the phone, so I pressed him. “Do you ever play a gig where you feel just totally unprepared?” He laughed again, and said, “Seven times a week. I never feel prepared.”

One of the problems connected to addiction is that abandoning the drug creates a void. My self-consciousness being what it is—a time-consuming addiction—would create its own void, were I to abandon it. Sometimes I think I hang onto it because I can’t imagine what would take its place.

Star of the day. . .Cool Beth