Some trips are all about the journey. Other trips are all about the destination. Then, there are those trips that are all about coming home and kissing the floor because you’re so fucking happy to be back that you don’t care how much dog hair sticks to your lips. Last weekend I went to Albany to visit my grandparents in the nursing home, attend Rosh Hashannah services and take in a spontaneous funeral just for fun. Care to guess which type of trip this was? Like stepping over a dead cat on my way in to work, visiting Albany is a depressing and unsettling break in my routine. It’s an inconvenient but unavoidable opportunity to contemplate mortality, the fragility of life and all the other horrible shit that I don’t ever want to fucking think about. In fact, according to AllTheOtherHorribleShitThatIDontEverWantToFuckingThinkAbout.com, “mortality and the fragility of life” was ranked just below “picturing Jan Brewer having sex with her gardener and screaming ‘Ay, papi! punch a hole in that wall, and fill me with your anchor babies! There are 2 week old eggs up there with more civil rights than you could DREAM of!’” (her gardener was born and raised in Phoenix), but less horrible than “Mitt Romney ACTUALLY becoming the next US president” – which has been number one on the Horrible Shit list ever since replacing “Herman Cain ACTUALLY becoming the next US President”, which replaced “Michelle Bachman ACTUALLY becoming the next US President”, which replaced “Rick Perry ACTUALLY becoming the next US President”. Sigh.  I miss the Republican Primary debates. It was like watching the Heat play the Lakers and cheering for gruesome knee injuries (just as long as they’re all right for the next Olympics because I am a shameless Gold...

Jerry Garcia died the day I left Albany for good, August 9, 1995. In an apparent murder-suicide, he took my childhood with him. (NOTE TO MILLENNIAL FUCKWADS: I don’t want to hear how old you were in 1995. Whether you were in Middle School, Elementary School or Diapers, I don’t want to know about it. And wipe that patronizing “listening to Grampa Simpson tell his Lollapalooza Mosh-Pit Stories for the 10,000th Time” smirk off your soul-patched, hipster side-burned, weasely little face. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the suckers who showed up too late to the Great Global House Party of cheap gas, music videos and nuclear anxiety that was the 20th Century and arrived just in time to mop up the puke, save the polar bears, and recycle our empties to pay for healthcare. Have fun with that, kids. Hey- if you’re lucky, maybe you can scrape out a little resin ball of Contentment from the huge bowl of Prosperity we smoked last century. That was some gooooood shit.) Anyhow, I always felt like by dying right as I left my hometown for the Big City, that Jerry was looking out for me, protecting me from myself. It’s like he was saying: “Hey man, I know you’re moving to New York to follow your dreams and that’s groovy and all, but it’s going to suck major dog-balls for the first few years, so, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to go ahead and die That way, while you’re telemarketing credit cards to old people who can barely afford the minimum payment, or cleaning toilets in comedy clubs for stage time and tips, or getting turned down for that sweet job at Brookstone (fucking personality test- I was this close before they made...