I just remembered how one time at camp a bunch of us gathered a circle of canvas chairs around someone's tent and sat around having a mid-afternoon drink and a chat. Somebody had a boombox and I guess the batteries for it, so I got there first and flipped through my available music and finally put on a Marlene Dietrich CD. It was from a 2-disc set actually called "Cocktail Hour," maybe it was a series, and it had all these terrible cartoony pink drawings of lipsticks and sassy microphones on the faces of the CDs. It was funny, how it was a bright clear day in the woods and we were a bunch of anarchopunk-flavored kids in foldy chairs and Marlene, high-femme foreign archetype that she is, fit in so smoothly. I envy her that. Somebody said it was good music for our cocktail hour, and I felt satisfied. Classy as shit, I know: drinkin' in the woods, queer Germans of times gone by.

Anyway, I am going through all the old CDs I can find and putting them on my new computer so as to banish their physical selves to some far reach of the attic or under-bed, and I came upon that set, which makes me stop and think, How recently have I considered this "my CD collection"? I mean, it's got Beck and shit, and we haven't talked for some time now, whereas Marlene and I are on intimate terms these days. I think I dozed off and missed my connection, is all.

I remember at camp that time, we were all drinking soda or juice drinks from a cooler we desperately kept filled with bags of ice from town, mixed with flavored vodka or whatever it was. Probably flavored vodka, I can't imagine anything cool being there. Somebody had a frosted bottle of something reddish. After Shock? Is that the name? And it had a violent cinnamon flavor, and I remember we all passed it around to try and made various faces and moved on. The person who brought it seemed shy, and this was a way to break the ice. It was still daylight, not too warm, and what a nice memory it makes. I don't remember; we probably talked about music or social justice or something.