Even with the pleasant weather, and the drunken laughs and friendly smiles, there is the unease. There is that thing permanently twisted - has been for years - always making itself known as you ascend (for brief periods anyway) in your cups or pulling on your "funny cigarette" , using whatever tools are available to raise your spirits, there is always that inner disturbance to put a cap on the party. It is the amoeba that you can never shit out. You carry that baby in your head for good, your traveling companion, your invisible tumor.

Yes, you've been bent somewhere, man of the many smiles; something wrenched you from your correct posture somewhere along in the ordeal; it was probably an accumulation of knowledge, things experienced when you were vulnerable (leading to those many nights when still wide awake in the early morning hours, the only voices inside your head), and perhaps taken advantage of.

Call it experience, yes, and years of it. And you wonder if it has made you a better man. You've become better at hiding that twisted man, that sense of being forever out of step with the majority, the inability to dance with the commonly accepted. You know how to put on the face without much effort, and most people are fooled. Sometimes it is so easy that you'd just like to show them a glimpse of what's underneath, to let them know that, at times, you have truly felt things, at times you couldn't summon a smile so quickly, at times you wanted nothing more than to go to sleep for good.

But you've learned to close those windows in your eyes. Give the people what they want. Be quick with thehandshake and the laugh, and how can you fail to succeed? You're everybody's pal.