My other friend had not emailed the Rampaging Drunk Elephant in ages, and it was not because my other friend didn’t have a lot on her mind to email about so much as because the confluence of being busy or busy-ish most of the time, overcome with a sort of inchoate lame worry a lot of the rest of the time and then having trouble working out a way to be articulate without seeming to try too much to be articulate had combined to keep her from getting a lot done generally, and from expressing herself amusingly about the issues of the day in particular.

Maybe you know the feeling.

The Rampaging Drunk Elephant failed to notice the lack of correspondence, being too busy with his rampaging, and especially with feeling the euphoric fizz of being a wreck by half-past ten and sneaking alcoholic beverages into semi-public spaces and then going on about having “had a few.” And then knocking over buildings.

I last saw the Rampaging Drunk Elephant and my other friend when we were all at that party that time. When I arrived the Rampaging Drunk Elephant was trying to explain to people who may or may not have begun to feel somewhat trapped that the lessons from “James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” seemed to him to make a kind of foundational aesthetic for most relatively good modern western adventure fiction, and that while he, the Rampaging Drunk Elephant, could appreciate and really enjoy the kind of elaborate and realistic constructions you get from that kind of writing, in the end it seems to him to get a little suffocating and makes him especially fond of things like anime and The Scarlet Pimpernel and other works that deviate from the standard of semi-plausibility. I think his actual sentence was somewhat longer than that, and it looked like he had begun to feel that it wasn’t going over, but another cask of rum, broken with a tusk and hoisted, relieved that and some other worries.

Later on in the party my other friend and I were standing in the archway. The Rampaging Drunk Elephant was rampaging in our direction, the evening’s unsteady roll transforming his feeling of something else having gone at least slightly socially wrong into the more exciting feeling that it might be pretty rad to climb on something. I think just before that he had been bellowing something about atheists.

At that moment, all we could really do was look around and wonder: who are these people? What is this place? The kitchen, which will be again in the morning a kitchen, only filled with wine-stained mason jars, is now a dynamic venue for all your feelings, although photographs taken in the moment will only represent this as a kind of harshly-lit banality of grimacing. The living room is magic. Somewhere a bunch of people are having a bunch of excruciatingly awesome cigarettes.

Afterwards I could not remember if I had learned anything, but I had a dull sense that my life would be greatly improved if I could remember the name of the band someone had told me to look up.