JG says he has been going through a ravenous reading spell of late, and brought his latest batch of books he's ripping through along with him on the road. I did most of the driving. He's not the best with a manual transmission, much preferring an automatic, which he believes better suits his aristocratic bearing. Some of the titles I saw: Hitch-22 (a memoir by the late Christopher Hitchens); The Quantum and the Lotus (something to do with physics and buddhism); the poems of Emily Dickinson; Between Parentheses (essays by Roberto Bolano); and Reader's Block (a novel he would occasionally read excerpts from) by David Markson. Excerpts such as:

From Rabelais' will: I have nothing. I owe much. The rest I leave to the poor. Or:

We do not come to thoughts. They come to us. Thought Heidegger. Or:

Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. Or:

For forty-some years, Valery awoke at 5AM to make notes on what he thought of as the dawning of consciousness. Or:

You wanna walk in a parade? Everybody's lonely.

Otherwise we'd listen to music, on radio or disc. For radio, the three song rule applied, which states: if three disagreeable songs are played in a row, you have to change the station. All parties need to be in agreement. And so we ended changing the station a lot. The Basement Tapes and Blood on the Tracks were two of the more preferable discs that got spun, often suiting the setting. Still, there's something to be said nonetheless for combining the Wu-Tang Clan with the Canberra countryside. Beguiling juxtapositions would seem to be the only hope for that part of the world.

Then you find yourself exchanging alternate Bob Dylan song titles, where you replace a word with the word pussy. So before you know it you have:

Tangled up in pussy,
Simple twist of pussy,
Shelter from the pussy,
Buckets of pussy,
Million dollar pussy,
Tears of pussy,
Apple suckling pussy,
Knocking on heaven's pussy,
Gates of pussy,
Let me die in my pussy,
Pussy in the wind,
With pussy on our side,
Pussy farm,
Rainy day pussy,
Absolutely sweet pussy,
Temporary like pussy,
Sad-eyed pussy of the lowlands,
Like a rolling pussy,
Stuck inside of pussy with the memphis blues again,
Wedding pussy,
The pussy's still waiting at the altar,
Gotta serve pussy,
Neighbourhood pussy,
Everything is pussy,
Pussy in the long black coat,
Pussy of conceit,
Trying to get to heaven before they close the pussy, or Trying to get to pussy before they close the door

and so on. The road just flew by. And then it went very silent for a while, you could just hear the car and the cars that passed, and that undeniable sense of loneliness under the surface of everything, until JG said: Pussissippi?