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Karly, Charlie, and I got back from St. Louis—home of the country's second largest Mardi Gras celebration, or so I've heard—around 7:30 last night, and dropped right back into the same old groove.

But: Just 48 slim hours ago, I was sipping whiskey on street corners in the neighborhood of Soulard, watching drunken Missourians float down Broadway on the flatbeds of four-wheel parties, flinging beads through the air and caution to the wind. Red-capped, paunch-laden, beer-guzzling parade watchers shouting up to women, balancing, drunken, on balconies and the sills of second-floor windows: "Show us your tits!"

The tits are then shown: Beads. Flashbulbs. Shouting. Fighting. Blood. An ambulance struggles, lights flashing and siren blaring, to clear a path through the throng, inching some anonymous, shaking, vomit-covered partier toward a downtown hospital and a stomach pump.

Massive speakers pump classic rock into intersections joining G-rap and techno, swirling into some undecipherable, syncopated melody with birds flying and caps popping and thump-wikka-thump-wikka-thump-wikka-thump. Policemen stand there, laughing sometimes. It's all a lot of fun.

"I like this place," I can remember thinking.

Seeing Joe and all of his Gorlock pals down at Webster was swell. It was great just hanging out, listening to Ben Folds and Nick Drake, playing Cranium with really good, interesting people, none of whom, aside from my broseph Joseph, I'd ever even met before. I know exactly why Joe loves it there.