- In 1994 I was walking my dog down a sidewalk when I spied in a car a man who may or may not have been the now famous Billy Bob Thornton. At the time, he was not famous. He had done several films by this point in his now illustrious career, including but not limited to: Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (with Martha Quinn) and Indecent Proposal (as Day Tripper). But his fame had not yet reached those of us who only know the names that appear in People magazine. This was before the internet. I was 14 years old.
- It wasn't Billy Bob Thornton. On that day, it turns out, he was in a small town doing heroin with the daughter of an extraordinarily inept but nevertheless important producer. He was 39 years old. The daughter was 17. She told Billy she was 22.
- It may be the case that Billy Bob Thornton has never done heroin. But he did on that day. It might also be the case that he never met the daughter of the incredibly inept but nevertheless exceedingly important film and stage producer. And yet, on that day, he did. And while it was not him in that car that day, it might have been, and given a certain perspective, might have been is good enough.
- The small town was in Nevada, and somehow, still is. It consists of: 50 shops. These shops range from a grocery store which maintains its charm by not having many name brand goods, inconveniently so, for the locals who could give a fuck, all the way up to an actual haberdashery where Billy Bob Thornton did not buy the heroin he did not use that day. The town survives by the tourists who come through on their way to the industry where virtually everyone in the town who does not work in the town works. Apparently, watching machinery is good enough reason to buy ice cream, coins, inexpensive jewelry, authentic imitation Indian rugs, and locally constructed model windmills.
- It should be noted that just now I tried to type "ice cream cones" but ended up typing "ice cream coins" instead. So I inserted a comma. Because they have a coin shop there too. It also sells stamps.
- My dog is a Labrador mix. One Labrador engaged in an act of procreation with another Labrador, but these two Labradors were not of the same Labradoreness. This is the closest equivalent dogs will ever have to the sort of cross-breeding we humans derisively label as a "mixed marriage." There is greater genetic difference between a labrador and a collie than there is between a man who has much melanin in his skin and who traces his ancestry to Africa and a woman who has much less melanin in her skin who traces her ancestry to Africa too, but takes much much much longer to do so.
 This is a picture of Billy Bob Thornton. Notice the chiseled jaw. Notice the plunging neck line. Notice the hat, made by honest to goodness serfs in the Loire Valley of France. Honest. Marie Antoinette started a small village in her backyard with real peasants who made real cheese and real heroin and she would go there and hang out with them so she could feel what it was like. This was as close as she would ever come to a video game. An excruciatingly dull and utterly fantastically mind-numbingly simple video game. Notice the twinkle in his eye. Billy Bob Thornton was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which is ostensibly a retirement community, but also sells diamonds.
- When I was 14 years old, everything was great. My dog's name was Ranger. The sidewalks on which we walked were always clean and straight. He rarely shat. Somehow, he ate, and he ate, and he ate some more, and then he slept, and then sometimes I walked him, which was great, and the sidewalks, long, clean, straight, were also as white as the inside of a virgin's thigh but a whole lot harder and not nearly as tasty.
- Or so I learned when I was knocked to the ground not four milliseconds after seeing not Billy Bob Thornton who was not in a small town doing not heroin without a certain producer's daughter that day.
- It was more like 5 milliseconds, or maybe three. It's hard to judge. Certainly the time between photons having bounced from his face entering my eye and the close proximity of atoms in my face with those in the telephone pole causing said atoms to set up a shock wave of magnetic resistance forcing my body to move in an uncontrolled fashion in the opposite direction from that at which, controlled, but not observed, it had been moving, was much much longer than any number of milliseconds where the use of the prefix meaning "one thousandth" is still useful. But at some point, the action had to have started occurring, and rather than glibly point out that I was destined to hit the ground once the sufficient conditions of my a) heading for the pole and b) being distracted by Billy Bob Thornton's face, I thought I just say it started when I hit the pole. To further complicate the matter, it is not easy to say exactly when I even saw him, for although there was an exact instant when photons bouncing from face entered my eye, since it wasn't him afterall, we have to wonder if it is such photons which trigger the state "see him" since he isn't him (to see) anyway.
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