The annual confluence continues: three rivers, five of a trio, jetsam washed up on a porch in the Paris of Appalachia.

Waving our arms and shuffling our feet, we carry on these festivities with the monkey beat. We get lucky and score a nice cabin to fart around in. We don’t really age - we’re trapped in younger minds and adolescent dynamics.

We drive to the diner and talk, listen to the radio, make dumb jokes, list our ailments, and then plonk it all out into hardly-crafted songs made with local ingredients:

• 1 arbor of cherries
• 1½ dump truck loads of dune sand
• 2 sleeping bears
• 4 casks choppy lake water

So, like abstract visual art, anyone can do it but not many do. Lock yourself in a house for 24 hours and see if you and your dumbass friends write any songs. Constraints are constraints, even if they’re arbitrary.

There’s no time to get things right. Internet’s spotty, and lyric files crisscross with guitar tracks in cyberspace. A soprano sax reed is not quite conditioned by saliva. Somebody’s cranky. Somebody’s high. Somebody’s not feelin’ it.

But we get the songs we deserve and the band remains the same.