(originally published in the San Francisco Examiner’s Image Magazine, March 9,1986)

You can rue your run-of-the-mill roistering, and you can deplore your garden-variety dipsomania, but, my God, forget it, in present company the terms hardly apply. This Batso here has carved out a whole new order of magnitude in the hierarchy of riotous behavior. If Bacchus ever had a proper running mate, he sits across from me in this window booth right now. Another carafe, Batso? Why not? That makes, let’s see…oh, hell, who’s counting? Who can count at this point?

Warren J. “Batso” Harding throws a lopsided grin in my direction. “God, isn’t this fun?” he screeches in his high-register Dr. Demento voice. “I am having sooooo much fun, you just can’t imagine.”

Oh, yes I can, Batso, you madcap little renegade you. I know more than you think about your careening lifelong pursuit of skewed amusement. And, moreover, I’ve been sitting here these many hours in this bar in Poker Flat watching as you have systematically poured a full gallon of this truly awful box wine into your wracked and scarred little body. I’m happy that you’re enjoying yourself, but, really, what else is new? On your worst fur-tongued hungover day you could always find more fun than six monkeys on a Moped, and there’s certainly no reason to stop the party now, even for a fellow of the advanced age of – as you succinctly put it – sixty-one point five-five.

It’s just that you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that your idea of a good time should be taken, you know, seriously. I mean, let’s face it, you’re the guy who spent 27 straight days on El Cap back in the fall of 1970 making the first grueling ascent of the Wall of the Early Morning Light. Is that what you call fun? Inching your way up 3,400 feet of the sheerest, blankest, most terrifying rock on the continent, banging bolts all day until your arms went dead, then hanging like a bat from the wall at night in every kind of foul weather? All the while watching the leaves in the valley below turn from lush green to brilliant gold before finally dropping to the ground from the cold?