Hunter S. Thompson can die now

We have found his replacement.

Every Winter in Minnesota, 5 or 6 consecutive Friday nights of just ending up somewhere pile up on each other, into one King Hell bitch of a Friday, where a man is forced to make choices, not knowing whether the inevitably poor quality of those choices will haunt him at some odd hour, say 4am on Saturday morning, when he should have been in bed long ago, but is instead standing in a room where he's never been, with people he doesn't know, witnessing things he's only read about in books and seen between 40 minutes and 45 minutes past the hour on "VH1: Behind the Music."

That's Jack Sparks. If you like music you should be reading The Other Side of Country.

I have to thank Scott Chaffin for the pointer. And, by the way, Scott is bucking to be our Kerouac:

Here's how I'm gonna get rich -- I'm gonna organize 3-person trips to Minneapolis, and I'm gonna shove 'em in the truck, and I'm gonna drive them all the way there from Dullass, and we're gonna listen to two of my CDs for every one of theirs, and we're gonna get there early enough for everyone to have a nap, and we're gonna pick Jack up at his house, and we're gonna drink while driving and smoke Marlboro reds, and we're just gonna go and do whatever Jack says.