E5: Backdoor Bette Breaking Wind (Beneath My Wings); S13: Working Shit Out B4 THC (Is that really possible?)

An extemporaneous monologue, except when it isn’t. A walk home from work becomes an argument with moral distress, THC, AI narration, editing, and the suspicion that what feels like reality may only be the culture currently surrounding you.Then Bette Midler appears—or, more precisely, the Bette Midler who performed beside a piano at the Continental Baths before the wider world decided she belonged to it. The bathhouse matters here not as a charming origin story, but as evidence: places dismissed as marginal may already be producing the center.There are offshoots involving Barry Manilow, The Rose, Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2,” clickbait, the Stork, and the increasingly questionable meaning of “extemporaneous” once transcription, revision, and a synthetic voice become involved. The seams are left visible.This may be about working shit out before THC. It may be about whether that distinction is even as clear as it sounds.