they didn’t survive the long winter of the shutdown. And six-pound pints were a hard sell in this patch, the thirsty earners drift into the capital. But I had some good hours in there, talking books and other abstractions. Are those moments preserved somewhere, other than the unreliable memory cells of the extant topers? Are they played out over and over, with the audience trying to bite down the yawns? Or lost along the track somewhere in the gaping night, a torn ticket flicked from the carriage window.