Exhibit 18.1

Houston Notes

* The Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel next door are fantastic. The Menil is mostly modern & surrealist art with some antiquities and smatterings of medieval art thrown in for fun. And it is fun. Just a good, lively museum. The Rothko Chapel and its Broken Obelisk go without saying. You can pick up the primary text of just about any religion and read it in a very self-conscious art/meditation space. Somehow it works. I was this close to becoming a Hare Krishna. Instead I decided that I'll try to follow professional soccer.



* Conversation with Rental Car Guy

Rental Car Guy: Wow. This car has cruise control. Lucky you.
Me: Um, great.
Rental Car Guy: Where are you headed?
Me: Downtown.
Rental Car Guy: Oh, nevermind. You won't need it. Sorry. Didn't mean to get you excited.
Me: It's okay. [sighs/collects confetti from asphalt]

* He was right. I did not use the cruise control. I don't know if there's a way to set the cruise control for intermittent periods of 80 miles per hour followed by 15 minutes of not moving at all. Driving in Houston was actually sort of fun. It allowed me to break out my Michael-Rooker-in-Days-of-Thunder face as I swerved around SUVs in my Nissan Versa. Good times.

* Okay, I didn't decide to follow professional soccer. My apologies to everyone at Borussia Dortmund FC. Didn't mean to get you excited.

* The first song that came on my iPod as I waited for my plane out was Tom Waits's "Fannin Street." I had a moment where I got to wonder if it was about the street I was driving on yesterday before the first line, There's a crooked street in Houston town. That pretty much settled it.

* That is weird though, right? Maybe I should believe in Tom Waits. Previously, I've been a bit of an agnostic about his existence. Fossil records do suggest that Rod Stewart wrote "Downtown Train."

* So I liked Houston as a city except for this one thing: the light rail. It almost hit me twice, once when driving, once when wandering around downtown. I'm willing to concede both times were my fault--in that I was walking/driving in a place near the light rail--but there seems to be an awful lot of chaos created by this one train that runs in a seven mile straight line. I can't even imagine the set of circumstances that would lead me to actually get on it.

* I read the new piece up at Bear Parade in my hotel room on Friday. You should read it too. You'll like it. Unless you're Lydia Davis. Then you'll probably have very complicated feelings about it.

* Many thanks to Ryan and Laura and Gene and anyone else who humored me as I told them things they already knew about the light rail. Had a great time.