Alcohol, Kurt Vonnegut, The Replacements, William Carlos Williams, Mad magazine, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Tom Waits, certain trees, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, continental drift, The Sex Pistols, weather, W.H. Auden, The Pixies, Jim Jarmusch, John Steinbeck, suburbia, The Suburbs, Seinfeld, Pavement, Hüsker Dü (the parlor game, not the band), caffeine, Guided by Voices, chemical imbalances, The Minutemen, Modest Mouse, the wheel, the internal combustion engine, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Dinosaur Jr., Frank Zappa, and last but not least: gravity.