"Cool… what is that?" Shaggy asked.

"Dunno. Just wrote it." I continued playing. I broke past the chorus, and into the bridge. "It doesn't have a name yet."

Suddenly, unprovoked, Shaggy broke into song. He improvised lyrics as I played. I'll be damned if they weren't good ones. Shaggy is a Renaissance Guy, too. I stopped playing and wrote them down.

"What are you doing?" He asked.

"Stealing your ideas. Keep going." I started playing again.

"I can't. It's gone."

"What? What's gone?"

"I dunno. I can't think of any more." Fuck. I swear Shaggy borders on autistic.

"Okeydokey. Check this out, then…" I played some more, and belted out some of my own lyrics.

We went back and forth like this for a few hours. We refined the songs. Shaggy grabbed his bass guitar and lay down funky, rolling bass lines for each tune. We fell into a song-writing groove that lasted well beyond a bottle and a half of gin, a small hedge of weed, and a sea of pizza.

The next day I awoke in the refuse of my own creativity. Looking around me, I slowly recalled the achievement at the end of the evening: the perfect song. We - Shaggy and I - had produced a musical work of such wonderment and awe, that there had been nothing imaginable left for us to do but vomit and pass out. Which, naturally, we did.

Sitting on the coffee table, scrawled on a crumpled, stained pizza box, was our Opus - our beautiful gift from The Muses. I scrambled for the phone, leaning on an uncapped, empty two litre bottle of Coke, and accidentally knocked over the ThunderBong. I dialled El Hombre at Lowbrow Aristocrats, while desperately trying to sop up the stinking bong water with some discarded napkins.

"Lowcrats." He answered.

"Hey, it's Flip." I abandoned my attempts to clean up after myself. "I gotta talk to you…"

"Shouldn't you be working on your column?" El Hombre interrupted. "You're already late." The Man is a tyrant. Sure, he's a lovable tyrant… but a tyrant nonetheless. God help you when you're late meeting deadlines. In my case, I've missed so many, I've had to turn to Satan.

"Yeah, sorry, sir. But I think I have something better…"

"Whaddayamean?" He was agitated. "'something better'… you better not be trying to weasel out of…"

"No, wait, sir. Shaggy and I wrote a song. A good song. A great song. A great song for Lowbrow Aristocrats…"