we shall be changed
It seems inevitable that, given the directionand momentum of my life, I
will eventually become a bum. Years ago, I used to talk to a homeless man
who, like a troll, lived in the steam tunnels beneath the bridge
connecting the art building to the union, and he told me that becoming
homeless was never a decision made n an instant, but a stage in a
long-term process, a process he was convinced wasn’t yet finished with
him. This is where the Homeless Writer’s Coalition in the old book comes
from. The homelessness isn’t particularly interesting, except in the sense
that it would allow me to become the thing I have always wanted to be,
which is a street preacher. My twenties, I see now, were a time of
building my mythology, of doing the foundational work and burning it into
my consciousness, so that it springs to hand even when drunk or high or
sick unto death. My major impediment is my nervousness as to performing in
public, and so as an experiment I got in my new car and drove to a place
where I didn’t know anybody (Davenport), parked the car, walked around in
the cold for a little while, drinking fortified wine, until I ended up
outside a bar on Locust Street and started in on how not everyone had to
die, and how they kept that information from us, but only because the
medical condition of life after death was a fundamentally flawed concept,
and how the ongoing conflict in the Middle East was orchestrated by UN
athiests in an attempt to destroy holy relics imbued with cellular wisdom
which, like the sexual exploitation of angels during the fourth and fifth
centuries, has been sullied by the black magic of money and second history
which stains the eyes of newborn babies except for those it cannot stain
who are sacrificed in surgical theatres beneath every hospital with the
severed organs flung to ladies-in-waiting in the balcony who then throw
handfuls of rose pedals (in an re-enactment of Teresa’s vision of the
visitation of Mary) upon the doctors, at which point people stopped
walking past me and pretending not to notice and ended up chasing me off
the block, at which point I went back to my car and drove home. It’s a
start.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #