Dirt Under the Fingers

"A few years ago, I was listening to NPR(This American Life) and there was a story about a couple of fellows that “found themselves homeless” in the NYC area. Very interesting story and very sad as well. Just this year, I started connecting with some of my high school buddies using facebook. (An amazing site by the way.) Many of my high school classmates went to the Left Coast to work at an airplane manufacturing plant. There were four of us, that in 1980, took a trip from Burbank to San Fran to Las Vegas then back to Burbank. It was a four day weekend, Thanksgiving actually. I have managed via facebook to find all but one of my companions on the trip. One of these guys, that was on that trip was on that radio show! I was shocked and saddened to tears for my classmate. He has a blog called “thap gump” theadventuresofhobobob.blogspot.com. Sorry for the long post. This covered almost 30 years.
             -         Luis A., November 24, 2009 at 5:26 am"


You know I love searching the web, and I double love searching the web for me. I'm beginning to understand much about the InterWorld. It's a live or die place. When someone writes a blog, they hope that they get readers, they hope that they find people with similar interests, they hope that they can generate conversation or discourse on their blog. Very few of my readers talk on my blog. Very few. I get some emails, yes. I get some IM's, yes. But not many people want to be identified with my blog, even though they read it. Nice right. I'm so much an outcast, I'm an outcast on my own blog!!

But, many of my readers talk about this blog...ON OTHER BLOGS!! Yep. I've found many people talking about this damn blog while scouring the comment sections of other blogs, doing some trick searching techniques, I found the above at: The Art of Manliness, under an article entitled 'How to be a hobo.' It's the 43rd comment out of 56. Yeah, I've found some other surprising things about how to survive on the Internet too, but that will just have to be a later post.




Oh...you thought I was just going to glance over the above comment and keep on truckin', huh? Nahh, I'll fess up. Yeah, that was me and three other friends about 30 years ago. We were working at an airplane plant and God knows, we were making such a crazy living, doing so much crazy overtime that he had more money than we could spend. I swear to God, if you are eighteen and making very high in the five figures, you go mad. Well, we had money to burn and one of my friends, Slick Rick had a cousin in San Francisco that we could go up and meet. That's how decisions are made amongst men. "Hey, wanna go somewhere?" "Yeah, I have a cousin on the moon and...." The next thing you know, we're packing for a moon launch.




But continuing on. The four of us rented a car and drove our asses off, North up California and then across to Las Vegas. I sure would like to tell you what went on in Vegas, but just like the commercial says: "What's done in Vegas, stays in Vegas." This shit is soooo true. I've never did as wild a shit in my entire life afterward. I guess I got my fill of kinky stuff for the rest of my life. Don't get me wrong, women, wine and song is still my motto, but just not in so large quantities.




Yeah, Luis got in touch with me. He's doing great. He has a lovely wife, several children and living a dream life in suburbia. And here I am, a fellow traveler on this world eking out a living. Struggling day by day to just make it to the next week. Not that I give a shit though. I believe that all of our lives are governed by the circumstances we endure and the choices we make. Simple as that. I'm not one to crank and complain, unless I do it on my fucking blog, but in real life, the other ME that people actually see and touch...when asked how I'm doing, I reply: "Fine."



Why cry on people's shoulders? Does it do anything for you? Does crying make things better? Well, I'll be honest with you. Sometimes, when I'm alone (which is all the fucking time), and in the early hours before the sun rises, sometimes I weep. Cry like a little bitch. I'm not saying running tears down my cheek. I'm talking about those big, trembling, body wracking sobs that cause your ribcage to ache and your cheek muscles burn. I'm talking about just letting all that shit go. Just let it go in a flood of tears and pain and moaning and hair pulling, and falling down on one's knees.

I'm talking about letting it all out. No longer bottling it up. I'm talking about purging your very soul. And do you want to know something? I don't feel like less of a man. In fact, I feel much better over my circumstances. I think men have been robbed of a good outlet for our emotions by taking away crying from us. Laurie Anderson once said in concert: "We women have it better than men. When things go really wrong, we can always cry." Oh how right she is. When we men hurt, we grimace and swallow it down and it rests in our belly, like black oil and when it fills up, we die early. That's a sure bet.



My own father once scared the shit out of me. He sat me down at a tender age, with a bottle of scotch and said to me, "If you ever see a grown man crying...go the other way." Yeah, that's how I was brought up. Un-empathetic. A man in tears is in considerable pain. Should we forsake him? Should us men just go the other way. I would, to be honest with you. I like crying behind closed doors, but if someone else saw me crying, it would only make me angry. Like stirring a hornet's nest for absolutely no reason.




Shit, before I became homeless, and moved into my SRO, I can remember crying only twice in my life. Once, when my appendix almost exploded, and the other, when my godfather died. That's...oh and one more, as a child, my parents told me that I cried all day when my grandfather died. Okay, make that three times, IN MY ENTIRE 48 years of existence. Now, well, now all that's changed. I look forward to crying. I watch episodes of Rescue Me, and I cry all the time. I watch movies about the Twin Towers and I can't stop bawling. I watch a love story on TV and I'm shedding tears like a little girl at the end...oh shit, I shouldn't have told you that one.




I think, really, this time...the Hobo is healing. He's changing and has found a new state of being. My OCD and my manic period bolstering me up into the air and carrying me off. I am in full effect now, rare form. Like I said, I can't sit my ass still. I have to work, like a shark in the water, if I stop moving I will drown. I'm hyperactive now, I can't stop moving. Last night I fixed a close friend's netbook. Then I worked on my screen play, read the Writer's Market, found a publisher for one of the longest novels I have ever written, Taken for Dead, wrote a respectable query letter, printed out the first chapter and packed it all away and I'm ready to mail it to them on Monday. I have two more novels to knock down. Get them out of here. Diannon and Cover of Darkniss (yeah, I know Darkness is spelled wrong. I want to spell it that way).



From this point on, I intend to get off the can, and get on the stick. Luis, and all of you guys and gals out there that are writing about me in other blogs, don't feel bad, don't feel sad. I don't. Not any longer. I'm free to do what I will, and will do it. I'm free to say what I want to say, and I will say it. I have nothing to worry about. I've already lost it all. I've still got the two things most important to me. My Baby and my Baby's Bassinet, aka, my laptop and my laptop backpack. Both are still here. Both are still out, and when the day comes that I have to hit the bricks again, I'll pack up those two things, and march out into the desert once more.




Like I said, I've already lost everything.




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