One more repost, working on new entries but this has truly been a busy week at the house of why. I started with bloop in 2003. I lost about everything from early 2006 - early 2008 in a bloop crash, but I still have an archive of the years before. Maybe I will retell some of those lost stories one day to get them out of my head again. In the meantime here is another that is not up yet.
Before we met Jay the Monkey king, Lee's dealer was a sharkish man named Tan. Tan was a short and wide bull-necked thug with pointed teeth and tattoos who Lee had known since early childhood. Their childhood friendship was days spent throwing chainsaw blades and shooting bb guns at one another in their backyards, tossing bricks at cars from the tops of hills, breaking into abandoned buildings, stealing cigarettes, running from the police at night, typical stuff for this wonderful welfare city.
Tan was busted enough to be on a first name basis with the local police, who regularly shook him down for the product he carried. He never sold out his sources, so he kept enough credit to stay in the game.
Whenever we stopped by his house, it was crowded with the inevitable frat boys and underage girls. Once Tan talked a more moronic member of his circle into trying to snort weed. It looked like trying hurt like a bastard. Idiocy is the most dangerous substance around.
Tan's mother took care of schizophrenics, once he and his junky friends broke into her psyche meds. They wandered the neighborhood smoking imaginary cigarettes, one of them was arrested for walking into a stranger's house. A diminutive beauty named Brit lost her personality for a week afterwards. The rest survived unscathed to move on to the next buzz.
Indiscriminate intoxication without dreams behind it is a quick living path to a forgotten death. This is the way of many who prepare and serve your food, who clean your hotels and bag your groceries. They gather in tribes blending with losing dreamers. Fearing the over 30. Treated like gypsies and asked to reform. "That child is no good". Another deadbeat club. Another non-violent criminal from birth. Another cigarette. It is a hard life, but a beautiful one.
Last time I saw Tan, he was working for an overnight business cleaning company. What sort of business would you have an intimidating carnivore with a criminal record clean? Why a bank, of course. By now, Tan has set a plan into motion to empty the vaults after a busy banking day. If he succeeded, he is living rich in Mexico. If he failed, he is in prison for good. I may never know.
Tan's circle was the first I met who called one another "brother". These days this term must be used with caution, some react badly over racial connotations they carry. Our use was descended from hippy parents, practical over cultural. In many ways we are all distant siblings. Biblical religions state that we all descend from the same 2 ancient parents. Evolution states that we all descended from the same single-celled organisms. In certain Buddhist approaches, we are all incarnations of the same entity.
Remember this when your baby cries, when toes are stubbed and butterflies die. When one-legged beggars ask for change on the street, when hurled beer bottles shatter sunglasses piercing eyes, when clowns hide their track marks and machine gunned corpses buzz the morning sun with flies. Remember when the world seems hopeless and the telephone rings and the crayons snap underfoot and the bills roll in and the children burn and the pills flow and the canyons crack open spilling red with executions that according to the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI we are all expelled from the same great sneeze. |
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