Sometimes you just have to: let the fool drool in the pool.

A


fter sleeping only two hours at 22 Elliewood I could sleep no more. My boss, Ken, was rooting around nearby on an old 33 MHz 386. He was trying to be quiet, but when I opened my eyes and saw the bright grey alto-cumulus decorating the day that had emerged, I was compelled to join the masses on the streets.

A little anonymous email came my way today from the public computers in the Charlottesville Public Library. My guess is that this was written by the Psycho Glenn (see the September Musings).

You know, it's only quirk in personality that distinguishes you scene-dependent alcoholics. You're all engaged in competetive exhibitionism, aiming to prove your superiority in the face of the fact that you are drunks (and by that choice alone, inferior). The skinhead in your face, the gus out-witting...just variations on the theme of pretend-a-drunk-meaning...

2:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time

I


t's been a pretty boring little day so far. I really would still be sleeping now if I had my druthers. I bought two more CDs today too...
• King Missile's 1991 album The Way to Salvation for $4 and
• Cohen Live, a live Leonard Cohen album from 1994 for $7.

Hearing this album today, I especially like the way King Missile consistently mocks Christianity as a bloated collection of foolish myths.

The Way to Salvation was my first exposure to King Missile. Back in the Spring of 1991 when I first started listening to college radio (no longer willing to endure even one more song from Spruce Springstein and the E Street Band or Sob Seeger and the Silver Mullet Band), it was partly the right-on sardonic words to King Missile songs that solidified my conversion from the church of classic rock. I'd hear a spoken song like "The Story of Willy," which in its own quirky way so perfectly describes the selfish pathos of the human condition, and I'd suddenly realize that all that time spent rocking out to Led Zepplin had been a big dumb waste of time. Hearing this album today, I especially like the way King Missile consistently mocks Christianity as a bloated collection of foolish myths. Interestingly, all the sung songs sound kind of like Hüsker Dü doing Byrds covers, but I like them even though they are kind of dorky.

My 73 year old father, who mostly prefers classical music, claims to be a fan of Leonard Cohen. This has been the case since he first heard "Lenny" on Public Television's Austin City Limits. His enthusiasm was contagious; soon I too professed a liking for "Lenny." But I don't think it was just the music that drew my father to the music. You see, he once knew another guy (a coworker at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) named Lenny Cohen, and this alone made him pay special attention when the gracefully-aging crooner in black stepped up to the mike and began singing in that trademark gravelly baratone. But once my father started listening, the understated beauty of the singing and the lyrics had him hooked. I bought this CD mostly so I can be playing it some day in the Shaque when my Dad comes to bother me.

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M


atthew Hart was supposed to meet me in front of Higher Grounds to give me lots of money (his share of the landlord fees for 129 Observatory Street). Instead I found former housemates Elizabeth and John. They tried to be friendly, telling me that Matthew had come looking for me, and having not found me, had continued (for whatever reason) on to the Dynashack.

What makes their actions unforgiveable is what it demonstrates about their evaluation of me as a person.

At the Dynashack, I found one of the members of the Curious Digit (who has replaced Monster Boy on the living room couch) working on a disassembled blue scooter in the front yard. He and every other person in the extended Dynashack community has a peculiar artificial unctiousness about them. There's evidence of a sort of community-wide shame in the way they regard me. I'd be pleased to forgive them if I could, but the seat of that capability has been damaged. I've become terribly cynical not just about these people, but about people in general. It's not even that my housemates have actually made my situation so bad. Indeed, their actions provided the motivational force I needed to obtain a new house that I was going to have to get anyway. What makes their actions unforgiveable is what it demonstrates about their evaluation of me as a person.

I never did find Matthew Hart. He's too impatient. We said we'd meet at around four at Higher Grounds, but he'd become ancy and left by 3:45. I was there until 4:15 and tried to find him on the Downtown Mall, but to no avail. There were only a few people on the Mall who I would normally stop to talk to: Sundew (saying she'd help her hippie daddy sell jewelry but socializing instead), Bn (wondering how to pass an upcoming drug test), Cory and the coffee cart girl (selling coffee of course). Also present was the little thug Chaz. The latter was looking at me nervously.

I went back to the Corner still looking for Matthew but instead found Peggy, Zach and Wonderboy Neek engaged in uninteresting time killing behaviour. I thought I'd return to the Mall to resume my search for Matthew, who would now be working at the C&O. But once at the C&O I realized that it was too busy there for us to have a money exchange.

A


gain I saw young Chaz, and this time I decided to employ a subtle dramatic device. I had an Arizona bottle in my hand, and I started fingering it and looking at it lovingly with a psychotic look in my eyes. Deliberately or not, I've done a good job in Charlottesville of cultivating a reputation as unpredictably insane.

I hadn't look at Chaz at all. But then he came up to me. And he was friendly, saying he knew who stole my CDs. "Really?," I responded, equally friendly. He told me some guy named Mike Bennett had them. He didn't want me to tell anyone that he'd provided the information. I thanked him and we went separate ways.

My feeling is that Chaz might think he's a little tough guy, but he still has a self-preservation instinct and he doesn't want a crazy mother fucker like me looking to end his life.

Now what does this mean? My feeling is that young Chaz has been nervous of late. You see, it seems someone recently spray painted in yellow a stencil design reading "CHAZ DEAD @14" all over the Corner. And then, last Saturday, I told his thug friends that he is on my hit list. My feeling is that Chaz might think he's a little tough guy, but he still has a self-preservation instinct and he doesn't want a crazy mother fucker like me looking to end his life. By taking this one little step, he hoped to redirect my rage. And the information he gave me may even be true; others I talked to subsequently say Mike Bennett had been seen in housemate Ches' room scoping out the place during Space Party II.

I returned to the Corner, this time having filled my Arizona bottle with 100 proof vodka steeped in a tea bag. I ended up talking for a very long time with the weird post-goth guy Dempsey in front of Follette's. Meanwhile a variety of people who share the upstairs Follette's rooms with him were positioning a rental truck nearby and then loading it with their worldly possessions.

Red-faced wanna-be-skinhead Colin works as a dishwasher or something at Little Johns (adjacent to Follette's). While I talked to Dempsey, Colin could be seen taking a number of cigarette breaks, talking to a punk rocker friend and trying to look tough. It's precisely the trying that is so fucking ridiculous.

I went to sleep at 10pm in 22 Elliewood. My Friday night hadn't been too exciting. That's one of the costs of homelessness.

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