The meeting at union square

The meeting at Union Square went pretty well though I hadn’t washed my face and still had all that make up on. Cyrus’s partner Will asked me what was on my face and I said it was make up from the night before and explained I’d had to leave in a hurry because shit had gotten crazy. We all stood six feet apart and wore masks and they explained this idea that they had for my story where they wanted to do a graphic novel and a web comic and develop a tv show out of it and that they had backing from Angelfire Studios whom I hadn’t heard of but pretended to be familiar with. The contract they offered seemed very straightforward and I didn’t feel the need to try to negotiate for points on the back end or anything like that but I did have a question about the “cancel clause” which they explained was necessary because of the nature of the arts and entertainment and American and International and Online pop culture and all that, they wanted an option to break contract in the event of any kind of scandal or public relations clusterfuckery that might result in my work or personality-brand becoming toxic and unmarketable. In the language of the contract it was clear that this was in reference to things in the future but eventually these two guys and their backers would use it to break contract with me based on some shit that had happened in the past (and not because the things resurfaced or anything) and would steal my work so that I’d have to call Tony Beefaroni and such. And of course if I’d shown the contract to Wyatt like he’d told me to he probably would’ve told me not to sign and would’ve helped me renegotiate the terms. But I just signed it and so like I’m still trying to get that money now as I scrape by living in a tent out in the Sonoran desert and writing on the concrete on the side of the gas station convenience store some eight months later.

Here where I’m writing out in the Sonora it is getting very hot. It is almost June now. 2021. I will have stories from this era in later chapters. Right now, May 27 2021 as I write the first drafts of these chapters in longhand, it’s like, Trinity is dead, that guy Angel from her apartment is in prison for multiple counts of aggravated sexual assault, the second Angel is dead of overdose or suicide (which I’d find out about in January of 2021) and Hannah is dead of overdose or suicide (which I’d find out about in March of 2021) and Cyrus Ademi is now dead from Covid and his partner has absconded to Morocco but Tony Beef kinda got my money before that all went down but when he’ll be able to pay me really depends on when the price of Yousecoin, the preferred cryptocurrency of New Jersey organized crime figures, hits fifty cents per coin, or when Dogecoin hits a dollar. Whichever comes first. But meanwhile I’m out here broke in the desert wondering how I’m gonna deal with the heat as the temperatures go up over a hundred degrees every day. Sorry for all the spoilers or whatever but I don’t always care about that kind of stuff ok. I’m kind of interested in the memory layers in effect right now, the onioning penumbras of it all that I fear cutting through too much all of it for the sting and the weeping that it might cause.

But so after this outdoor meeting where I foolishly struck a business deal with some people that I shouldn’t have, I headed back to New Jersey and got off in Radburn, which is a part of Fair Lawn, which is next to Glen Rock, Hawthorne, Paramus and Paterson. Ridgewood was over on the other side of Glen Rock. I wanted to visit the Radburn train station because I’d lived there in 2018. I’d recorded an album there and I’d had fond memories of it even though my life had been very fucked up at that time even for me. It was after I’d left the squat I’d been sharing with Jim from the library after he’d run me out attacking me with his cane. Like I said before this had not been too damaging in physical assault terms but it had done quite a number on me emotionally and but so I left and I wandered and I got lost in the maze of my own mind with the old way through lost to me as the walls had been broken down.

The station was small with a waiting room that was just about twenty foot square, a ticket office and two restrooms. One door on the parking lot side and two doors on the train track side. A little lawn off to the third side and a small business and a parking lot and one story office on the fourth.

It was not open now there were signs up on the doors that explained that due to Covid the station was closed.  This was the case at pretty much every station that was not a major hub like Secaucus or Newark or Trenton or Hoboken or anywhere like that. This, like the closing or restricted operations of libraries, saddened me quite a bit and still does now where here in Pima County Arizona where I’m writing this at the Speedway on West Ajo out in the county, we still have library access. It makes things harder for the drifters, the loiterers, the displaced and the broken, the crazies and the bums. During Covid the displaced have become more displaced, the liminal more liminal, many have been driven from the margins out into the margins of the margins.

So anyway though I couldn’t sleep at the Radburn Train Station like I’d done back in 2018 back after Jim drove me out during that time that I recorded an album if dream noise pop under a different name and got cancelled online and arrested for lewd disorderly conduct involving an American Flag in the public library one town over. But I could still plug in to the electric outlet and sit down on my trusty Adidas Duffel Bag behind the central air conditioning unit and use the free wifi. There was still free wifi at a lot of stations and by main roads provided by different telecom corporationsdepending on the region. It was a Covid emergency measure and was one of the upsides of all this terrible era for bums like me. Sadly of course people were dying in high numbers and the US saw some troubling increases in crime and poverty an addiction as well as people being stupid and or self righteous in general.But I had free wifi which was good because I liked talking to my friends.

But not all of them! Hannah kept emailing me asking when I was coming back and saying it was rude to leave and that I still had some of her gold matte nail polish. Unwisely I told her I would come back soon but she kept demanding to know exactly precisely when and telling me she’d prepared everything for me and that I was being rude which seemed weird to me. Her own constant rudeness did not really occur to her. This happens with some people and I don’t think she could really help it but it was still a pain in my ass. But I wanted to chill at the station a few days and just sleep outside since it’d be warm overnight and I needed some time off after experiencing some bad vibes out in Queens. Basically I wanted a day to chill and then I wanted  to eat the rest of the LSD I had and do some pretty advanced vibrational stuff involving the resonances and reverberations of this train station I lived in during a difficult but important post traumatic psychotic time in my life that I’d avoided thinking about for a few years but was now ready to work with. Sometimes we can’t deal with things right away like if you get raped as a kid or something like that.

But so I didn’t really wait for the acid trip really, the memories began to emerge after the mere notion of remembering them later! Like language and emotions memories often happen as if we they are the active principle or agent and we the people are merely the passive vessels of their becomings. But why? Why do cats purr but why do cats purr really? Why music? What is the deal?

I didn’t really stop to ponder that then I more just scrolled blindly on my phone looking at it without seeing it as my mind turned inward and I began to think back.

Part of the strangeness of that time involved wildly veering moods, disordered and bizarre thoughts, a lot of recurring intrusive visions and a kind of condensation of time which I still sometimes experience wherein I get very absorbed in the moment and have trouble planning or making decisions or even conceiving of a future at all beyond what was directly in front of me so I’d just figure things out second to second and minute to minute and it would grow into hours and days and days and weeks and such. I still do that now sometimes. It’s hard to explain. You just block everything else out because it is too much. Mental avoidance of the memories or anticipations of trauma, suffering, humiliation and defeat, things of that nature. This time was not that though really so much as a remembrance of and a reflection upon that.

I had known through previous experience (before 2018, that is the level of time and memory I’m talking about now) that the station was basically unattended at night and that one of the doors didn’t really close right and you could just leave it leaning on the frame so that it looked closed but was not. The floor inside was marble and there were hardwood seating areas along the wall and in these kind of short hallways to the bathrooms. The short hallway to the men’s room also had an electric outlet. So basically if I made sure to close the doors from the inside and get the janky one closed tight I had the station to myself from 9:45 pm at night until 5;45 in the morning. The waiting bench and wash in the bathroom and charge at the outlet. Just across the tracks was Dollar Tree where I could buy cheap food and supplies and I was getting money from people online in various ways, crowdfunding and Patreon and such.

[now august of 2022] Now here I am sitting and writing on May 30 2021 reminded of the time in early Autumn 2020 when I was remembering back to late summer early autumn 2018 before I ended up at Badger’s for the first time in Autumn 2018 and before I ended up living with Nina who I met on Twitter in2018 but did not meet in real life until Winter of 2019.

But so sitting on my trusty Adidas duffel bag full of my clothes and notebooks in the shade of the station and scrolling on my phone with one hand holding my other hand gently on the tender bulge of my hernia as my mind drifted further inward and I thought back to those troubling days in 2018. Before Jim from the library had attacked me with his cane and driven me from the squat we shared—which he’d had every right to do by the code of the streets, as he’d been there first and knew the owners and managers (we’d been in a basement under a business on Maple Ave in Fair Lawn just down the street from Stosh’s Bar the Passaic River and Paterson) and had invited me in after we’d gotten to know each other at the Fair Lawn Library. I’d finished a book and rekeased it. It was called 2017 and I’d written it over the course of the year 2017 and included references to current events and changing seasons and put a bunch of stuff about racist police violence and political protests and sweet sweaty riots in it as well as some of the problems that occur among the kinds of people who end up getting involved in such type things and all that including things like sexually predatory behavior and murder and such. The stuff of life you know. Nothing unsavory. I had the main character fall in love with a young woman half his age and then get murdered by her volatile abusive father at the end haha spoiler alert or whatever.

Anyway I’d known Bethany Klein from Twitter and we’d met before and I’d seen her at protests back when I’d been into that kind of thing. I’m pretty woke you know. But so we knew each other and had a lot of mutual friends among the activists and the left wing Twitterati and such. She worked at a sex shop on Rt 17 where I once bought a vibrator back when one of the Misfits old drummers worked there, Mr Jim. She’d always been nice. But so when I had this bookm out I wanted to promote it. I was friends with the guys from the Chapo Traphouse podcast, a popular left wing comedy talk show type thing at the time and was hoping to be able to promote it. I’d built a pretty good reputation for myself as a writer and musician and there was a real possibility that I could make more money and build my brand and my reputation through them though of course I’d end up destroying my brand and ruining my reputation instead as is my wont dear reader light of my life these things take time just like wines and eclipses don’t you know.

I stopped scrolling my phone and I stared off into space and remembered. As I’m doing now between periods of looking down at my notebook and writing. Remembering myself remembering,  I remember remembering being very attracted to Bethany when she was 19 and I was 43. It happens. It is a well known but not often shared truism among scientists that all 43 year old weird homeless old dudes are attracted to all nubile 19 year old tall well proportioned and cheerful young Ashkenazi girls from Fair Lawn they just don’t let the general public know about it or society would erupt into orgies of lava and radiation you see. But that is the story on that.

But so in 2018 I’d finished my writes and rewrites and was publishing my book and trying to promote it and I messaged Benny and asked her if she’d read it and tell people about it because I always felt like getting hip young people to get into your stuff was the way to get your stuff to blossom into real culture for really real you know really, and she said she’d love to check it out but would rather get two copies from me in person than order it over Amazon. This sounded good to me but it made me me a little nervous partly because I was attracted to her and was nervous about getting in trouble for being a lecherous old creep who lusts after younger women and like even worse than that some issues I I have about. Attachment and abandonment and love and sex and feeling unkoved and wounded and betrayed and shit and my mother and my father and the Fonz and the Babysitter Nancy Bonaducci Lolita love of my life light of my loins glitter in my nifkin and my own raw weird childhood yes I will yes I mean across the aeons and galileo dear reader I knew about that and I’d been working on it a while now but I’d been getting more and more stressed and more and more desperate beacuase I’d known old Jim was getting sick of me and could tell I’d been getting back into heroin and fentanyl (and then drinking heavily or stealing cough syrup when I couldn’t cop or was trying to kick, so I was volatile and hard to deal with) and plus he’d get old man rage when I looked at my Twitter and messed with my phone while he was trying to talk to me. He had a lot of issues with anger and feeling threatened, he’d had a lot of violent trauma in his life and had too much experience with human cruelty and I’d known my living situation with him was precarious from the get go. And as usual I’d had no money and was a bum.

When I went to meet Bethany it was at a place by where she lived but she’d posted pictures of all these places I’d recognized because I’d been wandering the streets in that area for years. When we met up she was really nice. She was kind of dolled up in make up and short shorts and fence net stockings and platform shoes. Nothing wrong with any of that of course she looked great. I was overcome with urges right away. It happens. Impure thoughts! I’ve had them. But mostly I was just thankful to have someone who was interested in my work and would hang out  with me. I was pretty homeless and struggling at the time you know. Trying to feel human one way or another. Carnal lust dear reader light of my life love of my loins tender questionable provender of my tongue across the agons can help one to do that in during the down times. It will reach up out of the squish and squalor right up into the light like the first little plant in history which had to exist and happen at some point in time when you think about it! I’m sure you can already see where this is all going. But so we got coffee and sat outside together and talked and things were very friendly and even flirty which was surprising to me and at one point she like held her hand up for something like a high five an when I put my hand to hers she laced her fingers between mine and this was very heartwarming and sexually arousing to me as I had not experienced that kind of of physical affection since the first tender plant on the first day of time and all that and like it all became very powerful and strong and swirled around me like weather and electromagnetism as happens with every average joe like myself I suppose all the time everywhere probably do you think and I felt a kind of emotional and apiritual; attraction therefore if you can understand that though I’d understand if you could not and simply saw me as a creepy lech which I cannot really ever deny being etc yadda yadda and she told me that if I ever needed any help that I should get in touch with and she said I could come nap at her palce if I needed (she knew I liked naps based on my many tweets about enjoying naps you see.)

During the day I couldn’t stay at the squat, I had to be out before 7 am and couldn’t come back until after 6 pm because those were the business hours of the store I lived under and that was part of how things worked there. But so that had been kind of her and it was kind of a powerful experience for me because I’d been living in the secret underworld of the unpeople for a while and she touched my hand first plant light reader beginning of time and that was pretty validating you know feeling like a real human being and such after spending time as an invisible unsavorylooking weirdsmelling street creature for a while and had experienced some pretty bad dehumanization as a victim of childhood sexual abuse and as an adult being strung out and homeless on the streets and all that and whatever snails and salami slithering between each and every, but so like she made me feel like I might be actually lovable which I am but I forget sometimes and had not been very aware of at that particular time and so in that situation, being what it was, with me being like I am, I got kind of attached. I thought she might bring me back into the fold of humanity whence I’d been excluded or exiled myself or whatever.

That was in 2018 and in 2020 it hurt to look back on it because it would all go so horribly wrong you know. But so when that happened there were some other things going on that I’d mentioned. Like I’d had a falling out with Angel named Mary Kate after we’d tried to work together and cross promote each other or whatever. At that time 2018 those two were working on building a brand as hip artsy dominatrices and Angel had asked if I’d like to cross promote with them and was into it all and of course it was a business and marketing type thing but it had some very personal aspects as well. It was all actually kind of weird but I’m used to weird things and shit not having boundaries on account of my life and experiences and such. But so like for instance Angle asked me if I wanted to be their submissive and do dominance and submission roleplay online and stuff which I was of course was very into because I liked them both and had certain kinky aspects. This was another instance where I was emotionally attracted to something that made me feel like I belonged and like I was worthy of love and affection from someone I was attracted to but wasn’t really sure I was good enough for. In retrospect of course I can see that my neediness and my problems of swinging high and low emotionally because my sense of self becomes pathologically wrapped up in someone I’m infatuated with were very serious and that relationships formed that way would invariably self destruct and hurt me and others. But so it was like I would publicly be their submissive and simp for them and they would promote my book and hopefully this would help them do better as dommes and help me as a struggling author.

(This is a weird digression but I need to add it. Tony Beefaroni had a secret gay lover named Tommy Salami and Tommy was my uncle. Tommy was killed by the Catholic Church because he belonged to The Secret Order Of The Regular Guy who had the secret scrolls about the part of the last supper involving “around the corner fudge is made” that didn’t make it into the eucharist and was kept out and is related to me being raped by The Fonz and like the curse upon the Catholic Church where they were cursed with this terrible problem of pedophiliac rape because they left the fudge outta the eucharist ovah heah but I digress okay I’ll get back to this eventually lol)

Well, that shit self destructed very quickly because Mary Kate got embarrassed that people knew that those two were doing that kind of stuff with me even though it wasn’t particularly sexual and we never really did any fun role playing because Angel was kind of training Mary Kate to be a domme with me as their virtual sub. Angel had already taught Mary Kate other types of sex work. I’ve already mentioned that Mary Kate told me about how good she was at the violent pedophile roleplay shit. She took great pride in it. And I took screenshots of how she talked about it. She was very into all that. But she was not into people knowing publicly that she was involved with me in any way. Funny right. She got very agitated at the thought of other people thinking I was involved with her in that kinda way even though that was how we’d all agreed to try and do it. So she flipped out on me over very little and started shit talking me in tweets to the point where I posted screenshots of her telling me about this pedophile roleplay phone sex stuff she did and then I posted some news articles about a scandal she’d been involved in back in 2012 or so, when there was this “alt lit” scene of Brooklyn hipster poet types that became kind of a thing but then imploded over sex scandals and infighting. Mary Kate kinda likes being the center of trauma drama which I can of course identify with I suppose dear reader light of my life love of my lines but perhaps she and I are different in a few critical respects. Maybe we were both Baron Munchausen.

But so I had the blow up with her publicly and it was just kind of happening publicly and messily and Bethany messaged me telling me not to dox sex workers because I had in effect “doxed” Mary Kate aka Diana Dragonetti and I angrily replied about how there is a lot of real shit going on in the world among us tramps and drifters and grifters and thieves and whores and hobos and crazies and I definitely came off crazy and I was crazy at that time because that was when I became convinced that Angel had placed a curse on me. Then after that angry message to Bethany and becoming convinced that Angel put a curse on me because I got in a weird fight with Mary Kate and I went to this park where there is this one spot in the canopy of this one large forsythia where at the right time of day at the right time of year the sunlight comes through the leaves in such a way as to break the light into shafts that resemble the feathers on the wing of an archangel. I found that spot and I sat there and I tried to quiet my mind but noise and confusion, doubt and anger, pain and fear all swirled chaotically about and I became very troubled and I put my face in my hands and I began to weep. During this time Bethany shot and posted a video from her apartment and said it was me standing outside her building yelling at her but I was nowhere in the video and there wasn’t any audio of anyone yelling but the post went viral and it was very scandalous in our corner of Twitter and various people who didn’t like me for other reasons – many of them completely valid I’ll admit – and that basically led to me being cancelled as they say. My 5000 Twitter followers, my $300 in crowdfunding, my entire empire… burned to the ground. Poof. Then Bethany gave my phone number out to people who harassed me via text message for a while. What a development though in retrospect I can see how I had it comin.

Dear reader light of my life I did not handle it well. People started calling me a pedophile and such because Bethany was only 19 and I was 43 an Angel seemed to take delight in that which was why I said what I said to her before which I feel bad about now. There are things I’m leaving out I guess. How I told Bethany in a message that I wanted to hold her hand and she posted a screencap. How afterward I was lying down and crying on a bench in front of the Hawthorne library and a cop came and did a welfare check and I asked him to hold my hand but he would not. Not long after all that is when I got arrested for lewd disorderly conduct at the Hawthorne Library for taking an indecent picture with an American flag I’d found on the ground by the highway while wandering. All during that time I’d been living at the Radburn Train Station one town over in Fair Lawn. That was 2018.

And I sat there in 2020 remembering it all and wondering at my own fuckedupedness and feeling ashamed but also thankful because I’d been in so much pain then, And I’d sworn that one day I’d write about it. I had changed. I had changed quite a bit. I Piscadoro king fisher the orphic metamorphic strangeling changeling and all that. I am free now of all these things. As I am free of having been raped as a young child. By the grace of god and nothing less. But back then oh dear reader oh light and life and love, oh darling, back then I was in bondage. Now as I write this in my notebook in 2021 and type this on my laptop in 2022 I am free and sane and strong and strange and still growing greenly. Typing this in bed August 30 2022 after writing it in June 2021 sitting on the concrete outside the Speedway Gas Station and convenience store on Ajo outside Tucson.  Remembering my remembrances of reminiscences in retrospect circumambiguly.

Wondering how I’d gotten so crazy and why I’d become obsessed with the idea that Angel’d put a curse on me. She really did make sport of calling me a pedophile and then when she got cancelled after Mary Kate and her broke up and Mary Kate accused her of grooming her from a young age (Angel was in her 30s and Mary Kate had begun dating her at 19) she did not handle it well and know she’s dead.

That night (2020 Radburn Train Station memories of 2018 like newspaper in water somehow strangely feathery) I slept outside on the grass by the station. I knew that if the cops found me they’d be total assholes because that’s how Fair Lawn cops are. They have a siege mentality because they’re just across the Passaic River from Patterson. They especially hated black people and junkies. They had hassled me before many many times. They would hassle me again. At this particular time in 2020 I still had an open warrant one town over in Hawthorne because of the flag thing. Thankfully I slept undisturbed, and deeply, in three layers of pants (long johns pajama pants and jens) abd four layers of shirts and a jacket with a hat on and my hood up. It got into the low 50s which isn’t too bad for Autumn in northern New Jersey.

That night I had many dreams about things I’d been thinking about that day. In one dream I was sitting in the spot in the park that I recently described, in golden green, under a canopy of foliage that split the warm October sunlight into shafts like feathers on an angel’s wing and things became very quiet the energy and the very all seemed to dilate as an inhalation and the leaves all came together in a kind of geometric perfection like the tiled dome of some strange green church and there was one very brief moment of pure silence so quiet you could balance the cosmos on it and I became afraid and then a heard some kind of magical music in the distance like there was a concert somewhere and the music sounded very familiar achingly gnawingly so but I could not identify it. Like a word on the tip of my tongue. I wandered out into the streets and there were no cars or trucks but there was all this traffic. People were riding elephants and bears with big saddles  everywhere, staying to the right side one would in a car. Everybody was yelling at each other and people were shaking their fists and giving each other the finger but the animals were calmly resigned to their roles as cars and trucks.

The sun was a giant horn bell in the sky blowing pure light like the beginning of everything. The clouds were giant animals, vast sheep grazing seashells coral foam feather plump birds and cats in states of repose sphinxwise and splayed. The blue sky was a flowing ocean of infinity and life. And I had no pants or underpants and I was running and my dick was flopping around and people were swearing at me and giving me the finger but the animals were chill as I ran from the woods to the library but before I could get into the library I slipped on something and I fell dick first onto a big American flag that had a teenager under it and then suddenly a bunch of cops rode in on lions and arrested me for sexual assault on an American flag within seven inches of a teenager which is actually a class d felony and punishable by up to seven years extremely hard labor at the rape factory which is where they said I would end up if I did not tell them the name of my drug dealer and things got pretty tense for a moment but then music destroyed everything in a blast of light pure and child and I awoke with a start expecting to see cops because I’d been hassled for being a bum so many times in Fair Lawn but they would not hassle me for another day or so. I managed to drift back to sleep and had a dream I was flying over the ocean into the warm embrace of an incomprehensible being and then I woke up again and I was cold and the sky was growing blue with the first morning light but the sun had not yet risen. I got up and walked to the Dunkin Donuts down the streets for coffee. Luckily they were open but unluckily I couldn’t sit in there because of Covid. I could just go loiter at the train station so I just did that.

I talked with some friends in one of my Twitter dm groups and about halfway through my coffee I took one of the hits of lsd I had left and put it under my tongue and made sure to keep from swallowing it as I drank the rest of my coffee. Light accrued in the sky and birds sang as the sun came up. Sunrises are old, they’ve been around for decades now at least, and I’ve seen a bunch of em, but they still hit me with religion sometimes, especially if I be living outside. Some mornings can feel like the very first mornings sky blowing pure light like the beginning of everything.

So that was all pretty poetic and beatific and revivicating and all that. Feeling I was in a state of grace I decided I was emotionally ready to check my email but then it turned out that I was not ready to check my emails and that my feelings had betrayed me once again! Hannah had sent me several angry wounded emails saying I’d betrayed her and been very rude and that she’d expected me back that night and she demanded to know when was I going to come back and I got flustered and annoyed and poof all that grace evaporated and went back to heaven and the beatitude lapsed into mere attitude and I felt sad and annoyed and while I felt pity and compassion for this woman who was obviously suffering I also felt threatened and annoyed by her and just wanted to ghost but I didn’t know where I would stay if I did and I knew it might be good to try again but the scene that night had just been so terrible that the thought of going back filled me with dread. This was a real dread. Very strong in the viscera. Her most recent email had been at 5 am and I replied briefly that I had some stuff to figure out and that I’d be in touch.

I’d end up exchanging more emails that day. She would reply almost immediately. Hannah wasn’t much of a sleeper and for some reason I couldn’t quite fathom she was deeply invested in getting me back to her place for some reason. But I had to worry about my own situation and felt it might be best to hang around where I was and trip on some LSD and see what happened, unreasonable as that may seem.

It turned out to be a beautiful day. I ate my third hit of acid after a few hours and walked around the old hood a bit with my spirits light  reminiscing about heavy things that did not pull me down into sorrow, regret or dread owing to the buoyancy of my trip. I marveled at how bad I’d felt at the time (2018) and how I’d had such trouble letting go of things as I self destructed. How the delusion of Angel’s curse and my wounded attachment to what I saw as a vicious betrayal by Bethany and I realized that my state of mind and my behavior at that time were very similar to how Hannah felt about me at this time in 2020. We were not all that different. As commonly happens among the humans.

But there was something very real that I felt which was that she and her husband were doomed in some way but that I was not because while I had my demons I also had real Angels perhaps in abundance for reasons I myself can scarcely fathom dear reader yes I will light of my life for all that chaos and sin in which I wandered I had very real experiences of grace and redemption every once in a while and I had a vocation as a bard who might transform the otherwise dreadful and ugly things an this life into some kind of meaningful beauty through the spiritual power of my song and that there was some mysterious interplay and reciprocity, some kind of intimate intertwining, like a marriage,  between my capacity for receiving grace and redemption and my ability to beautify and therefore in some minor but undoubtedly significant way create small instances of grace and redeem a few of the other low creatures around me as I wandered the weirdnesses of the interspaces of America.

But for all that real belief in the potentials of my poetic power I knew I had very little ability to make things better between myself and Hannah or to preserve her from her doom. I did not know that she would die but I expected her to commit suicide.

I visited nearby Dunkerhook Park where I used to bathe in the brook and walk the paths that wound along the water and through several towns including Fair Lawn, Paramus, Glen Rock and Ridgewood. I’d been intimately acquainted with it all for over twenty years and knew every bend in brook and river and every side path off the paved paths and through the woods. I looked for possible places to sleep. I had to figure out where to go. But I didn’t concentrate too hard on any of it as my mind was in flux as we say in the timewarp interjelly you know like an energetic flowering of colorful intuition and intense sense impressions with my usual thinking voice that I have in my head kind of submerged in the seething foliage and throbbing cosmic music of the LSD which really had a hold of me now I supposed.

What is the world but doom and miracle in constant incomprehensible copulation. And how significant a thing was I within it. And who really cares about such abstract notions anyway when you’re all hilt and gills in the flesh and the blood of it. I began to laugh at myself, silently at first until it rippled out of the center of my being, an axis like a vibrating string, and I began to outwardly shake and guffaw and sit down on the grass and even then fell over on my side guffawing with my hand over my hernia to hold my guts in as my diaphragm bounced so joyously in my body. The idea of worrying about things seemed silkly and I felt an immense sense of gratitude. A few people walking by regarded me warikly and I supposed that they supposed that I was insane or somesuch but I felt as if I’d been liberated from having to worry about such small things. Why do they even make insanity mean the opposite of living in sanity it makes no sense to me. So it goes dear reader life of my light and love of my heart and all that.

The rest of that day passed as a wonderful dream, the kind that makes one wake up happy even when life is hard, and such dreams do exist for I have had them, and whence does their energy flow do miraculously forth? I don’t know. I stayed up into the night and talked to my friends on Facebook and replied to Hannah’s emails politely but evasively. I knew that I would not go back and that I was better off taking my chances living by my wits as terrifying and hilarious as such may seem. I messaged some other people including Wyatt and he said congratulations but also said I should have shown him the contract first. I told him about the cancellation clause and he said I really shouldn’t have signed it because they had put that there because they expected to use it and they might rip me off big time. The idea that someone would steal my work for their own gain seemed insane to me because I’d gotten so used to not making money from shit I made for so long I couldn’t really believe someone else could make money off of shit I made even though I also knew that the reason someone would pay for the rights to make some shit from some shit I already made was because that shit could make some money. I contradict myself I contain multitudes. Shit like that . Round the corner fudge is made. I don’t always have a firm grasp of reality though I sometimes get a glimpse of a higher reality. Shit like that. I contain pulchritudes. I had an epiphany about the need to try and be good in some way that I might not be able to define by way of legality or articulable codes of contract or quanta of money but through the mysterious intuitions that sometimes emanated from the vibrating axis of my being in manycolored reverberations in a similar way and from selfsame source as ths song of my bardic being streaming from the horn of Gabriel the Angel of Death sings from the sun at the source of all life as in each moment the end and the beginning the death ahd resurrection and destruction and creation of all things play out in incomprehensible complexities and surreal creatures whose endless activities drive the passage of time in the universe. We are living in the end times people and the end times are only beginning. And the beauty of that was the truth of my grace that was all I knew on earth and all I needed to know.

I did not sleep until late at night and I remembered no and I woke up again cold at the first light of day. I felt tired but grateful. I walked to Dunkin Donuts and got coffee and used the bathroom, making sure to look at my phone I couldn’t shit, which is a fairly common problem in these ultra modern times we’re living in I bet. I fired off some dope tweets and read some news. What a mess the world becomes if you read the news and spend too much on Twitter. Or what a mess I become. What a mess my world becomes. I hadn’t slept enough and was still very tired as the world grew bright. The sun was warm but the breeze was cool and dry, it was the kind of warm yet brisk weather that makes autumn in the northeast so beautiful. Once it was warm enough I moved my stuff into the shadow of a big tree that was not ideal because it was too visible from the parking lot and the train platform but which had soft ground and shade that would last a few hours. So I really should not have been surprised when I woke up from a very heavy slumber to see some cops standing there.

There was an older officer who looked like James Cromwell or Dudley Smith and a younger cop who looked like nobody very nondescript and even a plainclothes detective. That’s a thing they’ll do in Fair Lawn, send two beat cops and a detective just to do a welfare check on a slumbering bum. I think it’s to intimidate and to help carry out and cover up beat downs and such I don’t know. Something similar had happened to me before back in 2017 or 18 when I’d been napping on the ground in a public park in the day time which was common and legal in some places but was frowned upon and discouraged in Fair Lawn.  I don’t know, maybe the sight of bums was thought to be a threat to property values whose decline would mean invasions of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Ostrogoths and Xenomorphs. All I knew was that this was a thing with these guys.  I was surprised to see the cops but I was also a veteran of such experiences and still groggy with sleep and post trip fatigue and so I didn’t get very worked up even though I was worried about the open warrant I had in Hawthorne one town over for the flag thing but I didn’t know if they’d even want me.

I politely wished them a good afternoon and they started giving me shit right away and asking me questions that I didn’t want to answer. When I tried to walk away the one cop blocked me with his arm and held me back so I couldn’t leave which they weren’t supposed to do of course and I kinda got worried that they might rough me up. It was the old cop who kept hold of me while the other two watched. Something strangely sexual about the way that he held me. And he the old cop asked me my name and date of birth and I asked him isn’t this a welfare check? And he said yes of course and then he asked me if I wanted to hurt myself or anyone else I said no I love my life and believe wholeheartedly in the grand symphony of all being now can I leave? No he said we’re detaining you and we need your name and birthday and with surprising quickness for an old man he reached down and grabbed my balls and the other cops laughed and in a high girlish voice I told them my actual name and birthday which I immediately regretted but perhaps in my fatigue I was more suggestible than I might have otherwise been. So then he calls in my name and birthday numbers and tells me to wait and I try to leave and he brings his arm back up around my torso and holds me again and tells me I have to stay there and I turn to the detective and I’m like come on man you know he’s not allowed to do this and the detective just looks me in the eye and says nothing, stonewalling me. They all know how to work this as a team and can do whatever they want to me. They can kill me if they want. Say I was resisting etc. The old guy said they could arrest me for trespassing and I was like, for being on public property in the daytime? And he informed me that it was privately owned public property and that he could get the transit cops to come and do it but they would not be happy about it. I kept expecting him to call me boyo and then become viciously sadistic like Dudley Smith in L.A. Confidential. I couldn’t figure out if my warrant from one town over would show up because it was in a different county and I thought that even if it did they might not want me because there were political and media aspects. ACLU New Jersey had been at my first court date where I’d wanted to just plead guilty and pay the fine and get it over with but the judge would not let me plead guilty because it was too obvious that I had no lewd intent per the language of the relevant statute. Still though I was nervous because while jail might have had its advantages at this point I didn’t want to land in Passaic County jail in particular because it was kinda rough. So I waited and bantered insolently with the cops. It took a while for an answer from the other side of the walkie talkie. After a while the answer came back and the old cop told me Hawthorne had a thousand dollar warrant out on me but they didn’t want me. They all laughed at the surprised look on my face and thought that I hadn’t thought that my warrant would come up but what had surprised me more was that Hawthorne didn’t want me. Then we exchanged some insults and I mentioned I was friends with Jim from the library because Jim’s brother was the head of the Fair Lawn PBA. Then they told me I was free to go and I got my shit and went on my way. I walked toward Glen Rock and Ridgewood and messaged Wyatt about what happened and he told me to come over which was good. I hadn’t wanted to ask first because I knew he needed his space but I was kinda spooked by this encounter and my existence seemed very precarious so I was relieved that he invited to me.

We hung out and talked and then we smoked joints. He rolled one for each of us and sterilized mine and gave it to me and we smoked and he let me play some of his instruments. He had a guitar and two little mechanical wind organs and he recorded me improvising some music on the organ and singing. There were some good bits but it really wasn’t worth recording or sharing I didn’t think. He told me I could stay there for the night and maybe a few nights after that but that I had to get out of the house during the day which I thought was fair. We talked about the deak I’d made and he really seemed worried and I’d find out later that he was right to worry but like I didn’t want to believe there might be a problem I just wanted to be happy about my life. I was dismissive of him and told him to stop being so neurotic. I was in denial in a way though it was no so irrational of me so much as kind of willfully naïve. It was funny because I was more used to treating him liked he was the naïve and inexperienced one because he’d had a more normal bougie suburban life than I’d had. He’d never been raped by a US Marine as a kid for instance. But he knew more about business and money than I did. Most people over the age of one year old know more about business and money than I do to be quite honest with you dear reader light of my life fire of my long long long white album.

But so I told him there was nothing to worry about but that I would let him know about any further developments. He pointed out that I hadn’t gotten paid even a little and that I should have gotten an advance because I had so little money and nowhere to live and I got kind of sick of talking about it because I suddenly felt very annoyed and embarrassed and ashamed. So we talked about all the other wild shit and I told him about how things had gone down at Hannah’s and my trouble with the police at the Radburn Train Station. He talked about how he disliked the covid policies where he was working. The mayor and the superintendent of schools were both republicans and anti maskers and wanted to open schools and businesses back up. This was before people had started getting vaccinated but after we knew that vaccines were on the way. Wyatt didn’t like the idea of dealing with the tablets and computers that the kids used. They were disease vectors, he said.

Before going to bed that night I emailed Hannah to tell her I would not be coming back. She replied almost immediately telling me how much this hurt her and added that I still had a bottle of nice nail polish that she’d given me and that I had to bring it back and that it wasn’t ok to steal it. I stopped replying. For a few weeks after that she would send me hatemail though I’m not sure how much she sent because once I realized I could block her on gmail I did so. The hate mail was more hostile than the previous mails she sent and she called me a user and a liar and a scumbag and a thief and said I should grow up and get a real job and that I was a loser and all that etc etc etc. This all may have been true but did she have to say it repeatedly? No. Then once I’d blocked her she would send me emails from her husband’s account which I also then blocked.

I fell asleep feeling troubled and dreamed if my long dead mother. She said she hoped I’d been developing my practical side, and that I’d gotten over my avoidance of regular employment and she hoped most of all that I’d had kids. I lied and told her I’d done all those things and she smiled beatifically and she kissed me on the cheek and dissolved in a luminous mist. I woke up feeling sad and lost but also thankful that I was inside and warm and with a friend. Wyatt and I both got up early and he cooked breakfast and we drank beer and smoked joints and I asked him if I could leave my big bag, my sweet Adidas duffle bag that a pretty woman had once left behind as opposed to my trusty black leather messenger bag, which I would take with me.

“I don’t want to make my hernia worse,” I said, blowing pot smoke into a shaft of buttery morning sunlight  as  I stared at the huge houseplant in the southeastfacing bay window.

“Yeah don’t do that,” he said. He was very sympathetic. Wyatt is one of the most compassionate men I know in a way. But he is very nervous, and constantly suffering. And he needs his space. We were both old enough to know not to tamper with the forces of the chemistry of our own interacting fuckedupednesses which were considerable but we were aware of it and we genuinely cared for one another and had a sense of connection rooted in a sense that we had special things in common with each other that we couldn’t always find with other people in our lives which may not have even been true but which felt true which is the thing I guess with these things sometimes isn’t it.

“I gotta figure out my next move,” I said.

“I have to work on Monday,” he said.

“What day is it now?”

“Monday.”

“Oh I see. What is work again?”

“This is why I can’t have you here all the time,” he said, laughing. “But you can stay a few more nights until you find a place.”

“Awesome right on thank you,” I said. I told him I’d definitely be finding a space and had some pretty good options but I was being sly about it because what I’d really meant was I was gonna scout some spots outside where I could sleep on the ground. Ridgewood and Glen Rock weren’t like Fair Lawn, they didn’t have this thing about intimidating bums and junkies and black people and whatnot. Fair Lawn was the bordertown with the siege mentality but Ridgewood and Glen Rock had low crime rates and no visible homeless. High property values, good public schools and some very nice parks, some of them interconnected. The police patrolled the parks after dark but there were spots everywhere that they couldn’t see, and some parks that they didn’t really patrol, including one right next to the police station and library in Ridgewood, across the street from the town pool. I would end up sleeping there for a while in a small patch of the woods between the edge of the field, obscured by tackling dummies and little batting cages. For some reason Vets Field is open all night and people go there to walk or run around the track at all hours. But it would take some looking and thinking to spot this spot, which had wifi and was a short walk from running water and electricity, with bathrooms on the other side of the field that opened at 6 am and closed at 10 pm on a time lock and beyond that a public library where they had outdoor workstations with a bunch of electrical outlets and some really nice extension cords that you wouldn’t be able to just leave out all night in a less cushy insulated municipality you know. A good as new five outlet indoor/outdoor extension cord is worth hundreds of dollars.

So I left Wyatt’s and went to the Stop n Shop and got some food and then I went to the library and used the wifi and fucked around online. My hernia was sore so I sat for a long time eating pastries and drinking cold instant coffee under the tent roof under the gloomy drizzly cloudclustered sky.

I messaged my old girlfriend Annie [sally], whom I’d last spoken to via Instagram back when I was living in Denise’s shed in Tucson in March or April When I wrote the book of exodus. We’d been lovers and had always gotten along but had gone our separate ways. Oh man I remember when we split we had goodbye sex on a bed of moss on a hill in the woods up in Ringwood and I got a tick in the back of my leg that I didn’t notice until 4 days later when I got it out by taking a bath and keeping my leg submerged for a while and then pulling the tick out. Then I got some kind of non lyme tick borne illness where I got a high fever, severe aches, shivering, a little shimmy sham shimmer at the edges of my eyesight that was kind of fun webbed in intricate little vessels of pain and hurt pulsing like new lids and that all kinda sucked but I remembered why cats purr dear reader light of my love and all that and the whole thing is really rather funny to me now especially the vomit and diarrhea at the same time which I feel had some kind of cosmic significance like a snake swallowing it’s own tale through the aeons my love yes I will yes.

She’d fallen in love with a guy from Europe. She would do so again. That was her thing she loved the classy yearning of it. The one from 2018 had been in Scotland. The one she told me about this time was in Germany. A step up perhaps I don’t know the national rankings of Europe like I used to. We spoke some and caught up on things and still liked each other and we didn’t explicitly talk about getting together but we both kinda hinted at it and the vibrations were very obvious. She told me her daughter was staying with her for a bit which meant that I couldn’t just dawdle on in in my hobosexual manner but that I might be able to soon. She was concerned about my welfare and wanted to be sure I had a place to stay and I told her not to worry.

But so I hung out at the library and worked at my theory on the meaning of the purring of cats which I sometimes became very concerned with you know . The purring of the cat is connected to the primordial syllable of all the universe and helps us manage our own biorhythms and make for a happy home even when we suffer at the hands of those closest so us, it is an important thing the purring of a cat my dear reader light and love and all that. The library was partially open with restricted services that a lot of libraries weren’t offering at the time. October 2020  a lot of libraries were closed or just offering curbside pickup and dropoff of books and videos and such. After talking to Annie and contemplating cats for a bit I saw an email from Saguara saying that she’d had a dream about me and that that meant something and she described the dream and it had some details in common with my most recent dreams and that was kind of uncanny and she told me that if I ever get back to Tucson and I replied and told her that I definitely would and it all had a strange meaningfulness without meaning as happens sometimes.

I understood that I would probably end up back in Tucson again one way or the other. But for now I was just interested in living outside in Ridgewood and Glen Rock and maybe Paramus, but not Fair Lawn or Hawthorne or Patterson, for a bit, and while it was some homeless and down and out bum shit I had a sense of adventure about it and felt I could learn a thing or two and expand my skill set and my consciousness by it because I’m not just a rogue and a hobo I’m something of a wandering mystic as well, a seeker without very much at all by way of material possessions, living a life of low level asceticism and spiritual exploration in an age of materialist consumer excess in the wealthiest  and most powerful empire in the history of the world passes it's peak and begins to break like a big wave and lapse into its late period od decadence and fermentation. I don’t know, I guess some part of it is pathological and that I’m terribly messed up and misguided if not quite as terribly as the world around me where many of the most impressive and admirable people are actually obviously full-on hellfire demons and villains but worshipped as heroes and saints or whatever.

So after a few days at Wyatt’s I took my stuff and started bumming around. I’d been worrying about carrying my big Adidas duffel bag because of my hernia but I managed to get it a mile across town to the woods by Vets’ field not far from the police station and set up camp in a low key spot that wasn’t overly visible.  I Spent my time at The Library and the train platform, walking back and forth across town between my camp, the library, the stop and shop and the train platform.

Right now as I write this (2021 writing longhand but typing it up in 2022 on the laptop but with this paragraph set in the 2021 Arizona Longhand time) I’m sitting outside the gas station on West Ajo and it is the 12^th of June or so and it is supposed to be 115 degrees again so I’m smoking weed and talking to Cody and D Day, these two guys I know here. Middle aged violent biker type dudes. Cody is the younger at 47 years old. D Day is about 60. They bare talking about how you can wear pink and still be a man.  Now D Day is hitting Cody up for some weed and saying he’ll panhandle the money up and down the road later. Now he’s telling Cody about his Harley. Cody’s dad was in a motorcycle club and got murdered when Cody was 25. He was a senior ranking member of the Bandidos. Cody has been to prison 5 times for violent offenses including twice for assault on a police officer. Cody has had 3 strokes. Cody is my age. Cody looks much older than I do. I had childhood trauma but have been gifted with grace by God dear reader light of my life yes. I was grifted with an abnormal capacity for joy in the pits of hell I was told it is a disease by people who don’t understand that it is a miracle that my soul won in some weird lottery beyond this world that I cannot explain nor understand nor reject. Ody is hooking D Day up with some weed. D Day did ten years I don’t know what for he is out on parole and has violated his California parole by coming to Arizona. He has worked as a hired gun in the hollers of Appalachia, his four front bottom teeth are not there they got kicked out by corrections officers. He seems kind of like a rapist. I don’t know. Weed helps Cody manage his anxiety and his tendency toward explosive violence. Those two things are the same really, or share a common root. Cody was once a great boxer. D Day is highly intelligent and Cody is nearly illiterate but they relate as violent felons and biker dudes. I think weed helps D Day chill out a bit too. I’m wondering if Brandeen will show up. She’s had a couple bad days in a row. Her dad is a biker too. He raped her and her kids. She is psychotic a lot and tends to end up with the wrong dudes.  I’m writing all this now as D Day jokingly yells at me to stop pretending I’m better than everyone and come smoke some weed and bullshit with them. I think Brandeen might be paranoid schizophrenic or bipolar with paranoid schizophrenic features or something. I don’t understand psychiatric diagnoses they are not as good as 19^th century Russian Novels or stream of consciousness anglophone modernism. I don’t understand the neurological focus of contemporary discourse involving things like paying attention and fitting in and being able to relate to people. I have trouble not relating to everyone in the universe. I have trouble pretending everyone isn’t made of everyone else. I have strange notions about the spiritual ecosystem of this world. It is not unscientific to regard the body as the second substance. That is common sense to me. I don’t know what brains mean. I might not have a brain I think it might just be a spicy little meatball in there throbbing and singing. Maybe it is an infinitely inward cluster of stars beyond number in a space beyond knowing. Brandeen has been unmedicated and sleeping in the desert. She told me I was a good kissed one time. We cuddle sometimes but we don’t make love her dad raped her and her daughters. She has been really crazy lately. I think she and D Day know some of the same people. Her dad was a high ranking Warlord, that is the motorcycle club. The Hell’s Angels, the Warlords and the Bandidos are all sister clubs with treaties and such and they are the major gangs in the west. D Day was in the military at some point. I am one of the guys. The Fonz, the guy who used to rape me when I was a kid, was a marine in Vietnam and a biker but he was unaffiliated with motorcycle clubs and did organized crime with my family not the bikers. Yesterday at the station here the Speedway at Ajo the Distict manager Rita was here while Brandeen was out front stalking back and forth and yelling at some people out front that she knew most of the local gods and demons and could call them all out of the desert and the sky and Rita called the cops and five county sherriff’s cars showed up according to what I heard from Sam the Drunk who once had it all but  lost it and is insufferable with his endless self pitying drunken bullshit about how he misses his corvette and must go see his mother in Lake Havisu and who told D Day that cops had come because Brandeen had flipped out and was yelling at people in front of the store and D Day being an interstate fugitive and Cody being a five time violent felon who’d been beat up by the local police several times and spent time in prison for beating up police elsewhere did not like her bringing the heat like that. D Day especially. This is life out at the Speedway on West Ajo highway west of the Tucson mountains northeast of three points north of the yaqui pueblo east of the Tohono O’odham Nation south of Old Tucson Studios and Saguaro National park and up just a few feet from hell brothers and sisters and sissies and fisters.

Being homeless in Ridgewood and Glen Rock was very different than all this. Ridgewood and Glen Rock are affluent and insulated and there are very rarely any visibly homeless or even poor people. If you’re like that in those towns you really stick out and are invisible at the same time. There is a sense of dehumanization but it is also kind of safe and peaceful. I still had my New Mexico EBT card from 2019 and sometimes had lunch with Wyatt. I salvaged the fabric from a big umbrella from one of the outdoor dining spots. Ridgewood had a bunch of those in October 2020. I began using the umbrella fabric as bedding. It was thick and water resistant but not water proof. It did help me stay warm. I feel so silly looking back that I did not have smart bedding, like not even a sleeping bag. It is hard to explain some of this stuff. Being homeless is not merely a material thing it is spiritual and emotional and it is hard to explain. If you grew up in a home that was not a home and where you suffered and were kind of used and treated like a dirty little animal it can be easy to feel as an adult that you are still little more than a dirty little animal and lowly filth. The lowliness of homelessness, the sense of being at the bottom in the sewer because you are human filth, that is hard to explain. How you feel you deserve to just kind of float around in the nowhere spaces like litter. Oh dear reader light of my life and love across the aeons of heart and soul and stars and death that I have traveled would you believe me if I told you that while this is all true that it is there too that I found not only beauty but the meaning of beauty and the beauty of the meaning of beauty and the meaning of the beauty of the meaning of beauty or no? Yes I am of the dust and the trashcan yes I will yes blessed the beneath for they shall inherit the dirt and did you know love is an element like air and water and fire and earth and a force like gravity or electromagnetism or what my love please listen I’m singing to you in the vast whisper of the wind between the stars and I know that you love me too my angel and my mirror and my bread. I can’t believe they killed Tommy Salami over that fudge thing. Ridgewood had live outdoor music and some weekend nights I would hang out on the train platform and listen to multiple bands and people playing at one wafting up the hill from Broad Street like the smell of warm food and diffusing in the Autumn air Tommy Salami was Tony Beefaroni’s secret gay lover based on what I’d heard from Nikki “The Nickname” Dikulus, the Greek guy whose dad owned The Acadamy Diner in Elmwood Park over there who confirmed a story that I’d heard from other sources as well but whose names I cannot mention who are nowhere and know everything and speak only through spookiest proxies to vex your ectoplasm but listen I’m going to digress there is this thing alright and I think about it because I got raped by a violent Italian predator as a child like many in the Catholic Church over the aeons across the stars and death and yes we should praise existence even though these things occur and yes I want to give you flowers and dance with you in the moonlight by the ocean to the sound of the waves rhythmically lapping but listen dear reader I know you love me too like Tony Beefaroni loved Tommy Salami who got killed by The Church because he knew too much and had the scrolls that contained the secrets about how at the last supper there was a part where The Lord said “and round the corner fudge is made” and there is supposed to be a part in the eucharist involving “eat of this sweet fudge I made it myself” and this is connected to me being raped as a boy and shitting the bed as an adult and thinking I’m trash and being homeless in my soul and wandering the margins and outskirts of reality among rapists and killers and addicts thieves whores beggars cripples oh deadeyed children of the invisible american junk poverty night I know you love me too! I want to give you a flower and kiss you in the spot where you dream but so listen dear reader yes I will yes tender light aeons stars death music but so this thing at the last supper it happened and the lord did say unto his disciples round the corner fudge his made and they did eat the fudge and it was in the forbidden scrolls that you’re not supposed to talk about that the church killed him for and they did cut the fudge out of the eucharist and violate that most sacred of sacraments against the lord thy god’s bidding and it is connected to me being a bloody broken fuck puppet for a US Marine and my father who was once an altar boy not doing shit about it so to speak and me crapping the bed and not remembering my own trauma as a 33 year old living in Illinois or Indiana or perhaps Nebraska I mean New Mexico and it was because the Church tried to hide from the Lord’s fudge that it now suffers the curse of rampant pederasty and rape in its own sacred chambers among its own priests who perpetuate the false fudgeless sacrament this is the whirlwind they reap for their fear of the truth and the light of the love of the lord and the sweet sweet fudge of his holy holy hole the transubstantiation of the eucharist is not a symbol the bread is the actual flesh and the wine is the actual blood and the fudge is the actual shit but every church elder from Peter and Paul on down and now Tommy Salami is dead because he knew too much and I the King Fisher wander the land waste and wonder if I really needed to bring in Tony Beefaroni considering how destructive and cruel he can be now that Tommy is gone Nikki told me to be careful Nikki told me to be careful but I said with a grin as I rubbed my chin how can this be how can this be Nikki Dikulus but I digress and Ridgewood was very festive on those Autumn weekend nights with holographic batshadows laughter of children fluttering people dying here and there in haunted hidden clusters of Covid over and over light of my life.

New York and New Jersey were both just coming out of a very bad covid surge and there was no indoor dining anywhere. Ridgewood had fancy restaurants with outdoor heating and music outside until it got too cold after Halloween before Thanksgiving. It began to get rainy and gloomy in November and I slept in that fancy restaurant outdoor umbrella fabric with this blanket I had and all my clothes and a hat and my shoes on and got up one morning miserable in the gloom grey dawn and walked out of my little patch of woods by brook and out across Vets’ Field to the Ridgewood Library and sat there under the tent and recharged my devices a few hours and hoping the sun would come back. Around 9 O’clock a bike cop came looking around the tent patio and I got nervous. After he left to look elsewhere for whatever or whoever I got nervous that there might be other cops snooping around too so I walked back across the field and saw the same bake cop and another cop looking around in the small patch of woods  and I worried they’d find my camp and I walked away toward the parking lot over a little bridge to the parking lot when another bike cop showed up unexpectedly and told me to stop and asked me my name and I told him and added that I grew up in Ridgewood, which I knew made a difference. I even showed him my driver’s license, which was an old expired New Mexico license which didn’t necessarily make me seem like a local or responsible but he said they were looking for someone and had to make sure I wasn’t him and I wasn’t in the legal municipal legal sense though up and down in the more mystical oracular registers and orbits surely he and I and you as well were one dear reader loins of my soil of my garden and soul reaching across the seven seas and geologic tempo dreams of Nicki “The Nickname” Dikulus and the cop apologized which was a relief but I was still worried about them finding my camp and I wanted to go get my stuff and scurry away in fear and self effacement  but I still had to wait for the first bike cop and the other cop to finish snooping around in that little patch of wood so I could get my duffel bag and my umbrella fabric and head over to Glen Rock and go into the woods at the park where I knew a bunch of the spots. So I walked around a little to waste some time and then went to my humble little dirt camp where all of my stuff was exactly as I had left it and I picked up my world and I wandered once again! Dear reader light of my tongue tender loins of my aeons and I walked down the path at the one end of the Ridgewood park and walked a few miles carrying all my worldly possessions with my hernia aching a bit and the weight of my endless relentless conscience and memory and my piscadisorderism and all that fishy miscellany when youre growing up they don’t tell you that the seashell is the galaxy or that the decorated military man would violently rape you you just have to wake up and grow as an organism and perceive your environment and try to adapt and thrive that’s just basic biology and so I found in the Glen Rock a hard to see spot and put my big bag down next thing you know disorderism attacks im in an ambulance screaming into light sir you’ve got mental illness are the rosebud of the god of mercy and milk stars scatter why do humanity you mad at deeznutz and then as I was setting up my camp my hernia tore a little more and I kind of fell down in pain and cried out and clutched the ground with my hand and then in addition to that my back went out. I’d hurt my lower lumbar during a landscape construction in my twenties and I’d worked through the injury and didn’t get it treated properly I just took lots of oxycontin which I was already addicted to at that point back in the year 2000 but so that one acts up sometimes like every once in a while when I bends over and do back work like shoveling snow. The hernia tear was very painful and the back thing really hurt quite a bit on top of it not just bodily really but in my soul too and it shrunk my mind and everything suddenly got very painful and depressing and all I could do was lay down in the damp autumn leaves and weep and feel sorry for myself while still in some corner enjoying the smell of decaying oak and maple leaves and feeling warmly nostalgic for the good old days but mostly I just lay there and didn’t move until I really had to go to the bathroom and could hold it no longer. I cried while I shat and used some notebook pages to wipe with. I heard the voices of Nikki “the nickname” Dikulous and Ritchie “dick chin” Chanshuelo (the Chansuelo name is probably the most American name out there right now for those of you who follow crypto and gypcoin and all that) echoing through the ages and the last wastrel bat galaxies of my own mind which is a pretty impure thing sometimes! Wipe wipe wipe not the pages with the scribbles on them they are the precious it needs it but those blank pages which I had plenty of I’d been writing a superhero story about a man whose superpower is that cats like him though I wasn’t working as steadily on this as I should have been [catman] as purr my usual wont.

I had no wifi or phone service and no nearby electric but there were some nearby bathrooms with running water that I would start using once I got a little less depressed and more mobile the next day. Fortunately I had a little bit of vodka left and was tired from moving all my stuff so I could sleep quite a bit, though turning over from side to side as I do when I sleep was painful and distressing.

The spot I was in was like a low point in a forest clearing amidst small hills so that I was in the bottom of a small bowl of mother earth as it were and I felt a sense of spiritual homeness in that which was good. Spiritual homeness is essential to healthy living for people. So like I was in the bottom of this mother bowl as it were and there was a lot of brush around so that even though I was near a busy park right by the bathroom and parking lots and the duck pond I was basically invisible thanks to the hills and the brush and that was great.

I stopped eating for a few days and only got up to fetch water and go to the bathroom. The new tear in my hernia scared me and I worried about further rupture tearing my scrotum or like getting my guts twisted by tucking them back in wrong and causing a rupture in my intestine leading to a painful septic infection and death in agony. I did not want to go out that way. By way of a busted gut. Unless it came from laughing at the greatest possible joke in the universe, like in terms of physics. (Later on, in the desert, in the area that I’ve been living in for April, May, June  and where I’m writing now ((in the original longhand springsum 2021 typing up in same area sumfall 2022 camino verde)) I’d get a septic infection in my elbow and arm. I should add while still parenthetical that I will be moving into the city tomorrow. I will get to shower and sleep in a bed.

The monsoon season heaped misery and gloom upon me. At the ripe old age of 45 I plumbed new depths of self pity. Why is this all happening to me? Why do bad things always happen to me? Why have I alone been chosen by god to suffer more than anyone has ever suffered in the history and prehistory of suffering.

Eventually I died inside for three days which was pretty depressing but when I finally came back to myself I may have been starved, smelly, feral, but I felt really refreshed and invigorated and I went for a walk and my back was still kinda messed up so I was hunched over like a goblin and my hernia was sore and bothersome but it did not rupture further and I felt very alive and fortunate even though I wandered and suffered and self destructed and got myself into terrible predicaments and never really learned my lesson or grew much as I blundered through the blur like the weirdling wastrel clown of the lasdt gaseous outer nebula rings am I dear reader light of my choiring lyre over my mired star mud of streaky aeons in lucifurious trycurious biulumenescexcrescence of iridescence of gasoline puddle toilets that no freedom of bleach could put asunder? I was cold with the autumn rain and my dilapidated body creaked and growned with all too much awareness of life’s vicissitudes and ephemerality and whatnot, the kind of knowledge that one acquires with age in spite of some primordial probably pathological  insane desire not to,  known not to the brain or the heart really so much as the bowels of the guts and the bones and the marrow within. I could feel the weird revivifying music of the reaper cackling in a skeleton embrace of light and aged metal creaking of my endless costume of electronic decades in my loose glittering joints. The infinite shivers of shimmering warmth. Laughter of death at the cooling dying beach of the void and the ocean of all that entropic chaosmos. Even through all of that, I felt genuinely refreshed and even reborn. Crazy how life will throw that at you. Not the suffering and the difficulty, that is to be expected, but the life affirming aspect rising through it all like the terrible irresistible rise of a music slaves and saints alike have set themselves somehow free by? Suffused and overflowing with the knowledge that we are all imbued by our creator with irrefutable musicks? Is it wrong to feel alive by that? Quite the opposite I think.

So I had that going for me, which was nice. I got into moving around more and learning how to adjust to my new body again for the millionth time and tried to think of what to do next. The rain let up briefly but it got cold afterward and I needed more bedding and some materials for a primitive tent. The light rain on the leaves sounds calm and soothing on the level of sound like the soft sibilant whisper of a feline phantom lover and the water did cause all the colors in the green yellow orange red brown cloudlight to gently glisten but on the level of touch and at the levels of like, touch and thermodynamics and the microbiology of infectious disease the wateriness was so displeasing and kind of frightening in that way that the elements can be or whatever. I found a tarp and a nylon rope and planned on setting up a crude tent before a night of dropping temperatures and increasing rain on the first day of November to come so this was Halloween of 2020 I guess what a blazing amphibious blur it has all been through this Covid thing what a hall of mirrors! It was already but then to make things much better and or worse I unexpectedly found a bottle of Jim Beam Kentucky Bourbon in a brown paper bag stashed under a bush by the Glen Rock train platform. I figured some young people had put it there. Possibly a wifebeating irish American new jersey cop (the station was right by this train platform as were the library and the town hall) but so like I did a terrible job of setting up ,y tent and passed out drunk and woke up late night early morning soaked from the rain and groaned miserably for probably the millionth time in this lifetime dear reader light across dustye aeons and rivers but now I’m here in 2022 typing up the notes I write down about it in longhand in summer/monsoon 2021 in a place in Tucson where I got a housesitting plantsitting petsitting gig in a house for a month in Barrio Blue Moon. I know I skip through time it is a hall of mirrors mind I have broken into weird memories mimicking each other in mute musics of written words in the skies of my skull. Things had started heating up all over and a kind of pressure began to build. Heatwaves make people angry and violent and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise and the future is just going to be an increasing heatwave in increasingly lessoning empire and there are constantly scantily clad glistening body low low level sex scandals that make things even slipperier if I may be as vague and poetic about it as I can because I actually love the vaguest parts the most the music of them which if you can hum along and tap your foot to you don’t need to be able to tell what it means now I’m out in this area Camino Verde way in air conditioning Sept 28 2022 typing up material from my notebooks from June of 2021 at the end of September transitioning into October remembering back to to the year before when I wrote the first 7 chapter section, The Book of Exodus, in Badger’s in North Carolina which story this dude from New York City stole the story of which was a bad move because I know people like Tony Beefaroni back in Jersey right. Cy Ademi!!! But so as of now Badger is doing much better, he quit drinking and taking opioids and a lot of the scary gun stuff which was like, you always want a person to be able to move past that in life you know, and I think now he is like a wildeyed mystic who is into esoteric neoplatonic Gnosticism and big canvass oils now. He has done some illustrations for my stories about a superhero whose power was that cats liked him. I was working on that while catsitting at Tina’s in June-July 2021 during which time I was nervous because I’d met her through a friend whose good graces I’d fallen out of after stealing a bunch of morphine she and while staying there I drank hand sanitizer and smoked meth and wrote about the autumn of 2019 and I made friends with people at the nearby Moslem Community Center by the Mosque on Speedway Boulevard between Oracle Road and Stone Avenue with all the impressive suggestions of the triangles of associations of such names for stoned oracles in desert speedways to come fellow travelers back and forth in stitches of remembering over stories weaving flesh every once and a while but so like at that time back in 2019 I woke up cold and hungover in the rain echoes of the immortal glistening suffering of whispering illegitimate children mired in the mad mirror drippings of my own dreadful self pitty shitty two by four. And I cried and I cried and in the loud dark pathetic three A.M. Halloween into November 1 rain but I had to admit that something about crying the cold rain was cool in a darkly romantic way and that being a psycho and a failure is cool and that everybody should do it especially impressionable teenagers and university students all over the world and post tiktok video of it so I got up with my trusty black leather messenger bag and got up and decided to go for a good brisk walk outside when my hernia unexpectedly tore a bit more and I fell down and let out a high pitched cry! and fell down to the ground. Very painful both physically and emotionally what a weak old loser I have become I think to myself dramatically. I got up and humbled gingerly through the woods and weeds toward some public bathrooms that were not open yet but which had an overhang that I could get shelter from the rain beneath. But like just a I emerged from the sad sodden green gloom of the woods to the spot with the overhang I see the cops come in the park with the spotlight on the car doing the late night early morning patrol which makes it kinda fun because you’re like forbidden but you’re not really hurting anyone so it’s a little thrilling and it isn’t much but it can give you a shot of energy when you need it really and spice things up just enough but don’t get you in any real trouble you know, the real life enjoyer will end up in such sad little depressing grooves and ruts in the universe of the all too real having given up on life people like time warp goth records spun around black holes in bleak shuttling glyptic mysteries of spiderwebbing galaxies and the cosmic reverberations of words in a book in a library. So like I hid a bit behind the bathroom building while the cops did their thing wondering about what watery nights glistening coincidences wove in the weave that we wetly believed in the pissy dreams of internet stepsisters gleaming blondley in the cheap lurid transgressions of the internet irony night. I realized I was just kind of dumbly holding the whiskey bottle in my hand somehow swaying in place and I suddenly had to shit before the cop was done and so furtively snuck off and did so and just kind of laughed at how genuinely lame it all was. Then I drank whiskey on the concrete under the overhang and dozed off and woke up and it was kind like getting light if grey and wet outside and I took what few dry things I had left along with my other stuff to a spot by the pond under the gazebo out of the rain on the concrete in the cool early morning and I figured I should like, work harder so I pretended to be in the military but like interplanetary special forces of the mid to late future as opposed to the more commonly referred to near future in my experience. I made cool warm instant coffee with rainwater to chill out and warm up. The sky began to lighten and the clouds thinned out and in the dawn I lie down atop the picninc table and tucked my guts back through my hernia my hands searching as I felt for the pattern my hands had felt before to retuck my guts back in smoothly as the rain slowed as ducks and geese quacked and honked and took off and landed from and on the water in the sad silvery mist and drizzle. I decided to try and walk to wherever I could find some Wifi to message Annie and she if she would let me crash at her place and sleep with me a few times before I wandered back out west to Arizona where on 2022 September 28 I’m typing up notebooks from the peak of the summer heat and the big gush of the monsoon season back in summer 2021 I know the jumps through time are weird but I think that this kind of storytelling has a certain kind of sheen that I believe in through the smeared layers of my own self mythmaking and questionable integrity but craftsmanship nonetheless especially if you like the trashy stuff and I made my way over to Ridgewood by train in sad mournful Covid grieving grey drizzle and she asked me to come down there and comfort her in her time of need and so I hurried out of Ridgewood and down her way on a southbound train to the Trenton Transit Center which was partially open but had no indoor seating. The seats all had caution tape over them and there were cops on Segways and shit. Bad dystopian Covid scene man. Fear and Loathing in Trenton Autumn 2021 more death than usual this year and the autumn a wan grey green gloom of concrete and muted mourning in the morning the skies clearing and the sun coming out as I found a spot to wait on the concrete out in front of or behind (I wasn’t sure?) the station.

It got warm and dry quickly and I felt relaxed and I lay back and got comfortable but within a second or so a cop on a Segway, a young cop with a clean shaven cliché strong cop jaw, shows up and starts busting my balls. You cannot sleep on the abutment, he says. Abutment says what? I ask him? What? He says. I laugh triumphantly to myself as I sit up and get my things together and try to look respectable. Ridiculous, just ridiculous, by Saint Nicky the Nick I say. Dear reader. Light of my laugh choir of my joys. I had a bit of a long wait to go there, Annie had a full day’s work to go before she could pick me up. She was a school teacher. She taught high school French. She’d been working from home, as was the style at the time, and wouldn’t be free to pick me up until four o’clock, so I killed time by wandering around a bit, sitting around in various spots occasionally. Watched some dudes work on some skateboard tricks. I scrounged half a lit cigarette off the ground. An old black dude struck up a conversation and told me where there was a homeless shelter where you could get vouchers to buy groceries with. I didn’t make it to the shelter or get any vouchers but the gesture of the guy telling me about it was kind of reassuring you know it’s the little things sometimes. I just kind of ambled around disgustingly, shambling moistly in the rancid evaporations of the day as it were, as one does, and I killed time by wandering as was my sometimes unwanted wont, my groin kind of sore with my own endless rambling and my mind kind of soggy and fried like a greasy egg in my midlife mental health crises pilgrimages and crazy, hazy, dazed divagations? In deluges of gay delusions and effulgent divulgencies. Kickflips, railslides, things of that nature. Annie showed up and picked me up and we went back to her place and for a while things got a whole lot better.

We held hands as she drove back to her place in Treeglen. She had stopped coloring her hair and had a lot of grey but also a lot of bright red still, in curls, the grey and red both very metallic, so like silver and copper in many many curls that bounced a lot. Sad eyes. Annie had a deep sadness to her, she was always very sensitive and fragile even though she was also still gritty in the manner of Philadelphia people which I always enjoy being a Jersey person myself even if more of a north Jersey person really. But she was very smart as is the way with the metropolitan northeastern types, but also easily reduced to a powerless whimpering heap by even the most miniscule of misfortunes you just never know it is all very volatile I’m that way too.

Crazy typing this up now from my place at Camino Verde (sept 29 2022 looking back on when I wrote it up in my notebooks during the start of the Monsoons at my place at Tina’s in the Barrio Blue Moon June-July 2021 writing in the notebooks about Annie. (July 2021.) Looking at my notebooks I see a big gap where I stop writing and resume with “Man I had a major depressive episode”… I’ll continue in the next paragraph

I’d fallen into drinking heavily and giving long speeches to myself about suicide. Never a good sign!! Anyway it is midway through July 2021 I’m in Tina’s Casita. I drank too much, went down to the Crack in The Box on Grant and Oracle and scored some crack. Someone tried to rip me off and then get antagonistic when I stood up to them and ended up swearing revenge on me. Cracko Paco? I do believe it was Cracko Paco. Street life eh. But so now as I emerged from the terrible dread I felt, from the ache and the despair, all completely needless, so frustratingly self inflicted, and the petty quivering self absorption of it, these kind of weird shadowy inverse forms, these mirror images of pride and vanity, hubris and conceit, I look back aching with nostalgia and yearning like hormone poisoned teenager as I recall holding Annie’s hand as she drove through the hills along the water into and through Philadelphia and marveled at how in such things one might find all the love and the meaning in the world compressed into something the size of two small hands of two nobodies going nowhere out in the everywhere of the American morning. That’s what love can do, renewing even those to whom it isn’t new. Even just the small memories. Sometimes it is through such small but very meaningful condensations of meaning that we make it through the parts where it feels like there isn’t really much to go on. The next hand I would hold would be Saguara’s and after that would be Brandeen’s. You can remember the touch of such moments, the warmth and texture of someone’s hand, and that will call up other sense memories like the sound of someone’s voice and the smell of their breath and the sense of their personality that you see in their eyes when you look in their eyes. Annie had intelligent eyes and oft furrowed brows because she worried a lot though she was also quick to laughter and a fun and energetic conversationalist but kind of nervous and fragile. Saguara’s hands were always very soft and Brandeen’s were dry and old and dusty and feral and twitchy. All of their hands were lifelines back to the shores of civilization from the desolate alien wastes in the endless stupid distances of my aimless adventures, luminous lifelines in among the dark details of the situations surrounding us all in our lives fraught with madness and suffering in the comical cosmic clusterfuckery of the circus of the real.

Annie was not like Saguara and Brandeen. Annie was very middle class and well educated and like not living in the liminal margins in the penumbras at the perimeters of the circus. Annie is booj, a schoolteacher in an area with well funded public schools near a big city with a lot of culture, she makes like eighty grand a year and works weekends at a nice restaurant and has a nice apartment with cats and plants and everything. But she gets very sad and lonely and stressed out sometimes. She suffers immensely because she feels that nobody loves her and sometimes she gets very ashamed over little things and it gets hard to do anything. She keeps up with her own life but it overwhelms her. But she shows me how to pronounce French poetry and the sex is fun! She has one kid, the kid is in college. One of them modern they’s they have now you know. The kid stays with the dad more often because the dad is rich and has a big house and isn’t all neurotic like Annie. The dad is a professional musician and makes a bunch of money. He is a baby boomer, he’s like my dad’s age but Annie is like my age. Big age gap there. Who am I to judge! Lucky to be alive at this point in my life and am just lucky that I am part cat and could make it through my first seven deaths without dying. Where am I at in the story? Oh right I’m in my Tucson (Sept-Oct Rex’s) 2022 bedroom typing up notes from my notebooks during when I was at Tina’s casita in the Monsoon season (summer) 2021 reminiscing about when I arrived at Annie’s in like October-November 2021 just outside Philly. Annie’s ex, the babydad, is like twenty three years older than she is, she’s my age give or take a year or two. I think he was very critical of her and controlling in her relationship and part of her general sense of nervousness and dread is that she was in a bad marriage with a bully for a long time.

She was always really kind and affectionate with me. We liked a lot of the same music. I’m a big music fan in general and to be honest if I am sleeping with someone I will just pretend to like the music they like even if I don’t just to be nice or whatever, but with her we actually had some good overlap, and like we really did find refuge in one another, because I get overwhelmed by life too, I get overwhelmed by very little all the time, sometimes the most stuff is actually condensed into them you know. I loved cooking for her. Her eyes lit up, the brow became poignantly joyous, cooking for people can be very rewarding. So we had fun shacking up for a bit eventually. But so I’m getting ahead of myself.

She picked me up at Trenton right, you just remember things and the associations take off sometimes, sorry for the digressions, but we held hands in the car and listened to some music that we both liked as me traveled along the stone and the water out of Philly and into the suburbs where the Maples were changing color and some were very bright orange and red. We were talking, we had good conversational energy. She was a real Jersey girl you know. Soon we end up talking about sex. She seemed eager! She squeezed my hand excitedly as she spoke, I can remember the timing of the pulses of the squeezes. This was different than the twitchiness of Brandeen’s hand when you held it. She was an otherworldly madwoman oracle of another world and a conduit conducting interdimensional electricities, things of that nature, and severely post traumatic, and on meth sometimes, so she just be crackling like that you know. Annie was squeezing because she was happy about sex. Brandeen was physically affectionate but actually careful about sex stuff and we’d talked many times about how it had to do with her dad having raped her and her kids and all. Those were different memories that smelled like the desert and weird western wastes at the edge of the circus of the real.

But so while this was of course flattering and exciting to me too I had to awkwardly bring up my hernia. “I have to be careful,” I said. “I haven’t had sex since I hurt myself down there and I don’t know how much it will hobble my fucking.”

“I will take you out back and shoot you like a horse,” she said.

“You joke but they do that in Arizona,” I said.

“Sweetie it’s ok,” she squeezed my hand more reassuringly now. She turned to look me in the eye briefly, the road was curvy and had small hills so looking away from it to gaze at me was slightly risky which made it hot.

“My dick still works,” I said.

“I know what a hernia is,” she said.

“There are several different kinds you know,” I remonstrated.

“We are in our forties, Piscadoro.”

“I am but a dilapidated child,” I sighed ruefully.

“So dramatic,” she said. “Like a teen girl.”

“It’s emasculating!” I said in a high pitched embarrassing voice. Stevie Ray Vaughan’s version of Little Wing came on the sound system so that was cool I always liked that one. She laughed at me. “I wasn’t that manly to begin with!”

She squeezed my hand again, more in a light hearted good humored way now, warmly.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You’re such an idiot,” she said. The morning light gleaming in thin curvelets on the bouncing rings of her metallic hair as she laughed and we passed from out under the trees into the daylight.

“I know,” I said. Laughing at myself now. I shed a tear, a small one, that I quickly plucked from my cheek and put into my mouth to hide it. Just being insecure and childish really. Silly. It passed. Turned out the sex was fun! Whouda thunk it! I just had to be careful and not worry about it. We got home and showered and got in bed and did it sidestroke and I whispered sweet things in my ear and I meant them and she told me she loved me and we took our time and remembering how it all sounded and the smell of it and the warmth of her skin and sounds of our sighs and moans I did get some pangs of longing for that which was not there anymore but also a sense of satisfaction and gratitude at having had the experience I was remembering in the first place. And the sense of being reassured that I could enjoy sex and physical intimacy after worrying that I’d been deformed to the point of exclusion from those spheres of human social and romantic life. I felt relieved and reinvigorated and most and best of all I felt loved dear reader light of my life and love of my imperfect loins and all that.

What a fun time it all was! We smoked weed and bought pizza and cheesesteaks and watched tv. I had been living down and out for a while and I had come to derive the greatest joys from the littlest of things occasionally, and to realize that in having a good time I might be creating a special memory that I will cherish later on at Tina’s the Autumn after that or in my room at Rex’s the autumn after that. There is something nostalgic in autumn among seasons and older ages among individuals. These little things added up to a brief heaven amidst all the plague and pessimism of the time. Some Tito’s Vodka. Good stuff! We had great conversations about life, we made love, we ate and lounged and watched some tv. We went to sleep.

Or I did anyway. Annie had trouble sleeping at night and then in the morning she had trouble waking up. Some people are that way. Mornings were very overwhelming for her. I understood. I’ve never been a stranger to anxiety and depression, but at the time I was fortunate enough to be in high spirits so I could be encouraging and emotionally supportive and help her out in the morning. She would get so stressed about work! I found that understandable, I found the prospect of teaching high school French pretty terrifying! But she was actually pretty good at it! A lot of times it is the people who worry way too much who are the best at what they do. I’ve known musicians like that. She was teaching from home doing school remotely via Zoom owing to all the Covid that was still around Philly Metro Oct-Nov 2020 as I recall now from the outskirts of Tucson Sept-Oct 2022 thinking back to downtown Tucson at Tina’s monsoon (summer) of 2021. Tina worked as a highschool teacher too, she was an art teacher. I never got to know her like I knew Annie.

But so I got up first and made coffee and drank beer. I don’t always like to drink in the morning but when I do I enjoy it quite a bit though when my drinking gets out of hand I can get into trouble and be self destructive and hurt people. It didn’t get too bad during that time. I was happy with her and she was happy with me, we just both knew it couldn’t really last. But some things don’t. We both knew that we could at least enjoy it a little while it lasted and we did.

It felt weird writing in my notebooks about it in Tina’s casita because I was coming out of a major alcohol and drug related depression and really identifying with Annie about just feeling very fragile and overwhelmed sometimes. When I feel big and strong emotionally I can lift other people up and if I end up in the morning with someone who wakes up crying and saying I can’t do this I can do well cheering them up. She actually had her shit way more together than I did and she held down a pretty challenging job and paid her bills and had a kid at an impressive rich people university like Sarah Lawrence or something. She takes good care of her plants and animals! I can barely take care of myself I’ve been alive by default for decades now just drifting through the endless meaningless swarm of flesh and imagery and information overload and the sad eyes of exhaustion echoing over the aeons to the other shore of the text and the abyss and you dear reader fire of my sighs and light of my songs and all that once again to repeat my chaotic incantatory refrain endlessly reaching. Annie would perhaps get a little lost in her sadnesses and illusions but who still kept together and read French poetry to me in bed and explained the special nuances of the sounds of the words giving proper attention to the accent and the meter and the tone and the emotional dimensions and delicious juices in the words and all that and I’d try sometimes to convince her that she was indeed plenty good enough for this world and then some if she could only wipe away the tears long enough but to see it. She sometimes insisted that only good dick could remind her. And that in the absence of good dick mine would do too. Lucky for me! Oh how fondly I remembered it all then from Tina’s which I remember now from Rex’s out in the desert near the camps on West Ajo and Camino Verde and such.

I of course had no money which was the usual that year as it had been the year before. Good god I’m a bum! But I had soul power, which can go a long way. And she had a nice place and enough money that we could eat and drink and make love and be merry for a few weeks and that can really be a beautiful thing.

She’d had a cat named Felix who was cute as hell. We cuddled with Felix when we cuddled with each other on the bed and on the couch. In Felix’s black and white tuxedo patterning could be seen the interplay of our own personal yin and yang energies. Man I love cats. Like Burroughs, Like Lenin, like jazz, I love cats. Annie also loved cats. In fact we decided to go to Philly to go adopt another. I love Philly. I’ve never been arrested there, I would love to get arrested there some time. But so we went to like a famous cat shelter in Philly, I forget the name, and we adopted a big dark grey cat, a blue Maine Coon with a Ron Perlman face as you sometimes find among that breed in particular, easily over 20 pounds but without an ounce of flab on him, who’d belonged to some creepy old lady in some kind of Grey Gardens type living situation in a giant mansion full of mannequins with spiderwebs on them and grotesque mutant beasts in the back gardens especially in all the water features crawling with overgrown foliage and buzzing insects. The old woman had been dead for weeks before they found her. Anyway the cat was named Previous, which seemed ironic and weird once you got to know the cat for more than five seconds. How insane must the old woman have been? They say she bought used diapers off Ebay! So Annie and I renamed the cat Pablo. Maine coon’s are known as gentle giants and Pablo was very cuddly with Annie and myself at first. Then after we’d had him a few days we took him to the vet and it turned out he had some kind of bacterial infection and he was feverish and dehydrated and emaciated. He was already enormous, just like 22 pounds easy, but that was with his body wasted away by serious illness, which also had him very sluggish and passive, but then after we gave him the medicine that the vet gave us, he started eating heartily and getting more energetic and he put on five or six pound in no time and it was all muscle. And his energy changes. His personality. His vibration. Suddenly he is the second most dominant animal in the house psychically after me but before Annie and the other cat.

Pablo was not friendly with the other cat, Felix, who was always just as sweet and lovable as can be but who feared Pablo and understandably so. Felix was plump but small of frame so that Pablo outweighed him by a good twelve pounds and was way faster and tougher. Pablo tormented Felix relentlessly. And in terrorizing Felix Pablo ended up terrorizing Annie. It was all very dramatic! I didn’t realize it was all happening at first. It was all kind of funny to me and I was glibly dismissive of what I thought of as Annie’s neurotic overreaction. I mean she was neurotically overreacting as was her wont especially early in the mornings but I should have been more gently reassuring and helpful about it early on as Pablo revealed the true evil of his nature. Pablo was kind of like Tiger, the killing machine I knew back in North Carolina, Badger’s cat, but even bigger and stronger and more powerful by a good deal. Less bloodthirsty perhaps if not less sadistic. Merciless, ceaselessly predatory.

Annie would wake up and have anxiety attacks and start crying in the morning because she hated her job and the new cat was bullying her and the other cat. The strife between the other cats was utterly unbearable to her. Felix was not getting hurt but he was constantly fleeing to spots in the house that were too hard for Pablo to get to because he was so large. It was perhaps Pablo’s one weakness, being too large for certain areas at the window sills and on the back of the one chair and on the bookcase with the creepy dolls in it. If I’d been more attentive and considerably early on the whole thing might not have snowballed so ridiculously.

“Let them work it out,” I told her. “Felix is being a baby.” I thought she was favoring the weak one as women will do sometimes. That’s how I ended up with her anyway. And in a way I was right that that was what she was doing that she was favoring Felix who was kind of her baby but also she was just being more kind and compassionate than I was.

“He bit me!” she said, after Pablo had bitten her rather lightly and playfully. She began to cry and staggered dramatically to the couch and slumped down into it and put her face in her hands.

“Annie, your leg is fine, you can’t pretend the cat is bullying you.”

“I know I know,” she said. “I’m such an idiot.”

“Don’t say that,” I said. It was distressing just how distraught she was because the cat had hurt her feelings. Her ankle wasn’t hurt. “The real wound is to your already aching soul,” I said. “Cats play with feet all the time and when they actually attack for real it is pretty vicious! And Pablo is enormous and very strong.”

“I know I know,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time. Pablo started chasing Felix again and she began to cry more. “Why am I like this?” she laughed.

I held her and kissed her cheeks and tasted the sad salt of her tears and whispered gentle reassurances and gently stroked her hair with my fingers.

“I wanna smoke weed,” she said, snigging some snot and rubbing her eye, glistening with a kind of sad willful naivete.

“Go for it,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. She was acting kind of like a little girl.

“I’ll make breakfast!” I said, springing to my feet.

“Yes!” she said.

The cats zipped by.

“Pablo!” she cried. “Please stop!” Her eyes flashing.

“Can you please chill about the cats?” I asked her slowly, calmly, a little exhaustedly or even destroyedly maybe. Dear reader, loaf of my yarns. My chill dude voice.

“I’m putting him in the other room,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll make omelettes.”

“Okay,” she said, trembling absurdly.

Things always improved after these kinds of teary mornings but the mornings really could be distressful and Pablo really was bullying Felix relentlessly. Eventually Felix started pissing and shitting in the bed and on the couch. A fear response that just made everything worse! So it goes. Thing were cool otherwise and despite the difficulties with the cats and vibes in the morning things were really great and I was enjoying myself immensely. Really glad to be alive in fact. I loved having someone to talk to and cook for and drink with and go to bed with who actually cared for and understood me even if she had some other more official boyfriend in Europe who she met online and who lived in Germany and she talked on the phone for an hour a day with him and loved him more… I was fine with all that really. It was a good temporary thing! It was during Covid this was autumn 2020 it was a chaotic time. Her daughter would be coming to stay with her soon and I would have to leave. As time went on she spent more and more time on her phone talking and messaging to him or others than she did talking to me and that was fine too. She couldn’t visit him now because of Covid. People were avoiding travel. Not me, but people.

During this time I worked on getting my Twitter account going again after it had been locked for some reason and Twitter wanted me to add a phone number but I hadn’t had one then because I was such a bum you know. I obsessively avoid doing basic human shit because I have deep rooted issues of feeling subhuman and dehumanized because of being exposed to such cruelty and sadism in my younger years. I will avoid cleaning or putting sheets on a bed or changing my pants for a very long time kind of obsessively parading my sense of myself as soiled used goods for all to see you know and so what if I like it sometimes eyyyy cool it Ritchie sit on it Potsie all we are is lust in the wind dude sight of my loitering light in the life of the streets and the greasy spoons and the awkward teens and the scattershot used children of America. Entropy flaneur de lis de la soul in domina est.

Next thing I know I’m back out at the gas station West Ajo 2021 reflecting on how I did not write much at all while I lived inside at Tina’s dope casita I was just too drunk and depressed to do anything except eat and drink just a little bit more. I’m typing this up now and like it is Oct 1 2022 and I’m in my room at Rex’s in Camino Verde looking at notebooks from late July and early August 2021 where like… I experienced the elements in a new way right around then after my period of drinking and sulking inside before moving back out into the bush and living in a tent getting soaked the first night and seeing lightning rapid fire and in the raw everywhere as I clutched my precious notebooks to my breast remembering how back when I stayed with Annie I had peace especially after we took Pablo back to the shelter and Annie got her Klonopin and Ativan and Valium and Xanax prescriptions. At the peak of that chaos, when Felix had been going to the bathroom on the couch and on the bed, I understood that in my way because I used to do that when I was a kid. Felix was leaving turds on the parts of the house that smelled most like Annie as a stress response where he was like trying to bond with the food source and the boss and mom etc. We filled out forms at the shelter while we were returning Pablo and Annie started telling the workers that Pablo had bullied her and that I had done nothing to protect her which was true and to be honest I still sometimes wish I had Pablo with me in the wild but hey I’m sorry if these things seem all dislocated in time. So we smoked some weed and drank some vodka and we had delightful lethargic bloated comical warm rejuvenating middle aged sex before falling asleep in strange positions. I dreamed of the beginning of the world, when I once shat blood on my bed because I couldn’t keep a secret for my dad who wished I could have been more manly at age 6. The cat will go to the bathroom in a spot like that to bond with the head of the household as a defense mechanism she said in her sleep and we dreamed of other people who dreamed of other people still. Then there were days of peace, bliss and refuge. Annie taught school remotely and she got overwhelmed but she did a great job. One night we counted each other’s grey hairs. We whispered wishes we both knew would never come true, understanding that what we both wished and which was possible was that we could share our most impossible wishes and dreams with one another. If you go a real long time without that kind of thing and then you experience it and are capable of recognizing it for what it is when you do, well that is as close as some of us might ever get to grace or something like that. But such things are beautiful because they are so brief! Risen rose upon time’s rude rood in rhymes. Things of that nature. But so I had to get into an argument with Annie about ghosts because I am an idiot. We were watching one of those ghost hunter shows on tv. She started telling me about all these experiences she’d had with ghosts.

“I can’t believe in ghosts,” I said resolutely. “I find them ridiculous. I’m not superstitious enough.”

“Don’t you literally believe that the archangels of the revelation both exist and pay attention to you?”

For the holidays I would give her the greatest gift of all, my own departure and absence, which I hope to receive myself as a gift someday. I took Annie’s yoga mat and she bought me a sleeping bag and a Greyhound Ticket back to Tucson. I would leave December 19^th. The Snow was beginning to fall in the inscrutable east and so I fled. The art of fugue states America. So I headed back out west.