et Celine

Searching for work that is not offensive is relatively impossible.  I just sit here and write and live, sometimes living through debacle after debacle, wandering towns and downtowns, sifting through things with that cold wind of humanity that refuses to hold on to virtue.  I would have made it as a guttersnipe, but I was tracked after a month, picked up in some cafe after calling the police on former friends who were following me.  It took awhile.  I was all over the bus and train system, searching, mostly for places to sleep and live.  It wasn't that bad.  There were construction sites and people's heated laundromats, a mailroom, the freezing beach, places on the cliffside penninsula where one could dodge people pulling up in their jelly bean sports vehicles, wearing work out outfits.  I really felt like a Witch.  Things came into view more clearly that I was Dark and probably didn't deserve to live.  Call me nuts, but it made more sense that I existed than people clearly concerned with nettling conceptions of Good.

I have a Call as opposed to a Calling.  It shifts through broad avenues, is there when I walk through the open doors of the Hera Hotel in North Inglewood.  I am not ornate or pompous or serious any more, I just work on odd things here and there, trying to find some kind of living sustinance in a scrap of news overheard in jail or some type of flowing ribbon of breath when I ran, out of breath, to ditch some Latino muggers in downtown LA.

I usually escape.  I've only been caught a handful of times.  It's mostly not by police, nor when I Give Myself Up Voluntarily Because There is No Other Recourse Except Aftermath.  That and I am usually polite.

There was this matter of the drop point knife that was in the parka a waiter stole from me at the Redondo Beach Cafe for failure to pay.  Well I offered Labor in exchange for the overpriced sausage burrito, but he suddenly wanted a bunch of money and my clothes.  Fine.  I felt happy later finding out that my wallet wasn't in my jacket at the time.  The park was bright green, warm, and ugly as sin.

People in the city mostly want to do drugs, sit on their fat asses, and bugger.  It's boring and reminds me of a Mansion For Pigs.

You can move around, swift, observing story to story without writing it down.  It makes a lot of sense.  Transit workers are pestered, they won't let you relax, and the manager of a supermarket chain would just as soon see you starve than give you a fifty cent apple after you had six days of not eating.  Well, compared to myself, it seemed like they were made of money.  I told some Authority this later and all they did was laugh.  I got arrested for using a park bench for sleep, they told me that some woman in an apartment saw me and thought I was dead.  The cop was surprised when I sat up.  Apparently people usually die on park benches by the beach or something, but this was not where I saw the dead.  They were all over the ghetto on Sixth Street, laying there in fluids while SWAT cars howled through the trash strewn street with sirens, all the store fronts closed up with corrugated metal.

I figured at some point that I should get a job.  Really though?  It was too easy to evade.  You just sat on the train like a normal person, although in some sort of conundrum in terms of laundry and showering.  You just sat there and heard the black boys rap about getting high, and then some old Mexican woman gives you a dollar because you probably don't smell like chemical deodarant.  In businesses you make up stories when People Ask You Unnerving Questions, you use marina showers and the ones sticking out of the sand on the boardwalk, you move, most importantly, you move and keep moving, not expecting where to end up, wondering at the same time how it could all be so Beautiful and Breathless.