Thinking of Blogging And Thinking Of Writing And Look At The Time!

Blessed bernita slapped a "thinking blogger" sticker on my backside and I am having trouble making it stick. It's like those band aids you try and cover a greasy wound with. Sure, it'll stay while you don't move and just stare at it. But go for a burger... and it falls off in line next to the kid who keeps driving his thumbs hard into that plastic video toy he can't look up from.

bernita is a gifted writer whose daily posts revolve around writing- serious writing. Her webpage is full of writers. Serious writers. All this to say, that my being tagged a "thinker" (which I deny at all checkpoints!) has got me to thinking about my poor ignored and unpolished Sam, languishing away in a file on a pair of computers called "Sam and Hal".

Anyway, I started thinking I would like to start rethinking and rewriting this story, giving it all a decent second draft. Then I thought, "it sure would be nice to have some hard core honest feedback before I started, something to actually break me out of the mold my mind has set this in; a slap in the face to my histrionics, a kick in the ass to my stubborn adherances; a cold bucket of water to my lazy imaginings..."

Today seemed like as good a day as any to put that out into the cyber-slurry, in case such an animal exists.

Here is a cut and paste, straight out of my scrapbook--



Big City held millions of people. The edges faded into lots and fields and litter-strewn fencing that ran away from Big City like spokes in a mangled wheel. In its center Big City bulged in places and in others stood standing tall in windowed towers of concrete and glass and steel. The weave of roadways were most apparent from high vantage points within these towers-- some with rotating roofs that served coffee and some with offices that served its citizens.

Big City was never an idea but simply an occurrence with consequences. A whole army of its citizenry were employed in her upkeep and continual creation and enhancement. Humans unintentionally created Big City with a dedicated mindfulness over a large expanse of time, and yet clung to Big City like Big City created them. Big City was a mother to its own citizenry allowing the necessary clinging of her offspring and providing warmth and sustenance A mother who cared for her offspring under an umbrella of obeisant expectations. A mother who held her offspring accountable and doled out her disapproval in harsh doses of indifference and cold uninhabitable weather.

Those who found themselves where Sam found himself were cut loose from Big City comfort and left to find refuge within her colder folds. As a mother, Big City had too many children, and the scraggly ones and the flailing ones, and the ones who had fallen out of the parameters Big City set, were left to fend for themselves.

You see, Big City was also a machine-- as well as a multitude of forms of refuge-- and had developed its own ingenious means of maintaining itself through its own anthropomorphic needy existence like a robot who had taken over the laboratory that created it.

Wind ruffled across Sam’s unruly hair in a cold invisible wave. Sam’s face was now face down in sand again, and his cheek pressed itself into the silica piles and reddened and flattened. Sam’s wool trousers flapped lightly around his wiry thighs, and his dirty overcoat spread out on the sandy, filthy ground like a collapsed tent. You wouldn’t know it by looking at Sam right now, but Sam had beaten Big City in her own game once upon a time. Sam had had Big City on the ropes, had lived in Big City on his own terms, and had called the shots as they fell in Big City’s pockets. Sam at one time not long before, had been one who rode Big City like she were an obdurate cow, and had many times driven his spurs sharply into Big City’s recalcitrant backside like a cowboy drunk on power and pride.

Big City was like many other big cities. Dull and shiny and darkly well-lit in its quiet cacophony. You could say Big City-- like an ever-hopeful faith-- held many contradictions within its wall-less confines. She was a container for the passage of time and a medium to carry that container. She was a vast expansive form of refuge that demanded some form of servitude. She was unintentionally created with intense intent. She held opulence and wealth in one pocket, and had a hole in her purse. Her nights were well-lit and her days could be quite dark and full of shadows. Like a surrealistic imagining in a somnambulist’s landscape, big city was almost too bizarre to be what she actually was.

5:11

Surrounding Sam sleeping in the sandblasting sand still laying in tiny drifts atop a large concrete block in the pre-dawn well-lit darkness, were several more than several large piles of clothing tattered and dirty and darkened by grime and slime, wrapped around the lifeless limbs of sleeping, sordid piles of human beings.

A snort came from here. A grumble from over there. There were ruffling and weak bemoaning and strange calls out to the callous night, but not a single angered snore could be heard in defiant declaration of a profound and important life being bravely lived in Big City by anyone except a sleeping-- loudly snoring-- Sam.

These were sub-par human beings draped in discarded layers of Big City’s surpluses hiding from Big City’s citizenry and Big City’s indifferences and Big City’s cold and unsympathetic weather by sleeping beneath piles of unwanted cloth deep and thick enough to muffle the fact that they were living beings with needs and wants and things. By resembling the discarded and unneeded and unwanted they covered themselves over with, these men and women were hoping to somehow disappear. in large piles unseen and unheard. and uncared--for and unnoticed and therefore unmolested.

“Don’ t look at me. I am simply a pile of something you didn’t want Please step over me and don‘t look at me, please..“

By my count there were nine of these rag heaps scattered like random leavings from a herd, ruffled and wadded like dirty clothes piles long neglected, surrounding a snoring Sam and in no way mindful of Sam’s sad state amongst their affairs.

Sam was one of them, yes, though, not quite one of them. Sam was different. Sam seemed to have a reason for being Sam. Sam seemed to have a spark that these other piles lacked. When Sam was sleeping beneath the train trestle with this roughly wadded crowd-- which was not all that often-- things had a way of getting started. Sam had a way about him that got things started. Things got started while Sam was around, and settled down long after they ended, which made Sam legendary in the often confused and confounded minds of these piles of unwanted leavings.

6:23

At 6:23 on a moonless well-lit night, Big City seemed to crack an eye and look around. The sun was nowhere to be found. You couldn’t see it but you could feel it happening. Big City reached out blindly and hit the SNOOZE button and went back to tossing and turning-- not quite sleeping but not yet enmeshed in a new day dawning either.

The fact was, day was not quite ready for the dawn. The well-lit city was cloaked in dark shapes hiding in light places and faith was waiting for awakenings. Porch lights worried and signs were everywhere, while sounds were heard like shrieks and bangs and clanks.

It might have been a clank that actually caused Sam to sit up and look around. It might have been a dream. But at 6:24 on a moonless well-lit night, tucked up elevated in a man-made world beneath a train trestle overpass laying in sandblasting sand and surrounded by the leavings of Big City’s citizenry, Sam sat up and looked around as if a prowler had crept in unnoticed and stole his house.

“Fire. Fire. Fire.” ran through Sam’s mind like a useless mantra..

“And a beer.”

Sam took time to orient his mind. Things were thought that belonged in the haze of dreaming and alcohol. Wild things like jumping from this concrete block to the rooftops of several flat roofs far below.

“I could fly if I just could. God, I need a beer.”

Those kind of thoughts.

“Where is my honey? Where is my house? Where am I supposed to be in fifteen minutes?”

Sam gathered wood while waiting for his mind to clear. It never fully really seemed to, during these days. These days to Sam were like a blurry dream and a motion picture television Sunday morning rerun. These days were like a fast life lived beneath the water, or a car chase in slow motion on a curve. Days like these were a constant reminder of things lost and things not yet discovered. Searching for a hidden stash of wood, Sam let this day start in fuzzy detail and inconsistent constancy.

It was only a pile in a conical form, and it was rough and ill-conceived, but it was a start. The pile lit with a flash of fire from a small and expensive--looking lighter, and Sam blew on the burning wad of paper to enlarge the heart of the flame and warm his goodly nature to a level that left his life worth living.

“Fire is the elixir that quenches the thirst of the cold and the shivering,” spoke a shivering Sam.

“Fire on ice is a hole waiting to happen.”

Crackling joined the grumbles and the clanks and echoed eerily between two large chunks of concrete. The snaps and pops of pitch pockets in wet wood were reminiscent of childhood winter familial feelings and ski trips in Vermont.

Nine piles of wadded humanity remained unfazed by the newly flickering firelight. The flickers of flame danced and swayed for an audience that rubbed his eyes and wiped his nose with his sleeve and tried to make it all go again on the inside of his numb and filthy skull.

A man named Sam. A simple bum in a tattered set of woven keep-me-warms who watched their ardent orange dances and cornered them with proffered frozen palms.

The heat gathered in Sam’s extremities like a collection of good deeds, and sought the source of the soul of our Sam, the way a good deed should.

“Heat is life,” thought a slowly thawing Sam.

Light is life, is what I thought.

Who is telling this tale, anyway?

6:28

The fire grew with Sam’s additions. More light was added to the mix. A hand before the face was an orange-toned hand with life-lines and fingerprints and scars and calluses and ground--in dirt and grime and slime. These hands fed the flames more wood. These flames climbed this wood like liquid vines and clambered higher still.

Sam was now standing and happy to be living as his shadow grew behind him and his feelings overpowered him.

“Mimi”.

Sam would think this thought a lot.

“Mimi“.

The flames clamoring to the chin and backing down. Sam smelled the singe and took it all in.

Sam thought, “A shave, of all things, “ and he rubbed the burning flesh as he began to laugh.

As 6:38 came and passed, the sun was now an inkling on the horizon. If you thought about it long enough, it would show itself in bright warm golden flashes. It would not be your own idea but your premonition that would coax it out of hiding. If you expected it, it would show. The sun was good like that.

It always showed. It always came.

Faith held forth that the sun would always shine. The sun was light. Light is the life I am trying to convince you you are privy to while you are living. Without your light you have fear and with that fear, darkness.

On a well-lit moonless Big City night, the darkness was now giving way to lightness. Sam was warming to the leaping flames striking flashes of more light like lightning through a woven moth-holed blanket held before the sky.

Sam’s laughing and this lighting left no doubt that there was crazy fire in the air. Things were getting started. You could tell. You could feel it. There was magic to be found in Sam-surround that came with pyrotechnics..

Sam grew animated.

“Alright everybody, rise and shinola!”

Sam raised his straight arms to shoulder height like a scarecrow and then flapped them like a conductor out of control of his orchestra.

“Up and Adam and Eve and an apple a day!”

Sam was walking in tight circles to go along with all of his other craziness now.

“Get up! Stand up! Stand up for your rights!”

Sam was doing the wave by himself.

“Wakey wakey little snakies!”

Sam was doing something I’ve never seen before.

“Bimmm Bommmmmnnnnggg! Bimmm Bommmmmnnnnggg!”

Sam was now hitting a giant invisible gong.

“It is the sunrise, not the advent of day that one should worship, if one should wake in the dark.”

Sam was now reading from a make-believe book.

“Aaaaooooga! Aaaaooooga!”

Sam was driving something old with a cord for a horn.

“Come on boys and girls, you’re burning daylight!”

Sam was waving at and extolling each pile of rags like they were lit but not yet aflame.

“Oh my God! Look at the time!”

Sam was looking at his Rolex on his well-tracked arm.

“Time to get up sleepy heads! Barroom! Boooba! Barroom! Boooba!”

Sam was now trying to play a giant non-existent tuba.

“Eeee eeee eeee eeee eeee...”

Sam’s smoke alarm in his head just went off, or maybe they were his back-up beepers?

Sam was doing his best to raise an alarm. Nine wads were doing their best to hide beneath the thickness of their unwanted mounds of cloth, and the sun was now throwing its first finger to the skies in a jubilantly defiant pronouncement of its arrival once again.

One middle finger of light. One ray of hope. One beatific second in a cyclic miraculous ritual.

The time of that miracle was 6:46 am on a cold November morning dressed in frost.

A bald and mostly toothless head emerged from a hole in a wad. This was The Laughing Man. Sam had woken him and made a funny. This had made him laugh.

Hoo hoo hoo haw haw haw haw ha ha haw.

There are laughs and then there is laughter and a head. With the Laughing Man, the two were separate and sometimes equal. At times the laugh is all you heard. Sometimes the head is all you saw. Sometimes the mostly toothless hairless head and the laugh emerged and merged and melded into an event you noticed and analyzed in a mixture of fear and cheerfulness; while the crazy, mostly toothless hairless head laughed on and on and on like an echo repeating itself in a chamber of horrors that you got in free for.

For Sam it was the whole package. A laughing, mostly toothless hairless head with a laugh that affected all it came in contact with, like good music in a dome or silence in a quiet place.

The flames flickered against a backdrop of concrete blocks and trestle tracks above and flat rooftops below. The flames were an inverted, dancing moment cloaked in orange. The world seemed afire while the Laughing Man laughed, his head out of a hole in a wad while Sam pronounced daylight officially on its way (in a moment if you would all just wait for it.)

The scene-- eight wads of undesired garment piles and the ninth now a head sticking out of a pile of rags. A bum by the name of Sam in a posture of great reverence like Elvis or Jesus filling noisy silences with impromptu profundities. and silly gnomic nonsensicalities.

“The world is not flatter than a pancake.”

Sam had some odd dance thing going now, as if each point needed a tutu and a pointer.

“You cannot knot a knot.”

“There are more than seven wonders. I wonder where they went?”

“Devine is for degrape, which grows on the side of denial...”

Sam was dancing on his quaking toes and pointing at nothing, and uttering stuff like that.

And the Laughing Man was certainly getting a kick out of all of it, to be sure, as was apparent by his laughter.

Hoo hoo hoo haw haw haw haw ha ha haw... and so on and so forth...

(I suppose you too, would laugh, too, if you were there.)

6:45

With the light came the noise. Big City didn’t wake with a whisper. She woke with a clamor. Engines started. Tempers rose early. Garbage cans were dragged across rough pavement. Sirens resounded, and boom stereos beat their drivers to their jobs-- the bass so deep it pressed against the sides of thoughts in rhythmic angry pulses . Big diesels rap-rap-roared. in deliverance of backdoor rendezvous’ with vendors of all stripes and sizes-- the bread was getting spread around town.

Subway trains clacked and clattered as they ran around in circles or back-and-forth like autistic toys full of sleep--wiping people reading the news and sipping lukewarm coffee that dribbled on many.

Clickety clackety clockety clickety...

One just clattered overhead. No. Maybe roared and clattered is what I meant to say? One just roared and clattered overhead. “One just rhythmically roared” works well as well..

Laughter ceased to make a mark in the world as the din of the metal wheels and straining steel and echoing clickety clackety clanking over--ran the verbal antics of Sam and the almost maniacal laughing of The Laughing Man. If you were a wad of unwanted cloth piled beneath the tracks high up on a block of concrete on a bed of old sandblasting sand, you would roll over and grumble for mercy and wrap your hands around your ears. This would be the tortuous part of your existence. This would be the time to swear and curse. This would be a good time for a drink. and if you were lucky enough to have hid a half of not drank last night’s bottle in your wad of ruffled collected clothing, you took a long swill here and now and were thankful for the gut warming flavor and unsavory momentary relief from being woken by a train running over your inebriated head.

Wads of unwanted cloth swelled and ruffled in this ritual. Hidden humans swilled and satiated beneath their mounds of wadded unwanted garments like burrowers in a mood to stretch themselves without showing themselves in fear of their own shadows.

The Laughing Man ran plain out of breath and settled down to catch it, sipping all he had in his possession, a drop of Ripple fumes and the odor of his own existence.

6:55

Sam stood with his fingers in his ears, looking less Jesus-like or Elvis-like and much more apprehensive.

Like a ringing in a banged-up ear, the noise was intolerable and then settled and faded finally, and then disappeared completely. The train had left the trestle and was gone. The din of Big City fell like a silence on Sam and his friends hidden in piles of collected cloth. The din was softly harsh and full of discord. But it was silence for the here and now.

Sam was back like a sage on fire. He had picked up a staff and had kicked the coals and fed the flames. He looked like Moses standing in the burning bush. He looked important, as if important things were things to say from scratch.

“This is it! This is all there is!
This is all there ever was!
All of this is all there ever will be.
All there will be always was!
Don’t you get it? Doesn’t that make, like, total sense?
You are streaming in time.
Your life is but a swim in a cosmic sea.
You are an event starting and stopping.
You are in it but you are not IT.
You have free will but can you free Willy?
All there needs to be always was, but all there was need not be.
Are you paddling yet, my friends? Or simply wading?
Put your hands in the air if you feel you are afloat on a boat!
DO YOU WANT TO SINK OR SWIM?”

There were no hands or takers. The Laughing Man had pulled his head beneath his heap of ruffled unwanted clothing and become a wad. There were nine wads now, lacking in movement and motivation.

Undaunted, Sam ambled on and on, using his own invented orator voice which he was quite sure sounded knightly and authoritative but was in actuality one octave too high to be taken seriously.

“There is life and then there is nothing.
Do you want life? Or nothing?
Are you living?
Are you alive?
Does the heart beat beneath your sternum?
Does blood run its course beneath your skin?
Do you feel things? See things? Hear things?
If the answer is yes, it is time to wake up my friends! Rise and shine. Get up. Stand up for yourselves.
Come and feed the fire that burns within you.!
Hallelujah!
Amen.
Alhambra in a jug...”

Sam liked his own bullshit. You could tell. He was now skipping and bouncing around the concrete block covered in sandblasting sand like an orangutan in shoes. He was be--bopping and hopping and kicking over piles of wads and revealing human forms hidden in each like nuts in a strangely-soft, colored and multi-layered shell. Forms that resembled humans but lacked a human drive inside were cracked and excavated. Forms that needed filling out with pens of colored optimism were scribbled on and drawn outside the lines.
Sam was relentless in his musings. Adamant in his kicking and prodding. Animated in his approach to early morning wake up duties like a dire dog in need of a let-out-to-pee.

“Come on people!
There is no day without the dawn.
There is no journey without the first step.
There is no inner glow without a fire in the belly.
You can’t collect 200 dollars, if you don’t pass by GO.
The world is your oyster
You too, can have it all, baby!”

From space you would not know what was transpiring in Sam‘s domain. You could only think-- “What on earth?“

From nearby-- perhaps looking down through churning legs as you ran across a train trestle-- you would see what would have seemed like the aftermath of a bomb blast. Bodies moaning and writhing on the ground. One frantic man in tattered woven clothing attending each victim in turn, circling around the top of the concrete block like a boxing paramedic., jabbing and parrying and checking for vitals and now a duck and a victory dance, Rocky style., all the while speed-talking in bits of intellectual acumen laced with large bits of crap .

Believe it or not, Sam was like that. A man in two worlds at once. A contradiction as odd as toilet doilies or sheep dog sweaters.

If you took Sam at face value you could buy a used motorcycle and a soda. If you took him seriously you could wind up in the park. If you took him home you could consider your day a dumpster day, as Sam would take your time and trash it with his rambling, babbling, sometimes nonsensical, excitable ways.

So you would want to be very, very careful that you didn’t take Sam home.

Not on days like these.