May 2, 2003

• Bread and Circuses

   

  The crowds, they cheer for you.  You may not see them but you hear just fine and as they introduce your name, you’re engulfed by the excitement and fear and wonderment of barbarous masses.  It’s the sound of late night static, the volume on your television amp’d to the max, green bars filling up the screen.  The buzz shakes your bones and exhilarates you, shouting citizens hurling epithets and lewd jokes, angered by your past, excited to see if you look as they’ve imagined.

   

  You’ve been waiting in the big game tunnel, where tomorrow’s hero and yesterday’s dead enter on a weekly basis, something like clockwork.  Here’s what the book will fail to mention, you’re not only bound but you’re naked, shivering wildly. Arms tied behind your back, chains clanking on hard earthen floors, you’re led out into the open, a bomb of sound punching you at the tunnel’s entrance.

   

  So, you’re scared and you’re humbled.  There’s some sweet but sad justice at work, the big man made small.  You’re a big ogre but you still enjoy the irony – even in death, the center of attention.  If you had hair, you’d feel a cold breeze running its fingers through sleazy romance novel tresses.  Maybe you’d toy with them a little, playing the weak fool and then bam! explode into a rageful man-killing fury.  You’ll use a stale, fried drumstick or for the stuff of legends, a baguette fresh from the oven.

   

  Chains snapping with one last surge of strength, you could be free.  Imagine that, a blind man taking on the rush of a thousand men, each one falling with the collision of bread crust and nose or neck.  One lucky soldier will slice it in two but divine hero you are, you’ll simply find yourself doubly equipped for the scuffle.

   

  But who do you kid.  The papers would note the day for something else, equally dramatic.  Arena collapses, thousands feared dead.  And as the pillars fell, you felt crumbling stucco and limestone hit your face and you’re happy for the opportunity because even in failure, you’ve found some redemption.  Your people dig you out of the rubble and though you’re broken through and through, they see a peculiar look on a face made hard with rigor mortis.  From one angle, in this light, it’s triumph but from the sides, well, it’s penitence.  Rabbi Sagacious would note a lesson in the complexities of man’s motives, captured in flesh made stone.  In the tectonics of living, our motives crash and explode like Krakatoa, contradictions and good intentions coming to a boil.  Lady’s Man, Sampson, you’re but one handsome example.

   

  And though you were blind, you died with beer goggles made holy, where every living thing is something potentially beautiful but in truth, often pathetic and poor in the eyes of God.  Death by way of falling porticos and tumbling pillars. 

   

  As sweet and sad a justice you’ll recall, waking up on the other side.

   

                      ——————————–

   

            

   

                  Crosswalk, Wilshire and Union

   

              Strange how a pin dropped in a cave

              Reverberates until you hear it

              And even see it

              And fear it.

   

              I’m carrying two bags

              Made of plastic.

   

              In one bag, my left hand

              Contains a carton of milk, sweet from the cow

              A carton of juice, plucked from the tree

              A bag of granola, a habit from youth.

   

              In my right hand, the other

              Full of bread to live on

              Sugar to dwell on

              Cereal to chew on during

              Tired mornings

              When I have no place to go.

   

              I’m just swimming in crap

              And I can point my fingers

              Call it sunshine

              Hope it sprouts sunbeams

              But it’s still stinkin’ up this

              Lifetime (and then some).

   

              Late night TV screeches

              A loud black and white

              And I’m happy tonight
              Relatively.

   

                  That’s his

                  Damn Story.

   

              ——————-

   

             

   

              ———————

   

  Late this afternoon, I saw a security guard stop a man from taking a shopping cart home.  Robbed of a way to take his groceries with ease, a disheveled man cussed up an enormous storm, shouting at the top of his emphysema lungs.

   

  I love LA, no doubt.  But I’ve been seeing some crazy things.  My tray of food was stolen at MacDonald’s today, children spilling my fries halfway across the parking lot.  Might’ve been taken aback but it wasn’t the first time.  Before, eating with a friend, an employee cleaned up a tray thinking the customer was gone.  The customer caught him and flipped out like you wouldn’t believe.  Voices rose and everything got real tense, real fast.  We calmed them down lest a rumble ensue.  I love LA and I eat too much fast food.

   

  I bumped into an old college friend out at a coffee shop earlier.  A very pleasant surprise!  It was real nice just catching up with someone I haven’t seen in a lawng time.  And it was fun hearing how mutual friends are doing. We’re all in pursuit of a dream.  Life is good!  But it’s already May.  Man, time flies.

   

             ————————-

               When he hath tried me,

               I shall come forth as gold.

               -Job

   

   

  Matt11:28

  • 2:59 am
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