Lell be little

[Michael Bailey]

Bled Welder wrote:

>
> The thing is, I'm not a normal person.  For one thing, I'm really, really,
> ridiculoiudly, really, absurdly, really fucking good looking.

it's true: I've seen his Facebook page!  However, you know what
Sortilege says, in IV - "want to change your life, change your hair!"
Dreads?

> Anyway, I'm on parole, and I don't even know what county this is coming
> from.  It's somewhere in Kansas.  I grew up in a very nice suburb of Kansas
> City, but my suburb is on the Kansas side.  I lived my adult life in SF, LA,
> and NYC, all of which I love, and I have zero interest in being back in
> Central City with my mother.  Zilch.
>

Kansas is pretty nice, though rather serious about their statutes.  I
myself had to plead nolo contendere to swimming in a prohibited area.
There's this man-made lake dating from the Great Depression - maybe a
WPA project - where I didn't see the "no swimming" sign, and the
ranger didn't believe me.  This, he said, would cost me about 20
dollars.  But when I went in to the courthouse to pay it, they said it
was a misdemeanor and I could contest it or not, and being a
non-contesting kind of guy most of the time, I chose the latter.  They
charged me like 170 bucks!  Wow.  And I was just walking out, hadn't
even submerged!  The bottom was rocky, and the rocks were slimy, and I
was just trying to keep my balance when the ranger alerted me to my
transgression.  Perhaps the no-swimming is part of the protections of
the vegetable life on the bottom rocks, and I feel bad that I may have
disrupted their quiet, submerged and perhaps even rather mellow
existence, with my pale feet (first swim of the year, I was all pale
pretty much)

  They also had a big "click it or ticket campaign" or maybe that was
Missouri.  And at that time I couldn't ever get Marie to buckle up.
So after I got the ticket from that, I used the basic stubbornness of
my nature to say, "Look, we're not leaving the driveway till you
buckle up!" And it worked!

So, in sum, the Midwest is tough but fair, and I'm glad I paid my
ticket.  But you might want to call them up and ask why they want you
to show up? There's usually some helpful functionary who is empowered
to dispense information and useful advice...


> The maybe humus side is that, since I've been back to Central City, I've
> been either in jail or on parole.  When you're on parole....you can't leave
> the city. My family all went to Vegas for Christmas....I had to stay here,
> alone.
>

good chance to catch up on one's reading, though.

I do feel a certain amount of empathy for the vicissitudes you're
describing, and hope that you can absorb their lesson and adjust to
the attention of whatever watchers are minding you; that's not
actually unendurable, is it?  after all, most of us are (as the
Beatles put it) "looking for somebody to perform for"  - so the
Watchers could be such entities

or is that "looking for somebody to perform with"? -- in that case,
your actions and the watchers' watching are themselves spectacles for
yet another audience - i wonder who that would be?  "who watches the
watchers?"