Hobo Was Here (Part II): Recuperation, Ruination
Having a near death experience is almost as liberating as a near hobo experience. Personally, I prefer the latter.
Now some of you may be so uppity as to suppose my hoboing was to blame for what befell me. Hogwash. Balderdash, even. It weren’t nothin’ but secret government agents. They reconnoitered my hobo camp, surveilled my affiliates, checked my library accounts, and knew very well my political leanings. The hospital didn’t care to look, but I’m betting there’s tungsten powder in my lungs. Later I found they even collected my tent as evidence. Of course, I’ll allow that it could have been another up-and-coming hobo who purloined it.
But getting back to my recuperation, I was laid up in that hospital bed for seven days and nights with a tube sticking out of my ribbed cage. They had it hooked to a vacuum, which may as well have been sucking the soul out of my hobo spirit. Because that’s nearly what it’d done.
I was eating three squares a day, sleeping in a bed, watching Bonanza on the talkie-vision. There wasn’t no end to it. The only thing keeping me hobo
New Müsic Friday: debating faith with The Ocean
New Music Friday is a tradition that my brother and I have shared since I left home to attend college. Every Friday (or as often as we are able), we trade albums that we believe will be worthy of discussion or debate. They don’t have to be new releases – just new to both parties. Sometimes we come across music that is just too interesting to keep to ourselves, and so I will share here, for you, dear readers, my impressions of a recent New Music Friday listening session.
This week’s selection: twin concept albums Heliocentric and Anthropocentric from The Ocean.
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The Ocean (sometimes referred to as The Ocean Collective) is a heavy, sludgy, experimental metal band from Berlin. These two albums were released in April and September of 2010, respectively, and were my first real exposure to the band. Musically, they remind me of other acts like Between the Buried and Me (aggressive vocals and thoughtful lyrics), Ihsahn (spooky saxophone) and ISIS (sludgy riffs), as well as a dash of Hurt (piano and violin interludes) and, if you can believe it, a single track (“Ptolemy Was Wrong”) that reminds me of Coldplay’s “Fix You.”
But lyrically, they are like nothing I’ve ever
Hobo Was Here (Part I): Coffin Tent, Collapsible Lung
Well, seems you couldn’t get enough of our resident Hobo – an oxymoron if I ever heard one. So, after a four-year leave of absence, he’s a-back. Hard times, people, hard times. Our Hobo – hereafter mostly referred to as “me” – had a change of fortune two or three times over and back again. It seems the Big Hobo in the Sky saw fit to strike me down in the prime of my hobo youth. A mere 30 years old and humbled like a Wall Street con man.
Sometimes people think when that big fellow hits he’s a-gonna wallop you like a thunder strike. Well, there I was, sleepin’ all restful-like in my environs, dreamin’ of the Big Rock Candy Mountain, when little by little I was stirred from my sleep. Just some back pain, I thought. So I rolled over and went back to sleep on that hard-scrabbled makeshift bed o’ mine. Next time I woke up with back pain and fullness in my solar plexus. Now this was highly uncommon for a hobo of my constitution. And the consumption was not afoot in these parts, so
New Incontinence Data Leaked
According to 300 cubic centimeters of leaked data from an incontinence study, aging Americans are twice as likely to urinate before reaching a toilet than they were 15 years ago. The results put to bed the idea that the European continent was the worst sufferer of incontinence. French scientist, Pierre Talet, thumbed his nose as he quipped “Who’s European now, America?”
Still researchers are not certain of what’s causing the increase. “We are now trying to collect more leaked data to determine if the increase is from a larger, older population, more beverage drinking, enlarged prostates, weakened bladders, shorter urethras, sleeping with the hand in a pot of water, or just laziness,” said lead researcher, Dr. Yuri Nader.
Up to 75% of study subjects, mostly middle age adults or older, reported frequent urinary urgency alone, while 15% reported flatulent urgency immediately followed involuntary urination. 7% claimed to not pee all day, citing “stage fright” while in public restrooms, only to report going home in a race against time, which they often lost. The remaining 3% of respondents did not seem to know why they were participating in the study.
First-World Problems #13
People keep telling me to cheer up.
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Some of my friends teased me throughout college because I’d sometimes wear a frown during class. I’d be staring at nothing in particular; just sitting and listening and thinking. I was never conscious of it; I am certain that it was a default expression of mine; eyebrows knitted in thoughtful contemplation, maybe arms folded across chest, all devil-may-care.
“Why do you look so angry in class?” They’d ask me. “Why do you frown so much while you brush your teeth?”
“I’m not angry,” I’d answer. And it was always the truth. Well, almost always. But people tend to notice when I’m angry. I tend to notice.
A woman at work the other day – somebody I’d never spoken to (I didn’t know her name and still don’t) – asked me, not exactly politely:
“Are you always that intense?”
She asked this based solely on whatever expression was on my face. My answer should have been something like this:
“I’m at work. What the hell is there to be grinning about?”
But I turned it into a joke, like this:
“I’m at work. I’m in the zone. It isn’t any fun in the zone.”
She just looked at me like I’d threatened to shoot
