Bright be the vault of heaven, and long the days and nights since first this peripatetic Ahasuerus put rubber to blessed tarmac and went my own way.
This, friends, is the story of that way.
The tale of busting my boiler while full-timing it in a camper in a bleak Yankee midwinter…and, while waiting to refill my antifreeze, panic-marrying an ornery space-heater—only to annul the whole thing later after she almost set my sleeping bag ablaze, presumably to collect the insurance money (and God knows what she’s done to the kids by now!).
The tale of mistakenly failing to decouple said camper from its tow vehicle one strange evening, and proceeding to accidentally jack my truck a foot off the ground only to discover a nail that would’ve made Trent Reznor blush leering at me from the closest tire-rim.
The tale of fighting off ROUSes in Brooklyn with a mic stand, drawn from every borough within a hundred leagues by the world’s most perfect Reuben; of striking parking gold in sketch-ass Wally-World lots just off the highway at 3am; of playing at dice with the doomer-fey Ren-faire pixie crowd and debating the finer points of adventuring garb with nerds; of heaving javelins with jocks and joining jams of every genus and species; of sneaking off from Balkan dance parties to drink cheap champagne and stare at tea leaves with gypsies (at least one); of navigating around suicidal sushi-eating commuters in Copley Square; of blind dates in a Montreal park involving an excess of cream cheese…and of volunteering to help friends move a king-size mattress across town in trade for the world’s most perfect bagel to go with it… (‘but wait’, I hear you say, ‘was it a St-Viateur bagel or a Fairmount bagel?’ Oho, but I never snack-and-tell…!)
This is the story of why I’m banned from buying essential oils in bulk from a certain online purveyor from now till the end of time; how I convinced a barista to start putting crushed matchheads in her coffees after watching The Expanse; how I lost my contact lenses and accidentally stalked Loreena McKennitt in a parking garage after befriending her cellist at a concert; why I can’t legally play Iko Iko at the MFA in Boston anymore; how I rescued a starfish off the boardwalk in Jersey only to watch it die a horrible death in my arms…and what that did to my soul.
This is what happens when you realize the cake for the lie that it is and figure out for yourself that the points no longer matter…and never did.
This is what happens when a mercenary writer chews his way through the leash of shame and chops through the fence of societal expectation with the bolt-cutters of candor…then moves into a spaceship named Ruach (ר֥וּחַ) and proceeds to aim at breaking all of life’s rules in one go (only to invent new ones for himself while up a tree of metaphor and high as a kite of equanimity).
At a certain point, my friends, the truth is that for every one of us, there comes a time to sally forth: a time to do tha bus-a-bus and get a lil’ bit fast and loose with our true selves.
Heads-up!—you off the reservation, now…making it up—shaking it up—breaking it up…and it’s time to get wholly critical of the vagaries of social credit in all its forms (if you ain’t already, that is).
This, then, is the story of that criticism: what it’s like to one day wake up and find that you’ve become a band-of-brothers of one—friend to all, and conformism’s public enemy numero uno.
I cannot tell a lie.
Gentle reader, if you’ve the time, I present you with myself. And (fair warning!), I’m a bit weird. No, but really—I ain’t foolin’ here, folks. I’s a strange brew, ticklin’ what’s inside of you, baby…shark-bait, oo-ha-ha!
A certain kinda guy once said when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro…I think you might know who I’m talking about. So let’s get a little bit weird, keep our cool, and lay it down fo’ realsies, how ‘bout it? ;)
Sure I’ll be seein’ y’all around this font of foibles…jus’ don’t tell me later I didn’t warn ya’s.
Until then, here’s to sailing the asphalt marches…one post at a time.
Careful, friend—ink’s not quite set itself, yet.
a sol rosen
