Omega O

Seattle to Maine and Back - Summer, 2010.


Henrietta Lawson oh poverty, silken fishnet stockings on the limbs of my heart's thought, not the legs, mind you, but the arms, like some ironic gauntlet! oh poverty, you dress me so with misconceptions and imperfections - i know not where or when to begin the litanies you have taught me - but the middle, oh my do i know the mist in your midst, of missed debauches and unsought bedrooms. Oh poverty, i love you more than i like you


My love is like a costume. You dress me in it with your eyes
Everytime I behold you, baby, the streets are paved with gold
Everytime I see boulevard abbreviated, what I see is beloved
I go looking for myself. I can't find me when your not around
Trapped within this skin I'm in, just another nameless clown.

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Henrietta Lawson Oh the consequences of involvement - The webpage I was using to host my blog of my cross country trip this summer has changed it's software - and so I lost the data - silly me no backup - SO, I'm going to try to reconstruct the journey through artifacts and the posts I made on this page.

• • Which leads to a related note. Yesterday morning I had the pleasure of spending some hours with my best friend, Moo Cat Meow Cow - otherwise known as Wiley Banjo Puppy. She and I went to several parks around SLO town, made some music, and such. Really, She played her Ukelele and Violin, and I loved it. She introduced me to several of the disaffected youths and otherwise idle wild folk whom she knows about the town. At Four Pm she had to go make recordings with some local fellow she knows. I guess doing audio recordings is this guy's hobby. As she described the scene to me, I began to be interested, and she told me she'd played one of my songs for him, and he showed some interest - then she remembered how this person had previously exhibited some contempt for the local homeless as they were near the shelter one day. So she made a point of telling him that I was a middle aged bum. Suddenly, this fellow who makes recordings of folk music made by my former traveling companion, who was once homeless, and will be, most likely, again when she chooses to travel, became reluctant to have a CURRENTLY homeless person around.
    That's folk music hobby-ism for you, I guess.
    Then, this morning, as I woke at that same shelter he'd sneered at, I sat having coffee with a career fisherman who owns property in three states that is dedicated to putting his kid through college (for which purpose he sometimes finds himself in the places where the poorer people go, it costing quite a bit of money to become part of the cogniscenti these days), a 75 year old lady in a wheel chair lamenting the loss of community and degradation of society that puts her in a position of having to be in this shelter, a pair of men who have committed their lives to serving the population of the destitute in this area, and then myself - scum of the earth that I am.
    We talked of the beauty of the day and the richness of life as it offers so many opportunities to understand the conception of being here, now. But I found myself not quite there, then. I kept thinking about my friend making recordings with some brother who was likely waking up today with his wife, preparing to go about his neat and orderly life in Sunny Liberal California's finest little city.. I wondered if he had ever had a chance to sit with anyone who had nowhere to go - if that had ever been him, if he was a person of faith, all kinds of things that weren't here and now. Then I snapped out of it, and remembered that this life is a gift, and that one of the purposes of the Motherpharm will be to enable people like that guy to have secure, encouraging locations at which he and his family might be able to come and interact with the homeless, and perhaps see the grand equality of humanity.
    

    September 20 at 8:40am

The Post above is from the Facebook page of Henrietta Lawson, a founding member of the Bad Folk Orchestra - in fact when the BFO first took form, they were people who I met and had made music with while using Henrietta.
She was a guitar. She wrote several stories and songs that are featured in the section called "Tales From Cafe Queequeg". So, there you have it. I'm not just some bum with big plans, I also have multiple internet personalities that I use to try to make sense out of this seething mass of dendrites and limpid dynamics that is homo sapiens.


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