Status Report

Girls are streaming back to campus. You can't miss that living on sorority row. They're well dressed with the requisite toys. Mostly white and no doubt pampered. Michigan's not a cheap school to attend. A few across the street sun themselves in the afternoon. Tiny bikinis over young tight skin. I watch them now and then. But that's all. I have yet to reach Old Perv status. I'm saving that for my golden years.

This is my last week of sublet living. I've been in this apartment since February. Its tenant returns from Paris to teach these pampered kids. I have yet to find a suitable replacement. It's amazing what people try to rent to you. Many landlords seem whacked out. Property relations aren't terribly cordial. A few nice people, but the rest on edge.

One woman demanded to know all about me. I had to pass some morality test. I said I was a writer. She paused, then promised to phone back. She did but lied, saying that she just remembered renting the place to someone else. While I'd like to think it was my admission that sunk me, I'm sure it was my humor. Certain people you don't joke with. She was one.

Looks like I'll return to hotel living. Probably the same place I stayed when my marriage broke apart. A dive, but habitable and cheap. I don't need much. I've been through so many bouts with poverty that a survival sense kicks in. I can stretch pretty much anything -- clothes, food, booze, assorted sundries. I still have notebooks to fill, and low life gives me time to do that. I occasionally go crazy, stalk my space cackling, crying, shaking. Isolation bends the mind. God knows what I'll see when it breaks.

The English riots are a savage dream, at least from this distance. Blessedly, Americans are too disconnected to riot. An atomized mass tearing up the streets would be a nightmare. With no real populist movement to give resistance shape, we are left with individuals lost in chaos.

I saw a glimpse of this during the 2003 blackout. Drivers arguing in the absence of traffic lights. People fighting over bags of ice at gas stations. Several neighbors walled themselves off, refusing to pool limited resources. My next door neighbor threw a blackout party in his carport. A few of us attended. We drank beer and watched a preseason NFL game on a small TV hooked to his Jeep's battery. A nice reminder that not everyone is frightened.

As always, my PayPal guitar case is open to donations. I'll continue to post whatever crosses my mind, in between writing jags on the book. Confessionals, satire, reviews, prose poems, bizarro configurations -- I give you all I have. You may not want it, but I'm giving it anyway. I'm just that kind of guy.