yeah yeah yeah

The walk from the home base to the meditation place was quite a long one. I was shy and confused and broke and new to the area but i knew the way to what i thought was the buddhist temple and i took it once a week, whenver they had their open air meditation night. I don't know if you've ever been to Phoenix before, or know about the area at all, but i used to sleep outside not too far from the Central Public library. Right around the corner from there happens to be the homosexual area of Phoenix and i certainly remember walking along and getting honked at or yelled at or whatever. There was this other homeless kid that i knew who told me about the guy who drove around in the limo with the christmas lights on it, asking guys to get into the limo and have sex with him for 10 or 20 dollars. I had to walk through this area every night and then up Central ave north all the way to Bethany Home. This is a pretty long walk and being as mentally twisted as i was, it always potentially hid pitfalls around every corner. I couldn't even walk past mailboxes without adding the numbers together to make one single digit sum. I couldn't look at license plates without doing the same. Or phone numbers, addresses, bus numbers or whatever. Obsessive Compusive Disorder was always right at my side, spawned from years of numerology books, occultic bands, and metaphysical banter. What started out harmless enough had brought me down like a lion brings down its prey and i was bleeding and dying before i even knew i was sick. After walking the couple miles to the meditation spot, i went inside and found a chair somewhere in the middle by myself. Always by myself. The place was usually pretty packed. It looked something like a highschool auditorium with plush chairs that faced forward in several rows. Eventually, someone would make some sort of announcement up at the front and ask for quiet for the next such and such a time while people were meditating. I always came in with excess baggage, fighting wars with unseen,unknown enemies in my mind during the silence. Struggling to make my way to the top of my garbage heap to proclaim myself master of my self and life. Conqueror of my thoughts and insecurities. But considering the vast issues i was carrying, these battles in my mind felt like literal life and death struggles. Often times, the place stayed quiet as a mouse for that hour of meditation. Sometimes you could hear someone who had fallen asleep, snoring away somewhere in the audience. But mostly it was what it was supposed to be - dead quiet. At the end, someone would go back up to the front and sometimes they'd play some strange, foreign instruments and chant some things and maybe encourage the people to chant along with them. I clearly remember them leading us in closing prayers where we acknowledged and magnified certain deities and yogis and whoever, Jesus Christ included, in a long list of people/spirits/whatevers that we were, in a way, bowing down and worshipping. Often I repeated those prayers as led. The walk back one night was noteworthy. About halfway back i watched as this other kid who slept at the squat behind the dumpster materialized from a side street and started walking some distance in front of me. Following behind him, i could see he was weaving badly like he was drunk or something. Since he and I were loosely friends (we had smoked pot together a few times), i caught up to him and tried to see what was up. Looking bad, he told me he was just "sick" and needed to get some sleep. So we walked back together, all the way to the dumpster next to the brick wall. It smelled like piss and i think he passed out right away and only later on did i realize the "sickness" he was talking about was a direct result of him shooting heroin with this late teen/early 20s white chick who i suspect ended up turning tricks in the park at night for drugs. I remember her talking about how her goal in life was to be a functional junkie just like her mother was, who apparently shot heroin and still kept her dayjob as a school teacher. Unfortunately, she didn't look like she was going in the right direction. I also remember when she got somewhat mad at me and told me that not everyone out in the streets was like me and didn't have the right circumstances or whatever to handle situations the way i could. In fact, coming from suburban white connecticut, she wasn't the only one who couldn't figure out what i was doing on the streets. My case worker at the drop in center took me in one day and asked me point blank what in the world i was doing out there. I had had a job and kept it for years, didn't seem to have any discernable mental illness (unless one were to talk to me at length one never would have known), and could articulate myself extremely well. But none of those things that i had going for me could change the cold fact of the hard pavement beneath my skinny body. The end of the walk with Ryan ended with me lying on a couple thin sheets of newspaper to separate me from the caked layers of dried piss on the parking lot floor. With my shoe as a pillow, i stared up at the patchy clouds praying to animal spirits and sky gods and other gods and even the big God and finally even trying to WILL it not to rain myself. It drizzled and sprinkled anyway and i was freezing cold, sleeping there without a blanket out in the wide open under the big arizona sky, counting the minutes until tomorrow came. yeah, yeah, yeah...