Lavational Ablution

A long time ago, I blogged about a night spent working in a homeless shelter in Danbury, Connecticut. I think that was the last time I wrote about anything I've done along those lines. I don't like to write about those kinds of things anymore because they are depressing and, more importantly, they are, at the root, nothing but one giant, self-serving pat on the back; they are disgustingly gratiutious. Good deeds belong buried in a pauper's grave next to the bad ones, all mixed together in the same dark dirt of anonymity--quietly dead, decomposing in peace and left to a particular, unthumped belief construct. Casting sunlight on them, digging them up, and watering them, well, that makes the self-righteous weeds blossom and grow like burgeoning stalks of bamboo. Money's not far from it all. It's but one logical step to then harvest that field and sell the crop to the patheticly ignorant cattle for them to graze upon, all moo-moo-like. So I'll instead write obscure about something that caught me last night. I was told to wash the windows and so I did. They were dirty because the office is next to the street. The cars on the street, driven by the disinterested and me-me consumed people in a rush on their cellphones or consulting their Tom-Toms or on their blackberrycellphoneTomTomamabobbers, kick up clouds of soot and muck. The muck stratifies, getting all over the windows, making them crusty black. Until last night, people couldn't see through this. I figure the muck and grime probably date back to the night when the then-jingoistic 'yellow' press sat in the back of the proverbial 'car' and reported about the jolly good joyride across the berms and over the crispy-critter corpses with one hand on the microphone and the other on the errect, war-happy penis. As I was standing on the ladder wiping it all away, cleaning that mess, getting my finger nails under those stratified layers of ignorance, I was struck by what was on the other side of the glass; I was struck by what people couldn't see: It was a clay statue depicting this moment. The clay was molded by some 8th grade student who went to school at the place where I was working, so it was as crude as you'd expect. Nevertheless, the soldier was crying--that was obvious. People couldn't see that: Now they can. They need to. ----------------------------------- Note to self: Don't really recommend The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to people. Twain was a great man and the book is a classic, but wading through its colloquialisms requires the patience and perseverance of Grant while he negotiated the fickle Mississippi on his way to lay siege and eventually capture Vicksburg. Note to Beck fans: My homeboy's got a new CD out. I just downloaded it and am giving it the once over for the first time tonight. Beck's my main man. Question to Dr.Phil and Oprah fans: Why the hell can I find trash books that cater to your three-neuron-firing brains all over the fucking place, but the brilliant memoir written by the father of modern day guerilla war about his time as an anonymous private in the R.A.F after the Desert Revolt is still out of print?