the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall...

So there was this person just now walking down Putney Road.  It was impossible to tell if this writhing with sudden jerky movements electroshocked vision was male or female. The quality of the voice was a bit gruff, a few ticks up the scale from Bea Arthur or Selma Diamond.  In my one room apartment a sliding door to a balcony provides the only fresh air. There is a bit of a view: 1080 high def, somewhere between 3D and 2D. In the view, a little right of center are three birch trees framed by huge slashes of green as if painted by Mark Rothko. I'd take a picture except the camera batteries (and their standbys) need recharging. Oh, wait - dig,dig,dig,dig,dig - Aha! Here's a view out those sliding doors, only just now the predominate color is green.

If you look toward the left of the picture. there's this clear space behind the trees that shoots off at a 45 degree angle. That's Putney Road which is  usually populated by all sorts of cars and trucks. i.e. a blue green/white 1964 Chevy Impala just drove by, followed by a black GMC Jimmy - a little later model than the '98 I used to own and had to put down this past February. The sound of tires on asphalt is annoyingly overwhelming even after having lived here for more than a year. If I were to walk to the left side of my apartment and look out the doors, I'd be able to see a bit of St. Michael's Episcopal (as opposed to St. Michael's Roman Catholic a couple of blocks away). Nice brick church, used to be downtown before they moved it. It's where the local service to memorialize Matthew Shepard was held - gosh, was it really so far back as 1998? Sigh. At the end of the service, the entire congregation was given hyacinth bulbs to plant in autumn and watch bloom in the Spring.  A little heavy on the symbolism but I liked it. Or did they maybe pass the bulbs out at the conclusion of the silent vigil on the Post Office steps? It doesn't matter.What does is that I planted my bulb.. Only, I can't quite remember where in the garden it went. And I'm not quite certain if it was in the part of the garden that became play space for the Neighborhood Schoolhouse or if it was in my relocated 'new' garden. I do seem to recall that it never bloomed. Then again, I do have some faint memory about the blue one on the right hand side of this photo. You'll notice that they all seem a little stunted. I never had the time or money to test and improve the soil. Well now, as applied to my life, that's all rather Jung-ishly symbolic. The Freudian implications are more than a little interesting, too - but that's a story for another day.

So there I was, looking out the sliding door as this apparition came into view, jerking spastically while walking. There was also a great deal of cursing and screaming at someone although no one was there. My first assumption was that someone else had been pushed over the edge. Another one of the walking wounded. Perhaps a late 40-ish female - no that's not a dress is it? More like a t-shirt hanging from a belt. The bizarre motions seem to move hands to ears - is the yelling and cursing into a cell phone? As I glimpse further visual information through the green leaves, I gather that the person is a teenage male - which would explain a lot. As he passes out of view, I decide that I prefer to think of him as another one pushed over the edge. What did it take? What finally did it? The way he's screaming into nothing or a cell phone I get the feeling that he just couldn't take all the bullshit anymore. He knows he's not very educated, he's  become aware that there is music older than the stylings of Kayne West, will i am, and Beyonce. He realized that teenage rebellion is manufactured and sold at the holy temple Walmart. Maybe he cracked under the pressure of days into days in a menial no future job that tears away at one's very soul. He has seen the future and it is bleak and he couldn't handle it. His curses and screams are his song, his gift to us, his gift to god. His rant is our salvation. He's probably headed to the Retreat where he'll be anesthetized into conformity. He'll get the blue pill, no doubt. Maybe he's on his way to an event at The Church - the one across Grove Street from the Post Office. It's now a sort of club/rental hall. On the small green space before the church building stands a giant stone Celtic cross which used to top the steeple before the lightning strike a few years ago. Luckily, the lightening bolt hit the roof, not the cross, or we'd have a lot more of the walking spastics, screaming, singing their litany of curses. A few minutes ago as I was searching for that pic of hyacinths from my garden, I found shots from the day they took down the cross.

See, Brattleboro just reeks of signs and symbols. As I hitch-hiked my way to work this morning, I got a ride from a guy who is of the end times rapture is coming persuasion. He was playing a tape of some third rate preacher intoning the signs of apocalypse. It seemed he was describing our world as it is now. The tape was over 15 years old, and its recounting of signs and symbols and approach of the horsemen was as eerily applicable to that time as it is now. End times, it seems, are manufactured and sold like gangsta image teenage rebellion at the holy temple Walmart. I wonder if the knights Templar have made it to town yet. Or if the wanderer's curses were his sermon,  another pilgrim who thinks he has seen the light. After all, the mad can see the signs clearer than most. And we're all a little mad here.