Ring Side Seat

Optimism and positive thinking are usually the best cures for home sickness. Living in the moment, staying busy and searching for the good in one's surroundings typically will pull a person back to a state of semi sustainable happiness. I say semi sustainable because contrary to what the song says, if you're always getting knocked down you won't always get up again. Physics states that what goes up must come down but has no law for what goes down. Typically, after an initial rebound, a fallen object never gets up again. Today that fallen object was me. My spirit lost the last dim ember of love for this sh*t hole of a town. I've never particularly cared much for my adopted French ville. It's dirty, sketchy, and 5000 miles from where I want to be but, my distaste was never particularly justifiable. Today however, my buried anti Aubagneisum was justified as I watched, what had to be, one of the worlds most spectacular and horrific hobo smack downs.

For a small town we have more than our fair share of homeless folks. Actually, I'm not convinced they're all homeless. Many of their cloths change day by day, and dirty as they may be their hair seems to have no trouble adapting to what current fashion dictates. Basically, there are a bunch of gypsies, drunks, nomads, homeless, and in general F***ups running around this town. With nothing to do but ride my bike and ride my bike some more, I've spent months worth of time camped out in the town square observing and mentally documenting the habits of the inhabitants of this slab of concert in the sun. I know that the bald guy sleeps under the air vent behind the post office every week day but never on the weekends. I know that the girl and 2 guys trio lost one of their German shepherds after it bit a police officer. I know that the plants in a particular flower pot will never grow because one of the drunks uses it as his toilet. Not just for urine. And I also knew that 2 of the wanderers had some serious sh*t brewing between them.

Today that sh*t stew boiled over. Drunken fists whirled through the air. Swings found targets and lights darkened. As I and the rest of the shoppers at the Simply Market watched one man repeatedly kick in the face of the other, all I could think was, "I'm getting the f*** out of this sh*t hole. I'm getting the f*** out of this sh*t hole. I'm getting the f*** out of this sh*t hole. ASAP" Part of me wanted to help the man and part of me felt that some sort of karmatic dept was being leveled against a man who had tormented our unhappy little town.

It was so bizarre. Nothing Really seemed to happen. The man who did the kicking walked away, an ambulance came and took the unconscious man away. The crowed dispersed. I paid for my soap and felt sickly consoled by the fact that a man who had once spit on me for denying to give him money, probably wouldn't be spitting again anytime soon. The only thing that seemed to exist after the incident was my overwhelming need to leave this place. Transform it from a reality to a memory. So that's just what I'm going to do.

Optimism eat my shorts. I’m peacin’ out of here,
Alex