thieving

I've gotten to be an expert at pilfering these last few days.

I can go without eating for some time, the only drawback being a sickness to the stomach/other gastrointestinal unpleasantries when food is suddenly abundant and I gorge myself. I house sit, I house squat, being a visitor of varying degrees of welcomeness in my attempt to try to get a paying job rolling and a new place to live. I sneak granola bars, perhaps a package of ramen noodles from an unfamiliar pantry. These are items easily overlooked- the owner can't remember how many Nature Valley Oats & Honeys they had in the first place. I use other people's shower supplies because I can't afford to buy new for myself, should my own dwindling shampoo stashes run out completely. I offer massage constantly, hoping a trade or a meal or a couple of bucks will turn up. I thought breifly the other day of panhandling on the sixteenth street mall, but for now that idea remains a back up plan.

In all of this, I am not dejected. There is a sort of frayed desperation of coming-of-age about it all, as if this were my right of passage, and now I could perhaps be an artist again. I take long showers in borrowed bathrooms, and think about characters, and rape, and plotlines twisting away into oblivion. Perhaps I can write a collection of short stories about everything I haven't thought of yet, while I am penniless and unemployed and it will perhaps be better because I have been so. Nobody I know is any better off. I'll probably try to hock my mixing board for next month's rent and deposit, and everything will be ok until the next string of bills is due. There is something desperate and wonderful about being alive right now. I oscillate between wanting to stay inside and read all day, and wanting to just go outside and look at everything. Or write about everything. Or listen to the spinning disc in my box, shaking and shaking and shaking.

Every little thing is going to be all right, as Bob Marley would say. No, woman. No cry.

I go up and feed the dying cat, and then I leave, to parts unknown. And always, I travel west.