Speak When You Are Spoken Of

I excuse myself from my friends on IRC.

I head downstairs to get a breakfast and to let Snow White know that she can come upstairs and inspect my room. I hop into an empty elevator, followed by an old man on another floor and we ride down together. When the door opens on the first floor, one of the stupidest looking drones from Paula murder of crows is standing directly in front of the elevator door. Her entire face droops from the corner of her eyes to the corners of her lips, as if her face melted for a second. And she lumbers into the elevator, blocking our way out. Now I know that the old man would have most likely allowed her to walk in, but I, on the other hand, can be a bit of a nasty cuss, and gave her a rock solid shoulder as I walked out, trying to knock her backwards onto her ass. Excuse me, I mumble as I walk on. I go down the hall to the cafeteria and sign the pad with my name. Jhon comes lumbering up behind me. "Hey, what is that name you wanted me to call you Ho?" Hobobob there, Jhon. "Right, right! Hobobob!" He corrects himself. "That's right. So how are you doing Mr. Hobobob?" I'm doing fine, Jhon.

I go to the counter and approach the two women behind it. Hello ladies, I say cheerfully. They respond in kind. "What is your name?" The woman on the right asks. Hobobob. She consults a list, roughly the same exact list that I signed in on. Her pen wavers over the list, going up and down it's length, skipping my name a half dozen times. I give her my room number. The list is in numbered order. Surely she can find me by my room number. The pen continues to make its wavering transit up and down the paper. Finally my nerves snap and I point with a growl at the line entry. "Oh!" She says sweetly, as if the line just popped out of nowhere, and that we weren't just spending an entire two minutes staring at the paper.

"What would you like," The other woman asks me. I don't know, what do you have? "Bagel?" Yeah. She goes off and comes back with a Bagel. Then the two of them stare at me. I stare back. They continue to stare at me. I continue to stare back. Finally, I ask: What else do you have. "Milk?" Yeah. She goes off again, and comes back, dropping the milk in my bag. Then she stares at me. I stare back. We do this shit several times until I fill my bag with breakfast and lunch. While I'm waiting and watching them stare at me between choices something moves to my right. I jump back. Tucked under my arm Is Snow White, just standing there, right up under me. WTF??? For a moment there I thought she was some huge dog that got the drop on me. "Hobobob, I was wondering if I could come up to see your room today." Yeah, right, we spoke about this already. "I was wondering can I come up at Ten?" Yeah, sure, come up at ten.

I take all of my hard earned breakfast upstairs, drink coffee and eat my bagel. I get back on IRC and before long there is a knock on my door. I admit Snow White in. She looks around...."Ohhh, neat." I smile. She goes to the kitchen counter..."Ohhh, clean." I smile again. "So how are you doing with your meds, Hobobob?" Taking 'em. "And your appointments?" Meeting 'em. "How are you doing with your Fair Hearing? How did that go?" I won. "Do you have the report of your latest physical?" I do. "How is the room, is everything satisfactory?" It is. "No pests, nothing?" Paula and her crows....no, I didn't say that. Nope. "Very good then. She closes her pad, takes my physical report and leaves. I close the door behind her. And the second she leaves, I turn off the light and jump back behind my laptop.

I jump back on IRC as if it was a hoo-er that owed me money. I was back in town baby!!! Stand back motherfuckers, Hobobob is back!

I wish I could give you some noble excuse. I wish I could give you a finer story about the hours that pass. I know. You'd rather hear how I went outside and played basketball in the corner court, or walked through Central Park, which is actually two blocks away from me. I know you would have loved to hear the story of how I packed up my gear around 2:30 and left for my appointment to see Dr. L. for my therapy. You might have even liked it better if I gave you the heartwarming story of my finding a stray dog in the street and bringing him home, cleaning and caring for the little, cute devil. You may have liked to hear all of this, but that's not the story I have to tell you.

I sat my fat ass in my chair and bore down on IRC like a child with a magnifying glass would use the sun to bear down on ants. I did nothing noble, nothing healthy, nothing moral. I did nothing up building, nothing encouraging, nothing enlightening. All I did all day was bullshit with new found and fast friends. All I did was talk the biggest shit in the world with a universe full of bullshitters, and it felt good. Not that we were all lying to each other. No, that wasn't it because lies are unnecessary in a world where anything can exist. When no one can make an initial assessment as to who and what we are, lies become extinct. You are what you portend yourself to be, and if you portend yourself to be something not you, what kind of self loathing is that?

Hi, I'm Hobobob, I have no money, I live in an SRO, I'm fat. And they come back with...who the fuck cares? Then you realize that your paltry life is not so much a big a deal as you thought it should be to the world. That there are trillions of people out there that you can, and will meet in the blink of an eye, and you are all but blips on a screen. Exalt yourself with lies if you so choose, but you don't become any more or less in the eyes of these people who are there, not to meet a close approximation of you, but instead...you.

Yeah, that's right. I made more fast friends in one day than I would normally make in a month. All of us with websites, that we can refer each other to. I went from a woman who sold lingerie, to a man who made turn of the Century hand bags, to another man who loves it when his wife sticks her narrow fist up his ass while wearing plastic gloves (and the shocking truth of this is, he has tons of pics to show you of this fetish of his) up to her elbow. One woman meets up with the men of the channel and goes on vacation with them just to have a partner, and if sex occurs, of which it almost always does, they both get on the channel and describe it to the rest. One woman is a computer analyst, another woman is from Sweden, with a decisive hatred for America and Americans. Yet she spends hours in the channel bullshitting with us because "Swedes are assholes."

A man from Britain who loves to drink ale, another one who likes to wear women's lingerie, and what kink do I have to get off there? I don't know. Not everyone has a kink, or something wacky going on upstairs in the ol' shoe department, if you know what I mean? Some of the people there are just as normal as you or ...well maybe not I. I'm the fucking once homeless guy. But I am drawn to these people suddenly in my life. I am locked and floating. All compasses and needles have spun about and found a new magnetic North.

I find it more addictive than fucking alcohol. I have no desires here. Not here, not now.

For the first time in a long while....
I think that I'm going to be alright.

Hobobob