That's Why You Will Not Survive

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Let me tell you. Life is funny.

Not funny Ha ha funny but funny, strange funny. Why do I say this? Because today I feel inspirational. I feel a sense of happiness for my future. I say a sense because my future is uncertain, but suddenly it isn't. Maybe it's an upswing in my Bi-polar responses. Maybe I am getting back to the energy, the fire, the heat of living a life worth living?

Whatever. Today's sermon is on perse- verance. I have had changes in my life that I just didn't see coming. They are all like that. In five years something will occur to your life that will change it dramatically. It takes only up to five years for it to happen, and when it does, it's a new dawn. It's a new day.

Don't believe me? Look back five years ago in your life. Yeah, that's right, break out your fucking calendar and look back to this date five years ago. If your fucking life is the same as it is now, I hate to be the one to tell you, but you are fucking dead. That's right. a goddamned ghoul. Go somewhere and call it quits. But if you are alive, this change is present. To one degree or another. It's what I call The Five Year Plan.

What is more, did you have control of this transition from your past to your present? Most likely many of us didn't. That's not to say that you are dead also. But it is to say that most of the time you will have no control  over your life. Things just happen. The results of an action by us is uncertain, but some of us take control over their lives when others do not. Nothing wrong with that.

I think, if I go back ten years I had just suffered the rocky road of my marriage, the destruction of the Word Trade Center Towers, the struggle to hold myself together, and slipping into the dark hole of alcohol. I still had a job, a home, a car and loosely, a wife. Things were not looking good in my life.

So, Sherman lets set the WABAC machine forward, five years back instead from today and you'll find me homeless. Stripped of everything I owned, even the fucking clothes on my back! I slept in front of the public library, ate food from churches and soup kitchens, got clean clothing from the Bowery Mission or other clothing drives by churches. I was so destitute that I couldn't even get TWO pairs of slacks and TWO shirts to change into if I soiled what I was wearing because I couldn't hold everything in my back pack. That was me five years ago.

Sherman, set the machine to today. And here you have me, living a kings life in a wonderful SRO on the Upper West Side. Probably not what you would find as a king's life...but to a homeless man, worth all the money in the world. With four walls, a bed, and heat during the winter. Not being snowed on in the mean months from November-January. I have a 24 hour door man to keep the riff raff out of the building because those brain dead cocksuckers (I'm not saying 'cocksucker' as if there was something wrong with that. I happen to love the hell out of women that can suck out the cream filling from a good erection. I'm saying cocksucker in the pejorative, as if someone lacking such necessary skills) would be lined up against the walls of the long hallway into the building, loitering, smoking and gabbing to each other.

What's really amazing is that I've got a micro- wave. Before I used to complain that food- stamps cannot buy you warm food at the grocery store (Did you know that?). So I couldn't eat any cooked meat or hot food that was prepared at the Deli counter. And let me tell you, the lack of warm food in the body is not good. Not good at all. You begin to crave it, as if you are starving. Just eat cold food for a month and you'll get my point. You'll start blowtorching your food for a week after that. Your body misses hot pasta, hot vegetables, hot beverages. You are cut out from hot foods altogether because when you are homeless, you have nothing to cook them in. Hence the joy of having a microwave.

So now I have been in this room for over two years. In another two years and some change, I expect something drastic to come along, as it has done. I'm expecting a big change in my circumstances. I have this feeling. But that's just the case. I feel good today because of this. So to all of you out there that continue to read me, don't give up on this merry go round of life. It very fluid, like picking up mercury with your fingertips.

Just remember, in five years, to wash all that fucking mercury off your hands.

Hobobob