“Oppressed by the weight of his own langor,” as Gibbon proclaims of the ancient Germans, and circumscribed to mere animal pursuits by the bounds of his own “sloth,” the barbaric soul is not untouched by civilization, but in a state of revolt against it. These learned discourses on human nature I listened to yesterday as I reclined in a consumptive stupor, trying to mend my health enough to afflict the world with my bad ideas for another year. As I woke and passed my host on the way out the door to go train with Portland Joe, he noted: “A minute ago you were truck driver tired. Now you look alive.”
Wishing him a good night’s rest before his next shift, I went out to train with Joe. We typically train at the park at 64th and Center in Southeast Portland. The locals have grown used to seeing us there.
I am certain that the rational reader, the man of Science, many of whom come to this site to ponder, is growing suspicious of my late blooming superstition. Are these words, these insistings that I am being stalked by Sendings, merely the fruit of Portland Joe, James Anderson and Beast O’Neal punching me in the head some half a thousand times over the past few months?
I hope so.
Let it be clear that I utterly reject “Science,” both the method and the religious cult. Physics are fake and devils and demons, gods and angels are real. I am an alienist, a rejected free radical cast out of the organs and into the civic blood of the Body Economic. As such, I am subject to sendings, people who see me, approach, befriend and unveil themselves to me in an attempt to expose and bind me.
The night before last, giant Daniel Speed, the survivor of a terrible hit and run in which he was sent flying in a welter of blood by a pickup truck and spent weeks in a coma, sat at The Dive Bar next to me and held my hand as he unburdened his soul, convinced that he should be dead and now feeling he is something of a meaty ghost.
Are these sendings come from God or Darkness?
Are these like the angels detailed to warn Lot?
Or, might these be minions of he who God assigned to test Job?
I do not know, but sit here under gray dripping skies in the only place that ever truly felt like home, my rucksack already packed and stacked in the corner. My pending abandonment of the only city to invite me to stay, I suspect, renders my fey form visible to those sent by the outer powers to oust this one from these inner shadows.
He who offends The World by contentment to observe and declination to serve—or even live—as part of society, affronts also Heaven and Hell.
Enter Anton Ales. He is a large old-school negro in middle years, a soul much more like the black men of my father’s generation than of mine or his. Sir Captain Richard Francis Burton would certainly name him “a litigious negro,” for Anton is a committed contrarian. He devotes every conversation to testing the social bounds that confine he and his partner in discourse. He then seeks discord and argument, always trying to lure out the real person within the branded civic facade before him.
The following typical African American traits define this big, sad-eyed man:
-Fatherless.
-Not just abandoned by his mother, but removed according to her lies, from friendly habitation, by the police, into the corrections system at the tender age of 15.
-Defines himself according to sexual conquests of the female species.
-Hates homosexuals.
-Regards every woman as a whore or slut.
-Regards every man as a chump or champ.
-Regards every human as a born liar who never tells the truth about anything unless they are drugged and/or duped into revealing an aspect of themselves.
-Marginally violent, ever wary of the true dangerous actor [the champ] and ever watchful for the chump who can be bullied.
-Slothful, proud of not washing his hands, not bathing, not cleaning his consequently rude habitation, as a rejection of slavery. To have poor hygiene increases the dominance of him over the woman who submits to his lusty desires as she wrinkles her nose in disgust yet receives his unsavory attention. His habitation, which smells badly so that we prefer to visit on his front porch under the light by night, is kept in a state of filth as a test of womankind. The woman who is conquered by his prodigious sexuality in her bed, when visiting his to relive her initial ravishing, is invited to insist he clean the place she is to be disrespected in. This grants Anton the opportunity to slap her and say, “Clean my house, bitch, or get the fuck out!” He dines upon dirty dishes plucked from an un-run dishwasher, dresses out of a drier, litters his own front yard with cigarette butts and even wine bottles, not out of laziness, but as an affront to the world that hates him in its very white civic bones.
Anton finds me fascinating in my cleanliness and my slave like self discipline. He believes that every writer writes mostly lies and that I lie two-fold in that I insist that I am truthful when in fact I hide my nature from him and others. [0] He is a classic Sending, sent to test my alienistic discipline. Befriending me, Anton Ales will bestow gifts out of the blue, handing me a roll of bills and insisting I take them. On some other occasion Anton, will say, as he did last night as we drank under his porch light [1] and his wine ran dry, “Motherfucker, you owe me. We walkin’ ta the 7-11 en you buying my drink!”
He had me of a surety, for he gifted me unearned and unasked cash out of the blue last week, a debt I must repay, I having been properly measured as a chump. Anton is one of the few denizens of Portland that knows me as a writer. To the extent he reads my work, it is only a means of finding grounds for disagreement so that he can further his driven quest to root me out of the gray cellar of my fey soul’s hideyhole.
Last sundown, Anton saw Portland Joe and I training and was kind enough to encourage Joe, video some rounds, and even don the boxing gloves and talk trash to Joe while mugging as the bully for boxing self defense drills. The big man charmed us and invited us to drink, luring us into his circle of nihilistic investigation, and then began, in classic American fashion, to insult us, insist our women were whores who yearned for his seed and were plotting our downfall. A good time was had by all as Anton tested, lured, interrogated, invalidated, summoned doubts out of our mutual shadows and alternately complimented us and demeaned himself. This was all part of a sophisticated conversational opera which suits this man of wounded soul so well to the role of Sending from Beyond. He is the perfect foil for the self-invented and over-disciplined man.
As Portland Joe recused himself from actual drunkenness, having the discipline of one social drink as an anchor, I agreed to a two hour revel under the porch light of Whore America’s sordid night.
…
Notes
-0. My written lies are limited to protecting the subjects of such biographies as this, by artfully misrepresenting their government name, yet preserving their true personality.
-1. Anton Ales has been asked to leave and not to return to, most of the area bars.
