Youth is never lonely. They constantly attract each other with the force of gravity, if only to complain how lonely they feel. If you want to know authentic loneliness, look for it in the quiet corners of Senior Citizen's Centers. In medical clinic waiting rooms. At bus stops. It makes you feel uncomfortable and sometimes unreasonably mad at the lonely old person -- why aren't they more optimistic and outgoing?
Loneliness is like some kind of social tuberculosis -- it creeps up on you gradually. I still don't think of myself as a lonely guy -- until I do. A certain slant of light at sunset; the sound of distant train horns; quiet Sunday afternoons; a brief email from one of my kids, carelessly spelled and filled with brittle brightness -- these kinds of things put me in a hole in the ground, waiting for the sexton to come by and fill it in.
But we were talking about Swedish meatballs, right? That was on today's menu, along with carrots. There was also canned peaches for dessert, but I decided to pass on that. The meatballs were served over rice, with lots of rich brown gravy, and they tasted pretty good. Of course, I didn't have any breakfast -- just a cup of Bengal Spice herbal tea. So I was ready for a good lunch. Hunger makes the best appetizer.
Not that it matters, but I counted 44 seniors at lunch today. And maybe they're all happy as clams and never get lonely. My perceptions are often lousy.
A while ago I fell down while walking to the Provo Library, which is just a few blocks from my apartment. I had to drag myself over to the nearest tree so I could slowly pull myself up. No damage, except to my ego. But it was the wake up call I'd been dreading -- the time had finally come to put away the rubber nose and baggy pants for good, because there is nothing worse than an old clown who takes a fall and can't get up again. But before I put the greasepaint away for good, I created a video memento of my clown craft -- putting on the warpaint one last time.
“ Yea, and then shall the work commence, with the Father among all nations in preparing the way whereby his people may be gathered home to the land of their inheritance.”
Gather me home, I am tired of stealing
Through landscapes that lack any intimate feeling.
A nomad that’s drifted for many long years --
I yearn for a haven away from all tears.
My home, my real home, is not just a birthplace --
This brief video was taken by the Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter CJ back in 2009, when I was working the streets of Minneapolis with a clown routine in order to make enough money to move back to Thailand. It took me three months to earn the airfare, and I learned a lot about street theater during that time.
For instance, I learned that there are dozens of bullying s.o.b.'s who make it a habit of shaking down street performers once or twice a day -- if you don't give them your money they punch you very hard. The cops have absolutely no interest in preventing this; they hate street performers and treat them like vermin.
So I learned to get scary crazy with the bullies. Whenever one would come up and demand my 'take' for the day I would pull out a big sports whistle and get right in his face to start blowing as loud as I could. If done without hesitation, making direct eye contact at all times, this always discomfited them enough to send them lumbering away.
I also learned to make a new sign each day -- in my case, in verse. Since I worked right in front of the U.S. Bank headquarters I got a lot of stuffy bankers who wouldn't normally give a beggar the time of day -- but when they noticed that I made the effort to write something original each day for my placard they started giving me ten dollar bills. And you don't do any better than that unless you're a pole dancer!
I worked the main drag of Nicollet Mall, a pedestrian walkway in downtown Minneapolis where only public buses were allowed to use the street. This is where most of the Twin Cities' street performers and homeless lunatics congregated. I was impressed by one young man's determination and simplicity of execution. He spent eight hours a day walking up and down Nicollet Mall, asking everyone "Can I have a quarter?" Most people ignored him or snarled at him to go to hell. But he never stopped, and so the sheer numbers favored him. I asked him how much he made in an hour and he said he could usually count on twenty-five dollars an hour. Nice work if you can get it.
Another guy, a really down-and-out bum who simply sat on the sidewalk with a scrawled cardboard sign that said "PLEASE HELP" actually kept a second piece of cardboard with him, on which were pasted personal checks, with the heading: "Do Not Accept."
A very cultivated gentleman, who rarely shaved and liked to drink Listerine, could recite page after page of Shakespeare for only a dollar, or sometimes he would walk beside a victim reciting the Bard if they DIDN'T pay him a dollar.
After knocking myself out doing slapstick, pantomime, and playing my musical saw to mostly indifferent crowds, I learned that what turns on the spigots for women and children is to simply sit down, look sad, and blow bubbles. I can't fully explain it, but when I would do this women would rush up to me in tears, saying "Oh, this reminds me of my childhood!" and then dump all their spare change into my bucket. And children were mesmerized by this simple expedient. They refused to move away from me until their parents emptied their purses. This leads me to the conclusion that you don't need any talent to succeed as a street performer -- only a deviant understanding of human psychology.
The problem with bubbles was that the cops were always looking for reasons to chase us street performers off the Nicollet Mall, even though we had a perfectly legal right to be there. So if one of my bubbles happened to float into someone's face and pop, causing them to blink and shake their head, a flatfoot would immediately pounce on me as a public menace and tell me to leave. It's no use arguing with the cops, unless you want to get shot, so I'd shuffle down a block or two and go back to work.
And finally, I learned that when it comes to rest rooms some stores have big hearts and some are just plain mean. Panera Bread would call a cop the minute I stepped into their store, but the Target security team was always very pleasant to me -- they never even searched me once, and began greeting me by name when I would come in.
It took me a few weeks to get the hang of street performing, but once I learned the ropes and got tough with interlopers who wanted to horn in on my performance so they could share in the 'take,' I started making anywhere from two-hundred to three-hundred dollars a day. That's on sunny, warm days. When it rained or the wind blew cold I was shit out of luck -- making less than 20 dollars for six hours work.
So do I ever give street performers money when I see one nowadays? Nope. Not even if they're blowing bubbles.
“Yea, wo be unto the Gentiles except they repent; for it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Father, that I will cut off thy horses out of the midst of thee, and I will destroy thy chariots”
If you are a resident of Provo, Utah, and are sixty years of age or over, you qualify for the Senior Lunch Program at the Senior Center on Freedom Boulevard. It costs three dollars per meal, but it is done strictly on the honor code -- they put out a little wooden box for you to put your money in. I usually give five dollars per week. The building is the back of the Provo Recreation Center. It features classrooms, billiard tables, a quiet lobby with a tropical fish display and fireplace and vinyl-covered chairs that discourage comfortable naps. There are exclusive exercise rooms and a large social hall with a stage, where lunch is served promptly at noon.
The Senior Center also provides several free health, finance, and legal noontime workshops for Seniors every month. Today it was an eyesight and glaucoma check up, from BYU. I'm happy to say that even though I've had the same pair of glasses for six years now, my prescription does not need to be updated.
The menu today is:
Salisbury steak
mashed potatoes and gravy
carrots
a dinner roll
and a bowl of pears.
It is served cafeteria style.
Everyone thought the pears were apple sauce, and several went back up to the servers to say it tasted funny. That's how they found out it was pears they were eating, not applesauce. Since about half the group is Hispanic, the condiment table features pickled cactus strips, which several elderly Gringo ladies mistook for green beans -- filling their plates full of them and then nearly losing their dentures because of the heat. We also get a small carton of one percent milk, so they were able to cool down.
It's cafeteria food, so what can I say about it? The only way I can actually eat it and enjoy it is to skip breakfast so I'm ravenous by noon -- then it tastes pretty good. Most of the people who eat lunch at the Senior Center are no longer able to do much cooking for themselves, or have completely lost interest in eating at all. The volunteers who staff this lunch program provide one hot meal a day to people who otherwise would probably only ever eat cat food and baloney sandwiches.
I eat there now because I need to save up enough money for a colonoscopy and to get my prostrate taken care of. I figure in six months time I'll have enough money saved up to do so. If I can stand it. I might start nagging my children for money instead. It's never worked in the past but maybe the recent General Conference has turned them into angels . . .
Notably, the company also announced that it would fix its troubled relationship with drivers, who have complained for years about falling pay and arbitrary treatment.
