BUM: A Fictional Memoir of Life on the Street

Noon. The lunch bell rings pretty constantly in my waking hours, but something about noon makes the opening of my merlot lunchbox feel right.  

Not only am I the biggest fan of antioxidants on the planet, I find the crippling headache I wake with every morning is best eased at the noon hour, when the sun is at it’s ripest, and the sweat factory that is my current outfit can concentrate a thimble full of alcohol into something that would make a fat man forget his name and occupation for a good twenty minutes.  

Considering that, one styrofoam cup of the cheapest red wine on the market will keep me fairly numb until the late afternoon, which helps get me through the peak tanning hours without suffering heat stroke or foaming at the mouth and going into convulsions.  And during this time (which i fondly refer to as “the day’s haze”), I get my best thinking done - whether I’m trying to invent a more effective way to trap squirrels or just dealing with the ocean of regret for having attempted to work as a stock broker with a form of dyslexia that had me buying high and selling low until I found myself giving stock tips to people wearing spring fashions that were first available to the market in 1978.

While most of the brain cell real estate from that time has been repossessed by fermented grape overlords, I do get flashes of my former life the few times a week a pinhole of light pierces through a particularly light blackout.  And while most of these memories are painful, it is fun to remember a time when I was able to enter an actual female vagina, instead of the tightly closed fist with some facial hair glued to the top I have today.  And in those partially-conscious moments, I always arrive to the fact that romance is still important: whether your chosen mate is groomed and shimmering like a magazine ad or resembles a lump of raw poultry buried in a nest of steel wool with a hat on it.  

At least I had the foresight to avoid having children.  Though, looking back it would have been hard since my former wife insisted that we use a condom, a diaphragm, birth control pills and made me pull out and finish by myself in the bathroom every time we made love.  Even when we had phone sex, while I was away on business, she would hang up the phone well before the moment of truth, and for years after I would find myself aroused by the sound of any phone that was off the hook and beeping. 

But it’s best not to dwell on the past too much, especially when you have to remain aware of your surroundings enough to not get sucked up by a street sweeper.

~ Fin