Dignity, Grace and Tumors, Part 3 of 3 Will Just Have to Wait

"She had to go because she didn't know who Joe Strummer was" -- Whoever Cowboy Mouth is/was

"... a man missed a Bible question because he did not know what Deuteronomy was.  Oh no!!"  - Billy Crystal, Running Scared.

(I'm listening to Cowboy Mouth for this post.  Mostly because I want to remember what the song was that caused me to buy this cd.  If it comes on, I'll let you know.)

(I'm not watching "Running Scared" for this post.  But I could.)

~~

I have a 3rd part of 3 written and shoved way deep in the annals of the blog draft site.  But I have a strict policy of never finishing a story. Actually, I'll put that one out next week.  I just wasn't feeling it this week.

Because ...

A couple of days ago, I was riding down the keystone. I was headed home.  I had been doing these weird unstructured intervals.  It went like this.  Go as hard as you can to see if you can beat the max wattage of the interval before.  If you go 3 times without beating it, you're done.

I got up to 13 hundred and something and like 12 intervals, so yeah.  I suck.

While I was cruising down the trail, I saw an old friend walking along.  I made reference to this friend in a lively comment thread from a blog post in 2008.  The comment is directed at Brady.  I'll save you the trouble of going there and just repeat the comment here:

____

I've known 2 people who write like you do. One is a stinking drunk who is now homeless. Brilliant writer though. Big huge waste. The other is you. Time to give up this crazy dream of working 9-5 for the corporate machine. Time to settle down and find a publisher. You're not getting any younger and you have a family to think about. How long do you think they'll put up with this '40 hours a week' thing you're doing?
____

Well the homeless guy is doing slightly better now (he has a home).  I stopped the bike and talked to him for a while.  Without going into too much detail, I can tell you this guy has all kinds of trouble.  His problem stems from the deadly combination of some severe mental health issues and a seeming incompetence among the mental health fixer upper guys.

He talked for about 3 minutes and I had no idea what he was talking about.  He kept interrupting himself.  Changing direction.  I couldn't follow any of it. Then I realized I was listening to emotion in the form of words.  If you could speak your thoughts as they happen when nobody is around, this is about what it'd sound like.  When your mind is going, you don't have to finish a thought.  You know what you're thinking.  You can start a thought and then it completes in your brain and you move to the next thought.

I don't think I could do this if I was speaking to somebody.  That's what my friend was doing though.  After a few minutes, I was not listening to him.  At least not in a straight line.  It was easier to understand him if I pieced together phrases from the previous minute or so.   I felt like this is what it would be like to be able to read somebody's mind.  You wouldn't hear whole complete sentences all spelled out.  You'd hear a rambling of disjointed phrases.  A shorthand of sorts that only means something to the originator of them.

After about 10-15 minutes, we set off on our separate ways and I was not hearing what I had been waiting for.

In the past, my friend has always ended one of these chance meetings with a "Let's get together for breakfast, some time."

I'd always say, "Sure." and think I'd never hear from him, nor him from me.  That's just the way people are.

But my friend is different.  I can count on him to give me a call within a couple of weeks and arrange breakfast somewhere.

So as we were parting, I was waiting for it.  But he said, "Well, I hope your family is all doing well. It was good seeing you," And so on.

I couldn't believe it. The feeling I got was that his confidence is so low, he wouldn't presume to suggest we get together for breakfast.   But I want to eat breakfast.  It's like, the most important meal of the day.

He started to walk away and I said, "Hey.  Call me about breakfast."

He said as soon as he felt like he had gotten himself together enough, he'd give me a call.  I didn't want to push him, so I left it at that.

But it bugged me.  So later on that night, I sent him an email to reiterate breakfast. I really like talking to him and listening to his creativity. I'm hoping we can get together soon and chat for a while longer.

What follows is a portion of the reply I got the next day:

Really good to see you Fred.  I forgot what it felt like to hear from the rare friends I think of as peers, especially at such redefining junctures.  Been jotting and drafting my thoughts the last couple years when I could while finishing off an accumulation of unread non-fiction to arriving recently on the brink of actually penning [redacted].  I see now the letter seems to have been coming along as something of a prerequisite to weightier overtures, with talking to you I know among them, unless of course you would deny having a certain efficient zeal that also allows your higher values, those akin to geekdom, exercise, comedy and intellectual consistency.?


Yeah - you should see how he writes when he's feeling well.

Well I never figured out exactly why I bought this Cowboy Mouth CD, but I guess this is ok ...