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                    Hello Naked Mic. 

 

 How are you?  How is the reader?  I hope you’re well.  Laurel asked me to write an autobiography for her webpage.  She sent me an email to ask and, in her email, she specified that her webpage was not to be an ordinary or dull webpage.  I think she wants something fun and creative, and I can only hope this submission meets her - and your (the reader) - standards.  And, I hope your standards are high, fuckers.

Last semester I went to Lund, Sweden.  It’s a cold and wet and dark country in the winter.  In the summer it’s verdant and colorful; my room overlooked a small man-made clearing in the middle of the apartment complex I lived in.  The apartments are large and square and grey and red, and they are identifiable by letters (I lived in letter N, for instance), and to mark the buildings the Swedes have painted monstrous letters on the sides of the buildings and made the handles of the doors into letters of the alphabet.

In the winter, I would bundle up and take midnight walks - short ones you understand - to a small park bench.  The bench was lit by a single lamp the bench faced a field with scattered, leafless trees.  I would sit on the bench with my iPod and listen to music, playing my harmonica for myself.

One night, as I was playing, a couple of fellows in high school came up and asked me if I wanted any money.  The question made me giggle, and I declined.  They asked me what I was doing, and I asked them where they came from.  We talked for about five minutes, to no particular end, and at the end of our conversation, the two boys went away.  The meeting made me think about the people riding in boxcars…. I’ve only read about these people in the boxcars, I’ve never met one…. but from what I’ve read, I think they’re people who just live- just traveling all over the country, wherever the rails take them.  I think they lead beautiful, sad, rootless, wonderful lives. 

One Wednesday night when I was a junior in university, I called my father up at ten o’ clock and told him I was going to Chicago.  Chicago is a fourteen hour drive away, and I had classes on Thursday and Friday, no place to stay, and no friends to go with.  I called a friend in W. Lafayette, Indiana who was studying at Purdue, and he told me I could crash at his pad for the first night.  Thanks, Eric!  J  For the second night, I called a girl named Elaine who lived in Chicago, but her boyfriend was coming into town.  I couldn’t stay.

But I drove.  It’s a long and flat drive, my friend, but it’s got it’s high points.  I like the flat land - I like physical geography in general - and I enjoyed singing along to the songs on my truck’s CD player.  I stayed in W. Lafayette the first night, and the second morning, I drove four more hours to Chicago.  I arrived and immediately got lost, driving through poverty and ramshackle homes and bumpy streets and houses whose people sat on decrepit front porches- and I saw all this poverty continue for forty-five minutes at fifty miles an hour.  The Chicago poverty seemed complete. 

At night, I went skateboarding at a park near the lake, and the park was windy and cold.  I didn’t have a place to stay, so I parked my truck, and went waling through downtown Chinatown.  I met a hobo there, who I walked along with- he told me about his past few years, how he was addicted to drugs and sex with men and how he had venereal diseases and no job at all.  I asked him why he didn’t go south, and why he didn’t find a job, and why he had sex with men, if he didn’t want to have sex with men at all.  But the man didn’t know, and sometime that night we parted, and every now and then I think about him and wonder if he’s alive.

Laurel & Reader, I hope you enjoyed reading about my life. 

 

-David.

 

 

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