I Wanna Be a Bum Too!

The Attention Wars 1

Almost everyone is incredibly hungry for attention. I've come to realize, since I've been looking at it, that we live in a war zone, with people basically mugging each other for attention all day long.

Attention Wars

Speaking of Art...

Effusive thank you's to Brian O'Rourke for his front and center display of one of the cartoons from my Buttonwood Art Show.

Speaking of Social Status...

...I'm just pulling the weeds and hauling them away - humble work, but I can't tell you how pleased I am to have been invited to ply my perplexing trade at The Middletown Fire Station on Main Street. The inside of the building is absolutely immaculate and it's only fitting that the parking lot reflect the same level of fastidious attention.

Actually, it IS easy being me!

But it wasn't always easy being me... By and by, I worked for free cleaning the streets of Middletown for two years to find myself positioned as what is apparently "THE Bum in Town". Indeed I have a saying, that I am THE most important bum in Middletown, and that between me and Tom Serra we practically run this place...

Ponderous Pigeon...

Parades.

Thank you Dr. Freddy Carroll from NEAT.

On August 12th at the Fourth Annual Erin Street Garden Party, NEAT, (who know how to get things done), gave me a "Neighborhood Builder Award".

I told the Mayor that I want his job and thanked a few people.

The tofu was EXCELLENT.

Seriously !

Too Big to See - Ubiquitous Debris

Alright, so this could be called Life at the Purple Hole or The Court St Chronicles, the latter, being a bit that I did on The Homeless Report, a radio program which aired on Wesleyan University’s WESU (88.1FM WESUfm.org) once a week for all of 06 and half of 07, until I gave it up, feeling that I was failing at doing good responsible prime time college radio, which was just stupid on my part of course…

Anyway, Bums with Brooms is, in the first place, an expression of, and as such, the proving out of a Homeless Report Concept, which would be the, as I call it, “Cool Hand Luke Factor”. Sometimes nothing is a pretty good hand”.

The fundamental tool for the removal and cleaning up of the garbage is readily available right there within the garbage, ie, the garbage bag. One can usually find a garbage bag of one size and description or another, and then put other garbage in it.

Bags are indeed so plentiful in the environment that sometimes they find you.

As in the case for example this one time, the winter of ’09, Barry and I were chillin at The Buttonwood on a Tuesday, at about 1PM, when B who is looking out the window says, “Wow look at that, that bag is getting sucked into the engine of that bus”. So I get up off the couch and turn around and look out the window, and I see at least one bus, but I can’t see what he’s talking about. Then I do finally “see” a full sized black garbage bag was being held by suction onto the air intake screen at the rear of the bus, where the engine is of course.

So, you get this right? A five (more?) thousand dollar (working, obviously) bus engine is in peril of getting cooked (fried!) by the “doings” of a 50 cent garbage bag. What, pray tell, if anything, is so to speak, “wrong” with this picture?

I’ll tell you, whatever one ultimately wants to say is “wrong with this picture”, I, for one, find it absolutely fascinating that I didn’t or “couldn’t” see the bag… “right there”, though it was…

I see cigarette butts… but I don’t see barnacle-like bags on buses! Isn’t that fascinating?

Harry Houdini knew how to make an elephant tell fortunes and read palms, or at least appear to be, but who’s making the garbage “invisible”….
Hmmmm…?

Fred Carroll's Middletown.

Fred Carroll who calls himself Dr Freddy H. Carroll in mockery of the adoration, adulation, and emulation effusively afforded to those who have achieved social status consequent to academic success, is a 5-year Middletown resident and bona fide local celebrity to the tune of Food not Bombs' spokesperson and litigant, Bums with Brooms founder, philosopher and promoter and former host and creator of WESU's "The Homeless Report".

Not burdened by the likes of a job, home, car, spouse, children, etc.., Fred is free to sit and observe, drawing what he sees, so to speak, as he sees it, hmmmm...