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Catch me on page five of the Chronicle...They caught my good side.

The Things I Swept Today... Monday

If there's one place on Main Street in Middletown that you would expect to be impeccably clean, it would be the sidewalk in front of The Chamber of Commerce.... but you'd be way wrong! Also, if there would be a place you'd expect to get paid for cleaning in front of it would be the Chamber of Commerce... you'd be wrong again.

The Things I Swept Today... Sunday

On Main street between the bar and the bike shop is a vacant space that's been vacant for awhile, years and there's a little doorway that catches debris.

I'm sweeping it out and thinking that no one watching me would come up with half a reason why anyone in their right mind would be doing this. However, on a "Bum Paradigm" I might be cleaning it for myself to sleep here tonight...

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...

Garbage equals food - Idler equals volunteer...

Okay, so this is all about Food not Bombs and The Municipalities’ efforts to either bring them into “compliance” or failing that, shut them down.

I use this as the starting point and “frame of reference” to explain, express, and articulate my thing which I originally called Bums with Brooms but which I now call Brooms not Bombs in recognition of , and in expression of philosophical solidarity with Food Not Bombs, as there exists a core similarity between the two. To wit, both take something which was previously being thrown away, discarded as garbage, and redefine it as the thing of great value that it originally was.

In the case of Food Not Bombs that would be food of course, which was then defined as garbage and then redefined back to being food again, and in the case of brooms not bombs, the thing in question was labor or potential labor, which then became idle, wasted hours and then became productive labor again.

Same paradigm, if you can paradigme.

Food not Bombs says, “It’s not that we don’t have enough food, it’s just that we feed way too much of it to cows (who would rather eat grass which they, cows, think of as food). We, some of us, then define the cows as food! And what we don’t feed to cows we’re as likely as not to throw in the dumpster.

In the Brooms not Bombs case, it’s what a capitalist might call “labor” that is being reclaimed or redefined from idle or wasted hours back into “productive labor” again.

That’s the basic paradigm laid out simply. The difference between the two is that Food not Bombs (in theory and in practice), seems to me to be significantly founded in love and compassion for others, as well as shock and disgust at the “sin” of wantonly wasting food.

“Are you waiting for someone? What are you doing here? This is private property and you are trespassing. Trespassing is a crime.”

Brooms not Bombs, on the other hand, is a response to one’s own personal pain. I found myself on the “trash heap of society” where my very life, my very being, had not only no value, but actually had a negative value.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I’m talking about, what Food Not Bombs has in fact been doing, giving food away, is the same as what I’ve been doing, giving my labor away rather than simply wasting it.

Ticketing Completed

My dog?.. Sometimes I think his favorite bone is the one in my arm!... (always gets a laugh).

Alright...

So we’ll pick up this story with this photograph of Dr. Freddy H. Carroll (as my friends call me) sitting in the back (where else?) of Officer White’s (what else?) cruiser, apparently being arrested, but in fact merely ticketed - a $100 Violation of Municipal Order thing (Cease and Desist "dispensing" food) - I checked “not guilty” and mailed it in.