I laid it on the line but she hung it up. Well, set me back up so we can knock me down again, I’ll be your Charlie Brown every damn time: 11:47 P.M., Friday night. Main Street. I sit in the same window I’ve sat in the last seven years. Fingers on the keyboard, eyes on the street. Across the way, one story above me, yet another man sits at a computer.
     I’m loath to understand, but he’s there every night, without fail. His mere presence pisses me off, eggs me on, keeps me as honest as I can possibly be at this time. His trim cut and serious features betray that he must be at work on some kind of private detective novel, and his concentration reminds me of something I lost more than a couple of weeks ago. I make a mental note to
try to trip him the next time I see him on the street.
     11:53 P.M., Friday night. There’s a helicopter floating overhead. Its light sends bodies scurrying. Shades are pulled, and the streets are darker because of it. I watch it hover, then follow the swath of light as it cuts through back alleys and hits on arthritic buildings. I wonder if it sees what I
do....
     The children at ease with being up well past their bedtime
     A diverse folk tied by binds invisible but no less real
     The silhouette of a young man with an electric guitar strapped over his shoulder
     The television blue of our individual, present-day opium dens
     Panhandlers palming liquid change. They check the neon clock which still reads OPEN but for how long?
     12:22 A.M., Saturday morning. Main Street, America. LIGHTS ON a woman counting cracks in the pavement. A passer-by looks back at her and marvels at how truly lucky we’ve been thus far.      LIGHTS ON graffiti hieroglyphics which can loosely be translated as “Whatever he said, and more”LIGHTS ON a newspaper on the sidewalk. People walk by, but no one will stop to pick it up. What they do in there and the way they do it is tired, in need of a vacation.
     They need to jump the first train to Tra-La-La—don’t look in my window if unprepared to let me be your tour guide—where they will be greeted by themselves, and be reminded that here there is no need to breathe. Black-and-white will dissolve into Technicolor, and they will study the art of documentary. Become reacquainted with old friends like surprise and passion; relinquish stale
utterances and sentences made easy but also less than what is needed. Unsafe
streets require unsafe writing....
     LIGHTS ON the stoplights flashing caution
     LIGHTS ON the light reflected off of the rear-view bouncing off the bass reflected from ghetto cars with back beat seats and fingers flipping birds
     LIGHTS ON the silly sail of the lost at sea
     AND the armadillo casts
     ....I walk down four flights of stairs and into the street to pick the damn thing up myself. As I reach down the copter closes in and its threat becomes clearer. The force of it unfolds the paper and sends pages flying pell-mell as I stand there holding only two of them. The obituaries, I note. I scan for my name and, finding it, I chastise myself for not making my bed this morning.
     In the meantime the copter’s light cuts through me, a team of doctors on board dissect my x-rays in real time, and I can’t for the life in me comprehend why I am not arrested just then
     as William Burroughs sweeps down from the shadows and we duck under the trailing beam and into cover....He advises me to take one last lunge at the football....If you end up on your back, he says, just resign yourself to looking up Lucy’s skirt.
     Which reminds me: The fundamental flaw with America’s dialogue on Freedom of Speech is that its center is assumed to be obscenity instead of freedom. Forget the shortest distance between two points on the pretext that so much else is lost along with the scenery. Imagine instead that you hold a thimble of alcohol. Transport yourself to a dry town and suddenly the thimble takes on new meaning. We should be leery of our allowing anything to have a greater presence in its absence.
     It seems to me that Freedom in Speech is a lot like fucking on the floor while staring up at the bed. You know it’s more comfortable up there, and yet there’s a certain vitality found in doing it a new way....An immediacy that would be lacking otherwise. Sometimes our words and the way they are presented need to be turned out in the hope of unearthing something different. Contentment is the
siren ushering us to a sleep undisturbed by car alarms. You know what I mean.
     Some clichés are true. This country is one of many blessings, our general freedom and its corollary in speech chief among them. The problem with any blessing is that, if neglected, it can turn on you and rather quickly become a curse. Exercise it, then. Celebrate it. Solidify its necessity before it can even be questioned. Rinse. Repeat. Turn a blind ear to those that say the revolution is complete. Chase ominousness away with the fortitude of open shades and twists of imagination. Inspire your journalists to poetry, your poets to perfection, all the while remembering to forgive the weatherman when it rains
     2:22 A.M., March 12, 2001. Main Street.
     Enough said?