The Journals of a Free Public Advisor II

Friday, October 20st, 2006

This evening, on Jack Brickhouse Way, I met two neighborhood kids, about 8 and 9, on bicycles. One of them asked me the meaning of life. I told him that there wasn’t enough letters in the alphabet to explain. "Some say that the meaning of life is togetherness. Because each of us are burdened to live as we are, in these feet, in these hands. We want to be free of the prison of the self. We look for others to fill our voids, and as we do this we discover love. Then Love is the meaning of life. If you have love, you have fertility, and if you have fertility, then you can have a baby. If you can have a baby, life, another person. There is freedom from your singleness."
The child thanked me, and left me 50 cents! I was so impressed. I on't think I will ever see 50 cents the same way.
After these kids left, I met *** on the night that she finally got to the root of her frustrations with work. She had been a legal secretary, working 9-5. She’s been a dancer all her life, so she decided to change jobs, going with one that would give her time in the mornings to take dance classes, shower and get to work. The reason she was frustrated was that she’d been getting tremendous feedback, pleads to stay on from her co-workers and her employer, ***.
When *** first approached me, she showed me a post-it with his name and number scribbled in his hand. She asked me “What’s going on with him?” Her friend wated silently with us.
I didn’t get her vibe about the guy on the post-it (though I should have), so she filled me in on some details. ***, her employer, was showing an especially sweet side for her, one that she didn’t feel completely comfortable with. She wondered whether or not he could be in love with her. I argued that she should listen to her feeling the issue and make this move for the purposes of maintaining her boundaries. She certainly does not want to be wrapped up in a Lawyer’s affairs. I thought she may have been revealling too much of herself, bringing in so much love that it might wrongly been taken personally.
She was a bright one, a full set of feelings, and a sense for the parnormal. She sought me out. That’s one clue, but then I was able to have a glance at the three books in her bag, one of which looked like a very deep book on the theory of yoga. We shared a few names back and forth, yoga studios that we both knew and hung out at. I got the sense that we were instantly friends, and that I wanted to introduce her to friends of mine. I should. I do worry a litlle that I was played against her rackets, and that she could be more unstable than I took her to be. It could be that she was falling in love with ***, and if so, should still follow my advice. It could be that she was so detatched from her feelings, NOT HER BODY, that she may not have understood them.
Later, at Oak St., I met a gentlman and his daughter who were deciding, right then, to move to Vancouver. He was glad that I could cheer his daughter up about the situation. “Live thou,” I told him, “There is not cap over the city of Vancouver.”
Then I met a couple students who were fortunate enough to have recieved semester-long fellowhips to work at the Newberry Library. One of them was a Milton freak, and the other, a good librarian. The Milton freak was in a timult because he’d had his blue pea coat stolen from the lockers of the Newberry. He should have locked it, and because he didn’t, I didn’t think that he should be so surprised by its disappearance. I talked to him about the price we pay to live in debt, as we do. As so many of us live by credit, and underneath their debts, they become unable to feel the poor. While he could have bought ten coats easily, he could not have given away a single one. To respect the burdon of his middle-class axieties he has to understand that crime is the direct result of stingy capitalists. I reminded him that the person wearing your coat will use every thread of that coat, sometimes living and sleeping in that coat if they haven’t a simple sheet, or a roof to lay beneath. I gave him directions to thriftshops on the north side of the city, and now I hope that both of these kids go together looking for the coat.
Kids should have fun.
Then there was a woman with a very dark demeanor. She was ravenosly beautiful but very sad. She said: “What? Go ahead?”
I stood. I could tell that she didn’t want to hear me explain anything. I said “Stop waiting. You’re too good to be waiting for who you’re waiting for. Leave it right here. You know that you are not supposed to live your life waiting for approval from another person.”
She wouldn’t hear another word I said. She reached in her purse and gave me her ex-boy friend’s glasses. Then she walked away with her friend, dancing and laughing, releasing the creuly of his absence into the night.
Then I saw three kids from college in Michigan, one of whom had two dutch reform girls that were interested in him.
Then three women who wanted to get married.
Then two kids who wanted to get married.
Then one guy who wanted to get married, and another guy who wanted an explanation for the many religions in the world, the multiplicity of them. I feel like I have overly simple answers to some of these questions, but it’s slowly changing.
After One AM, the crowd started to turn a bit darker. I met a veteren from the vietnam war had to go into complex sub-atomic theory in oder to explain that he can still hardly live with himself. He was very intelligent, and deeply troubled.
The next one, and the last of the night, was a man who broke off from his work buddies, and asked me how to handle his wife who is “deeply narcisistic, and has a borerline-personality.” His story was truly the worst. His wife, recognizing the sham of the marriage she was in, ran off to her country with his five-year-old daughter. She left him with allegations that he was addicted to pornography, child pornography, and that he abused her, threatened to abuse her, and owned a gun, (alll of which) according to him (were false).
My head was damn-near broken by the end of the night, at least I had a set of sunglasses.
I went home and had to challenge myself to settle all these lives in my sleep. Its now 8 am, and I still haven’t slept it off.

Live thou,
Travis

The Journals of a Free Public Advisor

Tuesday, October 17th 2006

I love my job. For real, I give free advice on a streetcorner in the gold coast. I keep my own hours, I come and go as I please, and to do so I keep my operation very simple. I sit on an upturned wooden drawer, and set around myself a series of simple cardboard signs that are each weighted down with harback books.

The first sign reads: “Free Public Advisor”
The next reads: “Free Counsel, Ask Anything!”
And the last: “Free Advice”

I want people to get the idea. When I am out on this corner, it is a public corner. Anyone can step up and ask a question. I don’t ask people to keep a single-file line and I don’t agree to confidential exchanges. Anyone who speaks up can be heard by all, and so expectedt to be civil to each other.

Tonight I am in Chicago, sitting on the corner of Oak and Rush. I am thinking that each of us are composed of contradictions. We have conflicting needs and experiences. We can be our worst enemies. We can be too critical with ourselves, too self-conscious, and too self-flattering all at the same time. We become so desperate for a solution to our dillemas that we loose sight of our selves in the process. Our feelings become a field of suppressed chaos that we manage through rationality, through ideas, and approaches to ideas that always cloud the real reasons. The real reasons are always clear on many levels, and yet they rarely appear to us.

I am watching each person who walks past this corner, asking myself whether or not I know them. I think that I will know them better if I continue asking myself this question. Tonight I showed up with a friend, Sam Luchsinger. She’s a bicycle messenger, punk rocker, and a playwright. After she left, everything moved too quickly, so it is, for the time being, left out.
I came home at the end of the night with 45 dollars in people’s appreciation.

Cinema

If I could see the movie one more time, I'd see it backwards, watching the beginning as the end and the end as the beginning. Through the aftermath I'd grieve less for my hero's losses and see instead the crisis he was built for.

Death is a birth in reverse, and so it is best to scan for the beginning.

Of the "body:"

How speak past the body that stands in that window of the screen? Window through window I discover a body, and a colon, a body without a body (except 4 the :).

Stepping through the congress of discourse, ascending the particulars of the party, the place, the body, and anybody...

Words become shadows. The shaping features of the body of the letter are framed by infinite wndows. The frame, the window, will catalog the volume of the actual and set it on an angle, abstraced. Depth then becomes only a kind of crosshatching, nothing different than a squiggle, and something to which discription holds no value; neither weight, nor size, nor sign, nor symbol.