Ten Sights You Won’t Soon Unsee on Skid Row

If Varsol prices at the nearest hardware store skew prohibitively high, supply and demand-type thing, then pick up a 710 ml can of Steel Reserve and let gravity itself wheel you down San Julian in the direction of Skid Row.

One: Roll past many bulbous legs, suppurating feet, and open sores. Roll past Mark Laita in his crisp white t-shirt. Roll past crack-addicted tricks and spice fiends and all the Fathers and Sons who are also The Many Fentanyl Addicted Wraiths of Sault Sainte Marie.

Two: Hear many a moan. Hear hateful shouts. Perceive an unceasing agony little better than what you experienced in hell. Hear amidst it all, a little bit of laughter. Ask a meth-desecrated youth where a theodic blogger might acquire a can of gasoline, one of the more toxic inhalants that nonetheless offers real value for money in any long-term huffing situation. Observe frantic distemper amongst the youth’s colleagues.

Three: If tremulously accused, “You the one burned down my old lady’s tent???” and “Third fuckin’ tent this week!” then endure many stiff blows to the softer organs as unwarrantedrebuke for an ongoing epidemic of skid row tent fires, i.e. ‘You stole my flip-flops; inviolable determinism dictates I burn your home. ’

Four: If flung from your chair and urinated upon, wonder if each causal chain link in the Problem of Evil is mere misunderstanding. The major misunderstandings that Merle’s muddled pals failed to address adequately. The minor misunderstanding of not comprehending an accented inquiry from an earnest immigrant at the Eaton Centre and nodding as though the bespectacled and bewildered Dane must have asked an affirmative/negative question, even though she has not, even though she has asked very specifically for directions to the Baby Gap, which she desperately clarifies by urgently showing you fists of Gap cash, and then pictures of a dozen newborn nieces and nephews the Gap cash will cloth if only she can make herself understood.

Five: Make the universal, ‘waving a scent into the nostrils’ motion with your hand and gurgle the words, “Huffing, ” until the assailant least gerped on Hummin’ Harold realizes you aren’t the arsonist, ceases kicking, dusts you off, and sandbags you back into your chair before offering you a resin hit off his bone in the prehistoric response to misunderstandingmade-evident: some meaningless measure of reconciliation.

Six: If newly-gerped on reconciliatory Hummin’ Harold, learn you can rent a tent for the low-low price of $13 with several bottles of Steel Reserve included in the $25 VIP Package. Hope your capacity to enjoy might still modestly outweigh your capacity to suffer.

Seven: Find yourself misunderstood anew as a tent merchant misperceives your appreciative gurglings as gurglings of defiance. Expand once more your capacity for suffering as you absorb kicks to your personal dentition from this upwardly-mobile man who mustn’t understand that the etymology of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” was that of “an impossible feat of strength, ”70 and that “what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources. ”71

Eight: If high in the purple sky a giant poster for Singing Competition features Britannica’s face, feel Catherine’s eternal presence confirmed, always above like Palmer Eldritch, and so below like all the world’s hapless victims, looking up and down on all this suffering while wishing she could help her brother. Feel a lust for deceased Catherine as alkaline and acrid as your resin hit and realize this particular sister-based brand of neurochemical confusion has been the primary misunderstanding of your own paltry sufferings.

Nine: If rented-tentpoles are broken over your skull as rented-tenting lies about you as mere tarp, the iron-taste of blood your primary sensation, wonder sacrilegiously exactly what kind of two-bit god hath wrought these city blocks where impoverished owning-classes kick in the teeth of those yet weaker, where open wounds go unsalved as the seities of past trauma go unsolved. Wonder exactly what kind of Harpo Marx creator set in motion this scheme of societal 70 (Reich, 2020) 71 (Land, Machinic Desire, 2011) race iniquity and inequity, unadaptive desire, and the needless-sensitivity of the inferior-alveolar nerve.

Ten: If it’s become “hard to know or express who [you] truly a r e,”72 reminisce-bump the wild flailing feet of baby Marcel_ Proust. Consider him stomping in his Bouncy. Marcel_Proust looking curiously at a muffin, i.e. ‘What is a muffin?’ How he first learned to grip things, and then throw them with dismissive haught. When he first began to cry real tears, and how adorably-sad that had seemed. Talking to him like a person, i.e. “Do you feel like McDonalds again this morning, Marcel_ Proust?” The little feeding apparatus that let you strap him to a Starbucks counter. Squeezing pouch mush into his mouth while he laughed at whatever early computational processes Ronald Majthenyi was amusing him with. Wonder if any fate brought about by such a charming young man could possibly be worse than a freedom of the will undermined by innate fear, undermined by the hardest problem of consciousness being the problem of others’ minds. 72 (Baldwin, Biernat, & Landau, 2015)