LOST & FOUND ART

Allow me to explain my predicament. Up until March 29, 2003, I had carefully maintained, organized & archived my entire email history from 1993 when I first joined Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL all within a few weeks of each other, having been instantly smitten with this new world of messaging. I hail from a damned near illiterate background—from an alcohol-hardened household, from a band of brothers who somehow esteem reading and writing of little use above that required by law.

This is not an indictment of them, but a tiny spotlight onto the struggles for my own sense of clarity, given my own poetic nature, and desire for pursuing and comprehending the incomprehensible. I had been fortunate that during my ten years of archiving, I had never lost anything I had ever emailed, or had received from someone. Except for obvious and useless SPAM, and lower tier business correspondence, I cherished every bit of communication I had ever mustered.

And I'd been fortunate to have met and sustained along the way a steady string of writerly aspirants, so our email wasn't of the dull flat liner variety that would soon cloak the long silences of previous generations who had transitioned from sincere letter writing to the less literary and more immediate telephone call. Now we had access to a marvelous combination of the two, letter writing nearly extinct, and the telephone call, often as mundane and flawed for its archival challenges as the polaroid in the digital camera age.

But then came the shock and awe of that March 29 loss. Ten years of treasured exchanges gone in a keystroke! Ordinarily I kept a rather recent back-up of my work, but for reasons of brevity, let's just say I had little to rely upon that day. I lost my entire hard drive of personal information. After the week long stress, sweat and toil of data recovery magic, I found that I had recovered maybe two-thirds of my email data. I lost so much more other work, but it was my treasured email that mattered most to me at that point, and the process was too inadequate to worry about the rest of the loss. Now, of course, my email did not recover it former glory. Now, instead of each individual mail stored away in personal boxes and folders, where I had immediate access to them in plain text, I now had over 22,000 individual files each named, starting at number 1, increasing in value one file at a time, like this:

Email file (generic) 16784

And to make matters worse, each recovered file, no, did not include just a single piece of mail, but sometimes two, five, or three, point three emails. And these texts were not alone in their new miserable state. Of course, each file included huge chucks of header and other unexplainable strands of ASCII gibberish, cast off, decidedly boorish digital DNA that I would have to clear away like so many acres of undergrowth in order to isolate a long lost masterpiece from my friend Steve, or a stroll through Landryville with the wit and sarcasm of her spicy Cajun' upbringing, or merely a well-written communication from back in the day, those early days when so many people inside and outside the industry mocked the functionality, or inspirational value of email, while here we were composing masterpieces, detailing small everyday events of those days of our lives, marching to our exciting times with an eye on posterity.

Yes all this, BEFORE THE DELUGE OF SPAM. Before Internet porn. And for several years, before the WWW itself. Ah, yes, we were there, and we were writers, and yes, we could be bombastic or plain spoken. We could lie with dogs, or we could ride elephant ears. Those were the days where great plans ruled the great plains.

Nostalgic, but that's merely the background noise of my original purpose in posting today. Now here's one of those recovered files I just opened this morning, randomly. I did not write this, it seems to be unsigned, but I did save it. And since it seems as apropos as a summer shower given a rather new MS friend's recent smackdown of the Intellectual Predator, a series I highly recommend, here's yet another redux circa 1993-4 and my AOL years (when I signed on there I was among a mere 250,000 subscribers. When I left over 25 million. But I'll leave that story to later.)

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First Light
He used to take advantage of me at first. You had to fight. He was dominating. You had to fight. He would push you to the edge. He respected me for fighting, for my philosophy and ideologies, and for my heart at the edge of reality.

Me and X developed a very special relationship where our friendship meant more than a job. It meant more than anything else I could think of, and I am good at thinking up things I just cannot touch. We used to hang out all night and we would just talk the paint off the walls. He'd tell me about his experiences and I'd tell him about mine. In a situation like this you meet a lot of good paragraphs.

When he saw me he was always real happy to see me like I was his next meal or the wedding of his fat daughter. I'll never forget this, one night we was walking and he said—it was almost like a movie, right—he said, "You know, a man meets a friend only once in a lifetime." That stays with me like the hiccups, even better. That quote is a great quote. It made me feel good that I had reached that height of wandering friendship and wondering humanity.

Mental States
Most of these guys just need somebody to really take the time with them. I think all these guys can be reached somewhere.

They throw all rejects from society into one pile and that's the ugly part of it. And only the strong survive. I've seen men lose their minds. Good men. Intelligent men. I've seen these men being ate up alive, men losing their minds before my face. After being in the condition over and over again these sane people eventually become insane because of the degradation.

Many times I have cried, I'm not going to lie to you or to anyone else who thinks about why I am here and they are where they are. I have swung at the air. I have felt sorry for myself. It's not easy to be independent.

As far as snapping, I've leamed too much to snap. I can't really diagnose my own case, but I'm angry now and again. I've got a temper that's really bad, enough to scare the crows away. That's new. Anger. That's the only thing that shivers me. I'm angry at the world. I might be sitting here talking cool and collected but....

I'm scared of myself at this point. Some of the things I had to do. I have beat people up. I have begged, borrowed, and stole. And the anger that I have. I dance and stuff and I just snapped at one of the girls at a dance class because at this point I'm angry at the world. Nobody cares for me. And yeah, I'm climbing up and I'm looking good. It's all of that need to say that I am somebody. You're not going to walk over me. I'm going to survive. I'm fighting. But I'm fighting 'cause I'm angry. I'm scared of myself 'cause I wonder if I get up there one day will I be vindictive? Hitler was once in a homeless joint. This is the stuff that makes Hitlers, I hate to say it.

Poetry

I want to feel better
So l write a poem
I don't care if it rhymes
If it's offbeat
Onbeat
Unpunctuated
Or misspelled
I just want to write a poem
So l can feel better
A poem is supposed to have moving images
Which stirs the senses
Well, the only images I see
Is blackness

Sadness
Unfairness
Martin
Malcom
Garvey
Kennedy
Nuisance
Revenge
Choking hands
Neck and mind braces

Starkness. Images that required reaction. That's what photographer Morton Hundley and I were looking for in October 1986. I had recently started a job as a social worker for the Homeless Services Unit of D.C.'s Downtown Cluster of Congregations, an ecurnenical association of 24 downtown churches. He introduced himself to me, and offered to buy me a cup of coffee. I said okay and the next thing I knew we were looking at these pictures he'd brought, nicely tucked into a satchel that was worn and tattered around the edges. His pictures were black. I had to cry.