“Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever.” - Kevin Smith
Dear Internauts,
Driving here tonight—to this strategically chosen corner of the chain cafe in which I sometimes write these things—I rolled toward the usual intersection and passed a copy of Piri Thomas' Down These Mean Streets flapping brokenheartedly along the double yellow line. In that moment, I had no idea it was Thomas' book. I'll admit, the part of me that lives more by dream logic than daylight sense thought of all miracles it was my lost notebook returned to me. There, in two sizeable slices of yellowed, vaguely moist paperback (though, technically backless...and frontless), this apparently famous work, which until tonight I don't remember ever having heard of, reached its fingers from the painted pavement like the last beckons of a drowning child.
Sure, I was going to leave it. The light changed and there was no easy, immediate solution to rescue these pages. Again, at the time, I had no idea if this was anything more than scraps. Could've been a signed Catcher in the Rye or cherished correspondence saved from the Civil War or more likely the torn pages of a phone book some poor soul received while waiting for a far more urgent parcel. I had a mere two hundred feet AT MOST before the thought of further investigation would be as banished from my mind as any sentence I type here the moment I'm distracted by the
How had it ended up on the road? And in such a state. With books, like hearts, such wear and tear can be a sign of great love and great pain. Likely both. Personally, I've never been mad enough at a book to actually toss it away, save the few books that were good enough for me to pick up again later. Cradling them like the talons of a dying bird, I feel for the old familiar pulse and sink into the weary down. Memories of that which kept me going before play out like the hints of a familiar tune within the cage of my mind, while I consider each new seed one by one. And sometimes, that rarest of literary phenomena would spark a life back into the hollow bones of plot. The sky opens wide and the poor creatures wings span wider than ever before. And the song flows on ever louder and truer. Often, if I stay long enough to study the flight, I can tell where the bird's course dips. Sometimes, though, the bird seems all the better for it.
At least we can say this particular bird got to fly for a little while, I guess.
Covers torn off. Missing about forty-ish pages near the middle. In two pieces. Or at least only the two that I found. And those bent and smashed in a way likely caused by being run over more than once.
Would I have ever even considered this book? Maybe. A quick search online says it has some decent press and is at least known. If I'd taken the right classes it could have been on a syllabus or two. I'm interested in learning more about this author now. I might even read a bit of it. Who knows? Might catch my interest. Might not. My attention is habitually fleeting.
If I hadn't stopped though... if I hadn't turned around at the first chance and pulled into the nearest parking lot... if I hadn't swallowed my fear, looked both ways, and stepped out... if I hadn't reached down and picked up these wrecked, incomplete, discarded chunks of idea-infused matter...
well...
I'd probably have written something about how much I think nationalism is a flimsy foundation for a standard of ethics OR how my old web host is shutting down so I had to fly back and forth between a new web host and a new domain host because apparently those are two separate things and they don't always get along well but now I've got a sorta new website even though it's just a poorly designed host for linking to various social media OR how I have never in my life applied to so many jobs just to receive absolutely zero reply from anyone OR how I think I finally settled on an okay script for the first chapter of that graphic novel thing I'm doing instead of being a good little self-promoting singer/songwriter man-child OR how I wrote a new song today by taking another song I was working on and changing the lyrics to something more blatantly cheesy and political because bombing for peace is really about what you can expect from any president but especially one who could bankrupt casinos y'know OR...
>deep breath<
This socially anxious, depressed, traumatized, demisexual, socio-anarchistic, neurotic, lonely, hungry insomniac, wanna be artist/writer/martian may not be great at breaking up run-on sentences, but I do sincerely thank you—from the deepest, darkest depths of my speeding heart—for reading.
-Odist
p.s. - if any of you have read Down These Mean Streets, let me know your thoughts, 'cause at this point I know absolutely nothing beyond the title, the author, and that it's maybe autobiographical...oh and of course that somebody either loved it or hated it a WHOLE lot.
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