Friday night i decided to take in the new Nic Cage movie, Bad Lieutenant. Nic Cage has made some duff choices in his career - not least financial - but when he's on, as in Wild At Heart and Leaving Las Vegas, he's a blinding actor. Bad Lieutenant needed to impress me, as they all but stole the title and idea from Abel Ferrara, who also made a film called Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Kietel, which was so close to the knuckle i'm suprised it ever got released.
Anyway, as i wondered through the open sewer that is Bath city centre on a Friday night, i approached a homeless chap sat on the floor, his jacket in front of him with a few bits of loose change in it. Feeling affluent and in need of good karma (if you do something specifically to gain good karma you never get good karma do you?), i went to give him some change. As i got closer i could hear him mumbling away to himself. It was like a stream of consciousness kind of thing, and i strained to filter out the crap and see if there was anything coherent going on. I reached down to drop change in and the homeless guy stopped his rambling, looked me in the eye and said 'Now do you know what the truth is?' He then looked away and continued with his babbling.
Things sometimes seem like such a good idea don't they? I get told by some people not to give money to homeless chaps for various reasons. Commonly they are 1) They may not be homeless. To this i say they still deserve money for dressing and smelling like that and hanging on a street corner in the cold. 2) They'll only spend the money on drugs and booze. To that i say so would i in their position. And i'll probably only spend my money on booze anyway. If you're going to fake being homeless and be such a good method actor you're willing to learn how to babble incoherently for hours on end until someone approaches you and you can then freak them out with a crazy ass sentence......you still deserve money.
Einstein was brilliant enough to realise that time is relative. The faster you go, the slower time goes until you get to the speed of light. Then some very odd things start to happen. If you were to travel very very very fast, your time would pass slower than mine. Time then, is subjective. Albert also said that time and space are intrinsincally linked. This isnt just a theory either, we know this to be true as the Hubble telescope has taken snap shots of galaxies in their infancy. It basically looks back in time and it can do this because it can see so far away.
In the same way, many people consider truth subjective. Do i know what the truth is Mr Homeless Freak Out Man? I know what the truth is according to me. I never tire of saying there's always three sides to a story. There's the two protagonists view and then there's what really happened.
Anyone who's experienced a nasty argument or the pain of a relationship breaking down, can testify that the truth is a very shady area. You know what really annoys me? When people say "I didn't lie, i just didn't tell you everything". As if concealing the truth isn't telling a lie. I believe it is.
William Seward Burroughs was an author. He was part of a splendid collection of reprebates called the Beat Generation. Burroughs was the oldest one. He labelled himself a 'queer', and was homosexual throughout his life. Although he tried to become a straight man by getting married to Joan Vollmer and having a kid, Burroughs couldn't deny who he was. I'm not homophobic, but i can say i've never had any gay tendencies. I will say though, that Burroughs made a good point about gay sex, when he pointed out that at least with gay sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, and you know what to do to make the other person feel good. Us men we fumble and stumble, searching for the fabled 'G spot' and if we're lucky we brush past the clitoris on the way. Like Burroughs said, if you're sleeping with someone of the same sex, you know what to do as you've done it to yourself through numerous masturbation sessions.
Burroughs was famous for his book, Naked Lunch. A really fucked up thing i can't even begin to describe. Forget the Cronenberg film, its not worth talking about. The other thing Burroughs was famous for was shooting an apple off his wife's head at a party. Burroughs loved guns bless him. He was a good aim too. But not that day. He shot and killed Joan and fled from Mexico.
Aaaanyway. Burroughs' Grandfather invented the Burroughs Adding Machine. As such, his family came into a great deal of wealth. Burroughs received regular monthly payments to fund his drug and alcohol habits, much to the understandable anger of his parents. It was Burroughs view that the truth lay with the underground. Much like Dostoyevsky. Burroughs was rich, but chose to hang around with people like Huncke the Junky in New York. He did this believing that the underground, bohemian characters knew more about life than anyone else, and he wanted a part of it.
For many these days to be down and out, to be beat, to be bohemian, is nothing more than a fashion statement or a load of student posturing. A bunch of people read the seminal works of the Beats - On The Road by Jack Kerouac, Howl by Allen Ginsberg, and Burrough's Naked Lunch, and basically built the sixties out of it. I assure you the shockwaves are still reverberating now. On The Road was written using the same stream of consciousness as my friend the Homeless man. Kerouac would hitch coast to coast with only a few dollars in his pocket, i can't see too many doing it now without the back up of a credit card.
I don't know what the truth is when it comes to being homeless. I can't even begin to imagine how that must be. I do know that the homeless guy's words stayed with me as i made my way into the thankfully very empty Little Theatre. The film was very good. Well, it was made by Werner Herzog. How can you not be good at things with a name like that? As i made my way back to my vehicle, through the drunks and the slappers, i looked for the homeless guy again. He had gone. Gone to carry on writing his book in his head. Gone to ask more do-gooders searching for good karma existential questions. Gone to experience a life i hope i will never have to know.
And that's the truth.
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