Whew. I thought I had lost my touch there for a while. Thought the neon sign that only certain people see on my forehead had vanished. So you can imagine the joy I felt when I walked out of my office the other day to smoke a cigarette and there was a guy sitting there with a backpack and a sack filled with various items he had collected while on his mission from God. I sized him up pretty quickly: nice enough looking, in his 40s, had on a couple of cool bracelets, needed a shave badly, kind of a wild look in his eyes. So I followed my instinct and said my usual, Hey, how ya doing? Well, let me tell you how he was doing. First of all, he used to own a milk distillery, but the government came in and killed all of his employees. Shot them down in their white uniforms. They tried to take his safe with all of the papers from 1966 to 1977 but didn t get away with it. Drilled a hole in it, but didn t take it. So he was on his way to get the papers after resting for a moment. Somewhere nearby, although he was not specific about the location, there were lots of lots of city block-sized, very shiny white buildings that God was going to lift up and plop back down just across the river in Arkansas and it was going to be his own private city, one that Arkansas desperately needed. No argument from me on that one. Then there was his secret recipe for cottage cheese. He tried to sell that to a major real estate developer but the government took that too and now they have a ten-year supply of it stored in a multimillion dollar pipeline system underneath various soccer fields along the California coast line, which are actually landfills where ditches had been and where the water had gushed two million miles per hour during heavy rains. Then there was the intricate valve system through which the cottage cheese could be accessed. And the fact that Memphis just gets prettier and prettier all the time, despite the helicopters that constantly fly over looking at all the warehouses. This conversation, and so much more than I wish I could remember, took place in the time it took to smoke one cigarette, and then the happy gent jumped up and smiled and said, Okay, man, nice talking with you. Gotta go check out the milk buildings again! He didn t ask for money, didn t bum a smoke, and seemed just as happy as a lark. The elevator may not make it to his top floor, but he was much more enjoyable than man sane people out there who don t give a damn about the government s penchant for stealing other people s cottage cheese. Damn them! I keep going back out to see if he s there again, but alas, I haven t seen him since. Probably somewhere making up a batch of his cheese, but I ll keep looking for him. He ll probably end up at my house asleep on the porch swing. In the meantime, here s a brief look at some of what s going on around town this week. Tonight, the Memphis Redbirds start a five-night home game run against Fresno, then Iowa. The World-Famous Chippendales (and we ain t talking furniture) are at Club 152 tonight. Dan Montgomery is at Otherlands. Papa Don McMinn is the featured jazz artists at Sunset Atop the Madison on the rooftop of the Madison Hotel. And Toasted Opus is at the Flying Saucer.
Categories
