Beautiful and Broken

Well, I will be on a Detroit train for the next week or two. Other topics will have to come after that.
Although I had an interesting and somewhat gross experience today with unclogging my toilet on the Sabbath. Which I will probably write about soon enough.

I refrain from work on Sunday as a personal Sabbath. The root word in Hebrew means rest. I don't care which day people take a Sabbath but that they should have one 24 hour period weekly of disengaging from their labors, resting, and reflecting, I am certain. It is good for the body and soul. So, stay tuned for a missive on works of necessity on the Sabbath. I just didn't want to have to deal with a clogged john tomorrow morning before work as I sensed that it wasn't going to be a quick and easy job. And I always have a morning constitutional, which makes a clogged toilet even more problematic. It wasn't easy and quick to unclog today. And it was nasty. For those of you with biblical knowledge, definitely a donkey in the ditch type of deal. Or Ass and Privy as it were.

Onto less putrid things.

One happy coincidence in Detroit was seeing the Philly band (late of Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show) The Roots. The performance was at the Fillmore which happened to be a ten minute walk from my hotel. I bought a ticket online and headed over way too early which resulted in me being one of the first in line to get in. I tend to run early to things as a way of preparing for the unexpected interruptions. More often than not, it results in me being hyper-early and just hanging out.

There were two gentleman hovering around the vicinity of line that were acting in a disturbing manner. One dude was out on the main drag outside of the Fillmore who would periodically scream at the top of his lungs. Maybe every 30 second or so. Like Old Faithful. He was loaded. He kept it up until a security staff from the Fillmore, a huge fellow, went out and had a chat with him and persuaded him to shut the hell up. Or threatened to bust his head.

The other individual was a lot closer to the line. He was growling and gnarling at no one in particular for the 45 minutes we were in line. He had an electric scooter. He was menacing. My back was up against the building and he was perhaps 8 feet from those of us who were waiting in the line to get in. This is where the picture above was taken. He seemed genuinely possessed and non-verbal until then end where he got in some type of chat with two burly dudes next to me.

While these two men acted nuts, the Detroiters were nonchalant. One of the Fillmore staff working  the line did make a comment, "See the kind of shit I have to deal with?"  I wouldn't say that I am naive but I am hardly street-smart. I had decided that out in Detroit that I wanted to present myself as a bit scruffy and down on my luck. So. I dressed down, carried no cash, and didn't shave for three weeks. My Admin Asst at work said the picture made me luck like a "thug." I was like perfect...that is what I wanted.

As an aside, I found the Detroit beggars a lot less pushy and entitled than those in Portland. I just said I had no cash on me. Which was true. I had my back-up VISA card in my pocket and the rest of my wallet stuffed in my travel bag in the hotel.

Those asking for money were polite and didn't go off when I told them I had no money. They moved on and so did I. One dude, I did offer to buy him some pizza at Buddy's a couple of days before; the night I landed Christmas Eve. He wanted cash and I was like, "Nah, but I will buy you some food."

I ordered a pizza to go and sat down with him at a table waiting for the order. I could see him getting skittish and he rolled before the pizza arrived. In our brief conversation, it was pretty clear that he had better times in his life. Why he decided to come to Detroit to live on the streets was beyond me. He recounted details about his life that showed that he had fallen on hard times. He was from back East.

I kind of cracked up when the Detroit Metro News titled the picture gallery from the show "Beautiful People."  I don't really see myself as beautiful and I kind of saw that descriptor being an act of  flattery. But, the more I thought about it, I decided that beautiful is a good description for people made in the image of God. Beautiful, but broken. The image, like a mirror, cracked. All of us...the people in the line, the loaded dude screaming out on the boulevard of broken dreams, the snarling dude on a scooter, and my man who decided to truck before his pizza came. Beautiful and Broken.