the timboucher experience

When you’re juggling in the streets, apparently your name becomes simply, “Juggler.”

“Hey juggler!” I kept hearing people say.

Or little kids would walk by and exclaim, “Look mom, a juggler!”

When you become a role or an archetype instead of simply a person, you become simultaneously both more and less than an ordinary person. More, because you have some special skill, some talent that you’re openly and actively sharing with other people without any expectation of reciprocation. Less, because not everyone necessarily sees the nobility in that simple selfless act of giving. People sneer, people laugh, people make comments of all different sorts.

But that’s the purpose of pure communication: a reaction. Any reaction. You have to put away judgement when you put yourself out there and just give, just be, just move. After a short while it becomes an intensely meditative act. I mostly juggled three balls all day yesterday at the Sowebo (South West Baltimore) Festival. Three balls whirring in continually varying patterns against a backdrop of constant visual activity. Crowds moving, individual people talking to you, smells of food and incense from nearby vendors, small groups of birds flitting about here and there, people’s dogs almost getting into fights.

You quickly learn the pulse of the street. All the activities and impressions in your perceptual field become like juggling balls. You learn their rhythms, their timing, their patterns. You learn how to alternate, how to manipulate, how to flow. You learn how to catch and throw and how to recover gracefully from balls dropped onto the pavement and keep going.

Juggling is a childlike activity and people’s responses to it tend to reveal something about the child hidden somewhere within them. As animals, one of the first things our eyes are drawn to is motion. It’s a simple matter of survival. Your eyes are drawn to motion in order to assess potential threats, food sources or possible mates. Juggling is the essence of motion. Whether people want to or not, they have to look at you. Their eyes demand it. Some people let it happen, some people ride it, some people enjoy what they see, some people follow along with their eyes, or their heads or their whole bodies. Some people stop. Some people act like they didn’t see you, like they can’t see you, like they don’t understand what you’re doing there in front of them - juggling. Kids usually squeal in delight. Little babies have a hard time focusing their eyes on the activity. You have to make sure you squat or crouch or adjust yourself to optimally target their limited field of perception.

I rescued at least one girl from crocodile tears. Her father or uncle or whoever offered, “Juggling and a mandolin? [which was strapped to my back] You’re a true Renaissance Man.”

“Working on it,” I said, and continued juggling.

When you’re actively out there trying to make people happy or at least to get them to smile, you find that a lot of people are perfectly content - or at least accustomed to - not being happy and not smiling. People like holding onto their hang-ups. It’s easier than changing. This way they’re safe. Their hang-ups and habits have gotten them this far - whether or not they’ll ever take them any farther.

Standing on a street corner and actively engaging anybody who passes by - no matter who they are - may not seem like a revolutionary act, but it felt like one for me. I think because you make yourself a target. You say, look at me, talk to me, interact with me. Most people don’t do this. Most people live private lives right out in the open. They’re in their own bubble and few people - if any - get in. But it occurs to me that this is what a performer is: somebody who offers themselves as a sacrifice, somebody who says it’s okay to stare at me. Somebody who simply says, “Let’s play.”

I kept standing at the crossroads. The festival was broken up over maybe four blocks in length and two blocks wide. Jugglers, as far as I can figure, ought to stand at the cross-roads. At least for a while. The crossroads are like a listening station. You catch the vibes and the currents of the four directions. You turn and turn like a weather-vane, facing each one and back again. You overhear bits of conversations, different accents, different voices. You learn to tune yourself to them, to modulate them, to duplicate them, to blend in and out. At the crossroads you learn how to become a chameleon. You become anything that passes by, an empty observer, a witness, a sounding board, a mirror.

“Hey juggler,” I heard somebody yell at one of the crossroads.

I turned to catch the wave.

A young black man, maybe my age, maybe a bit younger, but clearly full of wisdom and joy (people who have it wear it with authority) hailed me and drew closer.

“I’m a comedian,” he said. It occurred to me that he meant in the classical sense, in the sense that I was acting as a fool, as a comedian, as a comedic street performer, an entertainer, troubadours in search of smiles.

He said he’d tell me jokes and try to get me to drop the balls. I accepted the challenge.

“Why do black guys wear their pants around their ass?” he began.

I kept juggling, and we seemed to dial into the same vibe, the same rhythm, the time kept by the balls and by the parable he dropped on me.

“Why?” I asked him rhetorically, knowing a response on my part wasn’t really required.

I forget his next line exactly, though he obviously had them well-memorized and had done this before - though this was my first real exchange of street-corner knowledge. But he said something about having to ride the bus everywhere and about George Bush and his friends getting rich off oil while ordinary people suffered.

Or that was the implication anyway. I didn’t think it was much of a joke, at least not in the “ha ha” sense, but I liked where he was going with it. Then he segued.

“And when I was in jail,” he began, timing perfect. “If somebody had their pants around their ass, that meant they was somebody’s bitch.”

I kept juggling, laughed and smiled heartily, congratulating him on his philosophy. It was great because it was more than I was expecting. In fact, when you’re not expecting anything at all, anything you get becomes a tremendous gift.

“And you didn’t even drop a ball,” he said.

We talked a little bit, and he told me about a show he was playing later. He asked me how the festival was going.

“Good,” I replied.

I asked what time his show was, and then asked what time it was right now.

“About five thirty?” I guessed.

“Exactly,” he said, seeming pleased.

I launched into my own well-rehearsed bit: “Ever since I stopped carrying a watch, I always know what time it is.”

“Hey,” I said, “I already forgot your name.”

“That’s cause I didn’t tell you it yet.”

“Aha!”

“Prophet,” he said. Simple and to the point. And accurate. I liked it.

“Nice to meet you.”

At each intersection, I’d wait around until something happened. I didn’t know what it would be beforehand. I just waited for it to happen and it always would. It was unpredictable. Usually it was just a simple, authentic, direct, human-to-human interaction - some kind of positive response from people passing by on the streets that says, Yes juggler, we are alive.

That’s all I wanted. People who were alive. I had no other goals, so every little bit that I achieved became like an enormous monument to the rightness of what I was doing and my intentions in the moment. While waiting for a friend to get henna done (which I later ruined in a moment of buffoonery), a passerby even gave me a dollar. It was unexpected, and I couldn’t have predicted it even a second before it happened. It was a crisp new dollar bill too, and given by someone with a face remarkably like a friend of mine.

That was something odd I kept seeing yesterday: people who looked like other people. Like certain physiognomic types recurring over and over again. Maybe that’s just what your mind does to cope with larger and larger sets of sensory input. That feels like the answer: it breaks things down into types, and recurring instances of that type. As a survival skill, this sort of thing would allow you to navigate a vast herd of other animals (ie, people in a group setting), and more easily find family members, friends or allied sub-groups.

Another perceptual thing that I kept noticing had to do with cops. I wore my slightly exaggerated juggler version of what has come to be my ordinary day-to-day character costume: Blue Levi’s with the right pant leg rolled up (for biking) revealing black Champion socks connected to brown Converse All-Stars (a step towards clown shoes?), topped by a green leafy patterned Hawaiian shirt I bought in Oregon while fleeing romantic meltdown in California last summer, and a black Goorin Fedora. On my left wrist is a leather “friendship bracelet” - something I started working on as a project at the suggestion of a good friend of mine. Around my neck is an elk-skin mojo bag which I wrote about a few days ago: the one for songbirds. Over my back was slung my black Timbuktu messenger bag out of which poked the headstock of my cherry burst mandolin by Virgin Guitars. Lashed to the headstock with jute twine was a white almost honey-suckle smelling flower I’d picked down by the river with romantic intent.

Suffice it to say, barring the possible addition of face paint (not quite there yet), I had a fairly significant “costume” assembled and a veritable character (”juggler”) which I was making up as I went along. So when I saw other people with costumes walk by - full-on police officers, or rented security personnel - they automatically became an object of study. I would look at their costumes, how they carried themselves, how they performed, how they delivered their lines - and so forth. In short, they became little more than comedic actors in some kind of tried and true street performance bit to make themselves look big or important or to make or to prevent something from happening on the streets.

That’s one of the things I saw very distinctly yesterday as well: the enormous power and potential impact that one single person who goes out into the world with no other intention but to positively and joyously interact with other people can truly have. To have no expectation and to expect no reciprocation. To celebrate this moment, to say that we’re truly alive. You can reach and teach so many people so directly without them ever knowing who you were or what it was you were doing or why (questions which all become completely irrelevant in the meditative pure depths of the True Moment™). And you can sense the pulse of the streets, the mood of the people, what’s on their minds and hearts, what matters to them and what really happens to them. You don’t have to sit at home and theorize. You don’t have to wait a little bit longer for this one more thing to slide into place before you can go out and start living your life and having amazing and interesting things happen to you. You can just go outside and do it right now. Start living and get really good at it and share it with other people. To me, that’s what juggling is all about. That’s why it’s a big deal.

• Partner Juggling, Notes
• Don’t Look At Yourself
• An Internet for Smart Objects
• Hand-Stands In The Park
• Next Week On Tap: