the timboucher experience

Yesterday afternoon I cut my thumb on the end of a crystal I bought from a local New Age shop (also home to a paranormal discussion group I’ve been attending). I was attempting to create a thin wire coil around it in an act that might either be regarded as idiocy or maybe an act of imititative sympathetic magic, depending on how you look at it. Something like how the Pacific Islanders created something called cargo cults: they would ritually build their own landing strips in the vain hope that European airplanes would be attracted to them by some unseen force. I’ve been reading about crystal radio sets. I think the stone is galena. You can pick up radio signals with no power source. This blows my mind. This and the fact that you can transmit electricity wirelessly. Tesla and others did this well over a hundred years ago. Maybe the rumors about Wardenclyffe. Morgan wouldn’t touch it in 1904. Eleven years later the United States government blows it up with dynamite. Maybe the man was on to something.

Last night I took all last year’s tax documents, all my credit card and various forms of identification and placed them inside a black felt bag with various ritual implements and prayed to God to protect my identity and deliver me from self-delusion.

Shortly after the crystal incident, I met up with a friend of mine to kick off a joint project we’re working on together exploring the Spirit of Place within the City of Baltimore, which President John Quincy Adams dubbed in 1827, “Monument City.” We rode our bikes around Wyman Park, criss-crossing Charles Village, Remington, Art Museum Drive, Charles Street and University stopping at each monument we could find, documenting it extemporaneously in as many media as possible, and uploading geodata as we went, so that we can output interactive maps for walkabout, for Holy Pilgrimage amongst the City of Baltimore and her people.

This afternoon on the Avenue in Hampden, a strange woman approached me clutching a microphone with the distinctive plastic triangle bearing the call letters WBAL. There was no camera, but a man who seemed like he should have been a camera man lingering in the background. She asked me if I’d heard what happened to Michael Phelps. I said I had.

“What would you have done if that happened to you?” she asked.

“You mean if somebody put out a picture of me…?”

“Right, of you smoking marijuana.”

“Nothing,” I responded.

“You wouldn’t try to do any kind of damage control?” She kept trying to lead my responses.

“No. It doesn’t matter.”

She said something about him having endorsements, that he was being allowed to keep. I guess I was supposed to feel indignant. She tried to act chummy with me, with elbow-nudging statements like, “You’d probably be too chilled out to do anything…” Then she tried to get me to place myself in his shoes again.

“What would happen at your job if those kinds of pictures were put online?”

“Nothing.”

“Where do you work?”

“A pet store.” I indicated down the hill, back where I’d come from.

She said something about, oh they must expect me to smoke pot then, laughing.

There was also some statement made about buying Cheetohs™. Typical stupid stoner jokes from some lady who has no idea, but who has a story to produce. Better than a recent adventure down Falls Road though back on that icy night last week. Propositioned by a junkie hooker with a scar on her face and liquor on her breath, the only words of whom I could make out were “date”, “sister” and “round back” of the house. I walked off, “Gotta be some place.”

“WILL YOU?” She yelled. “Come back later?”

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