The Regular, October 23, 2013:

I was walking in Piedmont Park today, reminiscing about the weekend past.  The Big Gay Band was on the Active Oval, music geeks marching on the jocks' soccer field, wearing the olive leaves, taking a victory lap, in time, all right turns.

Tears welled and the sun brightened, magnified through them.  Each tear was like a tiny lens created by nature expressly to amplify light and flush out dark.  Tears have a way of acknowledging as one memory's joy and sadness.

As I walked I could hear “the regular.” He’s a crazy dude - tall, eloquent, toothless.  The couple I passed nodded at me in knowing agreement.  Yes, he is crazy.  “He’s a regular,” I told them, myself a regular.  We smiled, complicit.  How wonderful not to be insane like him was our silent affirmation.

As I moved toward him, smiling in the light of the sun, he looked at me and kept talking, now directing his words at me.  “I see you.  I am of this universe but not the same one you are in!”  Then he knelt as I approached.  Oh no.  “I am a Negro and I kneel before you.” Oh god, this is embarrassing.  He is acting out centuries of pent-up rage, me his convenient white man target.  “No,” I shook my head.  “Please don’t kneel.  I’m just like you.”   After rising from his bent knee, he said, “I am a Negro and I kneel to honor your spirit, which I saw.”  I felt calm, acknowledging to myself that my assumption about this man’s actions bore its own ugly stamp of racism.  He wandered on, preaching to his ever-renewing, invisible audience.

I would accept this honor, this revelation that I too had a spirit strong enough to be felt - or imagined - but why?  I think it because I somehow knew that our journeys were similar, jumping in and out of this now, this here, for other times and spaces of the imagination.  I also knew that his journey had been longer and more rigorous than mine.  Having seen much, he saw nothing wrong with me.  To him, I was merely a fellow spirit on a journey, and that alone had merit.  Such simplicity made him credible.  I believed him.  In his universe, maybe he had just nodded to a passing couple, silently affirming my insanity, but appreciating it rather than judging it.

Compassion and empathy are no longer merely words.  This is the wisdom of a psychopath.