Eric

I CAN'T SLEEP.

This is what's keeping me awake:

I am thinking how Eric, the homeless guy in front of Kellogg's Diner, looks a lot like Jamiroquai, but with more lesions. I don't feel I'm outing Eric by describing him in this manner. He knows he has lesions. It's a big topic of conversation with him.

I don't know what the lesions are, exactly, but sometimes he's on antibiotics for them.

Eric's also a strict vegetarian (his opener, almost always: "Ma, can you spare a miracle for a veggie burger?") and a seriously devout Buddhist. He once stayed at an ashram in India for months studying Sanskrit texts. I think this is actually not bullshit. He has a great story about that ashram--how one morning he was outside the barracks thingy where the yogis slept, leaning against a wall taking a shit, miserable with dysentery. His friend crouched likewise pooping, and comiserating. As they squatted there, a monkey strode out of the woods into the ashram's courtyard. Paying them no mind, the monkey deftly turned on the courtyard's water faucet and drank from it, like any five-year-old kid in the suburbs. Cute, right? So Eric and his friend laughed.

The laughter insulted the monkey, though. He quit drinking, stared them down for a horrible second, turned off the faucet, and charged at them. All screechy and arm-waving and what-have-you.

The moral of this post?
You tell me.
Go on, tell me.
Because I've got no idea.