The Gospel According to Tyrone

I finally made some resolutions I could keep.
1. Start a conversation with every person I bum a cigarette off/from.
2. Make it happen. Anything, by any means necessary.

The basic outline of Friday goes like this:
Brandon and I, broke as all fuck, are standing outside CVS smoking with the homeless people (is there a politically correct term for them?) who sell Street Sense. After warning us about the fact that the Bloods have arrived in Tenleytown, he tells Brandon to show me a good time tonight (I mean, we are a radical queer couple after all), and tell us that, with no money, we've got two options: go to Hains Point and watch the planes go by, or go down to Georgetown and sit by the Potomac. It'll clear your mind, he says. It's just you and the water and God, you don't need anything else. And don't forget to thank God every day when you wake up. And if you wake up one day, and you can't see, thank God anyway, because you woke up. Ten heart attacks and fourteen strokes down, Tyrone still sees it fit to sit on the corner and preach the word.

He simplified religion in what is potentially the most effective way I've ever heard.
1. Keep holy the Ten.
2. Love and respect.
3. Preach a little word.
4. Take care of God's children.

Brandon and I head back to the dorms to polish off our five-dollar bottle of Andre, pick up various supplies, and then head to Tenleytown to pick up the G1 bus down to Georgetown.

The details aren't too important. Just know that we were broke and stoned, and we spent two and a half hours wandering through the city under bridges, through dark French-looking alleyways, across Georgetown's campus (holla at Village C), along highways, down trecherous stairways (it was like a MOUNTAIN, I swear), and across and incredbily vast bridge to Virginia and back. We also encountered a number of belligerent preppy drunks.

I can't express how far from the water we were when we first got there. But it was essentially seeing a point in the distance and making the decision to get there no matter what. It was getting what you want.

Finding the water after all that time is indescribable. The closed park we wandered into was surreal. I had never seen so much newness in one place. The stainless benches sat on the edges of patches of straw; the park was so new that grass hadn't even grown yet. Under the harsh white streetlights, the blackest asphalt I have ever seen gleamed and shone, leading us to the Potomac River.

It didn't need to look like anything when we got there. It didn't need to be grand or vast or endless in its possibility. Knowing that it was there, and we were on the edge of it, and that we had found it simply by seeing it and standing at least fifty feet over it an hour before was enough. The things that you get when you ask and the things that you get when you just look blow my fucking mind.

Plus we sort of found God.

I guess it's all held in the idea that truth and belief are only what you make them. The truth is only what you can get enough people to believe, or what you can get the right people to believe. And so if you believe in God, then Zie exists for you, and that's all that matters. And if Zie does exist, then Zie has given us the greatest gift of all: for us to be able to create Hir for ourselves. God created us, and in creating us, gave us the ability to create God as whatever image we see fit, and whatever we need.

It took us an hour and a half to walk back to school. We made in at about 5:30 and smoked inside a hollow sculpture. You have not been high until you have been high inside art.





I believed in God on runways and starting lines. Zie found me again by the Potomac River.
You don't need to believe it, but I guess that's the point.