Behold the Man

He peers out at your from behind a stubborn wooden pole. His sullen shape covered in sweat from hauling your ceramic tiles, or your cedarn cross-beams, with which you pave the backyards of your ego. He looks out at you from a sidewalk bench, where he lies covered with ratty dog-furs, his face framed by the bushy outgrowth of three months' beard. He cleans your windows as you wait at the red light, and in that startling space he gleams like a Greek statue. He is the shadow that flits about in the back alley you glimpse into on your way from a Greek-Japanese fusion restaurant to the place that serves Mai-Tais in the dead of winter. He is staring at you from the imperceptible static of your satellite TV screen as the voiceover describes the death toll from a famine/natural disaster/war... any form of Malthusian catastrophe, really. He is the green-blue eyed punk devil stalking up and down your neighbourhood streets and kicking the gutter for no reason but his intoxicated anxiety... the hardening of the nut that has been kicked by clean, cleated shoes. He is the waiter at the restaurant you love that secretly stashes a pubic hair in every dish he serves you. He is the denizen of every hole-in-the-wall bar that openly tells racist jokes to the company there gathered and goes home and beats his wife... even though he tries not to, even though he provides in any way he can... even though he reads his five-year-old daughter stories of Pooh Bear and Angelmouse. He is bearded and filthy. He is the dignified old genltman that sits in Tim Horton's for three hours at a time with a drowning look in his eyes. Throw him some conversation. Ballast! Dignity! Unsettle yourself.

Consider: "You must change your life."