Dear Northern Lights,

        The city was dark and cold my first night out. The glow of the downtown lights was friendly enough-it was the city itself seemed uninviting. I wandered into town a lost soul in an inhabited body, peacock proud to be there. I traveled through town seductively, in and out of time, and found Hell's suburbs: filthy subdivisions of illegitimate mutants and dangerous forms of low-lives gathering to pick clean the bones of unwanted new comers.

        One fellow jumped in front of my car to stop it. For a fleeting moment, I fancied thoughts of putting a set of tire tracks on his oily chest. I refrained however, when I saw he had only stopped the car so that his slimy buddies could carry a refrigerator they had just heisted across the street into a waiting van. He smiled a tooth-gapped grin and waved us on like some sort of simian traffic cop. I wandered right back out of town, an inhabited soul in a very lost body, ready to make my way back home with my tail between my legs.

        As luck would have it, as it usually doesn't in my case, the store I had been assigned to was actually in one of the best parts of the entire city; the literal Greenwich Village of Indianapolis. Artists, musicians, literates, poets and coffee shop owners frequent the store often. I walked into work and danced like Peter Pan.

        After being here nearly a month, I am trying to reflect back on my time here and summarize it in the proverbial nutshell. To take this month and examine it on a daily basis would be a boring, boring, boring example of my vile daily habits: sex, music, liquor, pubs, bars, dope and (did I say?) liquor. The bottom line is: My role as the babbling, prancing, drunken jester hasn't changed much from my days at Pleasant Street. The only real difference is I'm making love to a whole new audience.

        For the first ten days of this ill-begotten adventure I was truly a man without a home: a traveling herder without a flock to tend. To be a romanticist I will say that I slept in the fields, which is essentially what I was doing. I was driving daily, one solid hour, to and from a field called West Lafayette, Indiana. This field also happens to be the resting spot of Purdue University. As I attended Indiana University, their biggest rival, I was conditioned to loath Purdue and its students. I made certain to drink extra heavy to assure a good night's rest in such horribly foreign surroundings.

        I eventually scraped enough cash to get myself an apartment. This helped, for now I had a home base, a place to attack from, so-to-speak. (What I'm really saying is I found a place close enough that I could walk to any of the local bars, get as hammered as I wanted, and still stumble the five blocks home: which, coincidentally, is what I've done every night but two since).

        I hate to itemize after I said I wouldn't, but as I was walking to work the Friday before last, I passed three skate-punks sliding their boards across the parking blocks. "Shred asphalt!" I hollered that at them to let them know that I accepted their kind, "Skate or die!" One of the punks flipped me the bird and the other two jumped on their dirt bikes and took off. The first kid grabbed his board and skated away telling obscenities at me. I yelled things not printable here and spit lung phlegm at them. I hate skate-punks.

        Another night while I was hanging out in my pad alone I noticed that I had no drapes and the neighbors were watching me like "Cheers" reruns, as I ran around nude in the apartment. After a few good belts of the Bacardi, I couldn't shake the line "making love to a whole new audience." I stripped the few moral values I may have had (and some I didn't) and masturbated in the front room window. Soon after, a number of the neighbors showed up knocking at my door, bearing all sorts of gins and good tidings, in eager anticipation to meet me. We laughed and joked and drank and smoked cigarettes and discussed human virtues and all their shortcomings. It was a gas. They love me.

        I truly believe that most people like freaks, mutants, social nonconformists and people of the like, contrary to popular belief. Hell, look at the people I'm telling this to. Indeed I am a mutant, but I am part of a band of gypsies who will chew on this planet, spit out its remains, and view a Garden of Eden. Someone has to.

        I blush now as I close this first letter to home. Davey always says that I think I'm someone other than who I am; that I'm trying to live the life of my role models. I am thinking that embarrassingly now. The couple of people I've met and tried to plug into must see me as Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road: bouncing around, rambling maniacally to anyone who will listen, and sweating profusely with the "fever of life."

        I'm telling you boys, I will eat this city alive.

Sincerely,

Agility Man