The Good Life

In a stuffy 4th floor apartment of a rat infested building in the crotch of Marseille, being droned to sleep by the A- symmetrical scratching and the cricket like vibratory language rats my mind opened. It was here while sleeping on the floor under the window that over looks the trannys and whores working the night shift on Curiol street. This window with an audio view, AKA Gato's V.I.P. entrance, was never closed due to the intense mediterranean waves of salty heat that would roll in and sweep out the cigarette smoke-rings that seemed too tired to move. Gato - the cat who would bring me half chewed rat babies in the morning as some twisted gesture of affection, the only form of affection I'd seen in a while. He would sit up at the foot of my foamy floor protector, proudly purring while i would lay there and accept this sole symbolic sign of feline affection as a sort of surrogate love. We would both hold out as long as possible until our magnets would butt together in a head butt - head rub, so affectionate he would lose his footing on the floor- so hard he was pressing into me. So we would rub our heads together, until I felt nervous about the kinds of parasitic pirate hangers on he may have picked up in the dirty salty streets of this amazing place.
I felt a wave of belonging sweep over me.
This is where I belong, I thought.
A foreign feeling after years of visiting and leaving and returning and leaving again.
Even architecturally I could tell I might fit in here.
Finally a break from the bleak and depressing conservative-monotonously efficient and economically responsible buildings that make up the relatively young cultural centers of my native Canada.
Not neither the typical pompous and over bearing beauty of romanticized and flowery European buildings, all sweet as hell on the outside and crumbling from within.
(Like L.A. Middle Aged housewives, where all the corrective surgery and slutty clothes in the world cannot stop natures decomposition and best before date given to everything organic.)
Marseille was crumbling inside and out, and beautiful because of it, proud of its cracks, scars, crows-feet and lines of abuse. A city so rich in this resulting character that I am sure money hungry interior designers must pay good gobs of paper to try to recreate in their "rustic" lofts or restaurants.
I might finally be in the right place at the right time.
Space and time.
Markets resembling Star Wars.
And everyone agreeing in their eyes that the time is really now.
A city living with loads of history artistically and revolutionary, a place where cops are wary of the people, not the other way around. A place so cool and fresh and which somehow has not fallen into the trap of glory days and has managed to stay out of the decorative bottles of nostalgia so many of the other former famously frenetic, fallen and subsequently gutted and dinsey-fied centers of art like Paris, NYC and even the eventual certain addition of Berlin have become pirate shipped inside of...
Marseille has yet to deal with an exploitation issue.
Among the car horns, whore fights and rat squeals my head finally got quiet.
Not in the lonely introverted and heavy way, but a lightness came over me.
A feeling bizarre and foreign to me, but welcome. Like testicles dropping inside my mind, I felt my coming of age.
It was bound to happen. I think the people I've loved could attest to that.

I'll have to send a group email.

The thing is;
I felt a change coming on, and questions were beginning to see answers, and things suddenly became clear- if not less muddy. The only way i can put it, is that in this tiny little place, with an autistic epilleptic child screaming his pure un-filtered expressions of joy or fear or both, and his typical tortured struggling artist father with his slightly pschyzophrenic tantrums and his wife the mexican mamma princess with a stern beauty and grace from years of pent up rage and anger, with all of this just waiting to boil over, with all this, I finally was able to focus.
Its like i could turn the sound off, visualize my atoms, or me as an atom, being magnetic, and drawing in all the pieces of the puzzle, that I need or may need. and because its an honor system, I realized I had to give back too..
So..
I am finding a way to make this world a better place,
the good life.

The good life is Not available in a bottle or a can.
No it doesn't wait for you to cash in your RRSPS.
Its not for rent or for hire,
and it wont be waiting till we retire.
i am finding the good life, or it is finding me.