In The Downpour Was I ...

There I was in the downpour at my Big Issue pitch. And who should come along are my buddies from Cheviot Asset Management that includes David Morgan and Allen Phillips. There was the Cheviot digital photographer swaying, too, in the downpour with me. I looked straight into his fancy camera and bingo I was instantly on the frontpage of Cheviot's world website for all the world to see me in my vain glory. And, I was 20 quid the richer, too, for my face's pretty mugshot ... Fame and fortune at last, I'd say ... Well hardly!!
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Selling "The Big Issue," you see, is a constant surreal experience for me. From the beauty to the breast and from the breast to the beauty, I see it almost every day at my Caffe Nero cubbyhole ... Rich, poor, elegant, rude, fancy, drunks, beggars, doctors, tourists, ugly, beautiful, lawyers, dogz, nuns, stockbrokers, frail, loud, judges, celebrities and so on and so forth I see and encounter from my little spot at London's Covent Garden. Folkz chat, smile, ignore, donate, buy, snigger, reject, amuse, dither, shout, whisper, and do all manner of things to and for me ... Some dayz are lovely, some are grave, some are bright and bouncy, some are soaking wet, some even abit snowy, some are like frost bite and other like sunburn. Rarely are the dayz the same, except for being a little street vendor like me. I am a human face that some just hate and others just simply love. That's part of the price you pay and the reward for living life to its fullest no matter what other folkz may do or say ... Fear not, for "new everyday is my love," so He tells me so. Therefore, fear not!!
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Some wonder why a grandfather like me is sitting on a London street corner selling John Bird's business invention of getting the homeless and the vunerable (!!like me!!) to flog his weekly magazine that's published by young Lisa Woodman. Good question, I'd say. For me having lost my huge home by a catastrohpic fire and being out of any insurance a few days literally before the brutal event, I needed to start all over again. That I did. I love doing business and selling that's why I flog "The Big Issue." As a news photographer for many years in America and China, I also flogged my own news and feature photographs to news agencies and wire services around the world. Prior to that I was a forensic photographer for various police entities. I had retired just months before the dreadful house fire ... So my life suddenly changed in radical directions, whether I liked it or not.
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Out of misery always comes joy ... Just be patient and always take steps to focus ahead even when the sky is not just gray, but pitch black all around you as you look to the sky for better and greater things ... Inner strength comes from finding strength in the recesses of your mind and spirit. People are like the living dead because they have not found the recesses of their inner self. They lack the capacity to internalise whatever confronts them, here and now. Get on with life and stop worrying about life for life always goes on with or without you. So grab it, my friends!! And don't let go ... until the force of human death takes over you ...
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And when people either love or hate you, remember you've now got their attention. Without attention, life is pretty dull and boring ... I thrive on attention, don't you? I know folkz like The Big Issue's John Bird surely do, too ... That's why he is so successful. Without attention you go nowhere, except to bed and dream useless dreams and don't even know you're already dead!!
The petty live petty lives and that's why they're so dead petty. Millions make so many like that ... So to get attention just publish ...
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And if you don't get published, then publish it yourself like I do. Then you get attention mighty fast. That's the beauty of today's Internet. You can be your own writer, editor and publisher all in one and say to hell to those who reject or surpress what you have to write and say. If they don't like it, then tell them they can always write their own piece and opinion to counter whatever I've written and said. I would have thought "The Big Issue" and "Caffe Nero," for examples, were already big enough not to worry, like they seems to do, about my criticism of them as a little speck that I am. I am of no importance, so why do they react so frantically?
Ah, yes I know the answer why!! It's my pen ... the one with pyaemia ink in it ...
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My pen is mightier than the sword and the power of my pen is sweet music to my ears and ever questioning mind ... My dastardly "crime" and nerve is that I write what I believe and not write what I am told to believe. That's scary for some, but not to me or to those of us who believe in freedom of speech both literally and figuratively ... Really? Yeeeeeeeeeeeep!!
So I write what I think, not what others expect or want me to think ... It's a good time to do that when the downpour comes, oddly enough. But try to stay dry for wet things have a way of muddling you and things up. So stay dry!! Cheers eveybody, yours truly and proudly, Monty.
PS. And what kind of money do I make selling "The Big Issue" some ask of me? I make less than do those catarrhine Camberwell punks flipping greasy hamburgers by the dreary hour at Burger King on old Peckham Road. How than can I be so poor, yet so bloody rich?
Take a guess!! +Abbess Hildegard, 2oo7 + Vol. 1, No. 3.