I always found that the old ragged people missing fingers or eyes somehow had more to them than the ones with all their extremities intact. The missing had added more, a signature on their body of having had communion with this worlds harsh reality.
I never gravitated towards the clean and tidy white-collar folk, I love the dirty hermits, the grease stained yellowed teeth old guys hunched over in some dingy garage. I’m attracted to hard lives filled with grisly tiny demises over decades, because what’s left is real. You can smell the underworld on their breath, how they learned how to rebuild engines out of necessity. How tragedy had shaped their soul into these fantastic mystical things. I love the calm in chaos, the sputtering confidence of their stories, how what was an obviously painful existence had beckoned some sort of morose hilarity and wrinkle etched wisdom.
Little saints with sailors’ mouths, big hearts beating under raggedy exteriors. Saw an old-timer with a missing arm get the engine of a rotting Miata started in a junkyard once, then proceed to drive the manual transmission car up the narrow ramps of a trailer with no wiggle room for error, all while smoking a cigarette. It was a borderline religious experience, if getting on with it was a being.
There was also Uncle Spud in the little town I grew up in, only had a few fingers left and one eyeball I think, his pants were always falling down and had lost most of his hearing in both ears, but he knew how to trim a garden or a hillside, some strange irony in whacking weeds with his missing fingers. Yelling and muttering things, shouting and breathing poetry before hopping in a barely running pickup and disappearing down a dirt road. Tired old guardian angels dancing in the dust of his mythological tango for cold hard cash.
It’s the dogs, the dirt, the competence with broken things. Silver spoons are fragile because they’ve never been bent out of necessity. There’s this opulence in the burn marks and broken fingers, a beauty in things growing out of places they’re not supposed to. Little bugs you can’t quash, mischievous grins stolen from raccoons, the clanking and clamoring from their garages are the drums they worship God with.
Dirtbags and drifters have plenty to teach too, these little prophets are littered across this earth. There’s a holiness in their grease and dirt. A strange paradoxical purification. You should find one, give him your ears, commune with his mythological demise and rebirth, see what ancient wisdom he has scribbled in that grease on the floor.