A Couple of Sundays ago...

I worked a shift over at the Berkeley Free Clinic. I had only one client, but he was amazing. a 42 year old heroin junkie, spitting image of George Clooney (only better, if you cut his dirt-dreadlocked hair from living on the streets). He was pos for hep B and C, wasn't sure if he wanted treatment, very fatalistic. He was high when I talked to him, but still-- this guy was funny, erudite, and eloquent. It started when he used the phrase "wrack and ruin," and I made an off-hand reference to Ragnarok. He then proceeded to expound for 15 minutes on the difference between Ragnarok and Gotterdammerung, Norse theology, the Viking expansion, the ethnohistory of Western Europe. For the next hour as I tried to counsel him, it was the same way, one scintillating digression, one wry observation, one self-deprecating one liner after another. He was freakin' amazing. And for a junkie he had the best damn veins I had ever seen-- I didn't even use a tourniquet when I drew his blood! All the while he was also doing an intricate cat doodle in magic marker on a little pad of paper he held. He left reciting an elaborate and hilarious Star Wars parody dialog he had concocted. Amazing.