Bicycle Trade Union 1

This is the first two chapters in my coming compendium of short nonfiction which includes a chronologically scattered discussion on my inability to drive and the massive archive of illicit retail experience I have and currently am attempting to accrue.  I hope you enjoy: Bicycle Trade Union.

1
The rains have returned again, like they were when I was a child, like they were sent and meant to instill an awe and reverence in the fortuity of natural process.  Combined with both the rivers, teeming at their banks, frothing with aquatic & avian creatures, this old home of mine has returned to its being as a place of water.

This is an obstacle to me, but even this ample deterrent is but a flinch, a discomfort; not sharp enough to slow efficiency.

The best gift for a drug dealer is a road bike.  It removes him from the authorities field of focus, regulation, and play: the automobile.  In a place as small as this, with only about 8000 permanent residents, it makes him not only safer, but faster & more willingly mobile than the competition.

I am, and have always been a skilled, intelligent, first-rate criminal, as well as a prime retail opportunist and customer service advocate.  Here, now, there is such an abundance of supply, especially for someone as amiable & nonabrasive as myself.  Combined with a strict & rigid over-policing with the intent for social engineering this has created an optimum environment and a need.  These and many other, darker, more complex contributions make me ideal for the transportation & trafficking of illicits, contraband, and unfindables.  That last word, that is really what i retail, information; the knowing of him & her, and where to find it & them.  The question, where my business begins and the common blandness of social structure ends is always the same: "Do you know where I can find ______?"


"I don't know," is always the answer they receive, because mine is a business based on the flawed and inexact  nature of man, and the fact that I really don't like saying, "yes."

2
I work at a liquor store, on the weekends, it is most likely where I am now, writing all of this.  It is not that the work is up to my potential, or that I am forced to be here.  Rather it is that I find the work fitting, an adequate involvement in the party, the industry stable & constant, and the lack of background investigation in a small business is suitable for someone with my clottery of past and present follies.  I find it ironic, some kind of punitive, and almost therapeutic that my alcoholic, D.U.I. received body serve a tenancy here.  Forced to stay involved in the frivolity, but also banished from it, and always made to observe even the smallest regulation or rule upon it.

It is not that I have any problem with the rules & regulations.  When they are meant to protect us, and the dominions of our persons and humanity, I follow them diligently, with fervor.  However, one of the first lessons of the thief & deviant is that the government is a capitalist entity, and its agents, organization, and evolution are based to that end.  I have my own law, my own rigid constituency & consistency which I uphold even as un-law.  Morality is always before legality, even for me with all my crimes... there is still an honor amongst them, a criminal chivalry of sorts.

I have committed all of the supposed sins in fresh, varied, and creative ways.  Now though, i find myself trying to legitimize, to make some sort of life out of what many call mistakes, but I simply know as the skills of life.  Change is difficult, and we resist it, even if we do not realize.  So I hold tenuously onto the clandestine, operations of which have molded me into a skilled artisan, a master thief, and a member of the illicit cognoscenti.