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December 17, 2005
Three Guys Named Earl
Please welcome Earl the farmer, Earl the Vietnam Veteran, and my memory of a homeless guy named Earl in DC.
Earl would make just about anyone who has ever joked about "tinfoil hats" or "black helicopters" a mite self-conscious upon meeting him. He was the real deal, a grade A-1 conspiracy theorist. He would come into the coffee shop after the morning rush, buy a cup of java, and set about his daily evangelistic task.
See, he had papers with him. His manifesto, an epic of sinister CIA plots and dizzying arrays of shadowy connections, read a lot more like a scholarly publication than a Clancy novel or whatnot. This was not some pencil-scrawled madman's diary; it was typewritten text that reflected the embers of a once-roaring academic mind, or so went his street bio.
Earl would draw his unsuspecting conversation partners in, and would lower his voice, speak very fast and begin sharing with them all the secrets of which they had been unaware. He could go on for hours about the CIA and its hand in controlling society by way of radiation sent out from black boxes hidden inside utility-pole electrical transformers. Of course, he would rejoin, these are on every corner; it is just their ubiquitousness that makes such innocuous-seeming fixtures the perfect vehicle. "Transformers." The word does take on a chilly sort of new meaning, if you're able to roll with his thought for a moment.
The listener would occasionally be regaled with a story of abuse by Park Police. Earl claimed to have been shot by them, and this is where one would wonder where truth's dividing line really was.
The coffee shop's manager was totally cool, but one or two employees were annoyed by Earl and his tales of treasonous transgressions. I simply learned something great from that man. He somehow found a way to show me that each one of us can be as strident, as earnest, and yet as hopelessly off the mark as he was. Also, if you talk incessantly about something really weird and boring, people will give you money to shut up and go away.
Miscellaneous | By joe lance | 11:43 PM