Burlington is weird (in a good way). It’s charming and rustic, serene and severe, preppy and hippy, and then you have this strange population of people who are grungy and gothic, maybe homeless, have piercings and holler/mumble strange blurbs about peculiar things. Usually I don’t listen, today I did.
I’m considering enrolling in a pilot program for career readiness that the Vermont Department of Labor and Community College of Vermont are funding. Soft skills, math skills, all the stuff that you apparently need to be a good candidate for a job these days. I don’t know how I feel about it. So I’ve been going to the VDL the past few days and it really reminds me that I live in Vermont. Not UVM Vermont, but a state that is rural, has lotsa cows and lotsa oddballs.
In D.C. we have kooks, but I’m just afraid of them. Here, they're just hoodlums. Dirty, ratty, musky, with lots of stuff going on in their heads. As my happy go- lucky career counselor from the Department of Labor said in a silly voice and smile, ‘The social deviants!'
I encountered a social deviant today. I was in the Fletcher Free Public Library and when you walk inside, it looks more like a homeless shelter or old peoples’ home. Any time you get out of the she-she spots in Burlington, it’s usually this mixture of people. Fortunately, they seem oblivious of each others presence.
I was sitting at one of the tables reminiscent of elementary school lunch tables, and a man came by and asked if he could plug into my USB. I said sure, why not. He was wearing a glass horn around his neck, really dirty motorcycle gloves and holding onto a camcorder. And there I was I was. In my thrift store high water khakis, black sweater and shpectacles. I was busy filling out forms for this career certification training readiness preparedness class thing and he said, that’s some serious stuff yir workin on. I could tell he wanted to talk, but I didn’t. I wanted to fill out my aptitude test which would rank me in order of Conventional, Artistic, Enterprising, or Social.
The man said the reason he carries his camcorder around, (and he said this in a serious tone) was to videotape the police beating on people that are innocent. He said the police always ask him where he gets his money and then he said they find out who his uncle is and they don’t mess with him anymore. He said he teaches taekwondo and he showed me a cigarette case that his uncle brought home from The war. He carries cigarettes in his fannie pack not because he smokes cigarettes, but because other people do and he wants to have them around for them. He said he’s known around town as ‘Hawk’. I wanted to ask him if he was serious. But I knew he was. Then as he was leaving, he looked at me and he said, You trying to be a healer? And I said, well yeah, sort of. In the past three months I’ve been seriously considering and now trying to enter the field of mental health. I looked around and there wasn’t anything that identified that around me. I said, How’d you know that? And he said, I was the bad seed in the family, but I come from gypsy blood.
