On March 10th of 2011, I was walking down Sutter Street, near Union Square in San Francisco, when I started talking to a man named Tim. When I stopped recording — he was aware and fine with it — we sat there and talked for a while longer.
In the weeks that followed, I thought about Tim frequently. I looked for him in that same area a couple times but nobody had seen him. Then one night he was there and told me he had been in the hospital. That was the last time I saw him.
I think a lot about Tim and hope he's okay.
Here’s the complete video::
And if you’d like to watch the video in segments…
1. Fiddler Back
Tim describes the brown recluse spider, which he calls a fiddler back for the marking on its body. He claims its bite lays eggs that hatch inside a person, that the venom exceeds a rattlesnake’s, and that a female’s bite will rot a limb to gangrene. Chad tries twice to redirect the conversation and gets nowhere.
2. Angels
Tim identifies himself and his companion Wayne as justice angels, here to take demons out, and lays out a hierarchy: archangels who fling fiery swords, cherubs who guard, seraphs who guide souls. He says the work has already started. Chad confirms on camera that Tim knows he is being recorded, and Tim says he doesn’t care.
3. Monsters
Tim explains why he is living on the street. Seventeen years earlier, in a small town near Grass Valley, a man assaulted his twelve-year-old daughter, and Tim killed him; he served thirteen years, and says the judge, who did not like monsters, gave him involuntary manslaughter rather than premeditated murder. Asked whether he has regrets, he looks into the camera and says he would do it again.
4. Nuclear
Tim reads the day’s news about the earthquake in Japan as prophecy: the world was destroyed once by water and will be destroyed next by fire, and the fire is the reactors. He insists the meltdown cannot be stopped and the radiation has already reached them. Mid-argument he offers Chad a candy bar, and Chad asks for two, one for each of his kids.
5. Simplicity
Tim’s whole philosophy in one word: keep it simple, just be human, say hello, shake a hand, buy someone a coffee. Chad pushes back and tells him he is being talked down to, and Tim takes it without defensiveness. Then he shows off his two-hundred-dollar Orvis beaver-felt hat, two flies tied to the band, and notes that he takes it off when a lady walks by.
6. Warlocks
Chad asks about the Charlie Sheen story running in the news and Tim dismisses him outright. He then explains that the Warlocks were the Grateful Dead’s original name, which Chad had never heard. From there he says witches, demons, vampires, and werewolves all really exist, and that there are many dimensions.
7. End Times
Tim tells Chad to keep his wife and children close, because the end times are here. He points to the pyramids as proof of something we can no longer do, and says the people who built them were not from here. He puts the transformation at December 21, 2012, roughly eighteen months out, and says it has already started.
8. The Matrix
Tim explains that Satan is the god of this world, and uses The Matrix as his nutshell: all of this is a computer, a facade, and you can control it once you know that. When Chad says he believes it in his head but not in his heart, Tim tells him that lesson is for his path and his feet only, and refuses to give the answer. He sends Chad off with an assignment: listen to “Ripple.”
9. Harmony
Tim pulls out a harmonica and plays the blues, saying he has been at it for thirty years. A passing man stops, produces a harmonica of his own, and the two play a brief call and response before shaking hands. Tim turns back to Chad and says: that’s simplicity.
Regarding the reason Tim said he was imprisoned,
I reached out the police department in Grass Valley, California.
Not surprisingly, I did not hear back from them.
On the surface, OMNIPOLAR is a home for creative work: stories, songs, and essays about life’s light and dark, and their integration. Under the hood it’s stranger. I run it with more than thirty named Claude agents, each with its own role and persona. A friend who read The Wire asked: “Is this you in communion, as one, with AI, or in dialogue with it? The line is blurry, which is one of the many things that make it so cool.” The blur is the point. I think out loud, an agent drafts, I cut and rewrite, and the passages that matter most emerge.
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