Carlos the Charismatic

Carlos doesn't live next door, Eddy does, but Carlos is often there talking.
A lot.
Carlos likes to talk.
He hangs his phone from the light fixture in the ceiling of the porch and listens to music and talks.
To Eddy, Priscilla and some other guys who sit on the porch next door.

A few days ago Carlos comes in asking if his son, Carlos Jr, can use our microwave to warm up his sandwich.
I stand in the kitchen with Carlos Jr talking about the football world cup while Carlos stands at the front door talking to Kimberly about the spirits in this house.
'You ever hear anything?' he asks us.
'Like what?' I say.
'You know...,' he says, 'like noise, like something in the night, you know, stuffs like that,'
I tell him I have never heard anything.
He tells me that this is good.
Carlos had told me that an old evil woman had lived and died in this house and that if I ever hear anything I should tell it to go away.
Carlos then tells us that if we do hear anything it's probably just in our heads.
'Sometimes you make it true only in your head,' he says, pointing to his forehead.

Carlos comes and goes from next door.
Sometimes I won't see him for a week or two.
I'll ask Eddy or Priscilla if they have seen him and then we will all wonder where he is.
The he will show up again, full of tales, making Eddy laugh.

A few weeks after we met Carlos told me that his wife had been shot, by the police.
'Not too far from here,' he told me.
'10 times.' he said.

*****
The image above is from South Park.

I get some advice from a young man

Tall Yellow House

While I was drawing this a young man dressed in a white shirt, black pants and with his hair slicked back, came out of the house behind where I was sitting and said-'Hey, do you sell those? That's awesome, man,'
I told the young man yes, that I did sell them, and then he offered me up some advice.

'You should go down to S.......,' He said, telling me the name of a place that I did not quite hear, 'there's loads of tourists down there, and you'd make lots of money,'
'Cool,' I told him.
'Yeh, man,' he said again as he walked off down the street, 'you could make lots of money.'

Drawing and listening to Rodriguez

While I was drawing this nothing really happened.

Nobody parked in my way.

Nobody stopped to talk to me.

Nobody went for a wee behind a bush.

It was just me all alone with my pastels, feeling happy drawing, listening to Rodriguez and singing along to this.

The Rollerblader and the Pothole

While I was drawing this a young man came around the corner very very fast on a pair of roller blades, hit a pothole, became briefly airborne, and then landed on his front on the road.

His phone had left his hand at some point and pieces of it were strewn across the road and his sunglasses were even further up the road.

When he rolled over I asked him if he was alright.

'Yes,' he said, 'but I have torn my work trousers,'

'Oh, dear,' I said.
He was sitting up on his bottom by this stage and looking at the hole in the knee of his trousers.

I felt sorry for him because rollerblading isn't that easy and I think he looked like he was doing quite well at it until the pothole.

So I said- 'I did something like that recently, went over the handle bars of my bicycle and landed on my knee,'
He didn't seem to really care because he was now crawling across the road, picking up the bits of his smashed phone.

'I wasn't even wearing jeans,' I called out to him as he crawled about, 'just took the skin straight off, blood everywhere.'

While I was drawing this 2 men stopped, at different times, to talk to me.

While I was drawing this 2 men stopped, at different times, to talk to me.
The first one, who was carrying 2 plastic shopping bags, wearing flip flops and shorts and sporting a pony tail, complimented me on the drawing.
'Hey,' he said, interrupting me so I had to take the headphones from my ear holes, which made me slightly annoyed, 'I just wanted to tell you that you really captured that, like, you know, you really got it,'
I told him thank you and that I very much appreciated his compliments.
'Well, I better let you get back to it,' he said.
'Okay, thanks,' I said, feeling very happy that he was now leaving me alone.

Then, about half an hour later, with my patience levels shriveled to zero by the relentless sun, I was interrupted again by a buckled shadow casting itself across my drawing.
I looked up and saw another man with a pony tail.
This one was wearing a baseball cap, also, and some kind of American football sweater and was hunched over, the cane he leaned on seemingly keeping him upright.
Looking into his face I saw that he was drunk and he had sores all across his face, as if he has been attacked by someone with long fingernails.
He leaned down toward me and said something I couldn't hear, forcing me to take my headphones out which made me want to scream FUCK THE FUCK OFF YOU DRUNKEN FUCK, I AM FUCKING MOLTEN UNDER THIS SUN AND I WANT TO GO HOME AND SIT INSIDE WHERE FUCKERS LIKE YOU WON'T DISTURB ME.
But I did not.
I just asked him to repeat what he had said.
And what he'd said was- 'That's really gorgeous. You really are so talented. Bless you.'
Then, feeling like an utter bitch for having such vicious thoughts, I thanked the man and smiled and said 'Well, I'd best get back to it, I'm really hot out here and I'd like to get home,'
'Of course you would,' said the scratched-up buckled drunk man, 'yes, of course you would.'