Southwick steps onto an old crate, wobbling a bit but catching his balance. He adjusts his tattered coat, clears his throat, and takes a deep breath. The scent of stale beer, fried food, and cold asphalt fills the air as his congregation—two drunks, a tired cook on break, and a pair of prostitutes waiting on the curb—watch with mild curiosity.
“Alright, folks, listen up. I got some goddamn wisdom to share, and it’s free. Free as the last cigarette in your pack before payday. Free as the regret you feel when you wake up and realize you spent your rent money on whiskey and bad decisions. So, lend me your ears for a second.
You ever wonder why some folks seem to know which way to step in life and others are just bumbling around, slipping on the same damn mistakes over and over? That’s wisdom, my friends. Wisdom ain’t just knowing a bunch of shit—it’s seeing the patterns. It’s knowing what moves you forward and what drags you into the gutter. And enlightenment? That’s when you realize it ain’t just about you. It’s all connected—your choices, your pain, your joy, even this sorry-ass city we’re all stuck in.
A drunk in the back belches loudly. “Oh, shut up with all that cosmic crap!” he slurs.
Southwick pauses, fixes the man with a steady gaze, and smirks. “Do you know where your mommy is? Grow up.” The small crowd chuckles, and the heckler grumbles into his drink.
Southwick shifts, then lets out a low, unintentional fart. The silence hangs for a beat before the cook mutters, “Wisdom’s leaking out the back, Southwick.” A couple of laughs ripple through the group, but Southwick just grins. “That’s the sound of truth escaping, pal.”
“Now, let’s talk about how we process all this mess. You, me, that busted streetlight flickering up there, even these damn machines they got now, these AI things that talk like people—all of it’s about patterns. That’s how we survive. We see something, we figure out what it means, and then we react. That’s life, baby. That’s the game.”
Southwick throws up his hands. “This is the cosmic lotus unfolding! The ouroboros chomping its tail! The sacred geometry of the gutter! Every movement, every damn hiccup, is Shiva dancing the universe into being. And you, yeah you, Davey,” he points at the cook, “you think flipping burgers ain’t part of the divine clockwork? It’s all a sacred mechanism! Frying the cosmic egg in the pan of time!”
You ever hear of memes? Not just the funny pictures on your phone—memes are ideas, habits, ways of thinking that spread like a cold in a crowded bar. They shape us. You ever hear a saying so many times you start believing it? That’s a meme. You ever find yourself doing some dumb shit just ‘cause it’s the way it’s always been done? That’s a meme too.
And these damn machines, these AI things, they got their own memes. They don’t feel, they don’t love, they don’t wake up in the middle of the night wondering where it all went wrong. But they learn from patterns, just like we do. The difference is, we got skin in the game. We got memories that hurt, choices that haunt us, people we’ve let down. They just spit out words based on numbers. No regret, no fear, no love.
From the side, one of the prostitutes squints at Southwick and frowns. “Hey, your zipper’s down.” Southwick glances down, shrugs, and zips up. “Just airing out the enlightenment,” he quips. The drunks hoot with laughter.
“So here’s the takeaway, you poor lost souls. You got a brain. You got a heart. You got choices. Don’t let the world turn you into some mindless pattern-recognizing machine, just repeating the same bad decisions like a broken jukebox. Look at your life. See the patterns. Choose better. Because nobody—no machine, no preacher, no goddamn government—is gonna do it for you.
Now somebody get me a drink, because all this wisdom ain’t worth shit if I can’t wash it down.”
The drunks chuckle, the cook shakes his head with a smirk, and one of the prostitutes gives a slow clap. Southwick steps down, satisfied. It ain’t a church, but it’s a start.