Heavy Slumming

By Mel C. Thompson

An indigent poet is forced out of his rent-controlled, basement tenaments in San Francisco and is driven to the far East Bay. However, he still occupies both the urban and suburban worlds, taking trains back and forth between San Francisco and Contra Costa. Typically mood-disordered, the poet experiences states of inappropriate elation and castastrophizing depression. All of these factors add a substantial amount of spice to the work. The poetry is of the plain-language / confessional-rant style, and so it is very user-friendly to people not trained in poetry interpretation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mel C. Thompson
• Release date: Nov 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215043943

Mel C. Thompson

Mel C. Thompson is a retired wage slave who survived by working through temp agencies and guard agencies. Unable to survive in the real world of full-time, permanent work, he migrated from building to building, going wherever his agencies sent him, doing any type of work he could feign competency in and staying as long as those fragile arrangements could last. He somehow managed to get a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in spite of his learning disorders and health problems. Unable to sustain family life due to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, lack of transportation and lack of income, he lives alone in low-income housing and wanders around California on buses and trains. He began writing at the age of 14 and continues till the current day. (He turns 64 in June of 2023). In his early years he wrote pathetic love poetry until, in his thirties, he was engulfed by cynicism and fell in with a group of largely antisocial poets who wrote about the underground life of drugs, sex, alcohol, poverty, prostitution, heresy, isolation and alienation. In his fortes he turned to prose and began to write religious fiction with an emphasis on the comedic aspect of theology and philosophy. He now writes short novels focusing on the attempt to find meaning in a economic world beset with money laundering, unethical marketing, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, patent trolling, corrupt contracting and every manner of spiritual and psychological desperation and degradation. When he is not writing, he wanders from hospital to medical clinic to surgical room attempting to sustain what little health he has left after a lifetime of complications resulting from birth defects and genetic problems. When he is able, he engages in such hobbies as reading, walking, yoga and meditation; and whenever there is any money left over from his healthcare-related quests, he goes to wine tastings and searches for foodie-related bargains. Before the pandemic, he spent many years gaming various travel-points systems and wrangled many free trips to Europe. He is divorced and has no children, no pets, no real estate, no stocks nor any other assets beyond the $550 in his savings account. His career peaked in the early 2000s when he did comedy gags for a radio station and had about 10,000 listeners per week. However, currently, he may have as few as five active readers on any given day. He no longer has the stamina to promote his work and only finds new readers through ran...

Book preview

Heavy Slumming

Mel C. Thompson

A Slacker Poet from Concord

In Search of Undeserved World Fame

Copyright © 2010, 2023

Mel C. Thompson Publishing

3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

Lafayette, CA 94549

[e-mail]

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Cover Image Information And Publishing Notes

Cover image generated by Microsoft Bing AI image generator with the prompt: middle aged man in a lounge chair with decrepit mission district buildings behind him.

As of the date 9-16-2023, all of the spoken-word pieces in this booklet are posted as audio-only productions (no video) on YouTube with the title: Heavy Slumming, Spoken Word by Mel C. Thompson. Due to the age and health complications of the author, and due to his outdated computer equipment and the financial challenges associated with upgrading it, he is unable to offer any certainty as to how long he will be able to maintain his YouTube channel.

There are plans to make this publication available at the lulu.com bookstore, however, due to the difficulties and expense involved in producing the books one at a time, the hard-copy units of this book