Bubba(XXXIII)

Bubba is a moss ball-slow-growing, unnecessary, quietly alive in a jar with his companion Spoiled. But in another life, he was born in 1900 in a small Italian village, one of seven children who never learned to be useful. In that life, he became an accidental detective who saw too much, a basketball star whose knee shattered in a championship game, a theater actor who mastered presence over performance, a scientist studying things that grew too slowly to matter, a sailor thrown overboard who drifted for days and survived, and possibly a spaceman who encountered beings beyond Earth. Each identity fell away as soon as it tried to define him. Now, in his final form, he sits in a jar in Marfa, Texas, teaching the same lesson he spent 124 years learning: that existence needs no justification, that slowness is not failure, and that a life of purposeful uselessness is the most radical freedom of all.