Neighborhood crackheads

Perhaps you can't see the man in the center right portion of this photo, but he is our neighborhood crackhead. He walks up and down our block with a shopping cart and he moves a bit like a zombie. Coming from the Haight-Ashbury district, I should find his presence midly comforting, but I don't. He walks like a cross between a zombie and a robot, with minimal use of muscles. His cigarette is stuck in his mouth but his lips don't form a supportive "o" around it. I don't know why he collects bottles or cans, because there is NO COIN RETURN for any can in the lovely state of Tennessee. I think that's my requirement for where I'll live next--I must live in a state that has a coin return for cans (Marcos, I hope you are reading this) . Jesus, Oregon enacted the coin return for cans back in the 1970s and is moving on to water bottles. Tennessee is sometimes like being in a country in the Middle East, without the good food. Everything is about 20 years behind the rest of the country.

I went to a job interview yesterday and the woman had a snapshot of Nixon on her wall (clearly she had taken it). I asked (as casually as I could), "did you get to meet the president?" She retorted, "you're the first person who asked me that point-blank. I did take that picture and no, I'm not a Republican." I was mildly relieved. Another interview I went to I found a copy of Ann Coulter's "Treason" on the bookshelf. I felt a visceral pain in the gut of my stomach when I made that discovery. Ann Coulter is certifiably insane. That's like having a copy of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" on my business bookshelf.