On any bus ride, there’s usually an old white bum in the sideways seats up front. Old white bums are more common than sane people, in the sideways seats. This particular bum was talking to himself a bit loudly, animated with hand gestures, but he wasn’t scary or dangerous or anything.
At the next stop, a 30-something redheaded black woman came onto the bus, and took the forward-facing seat directly in front of me. After she sat, I couldn’t see the front of her, but from a quick glance as she’d come aboard I’d thought she was a normal, sane lady. Then she started talking to herself, a bit loudly, but not scary or dangerous or anything.
The old white bum was talking about someone who’d done him wrong, and how disappointed he was: “I thought you were my friend, man. We go back so many years, but you done me rotten,” etc.
The redheaded black woman was all about Lakewood, a suburb south of Tacoma: “And you wanted to meet me someplace in Lakewood? Lakewood? Girl, I take the bus. Do you have any idea how long it takes to get from U District Seattle to Lakewood?” etc.
Those were their general gists, but both went off on side tangents, of course. By some quirk of human nature, they each tended to pause while the other was talking, and at one point their monologues almost synced into a strange conversation:
“You told me you’d be at the court, but when the day came I don’t know where you were.”
“I’m sorry, but Lakewood and back is an epic journey, a fuckin’ miniseries, and I ain’t doing it.”
“I mean, you said you’d be there. I was counting on you.”
“If you’re waiting for me to come to Lakewood, you’re gonna get old waiting, and then you’re gonna die…”
If I was a cell phone person, I might have taken a video, but I’m not and I didn’t, so that’s the whole story. There’s no punchline. No point to telling it except, obviously, that American needs universal mental healthcare.
The redheaded black lady was still babbling when she got off the bus. The old white bum kept talking, too, then got off a few stops later. After that, a random bum ten rows behind me started loony talking, or maybe he’d been loony talking the whole way, but now the bus was quiet enough to hear him…
Brenda told me she’s leaving town for three weeks, two vendors got into a shouting argument that lasted on and off all afternoon, and a man I’ve seen around but never yet spoken to blew me a kiss.
Telegraph Ave was more Telegraphy than usual today, but you’ll forgive me (or you won’t, what do I care?) if I don’t go into great detail. There’s no time to type it. Gotta unplug my mini-fridge and let it drip dry overnight. Gotta keep tossing trash into some trash bags, and my prized possessions into other trash bags. Joe’s already gone, so then there was one, and he’s me. I’ll be the last to leave, tomorrow morning.
♦ ♦ ♦
It’ll be casual for a move-out, since Judith is letting me stash most of my minimal stuff here for a few days, and Bill’s graciously offered to drive the heavy stuff over the bridge, when I figure out where to drive it to.
Tomorrow morning I’ll get an early start, and hope to find a cheap but decent lowlife hotel in the city. Then I’ll go to work at the magazine, same as any other Monday.
♦ ♦ ♦
For tonight I’ll say, thanks, Judith, for offering me a home when I needed one last summer. It’s been nice having a friend to come home to. No hard feelings about the eviction.
Au revoir to Judith & Jake, to Joe, to Cy, to three cats, and Lugosi the giant barking dog. Farewell to other people’s messes, as tomorrow I’ll begin making my own mess again, somewhere in San Francisco, where I belong.
Meanwhile, as filler, here’s a bonus rant I wrote a few weeks ago…
Living lousy for less Or, a lazy cheapskate’s manifesto
I’m a lazy man, and believe in laziness. I proselytize for laziness. A day off from work beats the best week ever on the job, any job. I’m currently working four five-hour days most weeks, plus occasional odd jobs which, coupled with the cash you so kindly send for this zine, give me enough money to live on, and rarely a nickel more.
For most folks, the biggest expense is the rent, so my advice is to live in the cheapest place you can find. Being in a fancy place, surrounded by other fancy places, fancy cars, and fancy people is not worth a fancy price. For lots less money you can live a better life in a crappy neighborhood, with rickety walls and a leaking roof. Does the roof matter, long as the roof isn’t leaking on you?
Crucial to the equation for cheap survival is avoiding any unnecessary expense. That’s why, in this public diary, you’ve read several times about Judith or Josh taking me to dinner, but you haven’t yet read about me taking them to dinner. And I have a great excuse — I simply don’t have the money. (Several times I’ve offered Judith an onion and peanut butter sandwich, but she always declines.)
An easy way to trim the budget is by drinking water. That’s the liquid your body needs — not beer, not Pepsi, not lemonade, Snapple, or even milk. Water tastes good, doesn’t spoil, you can fill a jug and carry it with you everywhere, and it comes conveniently and affordably out of a pipe in your kitchen. Simply eliminating soda, juices, and other factory-formulated sugar waters, you can save a few dollars every day, and that’s money that adds up.
Quit eating out, of course, but if you actually pay for meals in restaurants, you can trim 10-15 percent off the tab by ordering a glass of water, or drinking nothing. The glass of Coke they’ll bring to the table is almost entirely profit for the restaurant.
Save some money by spending some money on a big bottle of vitamin pills, and take twice the recommended dose daily. That’ll keep you healthy, and after that once-yearly expense, you can stop thinking about silly incidentals like nutrition, and survive nicely on the cheapest foods you can find.
My menu is mostly day-old generic wheat bread, generic margarine, generic peanut butter when it’s on sale, and an almost daily regimen of ramen, twelve for a dollar. With vitamin pills, food becomes entirely a matter of flavor, price, and quantity, and maybe flavor isn’t the most important of the three. Cheap food fills you up just as well as filet mignon, so remember my rule of anus: No matter what price you pay for the food you eat, it’s all poop in the end.
Once you get into the lazy cheapskate habit, you’ll find so many ways to avoid spending money, or spend less…
Shop for clothes at thrift stores, not The Gap.
Get your books from the library, not Crown.
Wait for second-run double features — two movies for a $1.50, instead of seeing the latest schlock for $7 on opening night. And of course, sneak your own snacks in.
Sell your car and start taking the bus. (You’ll meet much more interesting people.)
Have the cable TV shut off.
Cat food is cheaper than tuna, and tastes almost the same, or almost almost.
Have your phone disconnected. (Maybe that’s just me.)
Sandwich bags, paper bags, garbage bags, plastic “disposable” cutlery, the cool jars that pickles and mayo come in, styrofoam cups… all these and many more things are re-usable. For free sandwich bags, just use the plastic wrap that the factory puts around the bread.
Shaving, for either gender, is a societally-imposed waste of time and money. Wherever you’re applying a razor, hair grows there naturally, so be Mr or Ms Natural and quit spending money on blades and foam.
Haircuts? Do your own. I bought a hair-clipper at a thrift store ten years ago for five bucks, roughly the price (without tip) for one visit to a “hairstylist,” and I’ve given myself a monthly crew-cut ever since.
With hair so short, I never have to buy combs, and also save a few minutes of hair-combing time every day.
Personal hygiene in general is overrated fakery, largely enforced via advertising. Unless you do physical labor for a living, or have a hormone imbalance, a daily shower is a waste of soap, hot water, and time. I shower about twice a week, generally when my scalp or groin begins to itch.
Deodorant is not needed, unless you’re a particularly stinky person. Lather your pits with soap in the shower, don’t rinse it after, and you’ll smell fine.
For most people, shampoo is a waste of money. I wash my body with the cheapest generic soap, and the same soap washes my hair. No pricey sprays, creams, or gels.
Laundry is another expense that can be, maybe not eliminated, but reduced substantially. Unless you work in construction or play in the mud a lot, it’s simply silly to toss your clothes in a hamper after wearing something just once. The jeans I’m wearing today are the same pair I was wearing two weeks ago, and they don’t stink and don’t stand without me.
If you’re not in the habit of peeing on yourself, underwear can be worn for at least days, maybe a week, then rinsed in the sink and worn again. (Loose-fitting boxers last longer than tight-fitting briefs before the odor gets your attention.)
You may need dishwashing liquid if you cook lots of greasy foods, and if so buy generic, but I never cook anything greasier than macaroni and cheese, and wash my dishes just fine with only hot water and a rag.
Toilet paper comes in countless brands and varieties, twin-ply, triple-ply, quilted, and it’s all a canard. Rip out a square from yesterday’s paper, fold it 2-3 times, and wipe. You’ve just saved 59¢ a roll.
You’re getting the general idea, right? Always consider and reconsider every purchase, before whipping out your wallet. My lazy cheapskate philosophy is: The less you spend, the less time you’ll need to spend working to earn that money.
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.
Before going to work, Cy and I and Judith and Joe took another load of Cy’s stuff to his rented storage space. The three of them will be lugging the rest of Cy’s possessions around today, while I sell fish.
From Pathetic Life #22 Saturday, March 30, 1996
Cy’s gotta go, and so does Joe, and so do I. But today I had to sell fish.
♦ ♦ ♦
There’s a retarded woman, probably homeless, who sometimes loiters on the avenue. I don’t know her name, but we’ve spoken a few times, briefly. Always briefly, because she’s too dim for genuine conversation. Not much more than “Good morning” and “How ya doin’?”
She was sitting on the sidewalk, that’s all. A cop on a ten-speed bike rolled up and stopped, asked her a few questions, and started writing a ticket. The cop’s victim had so little understanding, she smiled and kissed the cop on the forehead. Officer Friendly smiled and chuckled, but kept filling in the blanks on the ticket.
I wasn’t about to say anything. A cop mean enough to ticket a retarded woman for sitting on the sidewalk would probably charge me with obstruction of injustice.
As I understand things, there’s a restraining order against enforcing the vagrancy laws. Cops aren’t answerable to the law, though.
If the woman was anyone else, I would’ve told her about the restraining order, but of course, she wouldn’t understand my meaning any more than she understood the ticket.
One of the other people who’d watched said, “She can fight it in court,” but of course she can’t. She wouldn’t know how to fight it, wouldn’t know what she was fighting, and probably wouldn’t remember to show up.
She won’t be able to pay the fine either, but the City of Berkeley doesn’t want her money. It isn’t about collecting $75. What the city wants is to ensure there’s an outstanding warrant against her — against anyone they target like this. The intent is to have a handy pretext to put people in jail. Can’t jail people for sitting on the sidewalk, but they can jail ’em for failure to pay the ticket.
Nobody in city government says it out loud, but what they’re trying to do is make life miserable for the poor, so the poor will go Elsewhere. Elsewhere must be getting quite crowded, though, since Oakland, San Francisco, and every city across the country has the same tactics.
♦ ♦ ♦
For the first time in weeks, a Christian gave me crap about the fish. A middle-aged white man looked at the fish display, and I knew something was coming, from the scrunched-up look on his face.
“I hope you know,” he said, “that these fish are an insult to Jesus.”
I pondered my reply, and finally said, “The fish are funny, that’s all.”
“They’re an insult to Jesus!” he said again, much louder, like I hadn’t heard him the first time.
“Jesus wears army boots,” I said. “That’s an insult to Jesus.”
At that he simply started raving, telling me I’d underestimated the danger of mocking Christ, and blah blah blah. Something about him being so pissed off pissed me off, so pretty soon we were yelling at each other.
Umberto somehow sweet-talked him away while the man was still sputtering, and his God never got around to striking me dead. I suppose He’ll get around to it some day, though. We’re all struck dead in the end.
♦ ♦ ♦
“My name is Jim Cranston,” said a bearded stranger a few minutes later. So what? was what I was about to say, but he continued, “and I’ve been subscribing to Pathetic Life since #10.”
I vaguely remembered his name from addressing envelopes every month, and also remembered Josh telling me I should be more patient with readers who approach me on the ave. So I was… not patient, certainly, but more patient than I wanted to be.
Jim Cranston is not instantly obnoxious, stupid, or Republican. Maybe he’s a decent guy. So we talked for two or three minutes, mostly about how much I hate it when people approach me on Telegraph to talk about the zine.
I’ve explained why I hate it, Jim, in the zine you buy and read and say you like. So why are you approaching me on Telegraph?
♦ ♦ ♦
After work, on my way to what’ll soon be my former home, I stopped at a corner store to buy a tiny roll of cough drops. The price wasn’t marked, but they’re 45¢ at a discount store, or 89¢ at a rip-off convenience store, so I took them to the counter and held out a dollar bill.
The cashier was talking to someone else, barely paying me any attention at all, but he rang me up and announced the price: “$1.57.”
Global thermonuclear war! $1.57, for nine cough drops? I stood there blankly, trying to decide whether to kill the cashier with slow torture or a blunt blow to the head, and he kept talking at his co-worker about some concert he’d been to. He took the dollar from my hand, and I’d decided I wasn’t giving him any more than that, so this was going to be a confrontation. I hadn’t said anything to him — he was still talking about the concert — but as he looked at me he seemed momentarily confused, probably seeing the rage in my eyes.
Then he counted out my change from $1.57 to the five-dollar bill he mistakenly thought I’d given him, and he said, “Um, thanks,” and slipped $3.43 into my hand.
I’m so nauseatingly honest, normally I’d have corrected his mistake, but I said nothing and left with my cough drops, a few dollars richer.
♦ ♦ ♦
Judith and Joe finished moving Cy out today, so he’s gone. And then there were two.
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.
