(no subject)
Two days ago or something I was sitting on a bench next to this tied up bike and its owner came to claim it (or, later as I learned, make sure I wasn't trying to steal it). He looked kind of like a bum, and he came in the direction of the forest where some homeless (or are they?) people live. But anyway, turns out he was just a janitor on the night staff and his shift started in a few hours and he was just hanging out. Anyway, we (mostly he) talked for a long time, about Georgetown, and black people and white people (which he liked to call light-skinned and dark-skinned), and how he saw a Yeti, why he was a vegetarian, how brothas from space are gonna come and kill/save us all, and other stories about his life. I have to believe that some of his stories were made up -- the Yeti I'm skeptical about; and he rattled off the names of Washington potentates pretty well, but I'm pretty sure he didn't actually know them -- but he was still a pretty cool guy. He told me about how the people at the Department of Public Safety on weekend nights confiscate kegs and drink them in their cave. And about how when he was on a nine-year crack binge, rich white kids from the suburbs used to come to the DC ghetto and smoke crack with him. He wasn't quite as crazy as you'd expect -- he was drinking while we were talking, but he didn't really seem to change at all. He really liked me, and I really liked him. He had a fanny pack in which he kept his US Army certificate, his ID, and $400, for child support and rent. Also some oils that he got from some Africans. Parts of what he was saying didn't make the most sense -- he harped on the fact that it was the first night he wore his camouflage jacket, and yet the jacket reappeared a few times earlier in other stories. He said he was 50, but he looked about five or ten years younger. His name was Julius (pronounced with an initial Y) Washington. I hate paragraphs.