I think I know where he was coming from. Maybe …just maybe…you hadn’t replied to his EMAIL !!!
Several years ago my then wife and I visited a good friend of mine who lives in northern NJ. My wife had never been to NYC so we all decide that we’ll go the Greenwich Village for a spell. My friend tells my wife, “June, there are going to be alot of strange folks around, just stay with us, don’t look at them or acknowledge them, and don’t give them any money.” Now that I think about it, it was Halloween, but I digress…
We’re having a wonderful time, going in all sorts of funky shops, having a ball. We come out of one place and a horribly dirty, stinky, scraggly guy walks right up to our group. He’s just standing with his arms out and won’t let us pass. Vince (my friend), Jill (his wife), and I just sort of push our way around him. My wife freezes like a deer in the headlights. She does the obvious tourist type thing - puts her head down, very obviously trying not to look at him. He starts in with “Oh, so your’re too good to help me out? What did your friends tell you, ‘Don’t look at the bums, don’t get near them, don’t give them any money?’ Well, hey, I’m just like you. I’m just a person, but no , your friends are too cool. They’ve poisoned you against me!” Vince, Jill, and I stood by and watched this for about 15 seconds and then intervened. My wife was like a statue…just frozen on the street. For the rest of the weekend whenever any of us disagreed with something the others said it was “Well, your friends have just poisoned you against me.”
I think I know where he was coming from. Maybe …just maybe…you hadn’t replied to his EMAIL !!!
originally posted by damhna
You sent him didn’t you? I knew it! I said to my pal see that guy there, damn he reminds me of someone 
ok for you information (said in a snooty voice) I came on specially to do just that (insert snotty nosed emoticon)
sorry for the hijack 50
This happened at a station on the Paris Metro. A guy on the opposite platform stood up and, in a mournful tone, shouted (in French) “Please…Please…can anyone tell me, what’s the capital of Canada?” After repeating this three or four times (and he sounded like he was about to burst into tears), I heard someone say, “Ottawa”, and the guy sat down again.
Drunk, homeless black man overheard at the Los Angeles County Courthouse:
“Chop dey haid off! Hee hee hee! Chop dey haid off!..” [unintelligable, and “Hee hee hee!”] “Din see it comin’. BAM! Chop dey haid off!”
A couple of friends made a short video several years ago. Some of the dialog was taken directly from a homeless person in New Orleans (where they lived and where the video was shot):
“Hey, mister? Hey, mister! I was just feedin’ them rats over there, and ya know what? They can talk! That’s right, talkin’ rats! Um, could you spare a quarter?”
I was walking down the strip in Vegas and pass a homeless guy sitting on some steps. He gets up and starts following me down the street, asking if he could get me some pot, or a woman, or whatever I needed. After about 5 or 6 "NO"s from me he says “Well, what about crack? If there is anybody on this planet who needs some crack right now, its you”. I couldn’t help but laugh my ass off.
That must have been one bitch of a crossword.
Well, I’ve been around two breeds of bum. The inner city Chicago type and the campustown type. The ones in Chicago are your industrial strength, potentially insane, scary, potentially dangerous, possible drug addicts, occasionally genuine and with kids to feed. The real social dillema types.
The college town type are much more suited to use for entertainment. They are almost exclusively drunks, and shameless drunks at that. (At least in my midwestern university experiences) There was one guy who my frat got to know (he’d show up pretty regularly at parties and in the lazy afternoons when people were out lounging, ergo drinking). We called him Hammer, no one ever could get a coherent name out of the guy, so this just stuck. Yeah, he was hammered, so we named him Hammer, what do you expect, we weren’t exactly sober here! He’d come buy every morning and clean up all the empty cans in the lawn and porch, his payment was that he got to take any unopened soldiers that were left behind. It was a nice symbiotic relationship.
Anyways, my funny story was during a summer in college, the campus was pretty sparse and a group of about 8 of us were out. A few friends had come back in from the suburbs to visit us who stayed on campus for a weekend of drinking. We were already fairly souped so when a bum came up to use asking “Change?” it came as across as extremely funny and witty when my one friend matter of factly replied “Nah man, the clothes I have on are just fine!” The poor bum was so baffled, could for the life of himself figure out what was said that had us laughing so hard. Anyways, its pretty mundane, but we have fond memories of it, and the phrase gets repeated often to this day.
On our family vacation to Paris, we spotted quite an amusing bum in the underground Metro. While walking to our train, an African-French bum started yelling in english in our general direction. We weren’t too sure how he knew we were American tourists, but he was the first person to speak english that wasn’t part of the family in nearly 4 days.
Of course, he apparently only knew three words: “F*ck you whites” which he repeated until he got bored and wandered down the hall.
We still crack up about that. The only person who spoke any english to us, and it was a racial slur.
A homeless guy once tried to sell me a pigeon. I was feeding them and he came up to me and offered to sell me one for a dollar. It’d be MY pigeon and I could feed it and look at it. He even pointed out the pigeon he was going to be kind enough to sell me, oblivious to the fact that I was already feeding it and looking at it. I gave him the dollar anyway though.
I was riding the bus in Uppsala, Sweden. There was an old man sitting near me who was very obviously drunk. He would try to engage a person in conversation, sometimes extending his hand. The person would refuse to acknowledge his existence. He would then start crying and saying something (I don’t speak Swedish). After about half a minute, he’s start whistling a happy tuneless tune. Happy again, he’d try to engage another person in conversation and the cycle would repeat. Over and over again.
Some of these stories are pretty funny, I gotta admit that. What I can’t grasp is the humor in deliberately antagonizing someone who is already plenty miserable. Alcoholism and schizophrenia are diseases, ya know. Would you go in a cancer ward to point and laugh at the bald heads and bulging tumors?
Peace,
TN*hippie
This story happened quite a while back, maybe about 5 or 6 years ago. I was in a SuperCuts, a cheap chain hair-cutting place. Two bums came in, one of which said that the other needed a haircut. The counterperson asked if they had money for a hiarcut, and indeed they did. The bum who needed a haircut kept saying things about himself that no one would know, then adding “Can’t tell!” at the end…
“I used to be a college professor… Can’t tell!”
“I’ve been all around the world… Can’t tell!”
“I once met Frank Sinatra… Can’t tell!”
This goes on and on, over the span of a couple of minutes. Then the song “Still Standing” by Elton John comes on in Supercuts. That reminded the guy of what he REALLY had meant to tell us… lol…
He proceeded to lie down on one of the seats in the waiting area, and started saying over and over, “I’m still standing… Can’t tell! I’m still standing… Can’t tell! I’m still standing…” lol, the other bum realizes that the cops may be involved, so he apologizes to the counter girl repeatedly, and gets his friend up and out the door.