The ghost of Sacramento

Fresh off yesterday’s rant, I stopped at the gas station on Alhambra & P and met a ghost.

Not a real ghost, of course, but one of those crazed homeless guys that we’re seeing more of these days. It was hard to tell his age, but he didn’t look all that old. I guessed late 20s, early 30s, but some rough ones. Reddish hair, blue eyes, and skinny. He had an old blanket wrapped around him and that look that tells you something’s just not wired right. He was aggressively panhandling every driver at the station.

He headed toward me. Usually, I don’t give handouts on the street, but I sometimes waver. It’s not a hard and fast rule. If they get in my space, it pisses me off and I’ll usually tell them no. Other times, I give because I just want them to go away and stop bothering me. Sometimes, I’m just in a mood and I give because it just feels so shitty to be standing there in clean clothes with a shiny car and a cozy home. You know?

I pulled a dollar out of my wallet, and then stashed my purse out of sight under my car seat. I got out of the car to start pumping gas, the driver’s side door between me and him. He rapped on the window, holding out his other hand to show me a quarter. And then he just whimpered. I think he may have been trying to speak, but it just came out as wordless whimpering. It killed me. Just killed me.

Someone so lost that they can’t even make words any more?

I handed him a buck, which he took with filthy hands, and I noticed his very long, black-with-filth fingernails. He reeked. He immediately set off for the next car. I pumped gas and watched him do the rounds. Some people gave him change. One woman shouted, quite firmly, ”No. Now go away!”  He was a little threatening, invasive. Feral.

 What can you do for someone like that? It was hard to tell if it was mental illness, a serious drug problem, maybe even just an act. I don’t know. I grabbed a $10 bill out of my wallet. I’m not sure why. A song came out a few years ago, with a guy telling a story about meeting a beggar and not wanting to give him money because he’d just blow it on booze and smokes; then the singer says he realized he’d just blow it on booze and smokes himself, so he gave the guy the money after all. It was kind of like that.

He disappeared before I could give it to him. I circled the block, looking for the guy but didn’t find him. Honestly, I don’t think I’d have had the courage to step out of the car to hand it to him anyway.

What can you do for people like this? Are they beyond all hope? I have no idea. Sometimes I think so, but I don’t like that answer.

Why can’t we have a Stupidity Recession?

**Pottymouth Warning** Read at your own risk.

Seriously. There’s really quite an abundance of stupidity around, in good economic times and bad. So why is it that stupidity never seems to flag, lag, cease, or at least ease off a bit?

I received a “forwarded email” (read: chainletter spam freakout) from a “friend” (read: paranoid person). This chain email was filled with alarming and badly misused language about how “women in Sacramento” are being targeted for robberies by, get this, two “black women.” The perps are apparently packing knives and causing their own little crime wave throughout the city. The letter exclaims that it’s “TRUE!!!” and even KCRA reported it!!!

I hate shit like this. I really do. It seems like I get a forwarded email like this from a well-intentioned friend every six months or so. These emails are all the same: The message is that women need to be fearful. We need to fear going out in broad daylight as much as at night. We need to fear strangers. We need to fear other races. We need to fear each other.

These “claims” of truth are backed up by a link to a single robbery at the Downtown Plaza. None of the other claims in the letter are backed up by any news source. Not one.

Whoever wrote this letter had way too much zoloft that day and is in dire need of remedial English lessons. I’m also pissed at the people who keep circulating this crapola.

If I learned anything in Women’s Studies 101, it’s that we need to reject these faux warnings about what “women should fear” because they’re ultimately intended to “put us in our places”–which apparently for some is still hovering about in the kitchen, safely cooking up brisket for hubby.

I call bullshit.

Some fine examples:

If you don’t have money in your wallet, they still can disrupt your life by stealing your drivers licenses, social security cards, credit cards, and other important info that most women carry in there purses. And your Gucci or coach, or fendi, or other expensive purses that most women have.

Really? Gucci, Coach, Fendi? MOST women have these? Good lord, please don’t take my FENDI! Here, you can take my firstborn, but leave the designer handbag…

Here’s another screamer:

These women have been spotted at Target on Power Inn Road, Wal Mart on Florin, Elk Grove and Natomas, Dee Dee’s on Mack Road and the one on Stockton Blvd. Various food chains and grocery stores. Places that all women like to shop at.

Places that “all women” like to “shop at”? Yes, I consider shopping at Wal Mart a real treat. I usually take my Fendi handbag, stuffed full of my credit cards and spare cash. It’s hard to balance all that weight on my little bound feet, but somehow I manage.

And a personal favorite:

We are living in desperate times, and all kinds of desperate crimes are happening right under our noises.

Well, at least we’re not being quiet about it, apparently.

In the words of Jon Stewart, f**k you, whoever wrote this crap. The biggest crime here  is your felony abuse of spelling, grammar, and common sense.