"Am I the only one who thinks that the people on street corners holding up signs asking for money are LAZY? At least put forth the effort to ask someone for some change! Seriously, I would love if you would post your take on this topic." - Robin

Robin brings forth a good point. There is a solemn divide between those who utilize the sign and those who utilize their larynx for the attainment of money from strangers. You see, while both groups are utterly shameless in their disdain for a day's backbreaking labor, as well as proper hygiene of any sort, their methods of lifestyle maintenance are entirely different.

Are the sign holders really that much lazier? The answer I pose is hell no. You see, they went through a ton of trouble to make their cardboard sign. They had to beat up one of the other hobos and remove the sharpie marker from his or her sphincter as he or she lay passed out in a pool of their own schizophrenic filth. Then they need to take the side off of a cardboard box without getting knifed by yet another crazy, filthy, hobo. Thats all before they even write the sign.

The real shame of the matter is, that it is those larynx-using hobos who generally manage to get the most money out of poor guilt-ridden yuppies. In fact (although my lack of upward motion prohibits my being referred to as a "yuppie"), I have first hand experience in this situation.

While, as I walked through the Village on my way to Penn Station about a week ago, I managed to walk past a number of "homeless" (damn politically correct term, lets just call it like we see it - "dirty") persons holding the cardboard signs in question. While their stench by no means encouraged me to stop and chat, it was the ease with which I could blatantly ignore their starving ethiopian corpse-like bodies that lead me to decide that my last $3.00 would be better spent on a tall latte. It was an easy decision -- I had three dollars and I wanted to keep three dollars.

On to the other approach: On Saturday night, I drove to south Jersey (of all places) to visit a friend of mine who lives there and to see the movie "Troy"* Now, I got a tad lost -- but not too far off -- and I managed to find a Wawa** that my friend agreed to meet me at. My friend, however, took a while, so I was forced to wait.

A man, probably not entirely homeless (I base this on the fact that he owned (or stole) a bike that hadn't yet been pawned to buy heroin, and the fact that south Jersey doesn't have too many steam vents to sleep on), walked up to my car shouting, asking me to open my window. I'm a white boy from the suburbs, and not wanting to have my driver's side window broken, I complied. He made some brief conversation, "So, are you graduating this year?" To this and other questions I just replied yes, disregarding completely the fact that I had graduated high school two years prior, I just wanted him to go away -- one of the few suburban defense mechanisms with a reasonable success rate (unlike the "just give him your money and ask him not to hurt you" defense, which runs a solid 3% nowadays). He moved right along to his goal: he wanted money -- $2.80 to be exact, but if I couldn't find the $0.80, he would be happy to take $3.00. There goes the latte that I oh-so-triumphantly chose over the sign-holding New York tramp, and who did it go to? A scruffy looking guy riding a bicycle who scared the fuck out of me at a ghetto Wawa in south Jersey. Oh, and he advised me never to open my window to a black man like himself ever again, lest I get car-jacked, including a demonstration of how someone "could" just reach right into my car. Now where did all of this go wrong?


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*Thanks for giving a fuck folks, I managed to scrape up the $9 bucks, and was very satisfied with Orlando Bloom's character in fact being a cowardly pretty boy rather than a manly Greek warrior.

**Read Wawa, think 7-11 without the expired dairy products and a MUCH wider selection of Jerky. Mmmm... Jerky.

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