Couldn’t ask for more, a cold drink, a sandwich and a shady place to sit after a long day in the Sun. Easy for complications to take over, and leave you uneasy, but with simple pleasures there is little to go wrong. Nor can those always looking over your shoulder find much for fault, when all that they see is that I enjoy simple pleasures. I have found that most of those sitting around waiting for chances to make threats are just as guilty as they want to think you are.

Looking for somewhere for a picnic lunch that won’t have people screaming, “We don’t want your kind here.” Is getting harder. Now they have put fingerprint readers at entrance to parks. It’s become safer to sit on the edge of toxic waste filled river. There isn’t as much complaining and you only have to move on when a cop realizes that you are sitting someplace. First they always assume you are getting ready to pour some vile concoction into the river, but the river is so polluted anything you put into it would help.

That might be what they are afraid of, but I don’t think so. Seems it’s easier creating the illusion of a monster and selling that than actually looking for the real thing.

The same goes for when they pass new laws effectively making you an untouchable. They have bought into the myth they created and have decided to believe it. Just seems to have snowballed and there isn’t much that can be done about it. Very little power is left to get things done so I am careful about picking fights.

Demanding a roof over your head when it rains is reasonable, and won’t have anyone thinking about it if the location is somewhere out of the way. Expecting that you can get a job that will allow you to pay rent isn’t to much to expect either. Demanding that I go shopping in the middle of the night annoying but at least it means that I don’t have to look at your bigoted faces.

So I win.

That there are fewer people out in the middle of the night means there is less chance of me getting run over, at least those who know me know that I’ll be awake sometime in the middle of the night and they can find me when I’m not sleeping or at work. Then they and I have to find an open coffee shop where we can spend an hour or two talking about old times, usually I can get a ride to the apartment and some help taking groceries in. As I get older that is more important than I ever expected it to be. Like most I expected to find myself sitting in a cheap hotel drinking cheap wine and trying to survive another day on to little money. It would leave me depressed, but I’m better off now than I ever expected to be.

So what if I live in an apartment complex that stays locked down, and requires a retina print to get in the front door. That there is a guard on that same door that is there for our protection as much as that of those who don’t live there is unvoiced.

– David Howerton