It's 8 am when we leave the CM PRESS building this morning (12/31). The fog is so heavy and thick that the ground is rain wet. No problem. We have the mutation and we're producing Vitamin D as we drive.
We turn from Harbor on to West 19th Street looking for homeless people. We see some likelies walking down the sidewalk, but we keep going to Placentia and then to the alley behind Center Street where homeless people are reportedly attacked from time to time.
We drive the length of the heavily potholed alley. The back of the Vista Shopping Center is on our right and hundreds of apartments are on our left. We pass a parked car with a Mexican license plate. Nothing odd in that in this neighborhood. Then we start seeing graffiti on the wall on our right. Not much, mostly stuff that has already been painted over. Then we see one that looks fresh. It reads "WS 18th St XV3." We wonder if this has something to do with the attack on the guy who reported being shot in the eye by a paint ball. No paint ball guns in sight. Punks are probably late risers.
We leave the alley and head over to where we earlier saw three homeless people huddling in the fog in front of the Lions Den bar across from the Someone Cares Soup Kitchen (the finest restaurant on W. 19th Street).
We recognize Gregory Dahlgren. He's the guy who had been shot with the paintball guns and had his photo either in the Katrina Foley Almost Daily Daily Pilot or in the OCR. We look at his eye, it's mostly just red on the skin around the eye, but to us the eyeball looks fine. Probably better than our own. We wonder if the original reports were exaggerated.
He tells us the attackers were kids. We ask how old they were, and he replies about 26 or 27 years old. We tell him those aren't kids. He says he's 48. We let it go.
All three of the homeless guys are looking at us suspiciously. We tell them we're not a cop to put them at ease. They still eye us as though we might have a paintball gun under our coat. Then, the one who's missing some teeth and who says his name is Bebop and who's busy drinking his breakfast from a tall can lets the cat out of the bag. "I know who you are. I've talked to you before," he says. "Oh?" we say. "Yeah, it was aboard an alien space ship."
We make a mental note to send the men in black over to erase his memory later in the day and leave.
We forgot to ask these guys if Katrina Foley had been by with a plate of lasagna or for a singalong. We'll try to remember next time.
The Senior Center
It's now about 8:55 am and we wheel into the Senior Center on West 19th Street. We get out of the CM PRESSMOBILE and go over to the front door where there are 12 geezers all standing around in the fog rattling their keys and talking about nothing while waiting for the place to open.
We blend in with the geezers and wait. We try to strike up a casual conversation but it falls flat. The alien spaceship thing, probably.
We continue waiting. Nothing happens. The place stays locked up. No signs of life inside. No signs on the door saying they're not opening today. We wait and wait and wait. More geezers show up. The Senior Center is locked up tight. We look for paintball guns. None in sight. At about 9:15 some geezers start leaving. More arrive. We mindlessly start rattling our keys and suddenly fear that geezerness is contagious, so at 9:30 we also leave.
Maybe for the next geezer art project at the Senior Center someone can come up with a sign indicating the place isn't going to open or is opening late. Hey, we know where they can get some paint for the sign.
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Those are our opinions. Thanks for reading them.