I'm a-feared that this entry is not going to be quite as knee-slappingly-hilarious as my last one was. Then again, I'm not even sure that it will make it live, given that diaryland has been bouncing up and down all day.

So Cher over there reminded me of bums. HE was talking about an old lady. But I've already covered my icky old lady story and lord knows THAT resulted in massive numbers of extremely gross googles, so I'm talking about bums. And, yes, TG, I will be calling you Cher from now on. I almost peed my pants when I saw your guestbook entry there.

That google however does not EVEN compare to "baby+sister+blowjob". You, mister (10-to-one it's a guy), go shoot yourself RIGHT NOW.

Also the "dog+sex" thing. Ew, ew and ew. In fact, I don't even KNOW how I turned up as a result of that. I mean, christ, I'm no prude. But jeeeeeeez.

If you live in New York City, you have a relationship with bums. It may be positive or negative or even both.

The one I'm thinking of at the moment is the one who very surprisingly kissed me.

She asked me for a cigarette. This was while the saddest christmas tree in the whole world was right outside our office building. It was the tree decorated with angels, each representing a person killed in the WTC. Extremely sad tree. Lots of sad people around it all the time.

Bum lady wasn't a mourner, she was definitely a bum. We have a couple. There's this one guy who's almost always there. I will NOT give him anything, however, largely because he's always sitting there with at *least* one, usually more, bottle of vodka, bourbon, etc next to him. Now. I'm reasonably convinced that most of the time if I give a bum money it's going straight down his/her throat or straight into the pipe, one. But you don't have to be so OBVIOUS about it. I mean, really. Also we see him a lot eating entire pizzas. I'm starting to think he lives better than I do.

On principle, however, I will almost always give someone a cigarette. I guess because there's really only one thing to do with a cigarette: smoke it. Ain't nobody gonna take my cigarette and magically turn it into crack or anything.

I will grant you that this does have the side effect of causing me to hide my cigarette if I'm passing an especially scary bum. We have quite a few of those, more now since they dumped hundreds of people out of the mental ward. Many of them scream at nothing in particular, then you. It's not so fun. And now we've also had a couple of brick incidents. One brick incident (i.e., bum hitting lady over the head with one) I could pass off as a fluke. But TWO? From two separate people? I sense a trend. I do not want to be hit over the head with a brick. Or pushed under a train, of which there have been definitely more than two instances in the past couple of years.

And I won't ever, ever, ever give money to the gutter punks with dogs or cats. I'm totally fine with you taking your own skanky ass into the street, but it's not fair to do that to an animal. Really, not cool. Also most of our gutter punks have actual decent homes with actual caring parents in them, typically in New Jersey. I can't get behind that, honestly.

Back to kissing bum lady.

She was so enraptured by my cigarette donation that she totally unexpectedly grabbed me for a hug and kissed me on the cheek.

Now. There's a few problems I have with this. The first problem is that I am really not so fond of urine. Or the smell of it. Especially pushed all up against my body. Ick, ick.

The second problem has nothing to do with bums. I don't like to be touched by strangers. At ALL. Ever. In any way. I can put up with a handshake, that is acceptable human interaction. I can also basically deal with the necessity of touching people on the crowded subway, but I tend to stand if sitting means being squashed in next to a male person. I'll sit next to a woman much more easily.

Like today on the bus. The guy I sat next to, very well-dressed middle-aged black guy spontaneously starts to try to converse with me about my Wall Street Journal, informing me he's a financial analyst. Then starts all pushing himself up against me in his seat. Yuck. I don't care about color, MEN are scary. The three or four men that I have been most scared of in my life have been white. I don't trust strange men as far as I can throw 'em. This has been proved to be the safest approach to the male universe. But this guy was creeping me out regardless.

Intentional Stranger Male Touching is the worst. I Do Not cope with that. I get very snippy and very GONE as quickly as possible. Like a guy in a bar putting his hand on me. You, sir, are gonna get your ass cursed out as quickly as I can get the filth out of my mouth at you. Hate it. A lot.

So, I mean, on a scale of bad touching, bum lady was fairly up there, largely because of the urine stink, however. Well...that and the kiss. It's not often a random person gives you a great big wet kiss on the cheek.

Mostly it was extremely surprising.

Okay, I've run out of things to say about Bum Lady and I.

In the meantime, people, where ARE you?? NO ONE is fucking updating today, practically, except Cher and a couple others.

Time for South Park. If I think of something, more later.

- onehanded