I wasn't going to mention this guy at all, but since I'm reporting on the day's activities, I'm obligated. So there's this guy walking toward me, and he's eating an ice cream cone, and he's "too cool" to look in my direction, so he walked past me about a half block, then stopped to "look cool," when in fact he was looking in his peripheral vision to see what's my deal. When he made out that I'm a trashcan, he got a little "too hip" smirk on his face and walked back toward me. When he got to me, he gave his ice cream cone a toss at the bag without looking. He missed. He, instead, coated my arm in Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. My reaction, of course, was to yelp, "What the Hell's your problem?", which startled him, but he continued to walk away, in his "too cool" shuffle, looking up at the sky. He then ran into a parked car, setting off its alarm. I laughed at him. Galen reminded me that trashcans can't laugh. However, I think that if a fellow trashcan had seen this dork, it would've laughed, too.

The Man on the Street

By far, the bright spot of the day was the homeless man who approached me mid-afternoon. At least, I assumed he was homeless; he might have had a home and preferred to sleep on the street, just to get that head-to-toe grime that effectively tells the passersby, "I wrote all the Sheryl Crow songs... gimme a dollar!"

This man walked up to me and asked me for some change. Galen, already used to discouraging people from talking to the human trashcan, told our new acquaintance to please not talk to the trashcan. Once again, this was a concept that befuddles, but when the explanation sinks in, this man said the funniest thing I'd heard all day: "Makes no difference to me... I talk to trashcans." Ah, the beautiful logic of the streets.

Now Galen wasn't happy, but what could he do? He sat in the background and stewed while my new friend and I talked and laughed. Turned out his name was Pigeon or Pidgin or Pig Pen or something like that, and he spent most of the past twenty years in Bangkok, until a run-in with Prince Charles forced him to come back to California, where his record company was waiting for him to cut another multi-platinum record. But then, when he got to the studio, everyone acted like they didn't know him. He invented the wah-wah pedal, for the love of Mike, and these people don't recognize him. For shame, record label! He told me more of his stories as he sifted through my trash for recyclables, and then his eye spotted a gaggle of tourists standing by a cheesy T-shirt shop, and poof! He was gone, faster than you can say Kaiser Soze.