linotypist

I have become less and less tolerant the more I run into panhandlers. What truly strikes me as bizarre is how brazen they are, despite having so little pride that they are on streets begging strangers for money. The chutzpah comes into play when they think that they can interrupt your phone call, your meal, your conversation, your reading, or just walking around engrossed in your own thoughts, and then believe that you'll give them money. The panhandler with the least pride of all encountered me early one Saturday morning. I was biking to my second job, and the guy ran after me, panting, and shouting, "Excuse me, sir!" three times before I rode away too fast for him to follow. If I had the time, I would explained to him that I was up early on a weekend morning--when I would much rather be home in bed--so I could earn some money. (I was running late, and explaining work to a panhandler is like describing plaid to someone born blind.) I have sympathy and respect for the homeless. Many of them are working. They are using public and private social services agencies to get food, find housing, and receive medical treatment. The panhandlers, OTOH, will not make use of these services because many of them require that they be sober to use them. (I am a problem drinker 17 years off the bottle, so I have some qualifications to address this.)

Hasn't worked since about Friday. :cry:

:wtf: Been seeing this message 3-4 times a day over the last week or so when I'm on your site. What do you guys have--a TRS-80?

Something I find amusing about hipsters in the Columbus area is the double standard re substance abuse. I stopped drinking 15 years ago, and replaced that addiction by being the Diet Pepsi equivalent of a chain smoker. I was at a party last year where I received a lot of unsolicited information, advice, and commentary about the evils of Nutra-Sweet and all the other ingredients in Diet Pepsi. Might have taken it seriously, except that the people giving the advice were all smoking and were drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon by the quart.

I am in the home stretch of a memoir about my friendship with Cincinnati novelist Robert Lowry (1919-1994), originally from Linwood, but who lived the last years of his life on Main St. (He was the author of The Big Cage, Casualty, and The Violent Wedding, among other novels. Does anyone have any pictures of Main St. (where he lived), especially the Dennison and/or Fort Washington Hotels, or of Clifton Heights (where I lived at the time) from that era? I may not include them in the finished project, but I would like contemporaneous pictures to jog my memory and supplement what I had written in correspondence, diaries, etc. from that time.