yournextpresidnt

A few months ago, I went on a miniature adventure. I walked to Market Square and sat on a bench. I opened my notebook and began to write. I had an iced chai from Starbucks, a pack of smokes, my iPod and plenty of things to write about.

Five minutes after settling in, I was joined by an older man who looked remarkably like Tom Waits.

This is what I wrote:

I'm writing this so this guy stops talking to me - maybe if I stop talking, he'll stop talking. Somehow I doubt it.

We'll see.

He's mumbling something about drugs and market square. Now he's talking about the bus. Wants to know where streets are. Little does he know.

This place is scaring me, but in a good way.

I bet there's a story him him, but I don't want to encourage him by asking about it. Maybe he'll just get bored and walk away.

I have visions of him killing me. A struggle. He's wiry and muscular and he has tattoos. I'm doughy and out of shape. He'd take me. I bet I could outrun him though, if I drank this iced chai first.

---

I want to mitigate the insensitivity expressed in this story by relating my most recent adventure, wherein I dragged a drunken homeless guy out of Forbes Avenue traffic while buses whizzed by students blared their horns at us, but I won't.

Judge me as you will.

---

The first time I encountered Tom Waits was while he was apparently playing a homeless man living in Wheeling, West Virginia. I don't know if it was for a movie or what, but he looked just like he did in Ironwood. I didn't see any cameras or anything, but I swear it was him. He even sounded like him.

There's not much to say about our encounter. Again, I was sitting, but at a bus stop this time, and he was sitting next to me. He asked me for a smoke, and I gave him one, and he started making creepy suggestions about my age.

"What are you, about 18, maybe? You look like you might be a teenager. Maybe even younger than that. Do you have a girlfriend?"

I was 23.