Every Spring in Chicago the homeless people start to appear in large numbers. The winters are awful, but they're peaceful and the homeless disappear for a while along with all of the tourists. But it's May and a little warmer and already I've had several run-ins with drunken homeless bastards. They're seriously pissing me off. At one of the towers that I work at, the homeless like to set up a camp under the interstate and harrass the shit out of us workers when we park our cars near their area. Well, I'm sorry you homeless fucker, but this is my fucking parking spot and I've got to go to work. Go drink your fucking beer and shout at people eslewhere! And no I don't have any fucking cigarettes to give you! And no I'm not going to pay you to watch my fucking car! We recently had a camera installed at work that points at our cars and rotates 360 degrees so that we can monitor them since the homeless often fuck with our vehicles. A couple of weeks ago I was working up in the tower and I started hearing loud whistling and popping noises. I swivled the camera aound and caught a homeless guy smoking a joint and lighting off bottle rockets and firing them up at the tower while tossing beer cans over the fence towards my car. I called the police but nothing was done. I couldn't leave the tower to confront him because I can't leave moving trains unattended. Yesterday, while walking down Michigan Avenue with Myriam and her mom, we stopped to look up at some building or something and I heard a mumbling and angry sounding voice coming towards me while we were all staring up into the sky. I looked behind me and saw some drunken homeless fucker coming at me with his fist clinched and cocked back as if he were going to take a swing at me. Instinctively my first reaction was to push Myriam and her mom along and out of the way of this approaching angry drunken bum. He was staring me right in the eye and saying something that I couldn't understand but it was obviously very threatening shit. I wanted to lay him out so fucking bad but rather than cause a scene I just walked off. Seriously, he was so drunk that I could have just simply pushed him down and he probably would have blacked out. Everyday when walking down Diversey to go to my gym I get asked for money on an average of about 3 or 4 times per day. And they don't take no for an answer. They always have something smart to say and sometimes even follow me for a bit until I stop and yell "no" a second time to them. But today, however, today was the breaking point. I was in the laundry mat, minding my own business, when a homeless guy that I've seen around the place several times before who I've seen on a few occasions come in and just shout "fuck you" at the people doing laundry, this guy walked by today and stuck his head in the door and tossed his empty beer can right into my damned laundry basket! I grabbed the beer can and ran out the door with it and threw it back at him as hard as I could. Luckily, the owner happened to be there collecting money out of the machines today and he ran out with me and yelled at the bum and threatened calling the police, etc. So, the owner of the place apologized to me and offered to let me re-wash all of my clothes for free, which I did, even though I didn't notice any spilt beer on them. Now I certainly feel sorry for some homeless people and I believe that they really do need help, but I rarely see them. Most of the homeless around here are just cocky fucking drunks who decided to stop taking their medication and ended up on the street because of it. There are free programs out there to help you get your ass off of the street, but these assholes would rather roam around fucking with the public instead. I'm fucking sick of them all.
anthony [email] said at 2:50 PM 05-12-2008: Ya know, if you're not part of the problem, you're part of the solution. I'll tell you why this is important if you can give me like a $1.50.
brandon [email] said at 3:04 PM 05-12-2008: God that shit sucks. I didn't run into anything that bad when I was up. Although I recognized some familiar homeless faces. I found that surprising. I figure, you're homeless in Chicago, you probably have a life expectancy similar to a coddled poodle left out in the Everglades. You might make it for a while, but eventually, you're going to get eaten.
The homeless in Chicago are very aggressive. I had one of them bump into me accidentally on purpose one time, on a busy-ish street. I think he was trying to pick my pocket or something. At the very least he was close enough that his feet where intertwined with mine, which made me go off. I think, he was attempting to knock me off balance or something, or use it as a lame attempt to ask for moeny. With the initial contact, he started talking really rapidly, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry sir, didn't mean to get in your way." Yeah right. So, feeling like he was about to do... something... I just pushed him down on the ground, hard, across my feet, he supplied most of the momentum. He come up a snarling mass of swearing and cursing. He followed me for blocks screaming and cursing and calling for the police to come and arrest me. I just gave him the finger. I was worried though, that he might actually attack me. No telling what those animals have, HIV, Hep. I'm pretty much in favor of killing the chronically homeless. Culling/killing or slave-labor. They're like any other wild animal/ pest population. Their numbers need to be controlled, and dangerous one's need to be put down. If a bear was doing this, they'd kill the bear, right?
meredith [email] said at 4:25 PM 05-12-2008: I think now is the time for Brandon to recount his story of that one Halloween night lo those many years ago.
john [email] said at 5:04 PM 05-12-2008: I think I see more drunkards and bums than most people because I work for the railroad and I'm always around shady areas of town where the tracks go. Homeless people love railroad tracks.
john [email] said at 5:16 PM 05-12-2008: Ha. Speaking of food, there's one particularly aggressive bum that will literally come up and grab at my bag of food sometimes begging for my french fries. I tell him not to touch my fucking food and then when I go in the building I can hear him yelling all kinds of shit at me.
john [email] said at 5:08 PM 05-12-2008: Yeah, I've also noticed that it's the same damned bums every year that are hanging around the area where I park at for work. Sometimes the city will send a dump truck and a front end loader to the area and it just drives through and clears out all of their shit. They'll disappear for a few days but then they just return with more crap.
anthony [email] said at 4:16 PM 05-12-2008: Unfortunately, the bum had quick enough reflexes to turn around and drink the beer mid-flight, rendering John's assault into an even bigger insult.
john [email] said at 5:02 PM 05-12-2008: Well, it was an empty can. It hit him in the chest but it was about the same as getting hit by a paper cup or something.
brandon [email] said at 5:23 PM 05-12-2008: Year before last. We had a bunch of homeless guys living next to our dumpster. They wouldn't leave, and it was freaking Amanda out. So I went out there one night and told them they had to move. They laughed at me. I'm calling the police, I told them. They laughed and cursed. "You better hope you're never homeless around here." One of them threatened. So I called the police, and about three cruisers showed up, because I mentioned that they had threatened me. They took them away and I never saw or heard from those, two particular cockroaches again. If you're on the street too long, you should get tagged like an abandoned car. The tag would allow anyone to turn in your head or pelt for a homeless bounty.
john [email] said at 5:39 PM 05-12-2008: Wow. That takes some balls to go and confront a group of them like that. The homeless in Chicago have really gotten aggressive lately. They walk around acting like those of us who are not homeless owe them something. I don't owe them shit and I'm really getting tired of their pushiness. Last month, one homeless guy attacked about 5 people right in the middle of the loop by the State/Lake L stop and sent 3 of them to the hospital. They were all females and he was just randomly walking around punching them in the face. One of them was a news anchor for channel 7. It's easy to spot the ones that have fallen on hard times and the ones that have decided to make a fucking career out of being homeless. They're the cocky ones that start shit with people who ignore them or get in your face to ask for money.
brandon [email] said at 5:54 PM 05-12-2008: In all honesty, after they were gone, I went and busted about 30 empty bottles in the area where they had been sleeping and shit. There's a colony of them that used to live at that abandoned mall. They used to keep me up with all their man on man fucking, fighting, and drunk, belligerent shit. Like having a bunch of insane, howler monkeys for neighbors. So, I just started calling the police, all of the time. And eventually most of them departed. Baton Rouge homeless aren't like Chicago homeless. They're timid little rats. Cause they know that they might just get shot or just disappear when they interact with cops, like that homeless black cowboy they shot down way back.
I look at them, and I just see trash. I don't see humans, people, I see walking excrement. Garbage. In a more just society, we'd put them out of their misery. They're a public health problem. They're vectors for disease. They're dangerous. But we coddle them. Coddling is for infants, not grown-ass men.
brad [email] said at 8:59 PM 05-12-2008: Damn, I've never known homeless people to be so confrontational. By far the most annoying "homeless" people I've encountered are the gutter punks begging for spare change on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley -- bratty white kids who've very deliberately removed themselves from the functional members of society for bullshit political reasons, only to beg for money from the same people they claim to despise so much, and then get all irate and sarcastic with you when you say you have nothing for them.
rick [email] said at 9:11 PM 05-12-2008: I've heard about them; they'll likely go to some expensive school after a year of that and then tell everyone they went slumming when they were younger.
brandon [email] said at 9:36 PM 05-12-2008: I've met a handful of people from Berkeley in my life. All would have benefited from exposure as infants, or a good strangling.
amanda [email] said at 12:02 AM 05-13-2008: Hahaha! This is truth. I go out of my way to avoid ever having to spend time in Berkeley for this reason. I find that my urge to slaughter people rises progressively as my proximity to Berkeley increases.
brandon [email] said at 11:25 AM 05-13-2008: Seriously, I've never met a set of people more smug about their place of origin/school. This includes Harvardites and New Yorkers.
amanda [email] said at 7:58 PM 05-13-2008: And they are dumb as stumps when it comes to doing anything requiring common sense, which makes the smugness all the more irritating. I don't think that there's anything worse than an overeducated imbecile, and Berkeley is full of them. They can expound upon Native American botany techniques and the cultural significance of the mandala, but ask them to read a map correctly or make change without a calculator or do anything useful in the real world and they practically implode from the stress/pressure. And don't even get me started on how unaware of their surroundings and self-centered they are when it comes to walking or standing anywhere in public. Walking amongst Berkeleyans is like being transported to a zombie movie, except the zombies are all wearing hemp. They'll happily stand on an escalator side-by-side, oblivious to people who might actually need to pass them, and those fuckers tend to walk at sloth speed and then stop suddenly in the middle of pedestrian traffic to look at something. People like that drive me crazy, and thus I do not go to Berkeley.
I had an interview in Berkeley once. One of the questions was seriously, "what would you do if a situation presented itself where you had to accomplish *two tasks at once*?" I think the example was something like, "you're filling an order and a customer comes in to pick up an order and pay for it." I thought it was a joke at first, but then I realized that this concept of multi-tasking really is a huge deal for Californians. I think that in the Midwest, it's implied that you will probably have to do multiple duties at any job. Out here they have to put it in the job description and see it as this amazing talent if you are capable of it.
myriam* said at 8:25 PM 05-13-2008: They'll happily stand on an escalator side-by-side, oblivious to people who might actually need to pass them, and those fuckers tend to walk at sloth speed and then stop suddenly in the middle of pedestrian traffic to look at something.
In all fairness to Berkeleyens (whom I, too, despise) the above statement is generally true of all Californians.
brandon [email] said at 8:41 PM 05-13-2008: When at airports, generally, people that stand two abreast on the moving walkways are of west-coast extraction. Why is that?
art [email] said at 8:50 PM 05-13-2008: They also drive slow in the left lane and get pissed off if you pass them on the right to go around them after waiting for them to pull over. And I'm not talking extreme speeds here.
myriam* said at 9:07 PM 05-13-2008: whoa nelly there bub, that is only and uniquely Northern Californians. They are FAMOUS for it. Southern Californians will pass you on the right, on the shoulder, at 85 mph. Thank God.
brandon [email] said at 9:36 PM 05-13-2008: Southern Californians will pass you on the right, on the shoulder, at 85 mph.
Mississippians, too, for some reason. I've been passed on the interstate, at high speeds, at the shoulder twice, and each time it happened in Mississippi just past the Pearl River near NASA's rocket engine testing facility. I sweat to god, at least once, there was hootin' and/or hollarin' that accompanied it.
amanda [email] said at 9:13 PM 05-13-2008: I've noticed that this tendency is particularly prominent in persons of Asian ethnicities. WTF? I would assume that coming from places where overpopulation is a problem, these people would be hyperaware of their surroundings and other people.
brandon [email] said at 9:38 PM 05-13-2008: So, it's agreed, homeless persons of Asian extraction hailing from Northern California should probably be sequestered into some kind of internment camp.
rick [email] said at 9:12 PM 05-12-2008: What irks me more than homeless people are the people who give them spare change. $1 is not going to help a bum. $10 will not help a bum. If someone really feels moved they should donate $50 or $100 or more to a homeless shelter and then next time they get hit up for change, hand that shelter's business card to the homeless person and tell them to call the people specialize in this kind of thing. The long-term homeless have problems far too serious for a a couple of quarters to solve.
brandon [email] said at 9:39 PM 05-12-2008: Shelters are insufficiently funded and exist in insufficient numbers, and really, in the long term, cannot solve the substance abuse, job training, and mental health issues that contribute to homelessness. When considering how to spend your homeless dollar, you're better off investing in a tub and some sulfuric acid.
rick [email] said at 12:09 AM 05-13-2008: True, but giving to a shelter is far more effective than giving to some random dude on the street. Some people want to help; that is well and good, but I do not want them encouraging certain habits.
brandon [email] said at 2:41 AM 05-13-2008: No, you misread. I argue that people should neither give money to homeless people - nor should they give shelter. Instead, a public fund should be instatuarated that creates a "golden corral" for the homeless. And, once a blue/blood moon, the homeless should be released at the far end of a canyon whose rims are manned by a Caribinieri of the citizenry, where upon they should be made to run a gauntlet. And from that gauntlet we shall choose our national leaders of the survivors, while those shot down shall be fed to the homeless. And thus, we shall rule justly over cannibals.
brandon [email] said at 9:35 PM 05-12-2008: A gutter punk in NOLA called my mom a bitch once because she wouldn't give it change. My dad whirled around, took the kid by the neck and told it: "I'm going to snap your fucking neck off and shit down the hole" Then he spit on the little faggot and choked him down to the ground. I was 12. It was the middle of the day over where those street performers used to tap dance for change. I've never been prouder. About then is when I started catching neighborhood cats and... disciplining them.
john [email] said at 11:37 AM 05-13-2008: Yeah, I don't get it either. If you're going to drink and be homeless for a career, then why choose one of the coldest cities in the country? Shit, save up for a bus ticket to some place warmer. It's like cockroach season in Louisiana. The roaches stay hidden all winter and then one day they just come out in full force sometime in the spring, pissed off and cocky, trying to take over your kitchen. The homeless do the same thing here. They stay hidden all winter and then come out in the spring all fired up and rejuvinated for a new season of messing with the public.
brandon [email] said at 8:09 PM 05-13-2008: It is definitely cockroach season. My cats are earning their keep.
I've always heard that St. Paul and Minneapolis hardly have a homeless problem because those that the winter doesn't drive off, it kills. Chicago winters will kill you, but maybe not as efficiently. Further north, and the winters are like tundras for the dispossessed, in Chicago, it creates a cycle not unlike that of the cicada.
anotherben [email] said at 6:48 PM 05-13-2008: i was in chicago this weekend and noticed quite a few homeless folks, until the rain came on sunday.. then they were gone. where do they go?
john [email] said at 7:43 PM 05-13-2008: A lot of them go down to lower Wacker Drive when it rains. I've seen volunteers set up tables and chairs down there with boxes of food to feed the homeless. I have no idea where they go in the winter though.
