Go to the shitty part of any decent-sized American city–usually on the edges of the old downtown area–in the early evening, and you will find a line of battered-looking men standing in line outside of a building–usually run-down. The building is a homeless shelter. A typical one will give you two nights a month for free, and more if you can pay a small amount. Dinner is a baloney sandwich or something similar, almost always preceded by a non-optional and decidedly denominational church service. A couple of guys will walk up to the front and accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior. The Christ will accept them with enthusiasm; the shelter staff, not so much, having seen it aaaaaaaall before. Crusty old bums who may want to blow you, fuck you, get blown by you, or get fucked by you. (That’s 24 possible combinations of 1 or more sexual acts involving a crusty old bum and you, which equals 16; most of the time, nobody asks, and if they do, you politely say “no”–I am not judgmental, and I am not easily shocked–and that’s generally the end of it. So, a total of 17 possible outcomes, exactly one of which does not involve sexual contact between a crusty old bum and you.) Breakfast is most likely to be a cup of coffee and a piece of toast (butter, unlike the church service, is optional), and then it’s out the door and on the street, regardless of the weather–no loitering during the day. That’s fine, since you need to get to the day labor office really early if you want to find work, and if that part of your morning is unsuccessful, you need to haul ass to the plasma donation center as quickly as possible–otherwise your protein drops too low and they won’t let you donate, which means that you’re out round-trip bus fare and still have to figure out where you’re going to sleep that night. The worst one that I’ve ever stayed in was a dank and dark one in Columbus, Ohio, next to a White Castle. The best one that I’ve ever stayed in was a Veterans of America one outside of Sacramento, California–clean, sunny, and they offered some social-service-type stuff. God bless the Veterans of America. Hell, God bless anyone who will feed and house the homeless.
Then you join the Navy. Boot camp is 80 guys in a large room; big, clean showers in the morning; 15 minutes three times a day to consume all of the food you can inhale (I actually gained weight in boot camp), and then it’s off to do interesting and/or fun things like make emergency flotation devices out of your clothing, learn what to do in case of nerve gas attack (gas mask on, syrette of atropine jammed hard into your thigh if you think you got exposed), and fight fires (pretty involved on a ship, since all of that water has to go somewhere outside of the vessel, or your ass is going to sink). When you get to your ship, it’s three bunks deep in a compartment that smells of sweat, farts, and depression. Plus, you learn to sleep with a 5-inch artillery piece firing directly over your head. (I did, anyway.) But, it’s warm, they feed you well, the food is quite good, and cigarettes are $1 a pack once you get out of American territorial waters.
Out of the Navy, you head to a super-nice college where everybody but you and the 12 kids in the theater department is polite; smart; attractive, even (possibly especially–who knows how the Upper East Side mates) in LL Bean boots; from New York, New Jersey, or Northern Virginia; and 18-22 years old. But, you’re married and have a kid, and you’re paying your way via the GI Bill and weekends spent drawing arterial blood samples and adjusting the occasional ventilator at the local hospital, so you live in one of those apartment complexes. That means (1) at night, entering the kitchen with your eyes closed, stomping like a motherfucker to kill as many cockroaches as possible, and then turning on the lights; and (2) during the day, hunting for their egg cases, ’cause every one that you crush and dump gleefully down the garbage disposal is 15 little cockroaches preemptively and preventatively obliterated.
…all of this to make it clear to my friends who have expressed concern about the fact that I’m living in a pod hostel at the moment that it is totally fine. Warm, clean, and so far no bums have suggested blowing me, fucking me, me blowing them, or me fucking them. Not that anyone makes a man of my age that kind of offer very often–I still politely say “no,” but being an old fat bald guy…at this point, I take it as a compliment.
English notes
Decent-sized: not small, but not necessarily big, either. How much cake do you want? Gimme a decent-size piece, but not too big, ’cause I’m old, fat, and bald. How I used it in the post: Go to the shitty part of any decent-sized American city–usually on the edges of the old downtown area–in the early evening, and you will find a line of battered-looking men standing in line outside of a building–usually run-down.
To be out (something of value): To have spent a quantity of money or rendered something of value without getting anything in return. I bought a bus ticket, but then I got stopped and frisked and I missed the bus, so now I’m out $25.50 and I’m still stuck in this shithole. How I used it in the post: You’re out round-trip bus fare and still have to figure out where you’re going to sleep that night.
Boot camp is the American military’s basic training. Recent graduates are known as boot camps, or just boots–confusing, I know. No less than in France, where said recent graduates are either pieds-bleus (did I pluralize that correctly??), or just bleus.
Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics that (in my very limited understanding) has to do with efficiently calculating the number of possible combinations of things. No hate mail on this, please—just correct me in the Comments section. The formula that appears in this post appeared on Quora–if you can prove it (in the mathematical sense), that would be much appreciated. Note that I did not do the subtraction of 1, because the formula is for proper subsets only, and experience has given me no reason to exclude the non-proper subset option.
Proper subsets: subsets that do not contain all of the members of a set.
Non-proper subsets: subsets that include the subset containing all of the members of a set. So, for the set A = {1, 2}, the set of proper subsets is {1} and {2} (and maybe {}, the “empty set”–I don’t remember from Linguist School). The set of non-proper subsets is {1}, {2}, and {1,2}.
Zipf's Law 