It's not mean because I really love them

This is probably really bourgeois of me, but I have favorite homeless/local vagrant-crazies. It started when I was coming back from New Orleans through O'Hare and a homeless woman said to me "Welcome to the city of thieves and lame-brained meatheads!" I was in awe that she had spoken such a profound sentiment directly to me, and it made and makes me feel a little special. When I was in Oshkosh, there were a lot of people who had been dumped out of the enormous downtown halfway house LOOONG before they were halfway and they would hang out at the local Country Kitchen and my friend Flossie and I would hang out there for hours waiting for them to drop us some morsels of wisdom and/or insanity. My favorite was Downtown Tony, also known as Mr. T. He used to always ask people if they were employed before he panhandled from them. I thought that was pretty high-minded of him.

Iowa City was not without it's homeless dudes, but there weren't many that were as colorful as the dudes in Oshkosh. I have to say though that there are a couple new people in Iowa City that I am really liking. The first one came in the workout room at the Rec Center a few weeks ago. He walked in with a viewfinder, like the old plastic ones we grew up with, glued to his eyes. He gazed into it intently until he got into the seat of the stationary bike, he biked for about ten minutes, then he got up and grabbed a cracked hand mirror out of his cargo pant pocket and held that up to his face as closely as he held the viewfinder as he walked out of the room. I think there is something deeply poetic about that and I wish I knew more about him, but I also sort of like the mystery of how he deals with images and reflections.

The other guy maybe doesn't count. He is sitting right next to me. (Is this a terrible violation that I am writing this as he is sitting here fright now? I'm sorry if it is.) He has a plastic briefcase like the one my dad carried in the 70s filled with paperback copies of Brotherhood of War. Probably like ten copies stacked on top of each other. He opened the briefcase, rearranged them like five times, and then he picked one and opened it to the middle and started reading.

The reason I think he might not count is that he's clearly not a homeless guy. He's very clean and unmussed and it appears that he's being looked after by his companion. So he's just quirky.
I love that he has so many copies of the same book, though. In a briefcase. I appreciate the air of authority it gives him. Oh, he just looked at me. Should I be writing this??

Eeehhh... !!!