Station R: Cruising Under Sale

Rufus is a hopeless romantic. However, what I really wanted to tell you about is the panhandlers here in St. Augustine.

In most parts of the country, the people standing by the road with cardboard signs saying they'll work for food generally look a bit rough. Here is St. Augustine, which I'm told has recently had some issues with close to a hundred homeless people living in the streets, they look a little, well, less serious.

How about a man with a sign that reads, "Need money for a new leg." Okay, he was in fact missing a leg, but he's making a bit of a joke of it and he's surrounded by a bunch of people who apparently want to hang out with him. I've never seen a man begging in the streets who was so popular. Elsewhere there's a long-haired young guy sitting there with a sign that says, "Family killed by drunken ninja." Here's is a girl of about twenty holding a tiny sign that says, if you squint to read it, "Need money for bigger piece of cardboard."

I've recently finished reading Into the Wild, a book by Jon Krakauer about a young man named Chris McCandless who graduated from Emory, gave the $24,000 he had left from his college fund to Oxfam (a charity dedicated to ending world hunger), and literally bummed around the country for a couple of years until he ironically starved to death in the wilds of Alaska. Although not many take it to that extreme, all of us cruisers, panhandlers, and other romantics living outside the mainstream (at least those who are out there by choice) are perhaps not so different from one another. One way or another, we go out into the world, seeking.

One thing's for sure. You get a couple of beers into Rufus, and he'll start philosophizing.

It seems inappropriate to break the mood by telling a shark joke, but we'll do it anyway. What does a shark panhandler do? He puts the bite on people!