Was just talking about taggers in the Mission. This homeless guy in the fruit vendors doorway got hit. That’s ridiculous.

Passed by the first box truck I ever owned. Sold it to two friends of mine who are doing their own junk hauling. They live in the mission where graffiti is unstoppable.

Jimbo took a 360 degree photo of the shop.

This is George. We met online. Two older men in relationships looking for a walk on the wild side.

That sounds weird. George found my website through the beekeeper video on current.com

He called me up last month and told me to get back to writing. We’d never met but he is an old junk man/wandering seeker and he gave me a few words of encouragement.

Between opening the shop and running Hauler! and going to City Hall for permits and all that I was sinking into the boring world of conformity and paper chasing.

It was nice to hear from a total stranger that my writing was interesting and I shouldn’t give up on it.

Thing is, writing doesn’t pay any bills and I’m getting old. I need to create a money machine because I like to drink and buy at the flea market. There has to be something for me to manage when my knees stop letting me jump off the back of a truck with boxes in my hand.

Writing is sinking towards the bottom of the list.

George gave another call last week, said he was coming through the Bay Area working with the Black Keys and would I like a pair of tickets and to grab a drink…I said yes. Finally the website is paying back!

I didn’t sell the trucks or anything, but again, George was awful encouraging and my girl and I loved the show, went backstage, saw the tour bus and got free tshirts. Thanks to George.

So now we need to encourage George, who is a little older than me, a roadie for a huge band, and thinking about how bad his knees hurt too.

In a dream true to a junkman, George lives near a beach in Florida and he combs the beach for driftwood. He dreams of making furniture and home decor from his found objects. Why not? Can we get an amen from you people that George needs to jump in and start bringing his ideas to market? It’s a long slow road for a good idea, and I think it is a good idea, so get started!

Another way to look at it is this. Come here, it’s about a conversation I heard in a bar. Someone I know, my age, almost 40, talking to a girl just turned 21.

She says, “I wish I was around for that (partying at bars during the grunge age of the 1990′s)”

He says, “It’s up to you to party so hard now the next generation wants to be like you. That’s how it works.”

Friend, that is how it works. That’s how getting 21 year olds to make out at a crowded bar works. Consider a 21 year old a rare treasure in the destitute pensioner’s pub we call our local bar and you see the allure of treasure. It doesn’t look like everything else around you. Maybe you hunt pennies, the old dull ones, maybe you hunt shiny women with skin that feels like a new Gucci purse – so soft and sweet smelling.

I think the anaology/parable demands us to say childbirth is the same as burying a bottle of high copper content pennies in a jar for the next generation to find. It involves leaving something behind, and so from one treasure hunter to another, older, slower treasure hunter, happy birthday Dad. I am your buried treasure. Nice work.

I also sort out pre-1982 pennies into the small glass jug because they have a copper value double their face value. Jimbo down at the shop has challenged me to see who fills their gallon jug first.

At this point I can see the difference in color between the two different time periods, don’t even check the dates. It’s a lack of shine, the absence of red on old pennies you notice. The old ones are like muddy water.

Happy Birthday Dad!

It’s nice to be the law, saves the energy spent being above it. The meter reader never pays for parking. Makes a nice crime novel title, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t the meter reader be a perfect sociopathic killer? The little Cushman three wheeled battery powered vehicle silently stalking the unsuspecting victim…meter man…a vigilante for city hall, murdering meter scofflaws…extracting only the proper coinage from the victim’s pockets that provides the necessary restitution…

When are homeless people gonna start using cell phones? I hired a long bearded guy the other day, he looked like Oggy Bleacher and was just walking by the dumpster where I was working.

“Wanna help paint?”

“Yeah, sure.”

It was that easy. He was from Belmont California, just a few miles south and home of MRIPs friend, Papa Sean. Wouldn’t you expect him to be from Philly or Jersey or something? Not a local boy. Anyway, this homeless guy used to clean pools in Woodside, Rusty Sunshine’s territory, then he started smoking meth. Now he’s painting a fence around a dumpster, one built to keep people like him out.

“You know any homeless people with cell phones?”

“Some people find them. You can sell them to the Mexicans for $20.”

“Why do people who have no home collect so much shit in shopping carts?”

“That’s the meth.”

“Who’s a homeless hero?”

“whatta-ya mean?”

“Are there any heroes in the homeless community?”

“Glide feeds us. They’re heroes.”

Glide is a church in the Tenderloin, and I was hoping to hear about a homeless guy who has figured out how to hack into ATM’s and spends the money throwing bbq’s out by the train tracks. But being homeless really isn’t glamorous like that.

In an attempt to bring relics of the past in touch with the youth of today we got a twitter account called mixednutssf.

You might look at it and see an invitation to a little bluegrass/rock show we hosted at the shop.

There were more discoveries. A young punk with a 6 inch Mohawk rode by on a skateboard, he was dressed in black jeans and hoodie and had pins and studs bolted to his clothes. He was talking on a cell phone.