Birds of a feather?

Scene: Downtown café.

An exceptionally decrepit, foul-smelling street person—even by local standards—walks in to the café. At first mumbling to himself, he starts walking up to patrons and yelling nonsense at them aggressively until the staff turns him out onto the street. The bum was carrying two tattered books: the local phone directory and Derrida’s Of Grammatology.

Maybe they can be choosers

Scene: The outdoor tables at an expensive vegan restaurant.

The beggar is clean, presentable, and polite as he comes to the restaurant door and asks for some food. A perky, energetic waitress seats him at a table and brings him a tall carafe of cool water for the hot day. A patron buys a to-go order of special salad and the waitress brings it out in a recycled natural cardboard box.

The man opens the box, looks inside, beckons over the waitress.

“Sistah, you got any real food here? Can you gimme a dollar for some real food? This is just leaves. This stuff is nasty.”

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The essayist John Leonard wrote once of a family reunion and his encounter there with his schizophrenic brother, who was living in a cheap motel (having burned himself out of his previous home). The brother had been reduced to an empty shell with neither future nor present. Leonard’s essay was, I believe, the first reference I read to the anti-psychiatric theories of R. D. Laing, to whom Leonard attributed the quote “Madness is proof of grace.” Leonard, to put it mildly, held Laing’s theories in disdain. It’s hard for me not to share Leonard’s scorn for medical theories that appear to arise from discredited philosophy instead of empirical observation, not when every day downtown offers observations like the preceding.