Against all odds, I met him once, Horatio. A fellow of fashionable vests, but not so much like Yancy. He has bored me with his stack of a thousand rhymes, and now how bored my imagination is. Wait. Why me talkin’ ’bout dis guy? Oh, for because dat guy gives plastic bags to them who is homeless.
In California, plastic bags are more valuable than money since they have long been banned as being at least as evil as Hitler’s underwear, which syllogistically makes money a greater evil than H’s underpants. I wonder if they were monogrammed, with fancy letters and a comb mustache.
The homeless, or FVs as I prefer to call them since it’s not like they are victims of an earthquake or the recent fires, cling to their precious plastic bags as lugubrious luggage bearing their ill gotten collection of stolen restaurant condiment caddies and cheap cutlery. And rocks. And doorknobs, probably. But especially empty ketchup bottles. What else? Socks? No… mittens. Knitted unmatched mittens. Possibly even a few bananas. The imagination reaches deep.
Bagman, Man of Bags, or The Man with a Thousand Bags once spent the night in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and during that brief time he bore personal witness to the surreal and ghastly scene of two unkempt, disheveled and half naked men beating each other to death in a fight to gain possession of a lone plastic bag that had haphazardly drifted by in the wind, probably all the way from New York. The scene wasn’t all high-brow and poetic with music playing in the background, like in that stupid American Beauty movie. It was much more visceral, bile and acidic, digestive even. Right then, in that singularly dark yet somehow illuminating moment, or maybe sometime later–the Twitter history is spotty, he committed his life to making a difference to society, and soon afterwards went out for a cheeseburger, but only because he was hungry, and one can’t change the world on an empty stomach.
This man, who is probably from Texas, or some other state without misaligned social and environmental values, is well aware that outside the state of California stores frequently give away plastic bags for free. Realizing that he could serve as a bagger of goodness, he has vowed an obligation to what has become his life’s most passionate undertaking. Tirelessly, he spends his days and nights handing out free plastic bags to those who need them the most: California shoppers. Grocery or housewares, he does not discriminate.
Oh, by the way, there are more used needles and doped up for dying drug addicts in the streets of San Francisco than there are plastic straws in the Pacific Ocean. Wait… San Francisco… Isn’t that where AIDS got started in the 1980s? Yeah, it is. San Francisco has always been gross. Really, really gross.
–DG.
Inside Doug's Head 