So here I am at the Dunkin' Donuts on US29 north of town - for reasons I don't need to explain - and there's this old guy at the counter feeling a bit chatty, complaining about all the bums and freeloaders he's encountered lately. He tells of the panhandler he talked with not long ago, who claimed to be making $300 or $400 a day, and how he has a late model Mercedes, and one of his panhandler buddies just bought a nice new RV. I successfully resisted asking him if he's in the habit of striking up conversations with people he has so little respect for when they accost him on the street and ask him for a handout. I'm always a bit curious how you can get such a wealth of information from someone you think is a total bum. Unless of course one of you is a liar.
The kid doing the cooking chimed in with his story of a "homeless guy" he met who told him about getting a boatload of hotel vouchers - at $60 a pop - and how he stays at the Hilton four nights a week, and blah blah blah.
Then, wanting not to be left out apparently, the cashier lady just had to throw in with "if I have to take a drug test to get a job, then they should take a drug test to get their free stuff".
Maybe I've been around too long or something, but these stories and the standard reactions and observations and what somehow passes for insightful comment have all grown pretty fucking boring.
I don't believe most of what spills out of people's gobs most of the time anymore. I get the weird feeling that an awful lot of these "regular folk" have heard these anecdotes in one form or another for so long, they not only take them as the truth, but have actually absorbed some of them to the point where they think the tale in question has sprung organically from their own experience. It seems like a variation on Munchausen's Syndrome - Munchausen's By Osmosis maybe?
The kid doing the cooking chimed in with his story of a "homeless guy" he met who told him about getting a boatload of hotel vouchers - at $60 a pop - and how he stays at the Hilton four nights a week, and blah blah blah.
Then, wanting not to be left out apparently, the cashier lady just had to throw in with "if I have to take a drug test to get a job, then they should take a drug test to get their free stuff".
Maybe I've been around too long or something, but these stories and the standard reactions and observations and what somehow passes for insightful comment have all grown pretty fucking boring.
I don't believe most of what spills out of people's gobs most of the time anymore. I get the weird feeling that an awful lot of these "regular folk" have heard these anecdotes in one form or another for so long, they not only take them as the truth, but have actually absorbed some of them to the point where they think the tale in question has sprung organically from their own experience. It seems like a variation on Munchausen's Syndrome - Munchausen's By Osmosis maybe?
Hmmm. Good one. And it brings up the thought that Munchausen Syndrome also applies to evangelical preachers who abuse their vulnerable recruits and acolytes with mythical nonsense in order to attract attention to themselves for money.
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