by James Jarvis
from Offline Journal Of The Damned
I like to shop at midnight. It's a thing I picked up when I was homeless. Peace and quiet. No little old four-foot Armenian ladies in a frenzied grocery rush elbowing me in the liver to get in front of me in the checkout line. No dozens of over-caffeinated Yuppies with "just one item" insisting on cutting in front of me in line for expedience sake. Day people can be such creeps.
So when I brought my little bag of groceries out to the Creepmobile tonight, I saw that parked next to me in the Ralph's MegloSuperGigantoMarket parking lot was an old Mercedes with a couple of homeless dogs living in the back seat.
I was homeless long enough to be able to spot a car someone is living in. The dogs lived in the back seat, their owner in the front. Their owner, probably a woman, is doing what I used to do when I was living in my car: the slooooooooooooooooooooow shop.
Sometimes it would take me three hours to buy one jug a water. In that time, I would read the labels of an entire grocery isle or two. In the summer, I would hang out by the freezers air conditioning myself.
Sometimes, I would wait in the produce section until the automatic vegetable sprinklers came on and catch myself a mist bath.
I'm sure the owner of these homeless dogs knows those tricks by now. I can tell from the inside of her car that she's been living in the old Mercedes long enough to know the ropes.
Tags: homeless, homelessness, homeless pets, homeless animals, pets living in cars, pets on wheels, homeless on wheels, ghetto life, south central, poverty, making do
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