United States Postal Office

Today I HAD to go to the Post Office to mail out three tedstrong.com tshirts. It's the post office on Pine at Hyde. It is stupid. It is run by stupid people. There is always a line out the door and it always takes at least -- that's at least -- 20 minutes to get out of there.

Anyway, it's usually a pretty ugly scene in there, but today was a record breaker. Sure, I'm great. I know I'm great; you know I'm great. But, I was by so far the most normal person in there, and I'm not even that normal.

There was a homeless, drunk man in line who talked to himself the entire time. In the end he wanted two stamps for two envelopes. He asked the employee to put them on for him. His own hands were shaking too much.

There was a very weird couple in front of him, and they didn't like being in front of him at all. They were both nearing old age and they were both reading parts of the newspaper. She stood demurely behind him, waiting for instruction. He was about 5'2" and her much shorter, and they were dressed very, um, low-key. He was grumpy and she was subordinate, but not like Archie and Edith, more like a mental hospital version. They scurried instead of walked. Hard to explain.

And the man dressed as a woman whose mannerisms were extremely effeminate. He had lesions on his face and shook a lot. He was a man, but he was fully in disguise as a woman.

The gigantic obese woman in an all-velour outfit; the gigantic obese woman in an all-stretch outfit; the gigantic, gigantic, fat, elderly man, with a Stanford jacket on (he could not possibly have attended Stanford), with a long, thin black belt holding up his torn-in-several-places-and-resewn brown pants, but where there were no loops the pants sagged back down below the belt. He had missed areas of white stubble when shaving his face that morning. He had a limp and a cane.

A jumpy, young, Asian man who spoke to a few people in line, but not in a language they could understand. A white-trash woman and her white-trash husband; both with hacking smoker's coughs.

Everyone kept pushing up close to everyone else because they wanted the line to move faster. They were under the impression that if you move closer to the person in front of you, that will help the line move faster, because the line gets shorter.

I don't ever want to be any of those people in there. But when I was in there, I felt I was one. Everyone was so pathetic and awful in their own special way, that I felt I was drowning with them. I'm sad and scared that that is life for so many.