Downtown Austin is notorious for having a bunch of homeless people hanging out at street corners. It reminds me a lot of San Francisco in that regard. There is something about ultra-liberal towns that seems to attract some of the craziest of the crazy homeless people.

I was in a coffee shop off Congress, just a few blocks from the capital, at a place called The Hideout. It’s kind of Austiny and grungy but cool. They have music shows and other alternative stuff at night. People that work here have Euro accents and they seem rather put-out with life, but this is very much an Austin vibe kinda thing – to act like you are all upset by the world and just sit around, thinking up beat poetry.

This coffee shop, like others I have seen in downtown Austin, is frequented by these homeless people, that come in and actually drink coffee and eat pastries and stuff. I have no idea how they afford these overpriced items… I can only assume it is either free or they use their begging combined with relatively poor money management skills.

So this guy in the picture below sat down and just started chatting it up with me. He was very nice, for a crazy person. He proceed to tell me what he likes to do is get shoe polish, rub it all over his face, and run around the streets singing show tunes. The funny thing is, my ideas are not completely dissimilar.

I told him his glasses were pretty cool (in a Napoleon Dynamite voice) and I asked if I could take a picture. He said, “Sure man, right on,” so I snapped it.

(All the pictures are gone. Times are hard.)