I went downtown with Kite in the morning to get her daily dose of methadone. She normally goes there alone, primarily because nobody else wants to get up as early as she does. The clinic actually opens at 4:30 a.m., for working addicts, and others who do not wish to be seen standing around outside a methadone clinic during regular daylight hours. I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of this, but there is supposed to be quite a collection of prominent citizenry, including members of the judicial and law enforcement divisions, who appear there anonymously during the early morning hours. I hung out on the sidewalk outside the clinic, sipping coffee and shivering and looking more or less like a junkie while Kite went inside to get her daily ration. She looked to be heavily sedated when she finally came outside again.

“They actually let you walk out of there in that kind of shape?” I asked her.

“Got a good dose this morning,” she said. Her eyes were partly closed, kind of sleepy-dreamy looking, and she spoke like somebody who was heavily medicated. “Got to finish the bottle,” she went on, “licked that sucker clean. Then she gave me another whole cup full.” She licked her lips and smacked them, rubbed her belly. “Mmm, swaz gooood.”

They give the methadone in small plastic measuring cups, and from what I gathered, her first cup was only a partial from the bottom of a bottle, while the second was the normal full dose. So she ended up getting almost twice as much as she normally does. It was too cold to go to the park and wait this out, so we got on the Broadway bus and rode it out to the end of the line. We took the Speedway bus back again, and by the time we’d made it back downtown, she was nearly normal again, albeit a tad bit goofy.

We had some food and coffee, smoked a joint, then went to the library to get some books. They have this thing there once each week called a “Farmer’s Market,” part of this ongoing downtown rejuvenation effort that has be taking place for more than a decade now. I expect that when it first started it was really a genuine Farmer’s Market, with bushel baskets of fresh corn and pyramids of red ripe tomatoes. Nowadays, however, it is nothing of the sort, having degraded to a handful of about six regular vendors who cater to fruitcakes and the like for lack of a market for real produce.

There is one gal who appears to have raided her grandparent’s attic and pulled down a collection of hippie clothes and a Tie-Dye for Dummies handbook. She sells these monstrous pink and magenta and purple dyed tee-shirts and wrap-around skirts. She incidentally wears her hair nappy and died similarly to her clothing creations, as if somebody told her that those colors were popular back in the days when real hippies roamed the earth. I think that if I were to wear anything so loud, I would have to complete the ensemble with sleigh bells strapped to my wrists and whoopee-cushions on the soles of my feet.

Another fellow there specializes in sterling silver tableware. Since I’d been smoking, I was in one of my human studies modes and accidentally prompted him to explaining his art to me, which he did at length, since Kite and I seemed to be the only people in town even remotely interested in what he was selling. In short, he had taken to bending and twisting these things so that they would stand up and look like, well, bent and twisted silverware. They served no useful purpose whatsoever. I’d pulled similar creations out of my garbage disposal in the past, but I refrained from telling him that.

Now there was a gal there who had something that I thought was unique. She had a collection of glass medallions, paper weights, and nick-knacks that she made by sandwiching brightly colored paints in between layers of different pieces of broken glass, then heating them inside a kiln until they melted and fused together. I had no particular use for a 10-ounce glass medallion, and have no desk for a paper weight, but I gave her an “E” for effort anyway.

There was one canopy up high on the lawn that didn’t appear to be selling anything, except the tenants were dressed like Buddhists or something similar, with clothes fashioned from bed sheets and hair-cuts by Hari, so if they were selling, it would have been keys to enlightenment. They had a couple of percussion instruments, which I gather is part of the basic kit to attract attention by making strange noises. I made a wide berth around their little pagoda. Kite, attracted by the strange metallic pinging of their bongo drums, tried to lead me over to them to see what they were up to.

“You don’t want to go over there,” I told her softly, gently guiding her by the arm in the other direction.

“But they have music,” she protested. If you can call it that, I thought.

“Trust me,” I insisted. She pooted out her bottom lip and reluctantly allowed me to lead her, looking over her shoulder like a child passing a candy store. We went to the library finally and checked out some reading material.

“I thought you were a liberal, Panch. What’s with the indifferent attitude since the election?” Enon was spreading a cloth in preparation for our lunch.

“Yeah, Pancho,” Kite joined in, “I thought you’d be all happy about it.” She was helping with lunch by pulling out the contents of the bags and sorting them on the cloth according to some semblance of type. I had just returned to camp from a food run, had managed to score quite a bit. We would all enjoy a well-balanced diet today, except possibly for Skute, who had earlier consumed some kind of narcotic in pill form, was at the time passed out cold, and I didn’t expect him to awaken any time before all the best food had already been eaten. Snooze you lose, I thought.

“You know, guys,” I told them, “just about everything I voted for was a winner this time. That’s never happened with me before.”

“And you’re not happy about it because,..” Kite had opened a jar of pickled jalapenos, proceeded to dig her fingers down in search of the best looking one. I winced in phantom anguish. The chick actually likes jalapenos. And I remembered how I selfishly thought that I would not have to share them with anybody when I picked the jar from the store shelf.

“I’m happy about the minimum wage increase,” I said. “That’s a keeper.” The truth of the matter is that most of the people I know who actually do work tend to earn more than the minimum wage anyhow, so I really don’t see it affecting anybody in my particular circle. There are, however, quite a few employers out there who insist on paying minimum wage in order to keep their bottom lines. These are the same people who don’t pay for sick time or holidays, and forget about medical or retirement benefits. These are also the same people who threaten to move their operations overseas when the costs are too high here at home. They can get the fuck out, as far as I’m concerned. There’s billions of starving Asians who would just jump at the chance to earn $0.30 per hour working for their little shit operations. They don’t deserve to have Americans on their payrolls.

“So that’s it, Panch?” Enon asked. “Minimum wage, but nothing else really made you happy? What about all the Democrats who got elected?”

“I’m not really sure I trust those polls,” I told him. “Even six months ago everybody was blissfully unaware of how dangerous things were becoming. George Bush and his cronies were busy stripping us of our civil liberties one by one, and nobody had a clue about what was going on. Our Congress and Senate sat on their hands because they thought that that was what the voters wanted. And you know what? I don’t think they were too far off the mark.”

“The one consensus we all share,” I went on, “is that we all seem to agree that things are going badly with the war in Iraq. But is that enough for everybody to all of the sudden decide to switch sides? I don’t think so. These are the same people who elected our Republican Congress and Senate in the first place. These are the same people who put George Bush and Dick Cheney in office. And all of the sudden they decide to change their minds about it all. These are the same people who are going to be goose-stepping across the parade grounds on the first indication that the tide is turning that way again. These people are more dangerous than the politicians they elect.”

“Wow,” said Kite. “That’s pretty extreme, you know?” She’d finished eating her pickled jalapeno and had begun fixing a ham and cheese sandwich. I had my eye on the jar of peppers and was making plans to confiscate it before she got too comfortable with it.