Scene: Shoplifters of the World

I was waiting in line at CVS, a long line, since they only had two registers going, behind this cute young thing buying herself a knee brace, and I heard a commotion behind us in the store. Apparently some guy had been caught stealing eyeliner, and was being confronted by someone -- this sharp-voiced Latina. I wasn't sure if she was an in-store Loss Prevention type or what, but she confronted the guy about the eyeliners, told him to empty his pockets. We're all turned in line to watch this fracas, and the guy, who looks to be perhaps Latin, himself, or Italian, or some other olive-complected soul, with a heavy black coat, a ball cap, and a black goatee-type beard, walks slowly out of the store, with the woman on his heels, telling him the cops were coming, and that she got a good look at him. She was on a cell phone at the time.

The babe ahead of me looked at me like "Huh?" (I could see she had braces on her teeth, which was a nice accompaniment to the knee brace she was getting) and I just said "Busted."

Nobody stopped the guy from leaving the store, although the Loss Prevention people (?) kept after him, watched him slowly walk down Armitage, busy trying to be inconspicuous. After purchasing my stuff, I went to the curb and last saw him near the Irish bar down the way, the River Shannon.

Meantime, I wondered: Eyeliner??

Scene: Furry

The other day, on the bus ride home, I saw a gay guy clearly out cruising. It amused me, because he was pretty old, but was ogling everybody who boarded, looking for play. That, and his outfit. Oh, my. First, he was balding at the top of his head -- so, he had that bit of a tonsure going, but that didn't stop him from zazzing up his gunmetal gray-silver hair with some product, so he had it spiked up ahead of the tonsure, which was an odd image if you saw him from anything but head-on.

He was wearing some pointy-toed shoes (maybe calf boots? I can't actually remember that), and some fashionable jeans. But the real cornerstone of his ensemble was his fur coat -- waist-length, not a long fur coat, but a brown fur coat -- beaver? Not sure. It was clearly the centerpiece of his get-up, accentuated with some shiny rings. The grizzled rooster hair and that fur coat, oh, man -- priceless! I wanted to photograph him for the sake of fashionable disaster posterity -- a sartorial Hindenberg, he was, and yet he carried it off with a flinty-eyed, hard-won kind of swishy dignity, I suppose: he didn't pretend to be anything but exactly what he was, and he was so clearly out for whatever he could hope to get that night.

Quite a look he had going, like some European sexual tourist run amok. He got off in the Gold Coast, for parts unknown.