It's Official: Loretta is Unhousable

The other day I went down to the Main for a meeting. I rarely have cause to go the Main and this was my first visit in over year. The Main abuts one of the city's most hardcore neighborhoods, one that is primarily the domain of prostitutes, residential hotel occupants, junkies and homeless. Even though the library wasn't to open for hours, there was already a crowd of them swarming around the entrance. I had to pass through a gauntlet of people squatting outside the doors or standing around next to their fleets of shopping carts. The atmosphere was festive and raucous and it kind of reminded me of Tent City at a Grateful Dead concert, especially when one of them intentionally aimed a lungful of marijuana smoke right in my face as I walked by so I could spend a good part of the meeting paranoid that I reeked to my colleagues. That area of the city is exciting to walk through. Crackheads often have these impromptu flea markets of items they have stolen or glittery objects they have collected, which they tend to do like mapgpies. They're very enterprising. The other day my cousin saw a man who had a large display of three year old Yellow Pages laid out on the sidewalk that he was trying to sell.



Speaking of street people...Loretta was evicted from her FOURTH residential hotel room and has now been officially classified incorrigible and unhousable. Our beat cop reported seeing her near the Main wheeling a shopping cart brimming with all of her earthly goods, headed slowly but inexorably toward the park.