Somehow I lost my social security card, which, according to the government’s site for such things, I’m allowed to do ten times a year before it gets to be a problem. Regardless of the lenient replacement policy, there are hoops to jump through with this sort of thing, and you definitely don’t want to be without that piece of paper, let alone the number itself. Even a very brief visit to a local Social Security office will introduce you to people who seem to be flickering around the edge of official person-hood, if not off that radar entirely.

Speaking of which, the tiny object in the center of the picture is actually a person in one of those Hoveround motorized mobility things for people who have trouble walking. He or she is being met by the Portland police while begging on the 205 exit ramp.

This was going on as I waiting my turn at Taco Bell, a location as well known for photo-journalistic opportunities as it is meat-shaped food products. While I tend not to believe in magical signs and symbols (except for that one dog’s ass that totally looks like Jesus), watching someone being carried off an exit ramp–a second police car seemed to be necessary to remove the Hoveround–tended to affect my otherwise cheerful “I’m about to enjoy meat-shaped food products” mood.

I’d been thinking about happiness a bit lately. In particular, I’d been trying to cope with liking the work I’m doing these days, even if there is quite a bit of it. I’d joked that yesterday I’d expected a piano to fall on me or something, because things were actually going pretty well for me after a pretty bad patch, and I just can’t seem to trust anything outside my default state of mildly comic gloom. No piano today, though this image certainly had an effect. There but for the grace of a rapidly fading Subaru Outback and some luck on the job front, go I. I worry about these sorts of things, probably more than is healthy. “Maybe my mortal fear of this new kind of happiness is how I’ll be miserable from now on,” I found myself writing in an email to my sister. And that seemed about right.

I think a lot of us are a little on edge these days, a little unsure of where things might be headed next–a kind of end-of-the-world Mayan-xiety or something–and watching someone who can’t walk get removed by the police for begging sums up all of that fear better than almost anything. But really it wasn’t just the scene that got to me.

What seems to have affected me the most was the flag.

If you look very closely, you’ll be able to see it, one of those orange, triangular “please don’t kill me” flags parents sometimes install on first bicycles before sending us out into the streets all knees and elbows, wobbly and unsure. At some point, it had occurred to this individual that his or her–I can’t be certain–personal mobility scooter required one of these flags, and of course enough people for whom walking is difficult are out begging on our off ramps, that Hoveround offers the safety flag as an accessory for only $17.95 (on sale from $19.95 right now). According to Hoveround:

Our wheelchair safety flag is a great accessory for increasing your visibility while using your power wheelchair in busy areas. The bright orange color and extended height of this safety flag gets you noticed and helps to keep you safe. Made from strong vinyl material, our power mobility flag is designed to last for a long time.”

I have to call bullshit on that one, though, because this person’s safety flag had ripped badly, so that instead of being shaped like a triangle, it floated out into two points, more like the flag of a castle. It was the flag that kind of brought it home to me, because I imagined this individual at some point working through the following simple thought process:

I’m probably going to be doing some begging, so I’d better get the flag.

The helpless tend to have the kind of ruthless logic that can’t be questioned, like this note my equally cautious and deliberate six year-old son wrote, and that I took with me on my drive across the country.

In the most literal sense, Taco Bell might not have “food,” but it never hurts to ask them for water, even if you just end up giving it to someone else.

As of last night, I can no longer say I’ve never driven the wrong way down a one-way street in Portland. Thanks, Google Navigation. Can’t wait to see those Google cars that drive themselves.

All I wanted to do last night was go buy a few shirts. This is the sort of thing I’ve heard of people being able to do without much in the way of incidents, but for some reason Google has a weird blind spot when it comes to GPS near my rental in Portland. Maybe it’s airplane interference or something, but my phone’s little screen shows my blue arrow marauding through hapless Portland neighborhood raised flower beds, garage-based food carts, and backyard bicycle frame welding sheds while the robotic nav voice (I call her “Ethel”) prattles on frantically for me to “turn right” or “make a u-turn” or “go north, go north, no west.” It’d be pretty funny, actually, if it weren’t so dangerous.

This only happens when I have to go get supplies. The bike route I have to work is relatively simple and quiet by comparison. But any time I have to break out my poor, road-weary Outback (the official car of Portland, from what I can tell), all hell breaks loose.

Anyway, plenty of people were kind enough to stand on their horns to alert the strange Pennsylvania man with the busted out car window and mangled bike racks all over his roof that he was about to cause a major pileup, but here’s the thing about traveling down a one-way street: you only do it when there really aren’t any cars immediately in the way. One tends not to steer blindly into the grill of an oncoming car, no matter what Google is telling you to do. This is because we are hard-wired, back from our days evading saber-tooth tigers, to avoid doing obviously stupid shit that will get us killed.

So you really don’t have to honk quite that much when you see this sort of thing. In fact, the courteous thing to do, really, is just get out of the way and give the driver a little room to think. Me, I only turned down the street because it was clear, and, frankly, it got me exactly where I needed to go. Ethel is brutally efficient like that.

Once I got to Target, I was dismayed to find that all of their shirts had extra, unnecessary loops and buttons and stuff. I have this policy against wearing anything with purely cosmetic fasteners, second or third neck holes, or extra zippers that don’t really do anything (the ’80s were a tough decade). What I generally prefer to wear are shirts that have buttons in the front in order to facilitate installation and removal of the shirt, and that’s about it for adornments. Rarely do I need buttons and straps on my shoulders to bundle my sleeves and fasten them up. This is because I hardly ever Footloose dance.

This meant I had to find some other large purveyor of bland, strictly functional shirts. I ended up at a mall, which, as you might suspect, is where Puritan villagers would have tied someone like me as a kind of punishment for witchcraft or walking the wrong way down ye olde one way Streete. Malls give me what I believe to be “the willies,” but this particular mall had a JCPenney’s store, which has now been rebranded by a new CEO and an ex-Apple executive as “JCP,” and you could literally feel the new energy of that name change flowing through the aisles of the men’s wear section like great rivers of urine.

So I picked out some bland fat guy shirts in a rainbow of dark colors, attempted to pay for them and was presented with the opportunity to save 20% if I signed up for a “JCP” card.

There are moments in life when I revert to a kind of Woody Alan-esque stammering inability to process surroundings, and shopping in general is one of those moments. To be asked to sign up for a JCP credit card instead of just paying and walking away, it turns out, is one of the worst.

I said I’d do it.

I have no idea if that was the right thing to do, or if already JCP is charging me hundreds of dollars every fifteen minutes, if my name has been added to no-fly lists, or if I’ve somehow purchased five years of Martha Stewart Living magazine. I do know that the process took about an hour instead of the three minutes promised, no doubt complicated by the fact that Pennsylvania seems to have my address wrong on my driver’s license. Something I never noticed until moving to Oregon, where their JCP stores apparently offer far more rigorous identity checks than, say, the government of the State of Pennsylvania.

The sign up process ended up involving my social security number, entered multiple times into a keypad as the sales associate assured me it does not appear on his screen. Then I had to input my birth date three times because the JCP computer was confused by a leading zero in the month of 09. Apparently, the software engineer who designed this system for JCP really only anticipated people born between October and December as potential sign-up candidates, which I guess is understandable.

Finally, I was told that I had to speak to the JCP credit department representative who–and I am not joking about this–gave me a multiple choice quiz on my life.

At which of these addresses did I at one point either live or work? I got that one instantaneously, recognizing faintly the home in which I was raised and lived for eighteen years or so.

At which of these addresses did I live? was the next question, and, diabolically, it was a trick-fucking-question. The list included addresses I’d never heard of. Given that I have an incredibly poor memory and that I’ve lived places as seemingly improbable as Atlanta and Chicago, though, this shook me.

“I don’t recall ever having lived at any of those places,” I stated, boldly into the waiting silence of the receiver, and waiting. “OK,” said the small JCP voice on the line, “I have one more question.”

“Yes!” I told her. “I knew I hadn’t lived any of those places!”

I was doing so incredibly well on this test about myself that I basically forgot all about the shirts or the JCP credit card. I pressed the check-out counter JCP phone firmly against my ear, determined to ace this exam.

In which of these counties did you own property? A tricky one, though one of the answers sounded like a place in Georgia, a place I once lived as an angry young English professor who once told a Georgia State Trooper he should consider pulling over some of the Mercedes Benzes and Lexi I saw going faster than I’d been going on the highway. Who once told a woman in a convenience store that yes, the person for whom I was buying the butterfly band-aids probably did need stitches, then stared at her until she gave me my change. Where my dog once tried to attack a body builder’s pet python and nearly caused me an ass-beating.

I was so punk then.

But I got that question right, too. I had once owned property in Cobb County, Georgia, where my neighbor had told my wife and I that he was glad we didn’t have kids and glad we weren’t black. (We ended up teaching him to expand his list by becoming a foster home for unruly Alaskan Malamutes–something like ten dogs living on our white, childless property at one point, even.)

God. All of this had happened to me.

At the end of the punishing quiz, I was awarded my life, and told I was granted my JCP store card, which earned me thirteen dollars off my purchase. The card would be mailed to my current address in Pennsylvania, where I no longer live, which seemed somehow strangely appropriate.