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[caption id="attachment_1722" align="alignnone" width="497"] Money, the gift that never disappoints. Click on the image to enlarge.[/caption]

Two nights ago, was a wonderful, warm evening; I found lots of interesting people, and things to have fun with -- the bodacious woman from Africa, who thrust a giant tub of rice and beans on me (yummy!) and "something to eat it with" -- an astonishing dark sauce made of liquid fire and crunchy pan scrapings. She called it by a name. After I tried it, I called it names also. Later on there was this nice man who called to me from his third floor balcony. He asked me to wait, he had something for me. Probably bottles. Third floor apartment dwellers love to drop bottles for binners, in bags, or otherwise. bags of beer cans are a splashy treat. Glass bottles are something else again -- "Dude! You almost had that!"

The gentleman returned to his railing and said, "here." and down fluttered a folded-square $5 bill -- I knew it before I saw it, because he'd done this years before, and I didn't realize who he was, and another binner, a few years earlier, told me of a resident in this apartment building dropping him $5.

It was a nice thing, and I told him so, he said he liked how I was always "out there trying." How nice to be appreciated. For years, right below his apartment, on the second floor, was a nice guy who always encouraged me, and commented how tidy and professional I was.

In the lanes, binners are under constant scrutiny -- not from everyone, just a select few. Foremost would be building managers, many of whom keep track of binners, Santa-style, finding out who's naughty, and who's nice, and occasionally bestowing favours, like bags of bottles, or blue bin access. Many residents -- home owners, and apartment dwellers, do the same. I could make a list of Fairview residents who are such serial Samaritans that they earn nicknames among the larger binning community. There have been two people who became known as the "Budweiser lady, " owing to the prolific amount of Bud cans they put out. There's the "menthol cigarette lady," who takes a few drags off a cigarette, puts it out, and back in the pack, until she has a small carrier bag full of packs of hardly-smoked menthol cigarettes, which she leaves, hanging on a dumpster, and has done so for years.

People who are homeless -- who "present" as being homeless, are, often, treated as being invisible; ignored like they're not there. Some homeless folk take it badly, some take it in stride, and some take it as a challenge. It's not true, of course, they are all too visible to "regular" folks, who, surreptitiously, watch the "hobos" like hawks -- they just pretend to not see them, on the streets at least.

I'll never forget an encounter I watched carefully back in 2005 at a bus stop on the busy South-West corner of Broadway and Granville. A panhandler who failed to get any change from a woman was yelling and swearing at her. She didn't flinch, didn't pay the slightest mind. The panhandler gave up, and walked away, at which point, this woman literally sagged, like a deflating balloon.

In the third book of Douglas Adams' The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy five-book trilogy. It is explained that, invisibility being impossible, the S.E.P. field is the best way to hide a thing in plain site. Slap an inexpensive S.E.P. -- Somebody Else's Problem -- field around a thing, and people will walk by it, around it, even over it, like it's not there, because their brain is telling them that it's somebody else's problem, and they can ignore it.