It's Not Always Bad.....

After three years of habitation here, you get used to people who know you and your opinions opining how anyone to the right of Bill Ayers can possibly live in San Francisco.

The answer: A faith in the inherent good nature and rebelliousness of people who fully realize and are used to the fact they're living under a completely-dysfunctional totalitarian state constructed on screwball ideology and run by nitwits. Sort of like Das Kapital meets A Night at the Opera.

This week's prime example:

He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It's a reminder of how he has turned things around.

In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month's rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.....

Moore is nothing if not dutiful. He attempted to work his way through the byzantine city government channels, although he didn't get much help.

"I guess my gripe is that when the city came by and told him to get his papers in order but couldn't tell him how to do it," said Travis See, who manages the Custom Shop Clothiers on the corner of Market and New Montgomery. "This lady couldn't even tell him which building to go to so he could stand in line and waste all day."

But don't despair, folks; there is a happy ending.

Larry Moore shined so many shoes on Thursday that he ran through two bottles of polish.

Then there were the women who walked up to give him a hug, the tourists who had their photo taken with him, and the people - more than one - who stuffed $100 bills in his shirt pocket.

"Honestly," Moore said, "it is probably the best day of my life. And not for financial reasons. It just means so much to have people come out and recognize someone working hard."

Now we just have to work on the general realization that our main control on this system is failing to re-elect the idiot politicians who appoint, employ, otherwise protect, and receive generous campaign contributions from the dimbulb city employees who cause these sort of problems.

But there is hope.