CAREER, INTERRUPTED

Sometimes, life just isn't fair.

You did everything right.

Maybe starting off with being born into a family who had the means and the dough to put out for an ivy league diploma, and the connections to help groom you for your future role as a player in whatever high stakes profession would be au courant after 'B' school.

Either that, or you looked around at a very young age, and decided you were not going to play for the team that headed straight to the minimum wage line, and an early marriage to an ardent beau who turned out to be the world's champion beer chugger, so you got a grip on your life and soldiered your way through a state school while working seven part time jobs.

Whichever path you traveled, you made it all the way to just under the fabled glass ceiling.

You know. That place near the top, within panting distance from the CEO, or COO or CFO perch you had been salivating about since you elbowed your way past the first casualty on your carefully thought out corporate ladder hit list.

And, darn. Here you are, on the way to being a high stakes corporate player, a real master of the universe in a pant suit, a pedigreed spear carrier.....and you've just been canned.

Somebody hit the 'delete' button on your path to the other side of that glass ceiling

Not only that, you're no, er, spring chicken anymore.

You are "A woman of a certain age," who hit the snooze button on your biological clock a decade ago when you started looking around for cougar bait, instead of somebody your own age at the speed dating events.

And despite the trim body and flawless complexion and rigid diet,your health might not be so good anymore, due to the overuse of prescription drugs you had to use to calm those twitches, and/or the alcohol or drug habit you may have developed to cope while blazing that career path.

Which is a real drag because you lost your insurance benefits along with the job.

And you spent so much time and cash on projecting the right image to your networking buddies and your slave masters you forgot to save any real money.

Then the disastrous economic slapstick hijinks a few years ago -oops there went the 401k, and your stock options....or whatever other high falutin' crap shoot savings schemes you were smooth talked into, and you, silly thing....you forgot to get a contract with a 'golden parachute'.

And the Blackberry, or whatever techno gizmo you used to stay in touch with and on top of your world? The one filled with the names and numbers of all of those other 'golden' people?

Fagaddaboudit. You are the last person they want to hear from these days.

Oh, yeah. You've come a long way, baby.

All the way to Homeless Nation.

Welcome to the world of ratty hair cuts, cheap hair dye jobs, cheaper shoes, ill fitting clothing and taco bell for lunch.

It's still hard to believe it really happened. But it did.

And that's the point. It happened.

Whether it was an abrupt departure from your illusion of a secure and upwardly mobile life by overextending yourself to the point where you really didn't have enough cash around to last more than two pay checks....or a slow, steady descent, into the indignity of selling everything you owned right down to the last pumice stone. It happened.

And you need to get over it.

Because you're not going to get anywhere in Homeless Nation...or, find the way out, unless you grasp the concept: You're homeless.

You're homeless, and you have no money, and no status.

People look at you, well....like you maybe used to look at people who weren't dressed quite right, and lacked the polish and finesse of the well turned out career woman.

You need to get with the program.

There are plenty of those around in Homeless Nation.

And they all involve a women's shelter. Living in one, not visiting each Christmas with a few of your used Chanel sweaters for the donation bin.

Yeah, it's a whole new world.

Noisy, and badly ventilated, chilly in winter, hot in the summer. Locked down at six pm. Food you know is nutritious, but, Lord, didn't these people ever hear of Bernaise sauce?

And then there are the "Others." This is not a shelter in St. Barts, Madame. This is a shelter, most likely in a part of town where you are situated away from people who don't like to look you in the eye, or who just don't want you around.

And there's a reason for that. Some of the roomies you are going to be living with, are not exactly flavor of the month, and you will have to learn a whole new set of coping skills to interact with people you used to look down on, or actually sneer at.

And then, there's the job hunt.

You will be out there, trying to talk somebody into hiring you for a minimum wage position who is looking at your resume and wondering how you could possibly fit into a job answering calls all day from irate customers. In short, your experience, and education and life in general have made you overqualified.

Yeah, you're in for the ride of your life.

It will take every bit of smart and cunning and resilience and spirit you have to get through this one.

And take heart, there are more and more of you drifting into Homeless Nation. Soon, you will have lots of company, and then you will be the wise and experienced and savvy street puppy giving the what for and where's it at to the newbies.

And in the meantime, if any of those people on your Blackberry, the one somebody stole from you the first night in the women's shelter, anyway, if any of those people ever run into you out there in the other nation, and ask what you've been doing....just tell them you've been in the Mistress Protection Program.

STUFF

A house is just a place to keep your stuff
while you go out and get more stuff.
If you didn't have so much stuff,
you wouldn't need a house.
you could just walk around all the time.

George Carlin

Remember when you had stuff?

You probably had so much stuff, your stuff had stuff.

Your laptop had it's own leather carrying case. The leather boots had that snazzy silk lined crinkle drawrstring pouch . The pocket size spray cologne was snuggled in a discreet little silver tube. Even your bag had a a bag to disguise the fact that you carried a bag.

Oh, yeah, and if you owned a car. Boy, that car needed a lot of stuff.

And all of that exercise gear. And the shoes to go with that gear. And the bag to carry all of the shoes and gear.

And then, the Pet. Whether it was Fido the dog, or Crystal, the cat, when they had to go to the pet shelter when your life tanked, you had to cart all of their stuff right along with them.

And then the techno bling stuff. Whew. Hard to tell which beep was going off from which piece of all of that techno bling stuff you had to carry around to stay connected with all of the other techno bling stuff droids.

And now that you're a street puppy, you still have stuff. Different stuff.

Toothbrushes, razors, washclothes, t-shirts, baby wipes, six or so cigarette lighters, dirty socks, clean socks, ponchos, hoodies and ski caps and raggedy levis. And candy bars, and old bus tickets, and canteens and chewing gum, and 3 month old packs of peanuts

And you have to carry most of it around with you.

Now, how much stuff you carry around depends on if you have a Place....or a Spot.

A Place is where, maybe you will be staying for awhile. Inside.

It could be an abandoned house. A friend's sofa. A car or (yippee!) a whole van.

Or, oh gawd, one of those temporary, emergency shelters.

The point of a Place is that it is inside, and thus meets the criteria for sleeping inside. Except for the temporary, emergency shelters.

They meet the criteria of please help me before I eat my shoes and set myself on fire.

A Spot is where you will be staying outside, maybe just the night, or until the police find you.

It could be a viaduct, a cozy hedgerow, an underpass, or (yippee!) a porch.

The point of a Spot is that it is outside, and thus meets the criteria for sleeping outside .

Now, the thing with your stuff is deciding when and if you can leave it in the Place where it would be inside....or the Spot, where it would be outside.

You don't have to decide if you can leave it in the temporary, emergency shelter, because if you do, the androids who work there will eat your shoes and set the rest of your stuff on fire.

It's a tough decision. And it depends upon how many days you really want to go without being able to brush your teeth or change your clothes, or barefoot, if your stuff is discovered, and the person who discovers it decides they need your stuff so they carry it to their own Place or Spot.

If you have a Place, you could possibly put your stuff into a closet, next to the friend's sofa, or on the seat of the car or the van before you lock it. If the lock is broken you can stuff one of your dirty socks into the broken window to make it look like it is locked.

If you have a Spot,unless you can find a tree whose branches are sturdy enough and high enough to conceal stuff without busting your arms getting it up or down from there, or a bush so thick with growth only you can possibly know it's there, it's better to carry your stuff around with you.

And remember, you can't have too much stuff with you, because you have to travel light.

Because you never know when you're going to have to run real fast, and also because if you carry too much stuff...you're going to experience a phenomenon ER doctors describe as "Your legs have swollen to three times their normal size because you're carrying too much stuff."

Now, see, as strange as it may seem. that's because you've been accumulating more stuff.

Go figure. Here you are, you just lost all your real good stuff. Then you got the rather shoddy stuff. And now, it seems you have more shoddy stuff than you had when you had real good stuff.

It's Alfred E. Newton's Law of The Diminishing Value of Stuff.

Which reads: When the total value of your accumulation of stuff does not total the value of your first contribution from the Tooth Fairy, you don't have enough stuff.

The whole point here, is to get rid of all the stuff that is weighing you down, and preventing you from running faster, and causing your legs to swell, or, making you worry all day if the sock stuffed into the unlocked door of the van is going to fool anybody who wants to steal your stuff.

Or worry if, the bough in the tree, where you hid all your stuff is going to break, or a nosy road dawg is going to sniff out your stuff behind that leafy bush.

Here you are, in homeless nation, and you're still worrying about stuff.

And it is time for ole' Alfred E. Newton's Law of Accelerating Stuff.

Which reads: When the mass of your accumulated stuff exceeds the length of any bough on a tree which is low enough for you to reach without busting your arms, throw all of the stuff into the river.

NEW RULES!

We have been watching this tinderbox of a situation between street puppies who panhandle, and street puppies who sell newspapers.

And we have been listening to the racous debate mounted by people who will not distinguish between the acts of selling newspapers and panhandling, and so take out their annoyance and rage on all the street puppies.... and so, with all apologies to Bill Maher, we have come up with this New Rule.

NEW RULE: YOU CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS

If you must panhandle for the cash you need to make ends meet you cannot whine about how badly you are treated by citizens, the law, the media, and politicians, if you persist in giving all of them the ammo they will boomerang right back to you in order to to allow you to shoot yourself in your own foot, by giving them any justification they need to use their power and influence to take away your ability to solicit people for money while in a public place.

You are up against it here, in a rigorous and contentious debate between your so called rights, and the right-of-way.

And you are not helping the situation any by contributing to the stereotypes which the powers that be are trying to use to outsource a decision about this situation onto a voting ballot.

And a vote to end your rights to panhandle on public property would also affect the hundreds of streetpuppies who use public property every Sunday to do their job of selling newspapers.

And yeah, there's a difference between panhandling and selling newspapers.

Just try the hours it takes to put those newspapers together, and the inability to take too many breaks from the burning sun, or the wind and rain and cold and you'll know what we mean.

But times are tough for everybody. And if you need to panhandle, how about a new approach to deal with what is rapidly becoming a diminishing -and aliented- consumer base, and to soften the impact of your activity onto the streetpuppies who are trying to sell their newspapers.

Be a Gentleman - or Lady - while you're trying to separate any pedestrian or motorist from even a small amount of their hard earned money.

Don't go out there with that sign and a vest looking like a mope, carrying a big ole' pity pot, or acting like a Hell's Angel reject.

And for Heaven's sake, do not go wandering into traffic, or pound on a windshield to get attention. You will annoy and frighten the very people you need to impress.

Say "Please," and "Thank You." And "Sir," and "Maam," instead of "Dude," or "Honey."

Do not look pathetic. Do not whine about some relative's operation, or needing train fare to get to a construction job in the next state, or say you haven't eaten anything in two months.

None of those obvious thinly veiled entreaties will pass the sniff test of a seasoned contributor/

If your request is rejected. Be a mensch. Name calling is for losers, and could bring the law down on your head.

And no leering at the ladies. This is not Match.com. This is commerce.

You are offering yourself as a worthy recipient of a part of the consumer's hard earned money.

The consumer is buying a sense of gratification and good will he missed by not calling the 800 number for the poor people in Dubai.

In addition, owing to your new presentation and good manners, the outraged and alienated citizens lawmen, and politicians and reporters who think street puppies are all a bunch of raggedy, spoiled, dishonest, drunken road dawgs will have to eat the next news story portraying all street puppies as, well you know, what we just said

And the hundreds of people who are out there selling newspapers will have an easier time of it, knowing their customers are not going to take out their ire at the panhandlers on them.

Ok, panhandlers and newspaper vendors can shake hands and return to their corners.

And now....how about a New Rule for people who are charged with looking after the needs of street puppies.

It's hard to know where to start.

Hmm. We got street puppies...we got people in charge of helping street puppies.

Ok. Just thought of a real good New Rule for people in charge of helping street puppies

NEW RULE: YOU CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS EITHER


You cannot hire people to run the federal and state and municipal and private agencies and organizations charged with seeing to the needs of homeless people, whose only guiding principle is personal ambition.

And/or who use their largely unchecked power to abuse homeless people or worse, enrich themselves at the expense of the very people they are charged with helping.

It is the height of hypocrisy to blame 'social conditions' for the social problems encountered by the growing number of homeless people who have slid into the numbers columns of the vast ledgers you are maintaining to record and track the problem, without using the powers of those agencies and organizations to make an earnest and rigorous effort to aggressively address those 'social conditions' and actually " give a hand up instead of a hand out."

That slogan, or a version of it, being one of the more popular slogans - or bromides - used by many of the organizations and agencies whose often feckless efforts, or sheer incompetence, and worse, deep pockets of corruption, stand in the way of making any real progress toward restoring homeless people to productive and fulfilling lives.

Yes, there are angels in most of those organizations and agencies, both government and private who are competent and give heart and soul to their seemingly thankless chore.

A chore which so many of them regard as not only a profession, but a calling, and who do their work with oodles of good cheer, and patience, and understanding, and compassion and love.

And, yes, there are monsters.

Bloodless, heartless monsters in some of those organizations and agencies who have long since passed the 'peter principle' mark, or who abuse the homeless in so many ways, or think nothing of enriching themselves with funds and materials which never reach a street puppy.

And the alienated citizens, lawmen, politicians and the media, who are harping about the necessity of keeping supposedly greedy street puppies away from street corners and medians need to keep a closer eye on the activities of some of those monsters in some of those organizations and agencies who should be able to actually help keep panhandling street puppies off those hotly contested street corners and dangerous medians, instead of cooperating with the effort to criminalize them.

And a closer inspection by citizens, lawmen, politicians and the media, into the fiscal chicanery of some of the people in positions of power in those organizations and agencies would make the fiscal interchange between street puppies and their contributors at any street corner or median on any given day - or year - look like chump change.

And one more New Rule.

Nobody gets everything they want. It's called compromise.

IN THE ARMS OF THE ANGEL

There were 56 of them.

That we know of.

Their average age was 51. But they were as young as 21, and as old as 70. And the age of four of them was unknown.

Their names were common. Mary, and Robert and Norman, and Stacy and Henry and James. And unique like Adalberto, and Akimoto and Camerino and Diogenes.... and John Doe.

All of them died in the past year. From the the winter solstice in 2009, to the night of the winter solstice in 2010.

A winter solstice, that, this year, was heralded by one of the most magnificent lunar eclipses ever seen by the people of the entire planet.

And on that night, in this week before another magnificent event, the annual recognition of the birth of the Christ, these 56 people were remembered, in song, and word and the soft light of 56 candles. by friends, relatives, and clergy and strangers who gathered in a serene and beautifully decorated park to give dignity and remembrance to their lives.

For most of them, that event, in the celestial wake of that awesome lunar eclipse, would be the only recognition of their place and time on the planet.

One by one, the names were called out by a procession of those friends and relatives and strangers.

And one by one, the candles were lit.

A small flare of glory in that moment of light. And a name put to a face unknown to most of the people who attended. And a few names achingly familiar to somebody who will remember them the longest, and spoken softly and haltingly by somebody who did know and love them.

They died in so many ways. None of them went "gently, into that good night."

They were hit by cars. Or trains. Or somehow, perished in the waterways in and around a great city. They died of exposure. And beatings. And unaddressed, or untreated illnesses brought on due to the ravages inflicted by the physical and emotional stress of having spent a long time living on the street. And some of them were suicides probably brought on by a broken heart.

And for that one night, in that holy place, they were united in the minds and the memories and the hearts of the people who sang the songs, and heard the kind words, and who lit the candles and spoke the names, and shared some measure of the pain the people they were remembering , had suffered in their lives.

And next year, once again, at the winter solstice, in that same park, which for that night will again be a holy place, there will be more friends and relatives and strangers and clergy. and more candles, and songs and words....and names.

And before that night, there will be more cars and trains and waterways, and exposure, and beatings and and untreated medical conditions, and the ravages inflicted by the stress of living without a home, and broken hearts, and suicides.

Remember these people. Remember them now, and love them now.

Before they are only a name and a small flame and a song.

Remember them before they become only a memory, in the arms of the angel.

ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS

"We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics.
This is how we stay objective."

Dave Barry



Today, we're going to talk about the news business.

Andway, were going to talk about the news business as it relates to street puppies and homeless nation.

And today, the news is not good.

Today, well, actually, yesterday, one of the finest newspapers in this country went to press with a story that blackened the eyes of every street puppy who lives in the distribution area of the newspaper.

And they did this by printing a lop-sided, ill-sourced, largely anecdotal, sensationalized, scare mongering diatribe about panhandlers.

And then, today, reprinted that piece of rubbish, in their sister tabloid (tabloid here meaning format of the paper, not one of those papparazzi rags) complete with a reefer( no, the editors weren't smoking reefer, a reefer is newstalk for a headline on the front page with a reference to a page number inside where the story can be found) which included mug shots of two people who were outed in the story as having had "violent criminal records."

Now, that's some reefer!

And a lot of people who read both -or even just one of those - papers are going to believe that every homeless person who puts on a safety vest and goes to the street to ask for money, is a violent convicted felon who is going to push in the window of their car and yank them out by the throat, and probably steal their steering wheel, too.

And a lot of people who read both - or even just one of those - papers will believe that people who put on the same safety vests, and work very hard on Sundays to put together, and then sell newspapers -astonishingly, the very newspaper which printed the story - are probably also violent convicted felons who will push into the window of their car and yank them out by the throat...and probably steal their steering wheel, too.

See, this is really all about the two cities which we visited in a previous post here on Streetpuppy, and their continuing struggle to outdo each other in their haste to lay waste to street puppies for once and for all.

Eventually, that will happen.

City number two will bow to the pressure from city number one, and finally pass the required ordinance, banning anybody from selling anything on the street at all, or heaven forbid, asking for money.

And then both cities, and their politicians will root and crow about how they have found the divine measure to once and for all rid themselves of the unsightly, unwashed, homeless group of misfits who are growing in numbers by the day.

And the astonishing thing about all of this...and that eventual outcome, is that a fine newspaper is right on board with those rooting and crowing politicians,

A fine newspaper whose product is sold on the street every Sunday by all of those unsightly, unwashed, homeless group of misfits who work their fingers to the bone to sell that product for a few measly dollars.

Here's my advice to every panhandler who crosses the river from city number one to panhandle here in city number two. Stay home. Please.

And here's my advice to every person who dons that vest every Sunday and sells that newspaper here in city number two, on the street.

Get another gig. Something. Anything legal.

Don't waste your time with these people anymore.

Let them come over here...yeah, all the editors, and reporters and executives of that paper, let them come over here and put on those vests, and work for hours to put those papers together, and them sell them on the street, come rain or shine or wind or searing heat or biting cold.

Let's see how fast those ill-sourced, largely anecdotal, lop-sided, sensational stories about all the 'convicted, violent felons' knocking on windows disappear from their pages.

PLAN B vs MURPHY'S LAW

Every Street Puppy needs a plan B.

But, here in Homeless Nation, if you're not careful, the failure of Plan A can directly affect your ability to carry out Plan B, thus turning Plan B into Murphy's Law.

You remember Murphy's Law, right? It's the law which states that if anything can go wrong, it will...at the worst possible moment. And that law has a sinister way of mysteriously turning many a situation into one big world of hurt.

We're going to give you a few scenarios here which will further illustrate this amazing trick.

SCENARIO # 1.

You are relatively new to this homeless thing and haven't adjusted yet to street life, and you're , lonely, and you miss the friends you used to have, and the wife who left you when the money ran out, and then a nice person asks you if he could please use your food stamp card to go to the grocery street across the street and buy a few items for his sick mother.

In return for which, he will give you cash for the items, if you will just wait outside the store.

And you say, ok, but you need the card back real fast because you haven't eaten all day, and you need to have some dinner before you keel over.

PLAN A. you give the nice person your food stamp card, along with the pin number and you wait outside the grocery store while he buys a few items for his sick mother, and you think of what you will buy with the cash he will give you in return. Maybe a cold beer.

PLAN B The nice person does not return. You never see the nice person again, or your card. So of course you miss dinner. And you discover the nice person has used up every penny on the card for whatever . You starve for the next month, and maybe for good if the food stamp police find out you were dumb enough to do such a thing, and revoke your food stamp card.

SCENARIO # 2.

You have secured a 31-day bus pass through some nice charitible agency. It was given to you in the hope you could use it for transportation to find a job.

Another nice person asks you if he can borrow your bus pass. He, too, needs to visit his sick mother.

He will just run up to his mother's house, tuck her in and give her some vicodin for the awful pain she's suffering from the mugging and be right back with your bus pass.

PLAN A. You have some doubts because of what happened with your food stamp card, but, you haven't lost your faith in human nature yet, so you loan him the bus pass, and you wait at the bus station for him to return from his mission of mercy.

PLAB B. You stand at the bus station all night, until you are thrown out by the security guard. You have no bus pass, and no way to travel around to find a job. And the nice charitable agency who gave you the bus pass figures out what happened and never gives you another bus pass.

SCENARIO # 3.

You have a cell phone, given to you by yet another charitable agency in hopes you can use the phone to call your OWN sick mother, or maybe..find a job

But, hold on, another nice person is really needing a phone right now. He needs to call his wife who thinks he is cheating on her and smooth things out or she is going to throw him out of their sleeping spot, and throw all of his clothes into the river.

PLAN A. You don't want that to happen, you're homeless, too and you know how important sleeping spots are, and clothing...and wives. You give him the phone and of course, he needs privacy to make the call. So you walk a few feet away.

PLAN B. You turn around, and....he's gone. With your cell phone.

You don't get another phone out of that charitable agency because all of the phone calls placed on that phone over the next few days are made to drug dealers. Who were caught and then turned in the person who made the calls, and he was caught too, with your phone.

And so after you get out of jail you realize you have no cell phone, no bus pass ,and no food stamp card. And now you have a police sheet.

And while you were in jail, somebody took over your sleeping spot, and your clothes are all gone from the hiding place it took you a month to find, and none of the other puppies will talk to you because they think the police may be watching you...and that you might possibly, be a jinx.

And all you have left that means anything at all to you, or has any value, is the watch your late father gave to you. ...on his death bed.

You want to jump into the river.

But wait! Who is that...over there. It's a woman. Hmmm...kind of a good looking one, too.
She's motioning to you. She wants you to sit beside her on the bench.

And she has what looks like a bag of...soda. Yup, cans of cold soda. And some munchies.

PLAN A. You sit beside her. And hey, it's not soda in the bag...it's beer. Cold beer. And she hands you an open container of the cold beer. And she is admiring your watch, and she wants to take a closer look at the watch, and she smiles at you, and gee whiz......when she smiles, she looks so much like your ex wife.....

PLAN B. We probably do not need to go into detail here, do we?

HIGGLEDY, PIGGLEDY

We here in Homeless Nation are stunned to learn of the recent higgedly piggedly hijinks in the international diplomatic community

What were we thinking of? Or rather, what were our fearless leaders who roost at Foggy Bottom thinking?

Foggy Bottom being what the United States State Department is called by the Inside the Beltway crowd. Foggy Bottom because it is located in Washington D.C., where it is foggy a lot as it once was a swamp. Ahem.

We only heard about the situation because one of those diplomats who created part of the muddled higgledy piggledy mess generated by the release of supposedly encrypted cables between Foggy Bottom and U.S. Embassies around the world to the news media, is right here. In Homeless Nation.

Pendleton Stanford Heddington IV. And Pendleton Stanford Heddington IV is on the lam

And he wants what every diplomat who is on the lam wants. Political asylum. And diplomatic immunity.

Political asylum is granted by a nation to a person seeking shelter from another nation if he has a reasonable fear of persecution in that other nation. That's another way of saying, he isn't exactly flavor of the month there right now.

Diplomatic immunity is listed as the number one tool in the diplomacy toolbox the U.S. State Department gives to all of those mostly Ivy League people who are sent abroad to other nations to practice the art of conducting negotiations with representatives of other nations, and to employ tact in order to gain a strategic advantage in a calculated and polite manner.

In other words, when dealing with the other nation's representative, lie through your teeth..and don't tell him he has spinach in his.

Well, we didn't know what to think at first. Political asylum? Diplomatic Immunity? What a concept in Homeless Nation. We don't even have a State Department. Or a cable machine.

But, ole' PinHead Pupster....yeah, we had to change his name. He insisted. And substituting Pin for Pen was ok, but the preppy in him just couldn't get with Puppy. So Pupster it is.

Well, PinHead, poor dear, was right in the thick of it when a lot of those cables were flying back and forth between his overseas U.S. Embassy post and Foggy Bottom.

And when the Swedish person from Wiki dropped the dime on the United States State Department, well, ole' PinHead wasn't fired. He was evacuated by a bunch of U.S. Marines aided with close air support, right ahead of a death squad which was making straight for his office at the the U.S. Embassy.

Seems a lot of foreign nations were very put out by the things PinHead and people like him were putting into their cables about the people they were sent there to employ tact with in order to gain a strategic advantage. Especially the cable about the Important Russian Guy allegedly having an uh, inappropriate relationship with the Italian Important Guy. Whoa.

Well, during the debriefing -which we needed to conduct in order to decide if the PinHead could stay - we needed to determine exactly why he had decided to come to Homeless Nation for political asylum and the necessity of diplomatic immunity on top of it.

We don't have a lot of Ivy Leaguers here. Anyway not yet. And we were a wee bit suspicious. After all he had been paid before to employ tact to gain strategic advantages. What if he was actually going to covertly mount a military coup here? Take us over and do things US embassies sometimes do in other countries to uh, level the playing field.

And Pinhead knew he needed to convince us of his sincerety, so he came clean. Seems the State Department gave him a list of the countries he could be sent to after a reasonable length of time on sabbatical, and the healing of the identity changing face lift.

PinHead was given a choice of either, (and we are NOT making this up, it's in the CIA factbook!)
Akrotiri; Vanuatu; Dhekelia; Lesotho; Burkina Faso; Clipperton Island, or Djibouti.

Well, we were not surprised. Given those choices, any pupster would have opted for the relative comfort of Homeless Nation. For one thing, we don't require a passport.

But we were still suspicious. And worried. Who would be looking for him? Was he hiding something? Was this all a plot to see if we had spinach in our teeth?

But Pinhead had something to trade for our asylum, and diplomatic immunity.

His diplomatic skills and tradecraft. And PinHead had done his homework on Homeless Nation.

And, as he diplomatically pointed out to us, we do have diplomatic situations with other nations. Situations which need the finesse of a fine, calculating, tactful, polite diplomat like Pinhead.

For instance, he could successfully deal with the situations with all of the little rogue nations within Homeless Nation.

We do have a growing problem here. A lot of different colors, and languages and lifestyles and personalities and agendas mixing it up together. And all of us being in the same boat, too. Whew. Sometimes, we start throwing more than cables at each other.

PinHead's solution is to start up his own Department of the Interior. Well, for that, we have to give him head knocking privileges. And we are taking that under advisement.

And then, he very tactfully and politely pointed out the diplomatic situations with surrounding nations. You know, the citizens who live right along side us, and do not recognize us as a sovereign entity. (His words not ours.)

Pinhead is going to open back channels to those surrounding nations.

Back channels is diplomacy lingo for unofficial channels of communications between states or other political entities used to supplement official channels, often for the purposes of discussing highly sensitive policy issues, and all the while, calculating the strategic advantages.

Like when a street puppy falls off somebody's porch and they're not supposed to be there anyway, who gets sued?

Or a street puppy is way too energetic washing a motorist's windshield for spare change, and it needs to be detertimed who was at fault for the vehicle hitting the fire hydrant if the vehicle was still moving.

Or when a street puppy falls into the river, like who has jurisdiction to pull him out?

Or, the street puppy panhandling issue. Oh brother, are we glad Pinhead is here. Wait until he sees the councilmen and and the commissioners he has to deal with. That alleged thing between the Russian guy and the Italian guy will seem like a cake walk.

Talk abut highly sensitive policy issues and strategic advantages!

Well, Ok, so we're going to give him a try out. PinHead is our new diplomat sans portfolio. Complete with political asylum, diplomatic immunity, back channels and all the other bells and whistles that come with important diplomatic postings.

And, while we're at it. We're going to suggest to Pinhead that, maybe he could throw a little of that diplomatic finesse and tact and politeness into persuading the nation of Djibouti to throw some foreign aid our way.

And we're no slouches here in Homeless Nation when it comes to international strategies. We'll let him know, if Djibouti doesn't come through with the dough.....well, diplomatic immunity or not, it's the nation of Burkina Faso for Pinhead!