You’re probably a little bit disgusted when you see some form of rotting food on the sidewalk but you’re a big city trooper and eventually you find yourself desensitized to the overall noisome conditions. You straighten your shoulders, lift your head and continue thinking about whatever you were thinking about.

For the sake of this story you’re going to be thinking about supper. It is about 7 p.m., it’s cold, and you’re hungry and thinking about supper. You’re bit low on funds so you decide to go slumming and eat a downtown ‘diner’. The one you decide on is actually called “diner” (you can chose a different restaurant but I am personally against printing commercial names in my stories and “diner” is a perfect multifarious and cliché name for a down town restaurant).

You step into this diner and ask the cook to make you whatever you want to eat on this cold day (the weather is such that your meal will probably be warm and large (perhaps Italian? Pasta seems to fit the bill perfectly here)). Because you are romantically inclined you sit by a dirty window and stare at the people outside.

You conscious mind feels very anthropologic but you really know that you’re watching your less than rich neighbors for the same reason you watch talk shows. Watson might scratch his head but Sherlock Holmes would note how ‘elementary’ the case really is: you’ve fallen victim to America’s morbid interest fad that’s turned everyone in the whole country into ‘pseudo-psychologists’ (spelt ‘psicoligist’ among grade ‘eighters’ who have chosen such a profession for a future goal.).

You sit there and chew your meal slowly because you’re too tired to be hurried and your mom taught you to eat like this anyway. Because your vision is either 20/20 or you’re wearing a very nice and appropriately prescribed pair of glasses you can see a young or old man or woman sitting in an alleyway.

Also for the sake of this story you have seen this man or woman on other financially enforced ‘slum-runs’. You know that he or she is a homeless drug addict and you’ve maybe even donated him or her some money (although we both know that you knew he or she was just going to buy more drugs with it). So, you’re chewing and staring and finally you see something ‘worth your seat’ (which is a saying created Yours Truly that I feel is creative enough to become popular). That man or woman starts to shiver and you see him or her cough.

You don’t know his or her name because names aren’t necessary for the purpose of this story so you don’t really care about him or her in the same way you would care about someone who you really knew. So you sit and watch and eat.

As the man or woman coughs and shivers he or she may look up at the window you’re sitting at. This probably scares in a way reminiscent of child-hood guilt-induced fears of getting caught. Luckily for you the man or woman is just twitching and can’t see very well anyway.

As you watch the man sit and shiver and cough you probably take another bite. Because you have involuntarily been watching this man or woman for a longer time than you first wanted to watch you may find that your food is cold (which probably irritates you; unless the food is Italian, as Italian food tastes good both warm and cold although in different ways). Perhaps, as a side thought you feel somewhat grateful for the food you’re eating when you think in relative terms the sitting, shivering, coughing, and perhaps starving man or woman outside.

Probably not.

Because your meal is cold you eat just a little bit quicker and pay a great deal more attention to your attention to your food than the shivering bum outside. Finally, you finish and pay the happily low bill and leave the restaurant.

Once outside you see the man or women sitting very still. You find this surprising so you decide to non-chalantly walk over to the no longer moving man or woman. There you find him or her quite blue and still. Because you have watched a great deal of TV you know that he or she is dead.

You probably undergo what is known as a panic attack at that point and it probably takes a lot longer that usual for successful person such as yourself to make decisions.

You can choose what the decision is from here on as it is not consequential to this story at all. I was able to make some pretty ‘good’ inferences before because I’m a ‘anthropologic’ fellow and am fairly opinionated anyway. But from here it’s all you because I really can’t guess what you’d do from here onwards, as I have never seen anybody react to a dead body before.

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