Today I had the day off so I replaced my expired Missouri plates at the Woonsocket, Rhode Island Department of Motor Vehicles. Rhode Island has, by far, the most inefficient DMV system I've ever visited. I arrived at 9am and didn't get my licenses until 2pm. I entertained myself by watching the stream of humanity that I don't see in my comfy office-park lifestyle. Woonsocket is a decayed mill town where the herion came in as the jobs went south and it is crawling with characters.

The people that blew my mind were the families. We're not talking about mom and a four-year-old here, but grandma, grampa with the playboy tatoos and what looked like track marks on his arm, the 30-year-old son with the beer gut and drug helmet, his stripper girlfriend, and her three kids - all with obviously different fathers. The future of welfare state and medicaid. But okay, druggies with strollers aside, why you would bring your whole family to the DMV? Do they do this for entertainment? Really, I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a contingent in Woonsocket whose idea of a good time was to take some herion and hang out the DMV.

For lunch, I went to a diner to get a take-out sandwich and saw a woman who I recognized as having just left the DMV. I said hi, and it turned out she had moved from Boonville, Missouri. I laughed and said I'd moved here from St. Louis. During the time it took the short order cook to make me a sandwich I found out that her now-deceased husband had murdered her only daughter at age 4 and two of her three sons had Hepatitis C -- commonly associated with injecting drug use. The loneliness you must feel inside when you have to reach out to total strangers for some small comfort. There really is a parade of misery out there.