He’s Optimistic Things Will Get Worse

He sits on a milk crate by the curb, a resigned look on his face, his wares spread out before him in tidy, colorful rows. But nobody is buying on this blue-sky, sunny day because the only thing he is selling is umbrellas - short ones, long ones, in every hue of the conspicuously absent rainbow.

When I point him out to Katie, we agree he’s certainly emblematic of something. “Or,” she says, “he’s Nostradamus, like, ‘What do you know?’"