Virtue and vice do not come by mere words;
actions repeated, over and over again, are engraved on the soul.
You shall harvest what you plant.

Siri Guru Granth - Ang 4, Stanza 21
(Translated by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa)
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Last night I got a to-go dinner at a restaurant on a popular boulevard. Meals there run around $20. I tell you this only because as I left the place, a man was leaning casually against a lamp post on the sidewalk waiting for me.

“Hey, man. I’m really hungry,” he said. “Think you could buy me something to eat?”

I looked at him, puzzled over whether he was homeless or just forgot his wallet, as his appearance didn’t make it clear. Then I had a flashback to a year prior when this same guy asked me for a meal outside another place nearby. That time I felt sorry enough to fork over some cash, but this time I didn’t get the same sympathetic feeling.

Is it possible to be a beggar with an ego shining through? Because this guy had become so good at scoring meals he’d grown arrogant. Not a facade of arrogance either. A genuine, full-belly arrogance.

He hadn’t exactly lost a ton of weight and grown a scraggly beard since I’d seen him last. No, it appeared as though he’d been eating pretty good over the last year. Almost TOO good. Almost like maybe I oughta quit my job and start begging around town myself.

I wondered if he’d been scamming top notch meals out of suckers like me all along. These weren’t sheepish eyes that expressed, “I could really use a dollar menu burger and fries, man.” No. He looked at me like, “I prefer oxtail with a side of cabbage. Oh, and a slice of their famous carrot cake if you don’t mind.”

Begging for spare change is one thing, buddy, but asking me to buy you a meal I don’t often treat myself to is homelessness with a pinky up. I wasn’t sure if I should give him props for gaming the system or ask for last year’s money back, with interest.

And I realize there’s a fine line between punching down and calling out a scam artist that I’m walking here, but it’s possible telling him off would have been the harvest he’d been planting all along. So either I’m a total asshole for thinking so, or I was fully justified in gorging myself in spite of that homeless prick. The world may never know.