I got Edward coming down the alleyway.

Edward’s a cool guy. I saw him in front of 7-Eleven, and he was kind of yelling. But really, I think he’s just talking loud. He was over there getting some coffee.

Edward Seymour. What’s up, my guy?

Hey, this is Edward. You want to say hi to my audience?

EDWARD:

Hey, this is Edward Seymour. Cheers to the 7-Eleven.

CHRISTOS:

This is the coolest guy right here. 49th Brigade, what is it?

EDWARD:

49th Brigade.

CHRISTOS:

Oh, you’re in the Army?

EDWARD:

Yeah.

CHRISTOS:

Congratulations. Me too, man.

EDWARD:

I’m here trying to bring some awareness and some information to some people. There’s things going on here that they just need to be aware of.

CHRISTOS:

Yeah. So all we can do is give them information. Thanks for letting us know, Edward.

Where’d you go to basic training?

EDWARD:

Maryland.

CHRISTOS:

Okay, cool. All right, brother. Cheers.

EDWARD:

God bless you, man. Have a good one.

CHRISTOS:

All right, so that was Edward.

Like I was saying, cool guy. I heard him in the 7-Eleven parking lot, just kind of yelling out. You know when you walk by these guys and you’re just like, what’s going on with this dude?

So I kept my distance, bought my coffee in 7-Eleven, and started walking away. By the way, $1.49 for a large. Best stuff. French vanilla. I’m caffeinated off of it.

I’m walking away from 7-Eleven, and I notice he’s behind me. I can hear him because he’s talking so loud. I can’t tell if he’s yelling or just talking.

I end up going into an alleyway, and he follows me. I’m thinking, what’s this guy up to?

But as he got closer, I realized he was just having a really loud conversation with himself. Then he said good morning to me.

He’s a real nice guy, as you can see.

We kind of bonded over the 7-Eleven coffee. We were talking, and I took a couple portraits of him.

I was shooting really quick and didn’t realize how underexposed I was. I was about three stops underexposed. I shot JPEG, but I think I’ll be able to recover it because I had the flash on.

But what I was saying is, you just never know with some of these guys. I think a lot of them get a bad rap.

From my experience here, a lot of the guys who are yelling in the air or talking to themselves are actually some of the nicest people. I seem to have more in common with them sometimes than I do with a regular Santa Monica resident.

It’s probably because we share some kind of similar background or experience.

I don’t know if Edward was actually in the Army. When I asked him where he went to basic training, he said somewhere I’d never heard of. That’s usually one way you can tell if somebody was really in the military. Ask them where they went to basic training.

But I’ll give the guy a pass.

Edward’s a nice guy. He’s a character out here. He was talking about Apache helicopters and everything else, but that’s Santa Monica.

You just never know who you’re going to run into.

And a lot of the time, those kinds of characters are the coolest guys. He was instantly happy for me to take his photo, and you can see in the video that he’s just a nice guy, shooting the shit with me.

Anyways, another great day in Santa Monica.

Thanks for watching.

Peace.