What was I for Halloween? A liberal.

This was not by design. In fact, it wasn’t until the sun had almost set on the day that I realized that I’d spend most of it in accidental masquerade. I was moving among liberals with ease, to all appearances and behavior one of them. I didn’t mean to do this. It just … happened. Like this:

I met a friend for lunch, and because he’s a vegetarian we agreed to eat at the local Whole Foods store, where the daily hot buffet is a veritable cornucopia of tofu-based delights. As I awaited his arrival, I loitered near the front and soaked up the atmosphere. I love Whole Foods, and I mean that sincerely. It’s reliably the best lunch in town, and you have to like a place that apparently makes multiple body piercings a condition of employment.

But every time I visit Whole Foods, I’m struck by the fact that I’m almost surely the only person in the place who thinks, for instance, that Clarence Thomas is a stand-up guy. Or that some of the proposed cures for global warming might be worse that the disease. Or that a little profiling might not be such a bad thing — especially when I’m booked on that flight.

In short, Whole Foods ain’t exactly brimming with my peeps. But there I was, grazing at the hot buffet with the curd-eaters.

After lunch, I went to the downtown branch of the library, where wireless Internet access is available. Except it wasn’t available. “We’ve been having trouble with it,” the fellow at the reference desk said. When I asked for a referral to another place with wireless access — hey, he’s the reference guy — he steered me to a nearby coffee shop. Once I got there, I fired up my laptop and checked email messages. One of them was from a former coworker, whose whole message was this: “How are things?” My reply:

I’m sitting in a coffee shop with about a gallon of latte in front of me, pounding on my laptop just like all the hipsters. My chinos are wrinkled, I have a week’s worth of beard and I have no visible means of support. I feel like a high-tech tycoon.

All those things may have been true, but I meant it as it a joke. Yet when I looked around, I realized it wasn’t a joke. There were eight people around me, and all of them wore jeans or chinos with T-shirts. None of the men had been within arm’s-reach of a razor in several days. (Maybe the women, too, but I didn’t look that close.) Like me, all but one person had a laptop open in front of them.

The one person who didn’t have a laptop was a guy wearing a lavender sports coats, a pink boa, a red cowboy hat with a leopard-skin band, and a werewolf mask. Everyone admired his Halloween costume.

Yeah, it was pretty good. But I thought mine was much better.

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