Swell

I gave a dollar to a hobo today. He stood at the Sunrise off-ramp, fully sleeved and pantsed in army fatigues with a blue mesh cap on his white, balding head. He was thin and looked unfortunate and I felt for him. I'm not usually big on panhandling. I'm possibly a pessimist, always suspecting that they're falsifying a dire existence and rounding up fifty dollars an hour while I peck away at a keyboard and make a mere portion of that. But this man, he was different. I only gave him a dollar anyhow.

But it made me think: he and I aren't all that different. He may not have an apartment or liquid asset money availability or debt. He may be lonely and sad, or he could be content and fulfilled. Or somewhere inbetween. But he wore lots of clothing on a hot day, he spoke in a crispily quiet speech impediment-impeded tone and said "God bless you sir." That phrase gets watered with meaningless repetition, doesn't it? Sometimes. Not from him, though. He meant it. How I know, ah I'm not sure.

But this poor man wore a grimace and acted miserable to make some money so he could go buy things to get by. I too wear a grimace and act miserably on occasion so that I may also buy things and get by. We're one and the same, and that old sunken man is me some day far removed from my present, when I will stand on a torrid street corner and gaze up at the open blue sky with hollow eyes and a raspy weathered old voice, holding my cardboard cutout of a sign that pleads to passersby, "Please help. Old man in need." And I'll roam by the car windows as they pretend to ignore me and the many problems that aren't theirs, and I'll dream of my youth with memories that I can't really be sure of, and of my kith and kin and progeny who went their separate ways and forgot about an uninteresting old soul who lived once with passion but now had nothing left to offer except burden and duties and an ammonia-smelling room with respirators and oxygen tanks, a fitting funeral pyre for the end of a tired old existence.

Audio: Blue Screen Life|Pinback
Video: nothing since Amelie
Text: newest issue of Rolling Stone