I don't know about you guys, but I get more entertainment and value from talking to interesting people. Just earlier today I spoke with an older hobo gentleman as I walked out of a McDonalds. He was going about asking people for spare change, so I gave him some (I usually give to people in need, if they ask me). I learned he was headed up north to Sacramento. He said he was catching a train to get there, and clarified that he was going to hop a freight train and wasn't taking a passenger train (duh). It's funny. A lot of guys who are homeless or on the streets for a long while look at least a little off. You know, dirty, disheveled, or not all there mentally. But he was very lucid, relatively clean, well spoken, seemed normal otherwise (whatever "normal" means anyway). I like these kinds of encounters. Even though sometimes people can be rude and even hostile, you can grow from them. I mean, most of us go about our daily routines, and sometimes run into people going somewhere or other, witness something happening, and a lot of it can be mundane, but I have learned that I can usually find something novel or interesting or special anytime I interact with and share moments with others, or in watching them. Through these conversations and encounters you can learn something new or peer deeper into the human condition. And some of those moments are more interesting than others, especially if you are lucky enough to meet more interesting people. The more you go out and experience the world, the more lucky you get. I cherish this kind of thing. It's wonderful, isn't it? The world is like a giant carnival.
Perhaps not if you're the homeless guy having to make the precarious leap onto a moving freight train in order to migrate to his next destination. I know what you mean though, there's a story behind every stranger's face. Bob Dylan made much of the romanticism of the drifter - including embellishing and adding to the fabrication of his own mythology - the reality however, is another thing entirely.
^Yes. I would imagine that the life of a drifter is very hard. I think you get to see the reality of the world when you are out on the streets like that. I was homeless for about a month myself, though I had a car to sleep in. It was just me and my dog. I remember crying myself to sleep on the night of my 26th birthday, in my car on a lonely cold night parked at a truck rest stop. But that is the beauty of it all. That is when the beauty of life occurs to you, when you are in the thick of struggles, when you've had to deal with being hungry and thirsty and alone and afraid. It is the brutality of life that defines it the most to us, because often we are so thick headed and full of ourselves and blind to the beauty and the depravity and the ugliness and the wonder of the world, until it just hits us, hits us very hard so we can't ignore it. It takes more extreme times and happenings for us to wake up, open our eyes and see world and our place in it.
