Cheerios
A good piece of writing from a stranger on Craigslist Portland on July 11, categorized as “w4m” in missed connections.
I dont know why i am posting here. its not very often that you come across someone that you have an instant connection with. i know that our texting was more sexting then texting but in that brief time i was drawn to your words, your intellect, your ability to articulate…. and most of all your honesty.
I have found that in this day in age the word friend seems to mean every person we have ever come across or spent more than 5 minutes engaged in conversation . I on the other hand have many acquaintences yet very few friends… mainly because i require cognitive stimulation or i get bored and annoyed.
i need friends that challenge me mentally, friends that try new things for the hell of it… friends that can handle the fact i tend to take things to the extreme and need to be reminded not everything has to be analyzed . I need friends that look at the world around them and see exactly how amazing each and every part of it is.
I am hoping that you would do me the honor of maybe becoming my friend.
- Location: in limbo
- it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
A Letter of Introduction.
I was born in the North, although some in my family say it was the West. I am an artist. I have traveled—or wandered—most of my life. I now live in the thirty-fifth year since my birth, and I have only now become aware of the potential for my life. I told you I am an artist, yet I have produced no works. I make this declaration, regardless. I have an artist’s vision. Bez Solntsa is my first creation. I am all of my own. He is mine, he is me. I am Bez Solntsa. At least that’s what I would like people to say. There are times when I am other places, and go by other names. Who is to say which is the truth, when there are time differences all over the world? When I am 1530 in Portland, I am also 730 in Yokohama. So know me as Bez Solntsa. I throw myself in with the youth, and like them I too am stricken with too cynical a nature. We now have waves of youth proud of their disconnection and ignorance of this world, their world. They live in the comfort of narratives, a sophisticated method of adaption to the modern environment. Sidewalks of the hungry and homeless become obstacles to maneuver past on the way to purchase some imported Chinese clothing (from a Swedish retailer). Get a job, one may resentfully say to themselves. That guy probably makes more than I do, another of the little lies that makes it easier to forget it’s a man, easier to refuse one’s own human response to help those in need. I bright this up because today I rode my bicycle down to campus and five or six blocks from my house I saw sidewalks littered with bodies, some covered in tarps no head or arm visible to identify them as people…just lumps of meat under a tarp. Forgotten, ignored. It was relatively painless for me as I could coast by. No need for guilt or pedaling, I was aided by the forces of gravity. At the university I went by the food carts and dropped a dollar to the street musician on my way out. Why he was he worthy of patronage and not those bodies strewn about my neighborhood is my own mystery. It might have been the convenience of a single transaction. The older man with a white beard, so sympathetic. He plays classic folk music. I find both of these things interesting but I don’t think this is why I favored him in my meager generosity. My best attempt to reason my display of selective favoritism, amongst those who are more poor than I am poor, is that the older folk musician was clean. I rejected the filthy and dirty street people as helpless. I tell myself they are too far gone. They live only for drugs or alcohol at that stage. But when the world has forsaken you that the extent that you can no longer live and ever be clean, what would any money mean to you in that hopeless condition? The clean, older musician just seems poor and out of work. He can play his guitar and make a few bucks. He doesn’t appear to be anything but a street musician. Good for him. I want to help him out because I know he will make it, and I get to be a part of it for a small contribution. But why should I really care what any downtrodden soul does with the money he gains through his misery (or in this case, did not gain). If I were living under a tarp on a sidewalk I think a drink would sound pretty great. When you’re unclean and you have nothing I doubt you want to feel anything but nothing. This thing I keep coming back to, about being clean…it seems so simple but also such a fundamental truth in our approach to the homeless and “normal” citizens. Would we avoid these people of the street so much if they were cleaner, or would be build new narratives to insulate ourselves, like the one where they have luxury spa facilities to rest and shower in now that we take care of them…I sure wish I was homeless. These lies we tell ourselves to avoid responsibility. At some point they become damaging to our very concept of reality. On the edge of narrative detachment you may hear someone say: “someone should do something”. Here I betray cynicism again and I must wear it as my own. Even now I avoid the crushing realism that is my first observance after I saw those forgotten sleeping humans: I could help them right now and give them everything I have, yet there would still be bodies on that pavement. We look at contemporary problems by searching for the expeditious fix, to move the problem out of our frame of vision. If idealistic solutions fail, do we make better solutions? Not in the present. Instead, we tend to revoke acknowledgement of the problem. I am ready to take a look at the world. That is a start.
My hope for us all is one word: sincerity.
