Friday, March 4, 2011

The Blog Must Go On: March 4, 2011.

My father recently asked me if I was going to post any more blogs, because he'd been checking in day after day and only saw Fashawn sitting there paused in front of the Hollywood sign. "If you're not going to post anymore, then you need to let your readers know," Dad said.

I've been buried in teaching. It's winter. The experiment is over. What else do I have to say? I had all kinds of excuses not to post. But this week I received an interesting message on Facebook. It came from a girl I met at a small rock and roll club six years ago while I was tooling around southern New Zealand alone. (She was beautiful, super cool, and French Canadian.) She and her friend took me in like a vagrant and fed me a homemade pizza and poured me wine while we watched Madagascar. The next day, we tried to hit the beach outside Dunedin, but the buses weren't running. We parted ways after that with a promise I would possibly visit her in Montreal some day. Which never happened.

Anyhow, she sent me a documentary called
Carts of Darkness in her message and said it reminded her of me. The video is about homeless and semi-homeless men in North Vancouver who live off of recycleables they take out of neighborhood bins. In their spare time, some of these men bomb the hills of North Vancouver on shopping carts, breaking speeds of 50 mp.h. and sometimes themselves (thank the people of Canada for socialized health care). The movie reminds me of Ted Conover's book Rolling Nowhere, because it isn't about solving the problem of homlessness but the freedom and companionship, as well as the alcoholism, that can be found there. It's about the people who fascinate me the most: outsiders.

One of the best quotes of the movie comes from a retired old-timer who lives in a trailer and collects empty bottles and cans: "Every time that you put effort into work and you're making a little bit of money, you better have a very good plan of what you're going to do with that money, because you're using up your life. We're not prisoners. We should not be prisoners of the economic system that we live in. We should be free . . . free people."



I have more posts planned. One will tie in with the early American literature course I'm teaching this semester (I will attempt to out-Glenn Beck Glenn Beck), and I will return to hunting for homeless in Tuscaloosa . . .

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