Walking through the night in Allston trying to get back home, talked to a shadowy homeless dude along my path, kept walking and ran into cico, talked to him and then the homeless dude caught up. Cico knew him from the greasy-hipster-underbelly of emerson. I'd offered to let John stay the night at my Westland apartment, and he in turn invited this guy to stay. I was apprehensive but knew that if John wanted it to happen then it would probably be fine. We got back and later in my room I found out this dude actually used to be in the hipster cliques at emerson before becoming homeless the year before our last year. I realized I had peripherally known him at some point. What I had not known before was that he was also a long lost member of neutral milk hotel. He had then had an underground-cult-famous solo project with a neutral-milk-hotel-ish name, which I was always unable to remember. There had been a documentary on him. Something had happened to him that had changed everything, and now he'd been living on the cold streets for four years. I was happier to help then, as I was fascinated by his story, but he was still a dirty homeless man and I worried about getting sick from having him sleep in my room.
The next night I was trudging across the crunchy-snow-covered backwoods of Boston with rob and Brandon when we heard a car coming. I thought it might be the dude from last night, or another homeless guy I'd come across, and didn't want to have to deal with him another night, so as the car came into view of us we, or I at least, pretended to be sleeping on the snow.
Then it was raining. We reached the part where we had to scamper down the hill to the city streets. I fretted that I had left my shoes outside in the rain overnight. We approached the bright colorful city lights of Downtown. I went into a convenience store and knew where everything was because I'd worked there a long time ago. But I might've knocked something over, leading to an unwanted conversation with the current stock-boy.
Then I was in the subway, asking someone–was it the neutral milk hotel guy? Or an Asian proxy?–what hard thing had happened in his life. I asked him two easy questions, then I asked him if he'd lost someone close to him. He told me that I had asked a question that he could not answer, and started zooming ahead of me. I could not catch up to tell him that I had too.
