Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
There is a philosophical debate raging in American cities about what to call people who live outside. “Homeless” fell out of favor because it focused on absence rather than personhood. “Unhoused” stepped in, which is linguistically considerate and also lands with the same satisfying thud as every HR policy email ever written.
I’ve been workshopping alternatives. “Outdoors-residential” has a certain Airbnb energy. “Wall-curious” sounds more judgmental than intended. “Architecturally uncommitted” is accurate but exhausting. For now I’m going with “Un-Walled,” because it sounds faintly heroic, like someone who escaped a fortress, which depending on how you look at the American housing market is not entirely wrong.
My Deeply Principled Policy on Giving
Here is my official stance, which no one has asked for and I’m providing anyway: I do not, as a rule, give cash to Un-Walled people. Not because I think they’ll spend it on something shameful. I spend my own cash on things considerably more shameful. It’s mostly because I never have cash. I’m a modern American. My wallet contains a library card, a gas station receipt from 2019, and a quietly delusional optimism.
What I will do is hand over my leftovers if I’m carrying them and someone asks. I’ll also walk with someone into a place and buy them a meal if they’re up for it. This is not sainthood. This is a man who chronically over-orders at seafood restaurants and has an easily activated guilt complex.
Which brings me to the incident.
The Prophecy
I was carrying a box of leftover something-from-the-sea, shrimp probably, or whatever aspirational item I’d convinced myself I’d finish later, when a man asked if I was going to eat that. Reader, I was not going to eat that. I handed it over.
He thanked me. We went through the usual pleasantries of two people briefly overlapping in the Venn diagram of “has food” and “needs food.” And then, as I turned to go, he said:
“Hey. You don’t go get knocked up, knocked down, or knocked out, ya hear?”
I have received advice from therapists, parents, coaches, managers, internet strangers, and a fortune cookie that promised my talents would soon be recognized and rewarded. None of it landed with the compact, three-axis elegance of that single sentence.
Don’t get knocked up. Don’t get knocked down. Don’t get knocked out. That is the whole of human wisdom, delivered on a sidewalk, in trade for leftover seafood.
The Words of the Prophets
Simon and Garfunkel wrote that the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. Rush, who were paying attention, clarified that the words of the “profits” are written on the studio walls, which is either a commentary on artistic truth or a very expensive piece of graffiti depending, on your hourly rate.
I can confirm that the words of the prophets are also written in the men’s room of my local Subway restaurant, a sentence that should bewilder Paul Simon. Specifically: an inspirational quote of unclear origin, a phone number belonging to someone named Tommy, and a brief but enthusiastic Yelp review of Tommy’s primary service offering.
(Why do I never have a pen on me when I go to the bathroom?)
Bathroom stalls are the Yelp of illicit activity. Always have been. One star, aggressively decorated, impossible to leave without having learned something you didn’t expect.
The point is: wisdom lives where you’re not looking for it. On subway walls, on studio walls, on the cinderblock above a hand dryer that hasn’t worked since the Obama administration, and on a sidewalk where a man traded three words of genuinely airtight life philosophy for a box of leftover shrimp.
Pay Attention
I started trying to recall other advice I’d collected from Un-Walled people over the years, since clearly I had not been paying nearly enough attention. The man outside a convenience store in Richmond who told me, unprompted, “Don’t ever let nobody rush you. Rushed people make mistakes,” then waited patiently while I dug through my car for an unopened bag of pretzels. The irony was not lost on either of us. The woman near the Charlottesville downtown mall who, after I bought her a coffee, said, “You got kind eyes. Don’t let nobody make you mean.” I did not tell my wife about this because she would never let me hear the end of it.
There is a particular clarity that comes from people who’ve stepped outside most of the structural buffers that keep the rest of us from thinking too hard. No mortgage anxiety. No performance review. No LinkedIn notification informing you that someone you barely remember has a new job. Just the unfiltered mechanics of the day.
And apparently, if you feed them your leftover shrimp, they’ll share some of that clarity with you. I’ve been too quick to hand over the food and walk away when I should’ve been standing there with a notebook.
Or at minimum, a better knock-knock joke. That setup was too good to waste.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
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