I was in a library walking among the shelves of books. I went around a corner and found a shelf section about 4’ wide that had been dragged across the end of the row, turning it into a dead end, like in a maze. I didn’t think it was supposed to be like that so I thought I would slide it out of the way, but when I pushed on the shelf about shoulder high the top half of it bent over. It was hinged like a door. It must have been spring loaded because it didn’t flop completely over, but the books were too heavy for it to spring back to vertical so it stayed there bouncing up and down sticking out horizontally.
I was thinking about an experiment of living as a homeless person. I read that book where a college student did it for a year and all that he’d learned from it, but I thought it might be quite a bit different at my age than at 20. First I thought about hair. I’m pretty sure I’d look the part of the crazy Vietnam
That got me to thinking about where I would go to find a mirror. I remembered seeing a guy shaving in the bathroom at the library once, but I thought that was pretty gross and wondered if they would kick him out if they knew about it. About the only place you can get privacy in a bathroom is at some gas stations, and those are usually pretty gross. I was also wondering about how I would keep my hair trimmed. A self administered haircut is not going to look good in the best of circumstances. I thought, too, that my hair gets greasy in just a couple days, so maybe I could learn to run the trimmers and keep it in the buzz cut range.
I would obviously need to keep whatever I owned on my person. Shopping carts work for some people, but the image is pretty bad and they aren’t much good off-road. A backpack would work, but I’d have to keep my supplies pretty limited to carry them all there. I was thinking about the changes of clothes I might need and how I would wash them and where I would shower. I had the thought of sitting naked under a coat at a laundromat or getting to a park or the Y and getting a shower and washing my clothes by hand while I’m showering, which would work, but leave me w/ a pile of wet clothes.
I was pretty serious about trying this experiment, so I was working through all these items one by one. Where would I sleep? What would I eat? What would I do all day? How would people treat me? How would I handle interactions w/ other homeless people, crazy people, the police, people I knew from before?
