Eight Years of a Life

I just finished reading the complete The Panther’s Tale. It has taken weeks and was no small endeavor. The Panther’s Tale is a journal written by a voluntarily homeless man in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has been keeping this journal going on nine years now. He wrote with such honesty and candidness that it was compelling reading. You actually got to find out what life really is like on the streets of Honolulu. Only one other homeless blog did this and it was Michael Hussey’s Last Day of my Life and he only writes about politics these days.

Albert’s tales involved things that “The Homeless Guy” would never write about as they would have scared off donators and readers. He wrote of the drug use on the streets which he also partake in from time to time. He wrote of the young homeless boys who stole from shops and pawned their takings to get money for drugs. He wrote candidly about the sexual lives of those on the streets as well. He ate discarded food, rummaged through ashtrays to get cigarette butts for smoking, and slept outside in the park for years. It was a much more realistic take on homelessness that what I have read on other homeless blogs save a few.

What a far cry from “The Homeless Guy!” I still firmly believe that “The Homeless Guy” was just a carefully crafted experiment in pro-homeless propaganda and cyber-panhandling to only benefit the author. Kevin would talk about crazy things such as how important Religion was to homeless people and that was just not truthful and was written to appeal to the sensitivities of the many religious people reading his blog. In other words, be Christian and give me some of your good fortune. When the donations quit coming in and he had milked that cow for all it was worth, he quit writing on a regular basis and the blog withered and died. A lot of nice and generous people got duped by him. A Mr. Cheng once gave him a thousand dollars in one day and he bad mouthed the poor fellow publicly on his blog and then spent Cheng’s money on cheap hotel rooms and fast food. How Christian is that? I am just glad that his blog no longer gets much readership and people are no longer being misled by his ideas and writings. “The Homeless Guy” would have made a fine if somewhat dullard politician in the way he was able to take people’s money and obfuscate the realities of homelessness.

I know I don’t write a lot about my homeless period these days. It seems like such a distant memory now. From what I have read though on many homeless blogs, my experience now would be completely different. I have learned through the wisdom of other authors about how to make homelessness much more comfortable and doable. Sometimes the thought is even appealing with what I know now. I have had many fantasies this week of buying a four hundred dollar plane ticket and flying to Honolulu to live in homeless paradise. Don’t worry. Those are just fantasies that help quell my constant wanderlust. I am content to experience it through the writing of others. My experiences with homelessness still do make me passionate about the subject.