archive the homeless

I see the homeless conspiracy-theorist peeps wandering my ‘hood and all I can think about is how disorganized their office products look. Bits of tattered legal pads fluttering out the sides of worn manila folders. I bet nothing’s even cross-referenced, which simply will not do. Most conspiracy theories are connected in some way, like the giant squid overlords possessing Oswald, just like Nostradamus said they would.

Someone needs to archive the homeless people. When they die, all their wisdom is lost. I care because I work with upper-middle-class college students all day long, and 99% of them pride themselves on learning absolutely nothing. They’re not furthering society, believe me; it’s the homeless people who are on the front lines of research and culture. So someone needs to archive them, and I think it should be me.

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About Halsted M. Bernard

Halsted, a/k/a cygnoir, does stuff with words. Her favourite things to do with words are keeping this diary, writing stories, and organising information. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband, two cats, a few gadgets, several fountain pens, and many books.

Posted on 7 Feb 2006 in Diary
  • fivecats

    How will you archive them?

    And see http://ruralrob.livejournal.com/388576.html

    …

  • http://www.livejournal.com/users/scarbelly Fashion Minister, People’s Republic of East Davis

    Okay so there is this guy who hangs around my favorite coffee shop (for the record, Naked Lounge at 15th and Q in Sacramento) and who, while not homeless and not definitively a conspiracy nut, has many trappings of same and is just generally ludicrous (sleeveless 80′s muscle T-shirt, droopy moustache, super-straight rex-kwan-do pony tail, etc.). He also likes to ask totally random people totally random questions with no context whatsoever.
    Now, the backstory to this particular incident is that I spent too many nights in the mid-1990′s listening to Negativland’s Time Zones Cultural Exchange Project on repeat while I was in a, shall we say, psychopharmacologically attenuated state. A little over a year ago one of my friends from back in the day, who is now my neighbor, decided to run a Call of Cthulhu game based on the TZCEP mythos (specifically, our characters were investigating connections between the Hudson Valley mansion of C. Elliot Friday and a dilapidated 19th century intentional community begun by George Sandeman and various strangeness involving Zoroastrians, the Nobel family, Mandaean cosmology, Trotskyite activity in the 1920′s Catskills, the Rumanian Iron Guard, and the Soviet Oil Fields at Baku.
    Which, as those familiar with the TZCEP will immediately recognize, put me in mind of all things Amelia Earhardt (if I’ve lost you already, just smile and nod).
    So this was all fresh up in my frontal lobes when random coffee shop guy leans over without any introduction or prefacing whatsoever and says “Hey which way is Australia?”. I think about it for a minute, gauging the layout of downtown Sacramento’s street grid, and point.
    A few minutes pass, then again with no “excuse me”, no “hi”, no nothing, “Which way is New Guinea?”.
    This continues for a while sporadically, becoming more and more focused on the south pacific, triangulating various locations like Hawaii, Fiji, Tonga, Truk, etc. … finally I look over and see he has one of those zoommable Earth maps and he has clearly focused in on Howland Island.

    Which now, looking back, is the perfect place to set my newest brain child: Snakes on a Plane, the d20 Roleplaying Adventure.

    :)

    thanks for listening, and thanks for being you.

  • http://www.1plus1equals3.net lara

    or i guess you can start by lobbying to have them all provided filing cabinets on wheels, dear.. maybe office depot or staples will sponsor it. with some ginormous advertising emblazoned on the sides of the filing cabinets. well, it’s a start anyway.