Back to earth

Fosterverse Weekly #36

I boarded a three-day train from Massachusetts to Los Angeles last week with an 80-pound bag of tools, on my way to do paid work in the physical world instead of the digital one for the first time since high school. I've tinkered with different kinds of machines for years, and realized recently that I find so much more fulfillment in giving an old machine new life than I do in writing a new piece of software. As I turn back to the physical world, I can see myself moving closer to it, and it to me.

I see the gap between me and the world around me narrowing by the ever-growing catalog of old scars and new cuts on my hands. I see it in my always-dirty pants, in my sore shoulders and in my slightly growing strength and in the way my built environment appears to me as a collection of raw materials and assembly processes. I see it in the so-called junk that could be repurposed but instead languishes in yards or landfills because reusing it isn't "economical." I see it in the way that wild desolation beckons me.

I see it in the way I'm losing interest in screens, turned off by the idea of turning on my phone. At the same time, I still find myself picking up my phone for...what reason again? But more and more I notice how grasping and hollow I feel when I reflexively check my few remaining apps over and over again.

I spend my three days on the train mostly looking out the window, alternately admiring what I see and grieving the rotting old factory buildings and trucks and piles of wood and metal that could be turned into something beautiful if only someone gave them the attention they deserve. It hurts to know that we milled the trees and mined the iron and baked the bricks just to let them rust and rot and crumble.

As I turn back towards the physical world I also see how as a culture we have turned away from it, in its infinite detail and nuance and messiness. We’ve turned instead towards the crowded solipsism of everyone talking all at once, addressing all of humanity without saying a word to our neighbors. In an online world of our own construction, we can build a narrative that Makes Sense, free from the need to confront life's ever-present paradox and dissonance…and as we do so, we neglect the world that actually supports us.

I see that neglect in the windblown plastic waste along the tracks and impaled on chain-link fences in every town my train goes through from east coast to west. I see it in the lookalike new houses and the texturelessness of industrial buildings, and in the location-agnostic sameness of everything from furniture to food. I see it in the way concrete and asphalt dominate the urban landscape, standardizing the chaos of untold intertwined lives into a uniform rectangular gray-brown-black. This is the color palette of a culture that has learned to fear eye contact and seek iContact.

I see that same neglect in the people who, in a world measured only in dollars, are (supposedly) cheaper to grind into dust than to help. We discard them in the same way we throw away a broken appliance: with plenty of life left, if only someone would pay enough attention.

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My train stopped in Chicago for a few hours, and I wandered around the city aimlessly. A man with a freshly broken nose and two black eyes complimented my hair as we walked past each other. His name was Nick, and he'd gotten his ass kicked and his stuff stolen the night before, right in front of the train station. He told me he was homeless and asked me for money, so we walked to an ATM together and kept walking and talking after I gave him the cash. I had nowhere to be, so I just followed his lead.

He told me about how he'd enlisted in the Army at 18, and at some point got caught smoking a joint and was given a choice: three years in military prison and stay enlisted, or three months and walk away. He chose the second. He didn't say how long ago that was, but judging the texture of his face, it wasn’t in the past decade.

We walked further out of the center, and as we cut through a parking lot, he said, "I'll be honest with you, we're going to the tent camp where I live right now, and I'm gonna do some drugs." He made no indication that I should leave, so I told him that that didn't bother me any. I appreciated his honesty.

As we got closer, I became painfully aware of my leather jacket and leather boots and long hair. I decided to be honest with him since he'd been honest with me, and asked him if I should be worried about the fact that I had an expensive laptop in my bag and looked a bit too much like biker Jesus (if you've seen me recently, you know what I mean). He told me that I was safe with him – “I keep a big-ass club in my bag…didn't have it when I got jumped, unfortunately.” I wasn't sure if that made me more worried or less, but I decided to keep going.

I walked through the camp with him, feeling every eye on me. Suddenly he handed me his coffee cup and told me to walk slowly on the far side of the concrete barriers in the middle of the road. I did what he said, and tried to look unfuckablewith. I stopped at the corner and waited. A couple of guys came up and eyed me like fresh meat. I smiled at them and they laughed, told me I looked like some dead actor I'd never heard of, and walked away.

Nick waved at me from across the street, and I went over to him. I think he'd been buying drugs with the money I gave him. I don’t blame him – I’d probably do the same in his shoes. I imagine the feeling of wanting something to take the edge off after a long day gets harder to resist when every day is long, longer than I can imagine. He went into his tent to smoke whatever it was. I realized that with him in the tent, I was no longer visibly with someone who looked like they belonged, and my instincts told me it was time to go. I said goodbye to Nick through the wall of his tent. He made sure I knew where I was going, blessed and thanked me, and told me to be safe. I turned around and walked out of the camp, looking straight ahead and holding my knife in my pocket.

I sort of wish I'd stayed longer. Partly out of a perverse curiosity about what would have happened, and partly because I wanted to show Nick that I wasn't casting him off because of his drug use and his tent. If I'd been with another person, I'd like to think I would have stayed.

I'm grateful to him for giving me a taste of what his life is like. It's harder to ignore the human suffering I walk past when it has a name and a broken face and belongs to a nice guy named Nick.

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I stepped back onto the train a few hours later, dazed. The fact that I could just walk away, forever, from the place that he seemed so stuck in was disorientingly unfair. Why is it that I get this life, and he gets that one? It seems like an economic question at first, but if I had given Nick every dollar I own I doubt it would have changed his life for long. In fact, he even told me a story of a woman he knew who'd been offered a place to stay, a car, and a good job, and walked away from it all to stay on the street.

So what can I do that actually makes a difference?

I've spent a long time asking myself that question, and what I have found is that to stop asking the question is to start answering it.

It's easy for me to get lost, wondering how to reconfigure the world to be just and kind and compatible with nature. But at a global scale, those aren't problems that I get to address. In fact, the very idea of scalable solutions is part and parcel of what got us here in the first place. (Human) nature is too complex for us to engineer – we have proven time and time again that our would-be solutions lead to ever more insidious problems that we must once again engineer our way out of, buying another few decades before the next unforeseen side effect makes itself known.

So I come back to the one thing that I can, without a doubt, give Nick, and give to everyone and everything else I encounter: my care and attention. When I feel most like I'm contributing to the world I want to see is when I give all my attention to this person, this machine that I can save from the scrapyard, this place that I'm in right now. Not because I think doing so will fix the whole world, but because it is the only thing I can do that I know will do anything at all.

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Jesse Evers is a Foster contributor. He writes at jesseevers.com.