east bumsburg, pa

near an interstate offramp some bums' paths converged.
we asked them "it could be worse: how?"

p.s. the background music for this interview, an excerpt from "Tess and Rosasharn listen to Leonard Cohen's Songs From a Room in a Ryder Truck" can be found in its entirety here (except for the parts we accidentally taped over). But don't you have anything better to do than listen to it, ya bum?

never go home

a story of a tattoo

accompanied by footage from the global discovery village at habitat for humanity's international headquarters in americus, ga. ( the global discovery village includes a tour through an elaborate reproduction slum town followed by models of homes that for humanity has built around the world.)

Marilyn

Yesterday as we were leaving our work site I spotted a ziploc bag - empty save for a few cookie crumbs - in an ashcan. My heart leapt at the luck. Our old ziploc bag wallet has fallen into disrepair, scattering our few hard earned coins from its gaping holes. Never one to pass up a chance to put another man's trash to use, I asked Tess to stop the truck so I could snatch up this treasure. As I jumped down from the truck, a white haired woman in the blue jumper uniform of the school's cafeteria asked me where we were going.
We got to talking. Her name was Marilyn. She told us about her years on the road with her truckdriver husband. How after the kids moved out they spent 5 years lving in the semi. How she enjoyed learning new ways to eat, and how she learned to talk to everybody. A mutual appreciation of the road shone in our conversation.
Marilyn's husband died on June 3, 1986. Since then she's been a manager of two school cafeterias, and although she is 77 years old and retired, she works full time at a college cafeteria, because she was bored without work.
The open road, the hard work, the rumble of the diesel engine. Marilyn found us in our Ryder truck, rejoicing over garbage, told us her life story, and walked away with a youthful spring in her step.

we're here. what's up with that?

Tess asks the bums, "what's up?"
Accompanied by footage of a fellow salesbum/artiste in Nashville.

what do you do, hoboe?

Our first stop on the bum tour brought us into a major hoboe hub.
Expecting to merely be checking into our next place of employment, and undergoing the mandatory training, we found much more: Rosasharn and I were only a small member of a large gathering of hundreds migrant workers from all over the nation!
Staggered by the disorienting experience of seeing yourself multiplied many many times over all around you,
realizing you're not alone,
--in fact there's a lot of you,
all over the place!
We wanted to figure out what this mass effect was all about so we took to interviewing the other hoboes we found there.

bonus question