This one time just after I’d turned 23, I went to a Seattle bar for a philosophy meetup, but there’d been a mixup with the scheduling and the only other person who showed up was a middle-aged man who was clearly too happy to see I was the only other person.
your way of writing is refreshingly honest, and your life seems so full of connection and earnest living, if that makes sense. rarely do i enjoy reading about other people's lives, at least not this much, so thank you for your continued writing
That'd be awesome. The only other substacker I know that narrates their own stories is stephen fry. I enjoy listening to a nice short story before bed and want more short stories to listen to😅
Love this and your willingness to see people for people without judgement and find the love in them. I’ve met many homeless people and am friends with many former ones, some of the best people I’ve ever known. Your writing is beautiful!
Reminds me a bit my youth when I was hanging out with alcoholics and taught one how to use computer and play video games. At 40y old he hasn't ever seen pc before and enjoyed it like a child. His favourite was GTA3, sinked into this game to the point he almost stopped drinking. It was in 2012 and now he's long dead but at least he died as a gamer!
The major issue in homelessness is not the lack of housing. It's the refusal of society to say no. No, you can't camp in this city. No, you can't shit in the streets. No, you can't panhandle aggressively. No, you can't shoot up publicly and leave your used needles lying around. The fact that we are not going to allow you to destroy our city by doing these things is not our problem. It's your problem. You can solve your problem by not doing drugs, getting help for your mental problems, getting a job, and sharing rent with others so inclined until you can afford a place of your own, probably in a lower cost community. This is not going to happen because the people we have elected allow the homeless to wallow in their victimhood rather than accept personal responsibility for their self destructiveness.
Kind of depressing that you read, or didn’t read, this specific and personal story and made a comment that could’ve been copy-pasted from any comments section on any post about homelessness anywhere. Maybe we could consider responding to the human content post itself rather than leaping to the abstract policy level, or at least have a bit of a mix?
Alex: Actually those are my thoughts. How is your approach (whatever it may be) working for San Francisco and other cities that are quite literally being destroyed by the homeless?
Alex: What the fuck exactly does “reading the room” have anything to do with a major national problem that is driving productive citizens out of some of our most beautiful cities? Why prioritize mentally ill drug addicts as sad as they may be over families who want to raise their kids in safe places? In short what the fuck is wrong with you?
Romanticizing the homeless and ignoring the destruction they are wreaking on society. Ditto crime. Ditto unlimited illegal immigration. Ditto, ditto, ditto.
Gay and feel good if this is supposed to pass off as autobiographical . No way any of this really happened. Would fit well in a novella though. This is fiction right?
This article is truly amazing. I live in Hong Kong and on a personal trip to US recently and always curious about the life and choice of the homeless people when I saw them. I kept thinking about this for many days until ‘BAM’ that morning I got your newsletter feeling like it’s a download from the universe:)
Not only your article answered to all my curiosity, the courageous and authentic story-telling and stories themselves captured my heart.
I wish I can also, for once, experience sitting with a few of the homeless people at corner of some street shop chatting about the unknown. I am still intimidated even saying so.
Thank you again for being the proxy of my universe.
This is interesting, as personally, I've never had a remotely positive experience interacting with a homeless person. The closest thing to a positive experience was the time one homeless guy offered to beat up another homeless guy, who was following and threatening me, in exchange for money. I guess maybe west coast homeless people are different from northeastern homeless people.
One thing that struck me as a bit odd was that your homeless friends never hit on you (or at least that you mentioned), which for a group of men who rarely get positive or even neutral female attention, seems almost uncanny. Perhaps they're so aware of their low status that it never even occurs to them that they have a shot. Maybe just be my northeastern bias, as in every city I've lived in homeless guys are notorious for hitting on every woman who walks past.
> Perhaps they're so aware of their low status that it never even occurs to them that they have a shot.
Their status doesn’t look _that_ low to me, at least on the streets around their blocks, as opposed to, maybe, the yoga studio.
Just imagine being one of Aella’s male, nerdy, sheltered, naïve college peers, and that, by some unfathomable chain of events, you found yourself going with her to one of those encounters with the homeless group. It’d be painfully obvious to everyone that you have no business being there, or anywhere less than a kilometre away from Aella, for that matter. There’d be no question that _you_ are at the bottom of the pecking order, and the best outcome you could hope for would be for everyone to just ignore you. Realistically, it wouldn’t take you long to commit a dozen social faux pas, each enough to earn you a broken bone or two, or a stab.
If you lived in the area, your—more likely, your parents’—home would probably be one of those houses they knew to steal from—unless, of course, your parents were much more worldly and street smart than you and had earned their respect.
You’d also be clearly happy you got to hang out with Aella, before reality forced the happiness out of you. Does that count as _too happy_? My uneducated guess is it does. It’d be similarly inevitable for you to become turgid-penised at some point, and you can just imagine the jokes at your expense that would raise, detailing how your sorry appendage is never going to get the acquaintance it so craves with the corresponding female body part.
It would be an unfathomable chain of events, though, as there are too many barriers. Staying up late? Outside? Drugs? Being complicit in theft? What will your parents think? Do you dare do anything they don’t like at all? Do you think you have a chance to survive without them? Of course, I’d expect these spoiled-manchild troubles to make you even more disgusting to your female peers than the middle-aged man from the first paragraph, so the whole story would never get started.
Aella - this is beautifully and movingly written in the best way. You might enjoy Jude Angelini's two books Hyena and Hummingbird. You should write more narrative non-fiction. Your eye and your craft are both powerful. Thank you for sharing this.
I had no idea you were a dancer! I was from the group of Fusion dancers in Bellingham in undergrad - circa 2013-2018 - and we would make frequent trips as a group to Om on Saturday (Sunday? I'm forgetting now) nights, then we'd go as a group over to the Dick's across the highway near the 45th st exit. We'd frequent Salsa Con Todo in Fremont and Blues Underground in cap hill as well.
I haven't gone since pre-covid! I was going when Za Thomaier was giving a bunch of lessons, the Bellingham crowd went down to Portland a bunch too. Then everybody got into Zouk and switched to salsa con todo's zouk scene.
No way I would have been able to recognise someone I'd only met once that day. I generally need to meet someone at least three times before I have much chance of recognising their face.
your way of writing is refreshingly honest, and your life seems so full of connection and earnest living, if that makes sense. rarely do i enjoy reading about other people's lives, at least not this much, so thank you for your continued writing
I masturbated to it later.
Really amazing and honest. I really hope Train is doing well
I've "Narrated" this article with ElevenLabs in your voice, I always read way better with my ears. Let me know if you would like me to get rid of it.
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/adventures-with-the-homeless-people
ty! I always forget i can read my own posts. maybe i'll try it for this one for real
That'd be awesome. The only other substacker I know that narrates their own stories is stephen fry. I enjoy listening to a nice short story before bed and want more short stories to listen to😅
Hi Aella, absolutely love your writing! Brutally honest 👌. Can I ask what are your thoughts on this voice cloning? I'm slightly concerned 🤔
Neat! Where’d you get the training data? I didn’t think there were that many recordings of her voice out there.
The Lex Friedman interview. Lots of high quality clean audio from that.
Love this and your willingness to see people for people without judgement and find the love in them. I’ve met many homeless people and am friends with many former ones, some of the best people I’ve ever known. Your writing is beautiful!
Reminds me a bit my youth when I was hanging out with alcoholics and taught one how to use computer and play video games. At 40y old he hasn't ever seen pc before and enjoyed it like a child. His favourite was GTA3, sinked into this game to the point he almost stopped drinking. It was in 2012 and now he's long dead but at least he died as a gamer!
The major issue in homelessness is not the lack of housing. It's the refusal of society to say no. No, you can't camp in this city. No, you can't shit in the streets. No, you can't panhandle aggressively. No, you can't shoot up publicly and leave your used needles lying around. The fact that we are not going to allow you to destroy our city by doing these things is not our problem. It's your problem. You can solve your problem by not doing drugs, getting help for your mental problems, getting a job, and sharing rent with others so inclined until you can afford a place of your own, probably in a lower cost community. This is not going to happen because the people we have elected allow the homeless to wallow in their victimhood rather than accept personal responsibility for their self destructiveness.
Kind of depressing that you read, or didn’t read, this specific and personal story and made a comment that could’ve been copy-pasted from any comments section on any post about homelessness anywhere. Maybe we could consider responding to the human content post itself rather than leaping to the abstract policy level, or at least have a bit of a mix?
Warm and cuddly as they destroy our major cities. Gotcha.
Refusal to engange with the content while repeating bullet points one can find a thousandful over the internet does not make you look smart.
I agree with Felix. Do you have any thoughts of your own to add, which are in tune with the actual conversation happening?
Alex: Actually those are my thoughts. How is your approach (whatever it may be) working for San Francisco and other cities that are quite literally being destroyed by the homeless?
The point is that grandstanding about political issues while others are trying to enjoy an interesting story is annoying and misreads the room.
I'm not sure what you mean by "my" approach. You don't know me or my (as it turns out, fairly libertarian) political beliefs.
Alex: What the fuck exactly does “reading the room” have anything to do with a major national problem that is driving productive citizens out of some of our most beautiful cities? Why prioritize mentally ill drug addicts as sad as they may be over families who want to raise their kids in safe places? In short what the fuck is wrong with you?
Romanticizing the homeless and ignoring the destruction they are wreaking on society. Ditto crime. Ditto unlimited illegal immigration. Ditto, ditto, ditto.
Hi Dave, I'd like to share some research with you, in hopes of elevating the discourse a little here. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8583397/pdf/ijerph-18-11660.pdf and I think you would benefit quite a lot from a listen to this conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpY_UinLih4
Thanks Misha. Some article titles:
“Urban Stress Indirectly Influences Psychological Symptoms through Its Association with Distress Tolerance and Perceived Social Support among Adults”
“Conceptualizing an Interdisciplinary Collective Impact Approach to Examine and Intervene in the Chronic Cycle of Homelessness.”
Total woke nonsense.
Sounds like maybe you just can't handle big words and complex sentences.
Aella probably ranks off the scale in openness
Gay and feel good if this is supposed to pass off as autobiographical . No way any of this really happened. Would fit well in a novella though. This is fiction right?
I enjoyed reading this a lot, it's very well written thank you
This article is truly amazing. I live in Hong Kong and on a personal trip to US recently and always curious about the life and choice of the homeless people when I saw them. I kept thinking about this for many days until ‘BAM’ that morning I got your newsletter feeling like it’s a download from the universe:)
Not only your article answered to all my curiosity, the courageous and authentic story-telling and stories themselves captured my heart.
I wish I can also, for once, experience sitting with a few of the homeless people at corner of some street shop chatting about the unknown. I am still intimidated even saying so.
Thank you again for being the proxy of my universe.
This is interesting, as personally, I've never had a remotely positive experience interacting with a homeless person. The closest thing to a positive experience was the time one homeless guy offered to beat up another homeless guy, who was following and threatening me, in exchange for money. I guess maybe west coast homeless people are different from northeastern homeless people.
One thing that struck me as a bit odd was that your homeless friends never hit on you (or at least that you mentioned), which for a group of men who rarely get positive or even neutral female attention, seems almost uncanny. Perhaps they're so aware of their low status that it never even occurs to them that they have a shot. Maybe just be my northeastern bias, as in every city I've lived in homeless guys are notorious for hitting on every woman who walks past.
> Perhaps they're so aware of their low status that it never even occurs to them that they have a shot.
Their status doesn’t look _that_ low to me, at least on the streets around their blocks, as opposed to, maybe, the yoga studio.
Just imagine being one of Aella’s male, nerdy, sheltered, naïve college peers, and that, by some unfathomable chain of events, you found yourself going with her to one of those encounters with the homeless group. It’d be painfully obvious to everyone that you have no business being there, or anywhere less than a kilometre away from Aella, for that matter. There’d be no question that _you_ are at the bottom of the pecking order, and the best outcome you could hope for would be for everyone to just ignore you. Realistically, it wouldn’t take you long to commit a dozen social faux pas, each enough to earn you a broken bone or two, or a stab.
If you lived in the area, your—more likely, your parents’—home would probably be one of those houses they knew to steal from—unless, of course, your parents were much more worldly and street smart than you and had earned their respect.
You’d also be clearly happy you got to hang out with Aella, before reality forced the happiness out of you. Does that count as _too happy_? My uneducated guess is it does. It’d be similarly inevitable for you to become turgid-penised at some point, and you can just imagine the jokes at your expense that would raise, detailing how your sorry appendage is never going to get the acquaintance it so craves with the corresponding female body part.
It would be an unfathomable chain of events, though, as there are too many barriers. Staying up late? Outside? Drugs? Being complicit in theft? What will your parents think? Do you dare do anything they don’t like at all? Do you think you have a chance to survive without them? Of course, I’d expect these spoiled-manchild troubles to make you even more disgusting to your female peers than the middle-aged man from the first paragraph, so the whole story would never get started.
Aella - this is beautifully and movingly written in the best way. You might enjoy Jude Angelini's two books Hyena and Hummingbird. You should write more narrative non-fiction. Your eye and your craft are both powerful. Thank you for sharing this.
Your curiosity, open-mindedness and sense of adventure is wondrous!
I had no idea you were a dancer! I was from the group of Fusion dancers in Bellingham in undergrad - circa 2013-2018 - and we would make frequent trips as a group to Om on Saturday (Sunday? I'm forgetting now) nights, then we'd go as a group over to the Dick's across the highway near the 45th st exit. We'd frequent Salsa Con Todo in Fremont and Blues Underground in cap hill as well.
It was actually fusion at om yeah but I said blues cause nobody knows what fusion is
I haven't gone since pre-covid! I was going when Za Thomaier was giving a bunch of lessons, the Bellingham crowd went down to Portland a bunch too. Then everybody got into Zouk and switched to salsa con todo's zouk scene.
No way I would have been able to recognise someone I'd only met once that day. I generally need to meet someone at least three times before I have much chance of recognising their face.