My goodness, you look beautiful today...
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I held it together until twenty minutes after five.
My last day in the office was rife with commemoration. It began at the workplace of a client, who had prepared for me a flattering going-away presentation. This was followed by a brief off-site (IHOP again, this is a nasty trend of ours) meeting with my boss, filled with an embarrassing level of adulation, almost to the point where I thought she was going to ask me back. She didn’t. After lunch and thoughtful gifts from coworkers, it was nearly the end of the day. Pretty soon it was only Carmen, the most senior staff person under my boss, and I left in the office.
“I should probably take your keys now,” she said.
Fuck that, I thought, I’m never giving up my keys. My attachment to the office, I’ve learned recently, is significant. The office is my structural home, but it’s much more than that. It is the place where I grew out of my relationship woes, my financial troubles, my creative doldrums. Everything. It became the source of the rebirth of my happiness. And part of me wasn’t ready to leave.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “How about I drop the key in the mail slot after I leave? That’ll give me a few minutes to finish cleaning up. You can get out of here.”
Carmen accepted. We hugged and said our goodbyes, and she disappeared through the entranceway of the building.
I walked over, locked the door, and turned around to face the now-empty office. The place looked ordinary. I guess that’s the irony of familiarity. You become so habituated in its embrace, so sheltered in its predictability that you grow comfortable, casual. Yet what breeds the absence of remark is the enduring dependability that familiarity provides. Think about it. A simple flip of the switch illuminates every corner of the room, yet we don’t rejoice in its revelation. Rather, our mood is contingent upon its delivery. We become immediately negative upon its failure. Angry, afraid, inconvenienced. This marvel of human invention! And we scoff at mere imperfections! Not even just a detail it’s become, but an expectation. This is the risk of familiarity.
I thought about this for a moment, and was soon overtaken with emotion for the splendor before me. Each breath turned into a gasp in acknowledgment for each extraordinary detail of this room. Each feature that had collectively acted as my sole shelter of respite for the past 500 days. 500 days! To the day!
I accounted for each detail of wonder that allowed for such a feat of space utilization, from the upwards-rolling blinds of the front window to the forward-facing desk situated in the rear corner, that sole obstacle from my being seen laying prostrate beneath its fortress-like teak panels. The desk drawer storing my hair clippers. The hidden storage knob that hung my suits and the dusty cranny that concealed my auxiliary shoe bag. The impractical, too. A curve in entranceway wall that always caught my imagination during phone calls, losing myself in its strange angular dimension which seemed more fit for a bike ramp than commercial sidewall. Or an unexplained divot in the flooring near the water cooler, crater-like in its mystery, like a sandcastle moat many times washed over by the incoming tide.
I sat down in my desk chair, overcome with sentiment. Unspectacular as the place was, I had grown to love it. But my relationship with the office was hardly a symbiotic one. All of the listed details were benefits the place had given to me. Without them, I would be left without a structural home. Without me, however, the office retained its identity. The imbalance was not lost on me. What the office had given me was far greater than what I had given back to the office. I felt a surge of gratitude, and a distant and not completely understood desire to somehow honor the place. Not knowing how to achieve the solitary honoring of an inanimate series of objects that comprised this structural location, I did what any person who truly loves another would do: I allowed myself to be vulnerable in its presence.
It was 5:20 on this final day in my office and there I was, tearing up, strumming my guitar with my legs hanging off the desk. I don’t weep often, but there is nothing quite as liberating as letting go in a purely honest way. A good cry is like a purging of excess, a release of weighted droplets of water that throw our bodies out of balance. The beauty of the act itself is striking. Our eyes, arguably the most compelling features of our body, become swollen with sentiment, literally blinded by feeling so strongly that this inadvertently self-inflicted phenomenon stops us dead in our tracks and commands the entirety of our attention. How beautiful is that! It is the act that we first learned, as little humans, wailing wildly, eager for the suckle of our mother’s breast or the warmth of our father’s embrace. It is how we first connect with the ones we love. Before we can speak, before we can communicate, we cry.
It was exactly the release I needed. One last bonding with this place that was so strangely dear to me. What I had sincerely intended to be a few lingering minutes has since turned into three hours. It is 8:00 now and I am still here, stretching out my farewell, spending the last moments at my desk doing what the last 500 days taught me to do. To write again.
In a few moments I will close my laptop, gather the last of my belongings, and lock up the office for one last time. Only this time, I’m ready to give up the keys.
-TOH
My boss and I took our seats at the booth of the International House of Pancakes and exchanged pleasantries. It’s a strange place to sit down for a serious conversation, surrounded by an array of syrup selections with The Isley Brothers playing in the background. I pretended to be comfortable, fiddling with the paper band around my dining utensils.
“You look casual today,” she said, noting my shorts and monochromatic long sleeve t-shirt. My boss doesn’t work in my office building, so often her comments expose the fact that she has little knowledge of what’s going on. I dress this way more often than not. While her ignorance plays to my lifestyle advantage, the reminder that she has no idea how productive I am irks me.
The waiter takes our order and moves along, cueing the beginning of us getting down to business.
“I think you know why we’re having this meeting,” she said.
Yes, I thought. I scheduled it. Two weeks ago, I looked around my office and it struck me how bad things had gotten. Finances were in the gutter, morale was low, and daily priorities had shifted to sales (or our industry’s equivalent) in an attempt to save our organization from collapse. I saw my coworkers’ heightened anxiety about feeding their children. And then there was me, consumed completely with my creative projects. Writing the Hobo book. Drafting a screenplay. Producing a documentary. It didn’t seem right that I should be so blissfully unaffected by this downward spiral while others feared losing their jobs. So I scheduled a meeting with my boss, intending to suggest that in the event of a layoff, I be the first to go.
As it turned out, I never got the chance to make the offer.
Without letting me butt in, my boss went on to explain why I was being let go. “It isn’t your performance,” she said, citing numerous achievements of mine throughout my 3 or 4 years of service with the company. She cited specific financial marks the organization was required to hit before June, and the discussions held for how to mitigate the problems without trimming staff. I began to feel bad for her. This organization was her conception and it was tanking after decades of success. I nodded along nimbly, collected in my acceptance of her terms, while she grew misty-eyed and hesitated with her words.
It’s rare for the employee to be the consoling the person who’s firing him, but that’s pretty much how the rest of the meeting went. I explained my intention for calling the meeting and reassured her that I was the best choice, personally speaking, to get the first axe. She seemed sincerely grateful for my attitude, and made every possible concession for my departure. We decided I’d stay on until the end of the month, keeping flexible hours to allow for my transition into unemployment. I would receiving a glowing recommendation for whatever gig might come next. And, I got to keep my brand new laptop.
For getting fired at an IHOP, it was a raging success.
So what now for The Office Hobo?
When I walked into the office the evening after receiving the news, a rush of sadness overtook me. Every object there represented a critical piece of what made this place home over the past 470 or so days. The latest stack of boxes strategically placed to block the view from the front window. The seat cushions that had embraced my slumbering body for so many months. The artwork on the walls I had worked hard to secure and install. All of these objects made up what I grew to appreciate as my home. Now it’s time to move on to the next chapter.
Many people dream of being able to change the direction of their lives and pursue something they’ve always wanted. I’ve seen friends do this to varying levels of success, chasing dreams of becoming comedians or teachers or recording artists or woodworkers. This means embracing risk and giving all focus and effort into a pursuit. This is part of my next chapter. Seeing if I can turn my love of creating into something that can sustain the simple lifestyle I desire.
So the story continues. I plan to keep up with my writings, both in real-time on this site and completing the book. Embracing home-free living only gains momentum, and I will explore the ups and downs of my experiences with that on this site. Those stories will just take place (or will they!?!) outside of the workplace. The Office Hobo is going mobile.
I hope you’ll continue the journey with me.
– T.O.H.
Over the past few months, I have been converting the back of my truck into a living area. In foreseeing the need to eventually move out of the office, this seemed like a natural progression for my lifestyle desires. After all, office living does not last forever.
Having spent many wilderness vacations living out of the back of my open-air pickup bed, I had a decent sense for what I was looking for. There were two initial things that topped the list: 1) A simple, secure sleeping space and, 2) Something covert that would allow me to park anywhere and not be noticed. Since I’d been sleeping under the stars–or beneath giant tarp–the first order of business would be to create a more permanent shelter back there. Although I will say that for the many times I slept under that tarp, no one was crazy enough to check and see if anyone was crazy enough to be sleeping under there!
Warm & cozy up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit!
Clearly I needed a camper shell. Since I live in a major metropolitan area, finding a compatible, matching shell wasn’t too difficult. A few days of searching on Craigslist, a day trip down to San Diego and a few hundred dollars later, and there I was with my shell.
The beginning of an era.
At first, I tested my budding truck-home out in the office parking lot with a simple backpacking air mattress and a sleeping bag. This was not ideal, but it worked. I slept just as well, if not better, than I had been sleeping in the office. What didn’t work so well in doing so was being exposed by the non-tinted windows. After cutting up my old tarp into window-shaped pieces (rest in peace, fearsome tarp) and taping it to the window trim, I found myself struggling to keep the poor man’s window treatment in place throughout the night. Even when it was up, plastic tarp hardly makes the place feel like home. It was evident I’d need a better solution: Velcro and felt.
I purchased a few yards of felt and cut four pieces into window-sized portions. Then, I affixed Velcro to each section of felt and stuck them to the inside of the shell. The result has been flawless. Once I figured out that sewing the felt into the fabric of the shell was more effective than an array of adhesives, I had the best privacy imaginable. Not only does the felt block out most light and peering passersby, the dark color makes it appear as if my windows are just darkly tinted. To this day, it’s the most valuable feature on the truck.
Limousine tint? Nope, that’s for sissies.
I keep the driver’s side felt down at all times, as it never interferes with visibility. From time to time, I roll the passenger side up, either to access a beautiful view while parked or to see the blindspot in traffic. The front-most window felt remains rolled up at all times, unless I’m physically in the back. And the rear-most window felt stretches its full length to velcro to the ceiling fabric, allowing me to see out of the back while I drive. If I’m ever leaving the truck somewhere for an extended period of time, I’ll lower that, too. Just to deter opportunist thieves who might see some goodies inside.
This flap flips up and sticks to the ceiling. It’s pretty awesome.
After solving my two initial problems by creating a secure, covert sleeping space, I started to address the need to introduce comfort and aesthetics. My top priority was a bed. But before I could find a proper mattress, I’d need to design and assemble wooden surfaces inside the shell for the eventual storage and workspace. This was the fun part. I decided to conceive of grand ideas. A folding cabinet, a place for food and a water jug, a refrigerator. Even a bookcase.
I’d have to start by building a foundation. Thanks to some help from a friend, I was given access to a woodshop and got to work bringing my ideas to life. The first step was soon complete: A wooden floor, with elevated shelving above the wheel wells.
Diagonally shot photography add drama to otherwise dull pictures.
I now had a platform to store my keys, wallet, and phone as I slept. I also had the dimensions ready for my bed–the exact width of a twin mattress. I immediately purchased a 3-inch thick memory foam mattress. This proved to be a bit too thin for my extroverted hip bone. Because I wanted to ensure I could still sit up straight in the back, I figured I only had a couple more inches to spare. So I went to a local foam store (they even have two branches in L.A.!) and purchased a two-inch thick sheet of regular foam. When the clerk asked me what I’d be doing with it, I told him I was making a crash pad for road trips. He nodded and said a lot of people who live in their cars buy that exact sheet of foam. “You don’t look like you live in your car though,” he said. “Mostly, those guys just smell real bad.”
Don’t judge a book by it’s cover, homie.
After cutting a few inches off the ends of both foam pads, I placed the memory foam on top, covered them with a bed spread and voila! New bed! I can’t describe how restful that first night on the mattress was. That’s when I started to prefer sleeping in the truck to sleeping in the office. Pure luxury!
The construction in the back was starting to come along, too. I removed the rear window to the truck, leaving only the folding window of the camper shell. This allowed me to crawl in and out of the back without going outside. I’d improve this later, but at first it added piece of mind. The fire marshal would be proud.
Heaven in a truck bed. Also note the slide locks installed on the inside tailgate. This is because the outside tailgate lock doesn’t lock, requiring some creativity to secure the interior.
I also added a second level to the shelving above the wheel wells. This meant I could still see out of the back, but now I had a chest-level (when seated) platform for cooking and working.
Notice the passenger-side felt folded up for visibility.
My truck was beginning to feel like a home. But there was still a long way to go to complete the project. From here I’d began to think of ideas for food storage, lighting, power sources, and ventilation. With a road trip planned for late March, I had my work cut out for me.
That’s it for “part I”. Click here for the second half!
– T.O.H.
There’s tumult in the office. Word of a severe budget crisis is circulating, and employees are having trouble focusing on their daily tasks. I lean back in my chair, prop my feet up on the guitar amp beneath my desk, and take a sip from my Bigelow tea as I study the behavior of my fellow staff members.
One of my coworkers, having recently returned from maternity leave, leans over another coworker’s desk to converse in a whisper. The second coworker just sent two kids off to college and is feeling the burn of high tuition costs. When do you think…? Who might they…? Eyes dart around. The Sparklett’s delivery man walks in to drop-off two new water jugs, but our financial officer waves him off. Not this month. An unpaid intern crosses their path, asking if anyone wants to share a Subway coupon with her. She hasn’t been receiving her usual free lunches lately and could use the discount. I can’t help but wonder if anyone is going to survive this.
This is an axe. It was placed here in this post for dramatic effect.
For anyone who has been a victim of cost-cutting, the feeling is all too familiar. An atmosphere of U-turn ideology vaguely cloaked in the red flag of “Urgency”, yielding abrupt shifts in policy and mood that can take that feeling in your stomach from empty to ulcer. Daily achievements are cast aside, making way for newfound anxiety about the newest past deadline. Uncertain. Unwieldy. Unpleasant.
The possibility has been looming over the organization for months. The beginning of my experiment-turned-lifestyle came on the heels of a financial tremor that froze raises and bonuses, and there have since been multiple aftershocks–or seismic predecessors–in the months leading up to what now seems like a looming cataclysmic earthquake. But instead of running for cover, I’m straddling the trembling fault line.
Aren’t I heroic?
Not really. Just a touch more prepared to take the hit.
Two weeks ago, my boss called a meeting and announced the extent of the organization’s financial woes. “It’s an extremely challenging time,” she said. “Can I guarantee your jobs are safe? No.” She glanced around the table to gauge our reactions. I sat in silence, wringing my sweaty hands. This was the moment I had been conflictingly anticipating for months. Was it possible that I’d be laid off?
For most people, this is an extremely unpleasant notion to consider. One might think I’d feel the same, seeing as my place of employment is my home in addition to my main source of income. Fortunately, a few factors allow me to take a more colorful perspective. For one, I’m rent-free already. So there’s little existing overhead to take care of. Secondly, California state unemployment insurance would be kind to me. Before taxes, I’d collect $1,800 per month while I get back on my feet. Also, with a few paid creative endeavors bolstering a growing buffer of savings, I have a few coals in the fire to survive a little joblessness. And as a potential bonus, I’m talking with another organization who is encouraging me to apply for a dream position with them.
Financially, I should survive it. There’d be time to more quickly prepare The Office Hobo memoirs for publication, as well as time to work on my other writing projects, all while finding a way to earn a stable income happily. The thought is actually kind of exciting.
But what about housing?
I would miss the office. It’s the closest thing to any building I can call “home”. Ironically, the philosophical love affair with living home-free that has developed as a result of living there could be what allows me to leave it. I’m ready to take that home-free affair to a new level. One of matrimonial proportions.
Over the last few months, I have been building a cozy multi-purpose room in the covered bed of my pickup truck. I plan on explaining this in detail in another post (coming soon!), but in short the plans for this room include everything from a twin-sized memory foam mattress to expandable folding cabinet door/counter-tops and a custom sunroof for ventilation… and stargazing. Like a loyal follower suggested on my Facebook page, this is a mobile living unit. Though not quite as luxurious as a full-hookup RV, it’s infinitely more stealthy. And yes, it sleeps two comfortably.
What appears to be on the horizon for me is a healthy serving of home-free with a tasty side-dish of job-free.
Will this actually come to fruition though? What if I get this other job? What if everyone else is let go but me?
I hope to find out soon. I’ve scheduled a meeting with my boss to discuss the prospect of layoffs. If she is planning on it, I will suggest she chooses me first. While I’d be happy to keep my job–it is flexible and earns me more than enough income–it would hardly be the end of the world for me to be released. With no newborn to take care of, no kids in college, and a safety net that can sustain my lifestyle, eliminating my position first, from a personal standpoint, makes a hell of a lot of sense. Whether or not I’m expendable professionally.
The new sequel in my home-free storyline might be right around the corner.
– T.O.H.
This week should have been a celebration. Monday marked my 365th consecutive day of home-free living, a grand total of 407 days during The Office Hobo experiment. As luck would have it, a newly ordered memory foam mattress was delivered to the office door that afternoon, as if to signal that it was time to rest easy. I walked through the office with the oversized package without a look from my coworkers, and set it unceremoniously behind my desk.
Despite the well-timed delivery, there was no celebration on Monday.
I had no real reason for this to be the case. This day hadn’t marked the end of my experiment, so there was no fanfare about leaving the office. There was no revelatory event or office-related catastrophe. No one (save for my friend, The Cock (trust me, I am not responsible for this nickname, though I take pleasure in introducing him that way) was even aware enough to remind me of the occasion. In fact, it wasn’t until later that evening until I even remembered this was the anniversary of the day I moved back into my office–for good. I was just kind of… brooding.
Why?
Last week, I hit the town with my friend Slaps (again, not my nickname). It was a Thursday evening and I would have preferred to stay in. Work has been extremely demanding as of late, and frankly the holidays left me a little tired of drinking alcohol. But it had been a while since I’d seen him so I kept my word.
The night started simply. A couple rounds at our old Culver City hangout, and catch-up conversation. It’s a dive bar, by Los Angeles standards, complete with perennial Christmas lights and variable-talent karaoke. And somehow we always manage to drink for free. With a name like Slaps on your tab, who would dare charge?
We very nearly called it a night early, but by some twist of fate we ended up at a speakeasy off Hollywood Boulevard. The evening’s memories play back like stop-motion animation, hollow human drawings slinking in and out of frame, interchangeable silhouettes breezing past with the seemingly purposeless shapeshifting of a school of fish in the open sea. It was a spatially refreshing place. Like the smog in the sky above the town, the neon-lit ceiling hung low, giving the aura of intimacy without the immediacy of illumination. Slaps and I took advantage. Or were taken advantage of. Two parallel zephyrs whisking around the jetties of bachelorettes, collecting names–Loretta, Mireya, Ashley–and sharing stories. This is not usually my scene. But tonight I was out of my mind.
Out. Of. My. Mind.
The bar was closing when I met Mileka. We found ourselves facing one another in a tunnel of a hallway, both waiting for our respective friends to finish… something. Her weight shifted backwards against the mortared wall as if the bricks were melting into her, absorbed by the kind mystery of her black eyes and rubbed smooth by the coarse intuition of her humble voice. Mileka and I talked in this way, merging thoughts on Haitian culture with philosophical collaborations on genealogy. In truth, I don’t remember much more as far as details of the conversation. I just know that it felt important.
It is a silly basis for connection, anything initiated at such an hour with a stranger nearly ten years your junior. Oh, but to be simultaneously aware and care-free. The rest of the evening saw us inseparable. Stealing away from friends and rides home, chatterboxing champions of the evening. When I kissed her later that night, she thanked me for doing so. We agreed to see each other again. Soon.
It may seem old hat at this point in the experiment, but the prospect of rejection still looms large, causing me great apprehension over revealing my living situation. When we set a date for Saturday night, I plunged into immediate cowardice. I turned down her 11pm Friday text message request to meet her out, and spent the entire next day projecting my anxiety onto my appearance and my lack of concrete memories from our conversations. Instead of touching base with her early in the day to confirm our date, a Los Angeles anti-flake tradition, I put it off, waiting until an hour and a half before our scheduled time to call her.
The date never happened. Some element of my behavior–the Friday excuse, the delayed call–had changed her mind about me. Our text conversations fizzled and we haven’t seen each other again. Mileka was gone as soon as she had arrived. I had fulfilled my own prophesy of her rejection by acting foolishly before the actual situation could even arise. How was I capable of this kind of mental lapse? After living this long under these circumstances, shouldn’t I be accustomed to the expectations?
As I lay on the celebratory memory foam mattress for the first time, it struck me just how delicate the human psyche can be. We create our own little realities, convenient or otherwise, so we may exist within them. And we invite others to join us, sometimes without taking into consideration that they too have constructed little realities of their own, realities that we ourselves might not fit into. It is in the intersection of these realities that we find conflict. Incompatibilities. Misunderstanding. Rejection. We can choose to disengage from those consequences or dive in. Disregard it, or invest, reassess, change. The latter can be a very uncomfortable place to exist. But if I haven’t learned anything else during this experiment, I have learned to exist in discomfort.
Laying with these thoughts, I felt the urge to cry. But in reality nothing sad had happened. A stranger remained a stranger. An anticipated outcome was realized. An experiment accrued more data. In learning from this experience, I actually gained more than I lost. All that I lost was the potential of a person fulfilling some preconceived ideal, some romantic notion that was fulfilled by a few lines of forgotten dialogue and a well-timed kiss. I was falling in love with the idea long before I knew anything about the person.
I spread my hand out across my new mattress, pressing down and watching as the mattress gave way to the force of the hand’s pressure. I held my hand there for a moment, feeling the gentle foam embrace the contours of my fingers, free of hesitation, my skin disappearing into the forgiving whiteness. Then, suddenly, I pulled back, releasing my hand from the mattress, studying closely the resultant impression. The imprint was so loyal to the outline of my hand, one might have thought I had become invisible, pressed still against this foam canvas. It took many moments to vanish, this phantom hand outline, but it eventually did, allowing the surface to return to its original state. As if the hand had never been there in the first place.
We should all be so lucky as to heal ourselves in this same fashion.
– TOH
It has been a while since my last update. I owe my audience so much in the way of stories, it’s nearly overwhelming. Many things have happened over the last month and a half. Things I will struggle to summarize here on this page. I continue to find myself discouraged for not being able to tell this story openly, but I’ll do my best and give some highlights here. Thank you for checking back to see how my experiment is going!
Today marks a milestone. 400 days of home-free living. Not only that, but in one week I will have lived this way for an entire year, uninterrupted. Well… perhaps I should say “continuously” instead. On January 28, 2013, I moved out of my place permanently and moved back into my office after a 6-week trial period months earlier. So next week will mark the anniversary of the day I fully committed to making my office home. Tonight I celebrate with a Trader Joe’s wrap (chicken pesto, for those of you scoring at home) and a booked flight to Chicago next month to see a lovely lady to be pseudo-named later. I’m nearing my savings goal of $10, 000 for the experiment, after having eliminated auto and medical debt, purchased some much-needed items (I hadn’t bought jeans in three years, so I was kind of due…) and (budget) traveled more extensively than ever before. These are the positives.
There are negatives, too. I have experienced more than a couple sleepless nights and scheduling snafus. On more than one occasion some form of unsolicited adventure has come my way, forcing me into uncomfortable situations and cutting into my creative pursuits. While I’ve achieved beyond expectations on concrete tasks, my creative ventures have been slower as of late. The stress of my situation has negatively affected the quantity of my writing, for I find it hard to relax and focus on a piece long enough to bring it to fruition. With lots of tasks to do, my life here is a bit too complicated to allow for creative space in the few free moments I enjoy. My writing was much more productive in the winter and spring of last year. I’ll need to simplify my life before getting back to that place.
And that is the goal for 2014. Pare down my travels, better prioritize my creative projects and, ultimately, create for myself a more stable home outside of the office.
That’s right, The Office Hobo will be hanging up office bindle stick and move into a more private setting.
I celebrate my 400th Day knowing that day is fast approaching. But where will I go? It’s a question I’ve put a lot of thought into over the past couple of months. The question surfaced most forcefully when my friend, Tim, announced plans to move to Los Angeles in January. He did this once before, but had to back out after getting a lucrative offer to work on a boat for a few months in the Gulf of Mexico. But with Tim coming back on land and wishing to move west, he was asking me to be his roommate. Tim has been one of my closest supporters throughout the experiment–mostly because the relative absurdity of my experiences–so I found his offer a bit ironic. Yet for a while I entertained the offer.
It was the thought of having a proper bed, of redefining “sleeping in” that attracted me first. With my own room, I could achieve highest honors in the field of impromptu weekend napping, an activity at which I was formerly unrivaled. I could regain control of my own schedule and entertain friends and intimates without sneakery. There was a benefit to having another creative type around to bounce ideas off of and intermingle with social peers. I found it an interesting proposition.
As time wore on, though, I found the prospect of paying rent no less abhorrent than when I began the experiment. As a matter of fact, I had become even more resistant to the idea, having now spearheaded a relatively scientific study backing my intuition that apartment life has more downside than benefit. Faced with the choice of spending up to $15,000 per year on rent, I balked. Nay, I pitched wild.
Tim was understanding when I declined his offer to move in together. But his understanding wasn’t going to solve my question of where to sleep during the coming year. Knowing I have no interest in paying rent and no gumption to continue the evasion necessary for full-time office domesticity, my options are definitively slim.
What do you think the solution is?
To be continued next week…
-TOH
Monday, November 18 will mark my 340th day of home-free living. And while living this way has become simpler–routine, even–writing about it has become more of a challenge. I’ve found that there is a sizable gap between my old posts and present-day. Plenty has materialized that I haven’t had a chance to report. At least not in the way that I’d prefer to present it. I am, after all, a perfectionist. Go perfect or go home(-free).
A lot has transpired in the life of the hobo over the past 2-3 months. From largely unreported romantic developments to unrelenting demands for creative projects and a rise in home-free awareness thanks to a surge in entertainment industry interest in my experiment. Each has demanded more of my time than in the past, and it is affecting the way I approach my blog.
Timing is only part of the problem, though. My biggest obstacle in reporting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth has been the heightened need for anonymity. When I realized a greatly improved website, the publication of news reports, and a spike in social media presence would be making me more vulnerable to detection, I had to make some changes to the way I wrote about my life. At a certain point, I knew I couldn’t tell-all in the same way I once had. And I had a hell of a time deciding what to retain from the old The Office Hobo website, and an even tougher time figuring out what new developments were appropriate to publish. It’s an issue that’s plagued me over the past couple of months. How do you make a blog personal when the most intimate details about yourself will give away your identity?
This, I believe, has hindered the quality of my work. I can’t share every detail I’d like to. Certain things about my workplace are off-limits because those details might give away the identity of my company or the nature of our work. I wish I could publish a story about an inappropriate relationship that developed between two coworkers here, and the saucy details therein. Or the strange things I’ve seen at night as a result of the very unique setup of my office. Oh, there are rich little stories that are going untold!
But I can only take notes of those stories and save them for later, for a day when I am no longer vulnerable to detection. When that will be, I can’t be sure. Sometime between now and when the book is ready for release. More specifically, sometime between when I move out of the office and when I leave my job. The timing of both is still in question.
I’m looking forward to filling in the holes with juicy details. Meanwhile, I’m doing my best to catch you guys up with details of how things are going and tell you as much as I can about my day-to-day. In a couple of upcoming posts, I will talk about some unusual sightings in my building, including a possible second, different “office hobo” in a neighboring place of business. I will also fulfill a recent void of romantic happenings in the life of TOH. There are some fun stories to share. I know some readers have specifically requested those updates, so I thank you for your patience in waiting for them.
Until then, I’ll continue to work on closing in on my goal of one year of home-free living. Thank you for your support in helping me make that happen. I look forward to sharing the coming months with you!
– TOH
No one wants to shower in a stall smeared in another man’s shit.
When I walked into the 24 Hour Fitness at 9:00pm on a Friday, my goal was to get in and out quickly. The gym is sparsely attended at this hour, with most members opting to be elsewhere, likely engaging in some activity counterproductive to their health. I saw this as a great time to get in and out easily, unlike my normal pre- or post-workday rush hours when the locker rooms are packed with 9-5’ers. And in a way, I got what I expected.
Overflowing towel hamper in seemingly abandoned locker room.
The locker room was a veritable ghost town. I was accompanied only by two other men, a white-haired toothpick of a man whom I’ve seen on multiple occasions fall asleep on the core strengthening room mats, and an aging, dreadlocked white guy in spandex who only seems to use the stair-stepper. I could only assume these were fellow home-freepersons. Older men living out their days on the fringes, in a climate and culture indifferent enough to tolerate them.
As I prepared myself for the quick shower, I was reminded that said indifference had infected the 24 Hour Fitness staff. Dirty complimentary towels piled up in corner hampers, under changing room benches, and across hallway floors. The way my people use these gym-provided towels has always disgusted me. While some of us prefer to use these towels for their intended purpose–to wipe the sweat off our faces during a grueling workout or dry off after a hot shower–others chose to get more creative. They use towels as floormats, as rags to scrub the bottom of their dirty shoes, as handkerchiefs for their bloody noses. Direct, disgusting, shameless. But nothing was as Bukowskian as what I was about to see.
Looks like it’s time for this shower room’s annual cleaning.
I tried to ignore the odor as I walked into the main shower room. The bathing area is separate from the shitting area, so the wafting scent of excrement came as a surprise to me. I immediately checked myself for rogue traces of fecal matter, but found myself smelling no worse than the average writer. Since I was rushing, I headed into the first stall, hoping to escape the stench with a quick wash. When I reached the first stall, I found it was missing a showerhead. Strike One.
As I left that stall, I remembered having walked into it last week and made the same discovery. I guess a missing showerhead falls short of the “emergency maintenance” designation. I suppose for those of us accustomed to bathing with a garden hose, it’d be a relative luxury. I am not one of those people. Even the home-free lifestyle has its limits.
As I moved on to the next stall, the stink of crap grew stronger. My sense of urgency increased with every breath of putrid air, each gasp accompanied by the horrifying visual of some stranger’s shitstain lining the sacks of my lungs. Must. Get. Out. Yet when I arrived to Door Number Two, the damn thing was missing its soap container.
Does no one repair anything in this place?
Panic was beginning to set in. With every inoperable stall I entered, I inched closer and closer to the unfortunate reality of becoming the first man ever to dry-drown in another man’s shit. But I really needed this shower. So I pressed on.
I almost wish I hadn’t.
What I found in Stall Number Three will stick with me for a lifetime. With the door to the stall ajar, I almost passed it by. But at that point the excrement scent had grown so strong I began to fear I might faint. So I grabbed the handle and noticed that the water inside the stall was on full blast. Yet no one was in it. Strange, I thought, that someone would be so wasteful as to leave the water running like that. I stared at the showerhead for a moment, noting the steam rising from its porous lens. I held my breath as I surveyed the scene. Hot water, check. Operable showerhead, check. Full soap container, check. Human feces on the floor of the–wait…
I call this work “Human Shit in Stall Number Three”
Someone shit himself in the shower. A man. A grown, adult man.
Then he ran off.
Then no one cleaned it up.
Then I came and took a picture of it. Ten minutes later.
I took a shower (in another stall, thank you very much), toweled off (with my own towel, thank you very much), and captured the above images. During that time, no one had come to resolve the issue. What exactly was everyone on staff doing? I started to wonder if it was them who had shit in the stall. Like they had some kind of contest going to see which Friday night staffperson could shit in the most absurd place. I quickly dressed and headed down to the front desk to look into it.
The “Welcome Desk”. Guess the on-duty staff was off crapping on a bosu ball when I came looking for him.
No one was manning the desk. Not only were half of the shower stalls in the place broken in some way, one of them being used as a temporary bed pan, but I wasn’t even afforded the luxury to complain about it. Instead I left wondering what stunk worse, the shit-stink air of the men’s locker room showers or the gross incompetence of the 24 Hour Fitness management. I figured it was a wash.*
I wish I had some kind of moral or dénouement to present after this story, but I don’t. Rather than talk about missing the cleanliness of home bathing (I don’t) or the yearning for the privacy of showering in your own place (I’ve adapted) or the reliability of having hot water and a shower head (I’m over it), I guess I’ll just say this: If you ever lose control of your bowels in a public setting of any sort, there is only one this I ask: Please clean up your shit.
I don’t feel like that’s too much to ask.
Thanks!
– TOH
*Pun intended.
Last week, the L.A. Weekly published an article I wrote outlining my experiment in home-free living. As one might expect, the article inspired a wide range of reactions. From disbelief to awe, from curiosity to outrage, readers made their reactions known through public comments and private messages.
It’s a common phenomenon by now. Small public fora pop up after nearly every posted article, news post, or YouTube video, and many of which devolve into heated debates on the disputed citizenship of our president or the promiscuity of Playa_187’s mom. It’s a given: Death, taxes, and unstructured, almost feral reactionary comments.
So when my article was set for release, I prepared for the onslaught.
I’ve had many chances over the last 300 or so days to study people’s reactions to my lifestyle. It is no surprise to me when someone disagrees with my choices, but it never ceases to arouse my curiosity. What about my decision provokes such strong reactions? Is it the silhouette of discomfort or shame, projected by the perception of the cynic? Is it the shock of my openness, my willingness to share said degradation? Or is it simply because it’s different? An unusual lifestyle choice that people aren’t accustomed to witnessing…
I’ll withhold addressing most of the comments I received. But there are a few I feel compelled to address, mostly because the resultant message will be informative for those interested in what I’m doing and I’ll have fun doing it.
Shall we?:
The Good
Most of the feedback I’ve received has been positive. People are interested in the project and want to learn more. It’s truly motivating to interact with readers who are curious about the ins and outs of my lifestyle.
Today I received a message from a young man in L.A. that made my day.* Through the course of your day, your emotions rise and fall with your energy, your environment. This message came after a long, mid-afternoon meeting with a colleague over some mundane topic. I was feeling the desire to nod off, to escape to some distant dream world when I checked my email and found the aforementioned message. It spoke about the concept of home, the embrace of an ideal rather than an expectation. It was the kind of message that boosted my spirit on an otherwise dull afternoon.
That is the beauty of the public forum. People can voluntarily share their sentiments, spreading encouragement in a way that years ago may not have been quite so easy.
The Bad
People can also be pretty critical.
One public comment I would like to address comes from the Weekly article page, from a woman who, for all she knows, might be an old friend of mine. It’s in the realm of possibility, isn’t it? Her comment is below:
It’s called stealing…stealing the company’s electricity, water. Don’t they have cameras?
I post this comment here because it questions a point of ethics, something I discuss a lot in my writing. Her assumption is that my use of company utilities raises costs someone other than myself has to cover. It seems like a fair assumption, if there ever was one. But the facts belie the perception. Here’s why:
Let’s say my office is 2,000 square feet (for the sake of argument), controlled by a central thermostat, and has a pair of unisex bathrooms (no showers). And let’s say that my office is kept at 68 degrees Fahrenheit, with a full show of ceiling lights and a single refrigerator that’s always running (yet still no shin splints!**). Now let’s say that, prior to my office living experiment, my coworkers routinely kept lights on and the a/c running. Nights and weekends.
True. Story.
The thing is, I don’t want the lights on all night. Or at all, really. So I turn them off. And because I prefer my living spaces warm and toasty, I run the a/c at higher temperatures. Alsom since there’s no shower, my water usage is negligible. So where my lodging in my office might appear to raise costs, it actually lowers them. So instead of being a thief, I’m actually a conservationist. I should probably get a raise for my efforts.
I’m kidding about the raise.***
The point is that, like most of this experiment, appearances don’t always hold true. What seems like a careless oversight–or worse, egregious banditry–just so happens to be a carefully considered positive consequence of the thing. Who knew?
The Impulsive
One reader called me a hero. Another called me a loser. Yet another drunk-messaged me to accuse me of being a fraud and a cheat.
None of these things are accurate. But each of them tells us something about ourselves. As humans, we are capable of an array of emotions in any given moment. If we chose to give in to those emotional reactions, regardless of the origin of the stimuli, we leave ourselves vulnerable to the weakness of impulse. That weakness being that we may not fully consider what we’re saying, we may report something inaccurately or disguise our curiosity with misunderstanding.
Conversely, we may reveal something worth studying. We may, like the reader who accused me of being a thief, inspire conversation on a matter of ethical importance. It may encourage us to consider something in a different way, even if that consideration is uncomfortable. Or, like the reader who messaged me this afternoon, we may share an impulse that spreads a smile that spans the afternoon.
It’s hard to place judgement on what I myself am fully capable of doing. What I can do is appreciate the opportunity to use what has been said as an informal qualitative analysis of people’s reactions to this kind of lifestyle. And for that, I am thankful. Because regardless of whether that feedback is positive or critical, the chance to learn from it is invaluable.
So thank you for your comments… and keep them coming!
– TOH
* “Young man”! I refuse to edit this because it shows how old I feel like I’m getting…
** Sorry…
*** I mean, I wouldn’t turn it down…
I think someone else is sleeping in my building.
A few months ago I started to notice a van parked in front of the building at odd hours. I’d only see it in the evenings, and it was always parked in front of the same business. (For the sake of anonymity, I’ll call it a watch repair shop. Trust me when I say it’s just as benign.) This gray van began to show up every night. I’d pretend to go home after work and it’d be there, vacant, predictable. Meanwhile, the watch repair shop would always be open well past dark, its door wide open to accommodate wandering eyes.
It’s as plain as the nose on your face.
The expression was always big in my family. My uncle might use it to describe a seemingly obvious attempt at converting a 3rd down. My mom might mutter it under her breath as my dad asked (for the third night in a row) where the ice cream scoop was. I thought about the phrase a lot as a boy, wondering about the absurdity of the words. You can’t even see your nose, I’d think to myself, going cross-eyed trying to writhe the thing into perspective. But it’s right there… I just didn’t get it. I literally embodied the meaning of the phrase.
As an adult, it has morphed into a matter of fascination. Hiding the obvious in plain view. Testing the boundaries of perception. Almost every scenario therein is mesmerizing. If something is done with confidence, it is almost universally accepted.
I started to notice the man in the watch repair shop during business hours. He was never working, just pacing around. Sometimes talking to the shop owner, an older Spanish man in baggy clothes, or pacing around outside, smoking a cigarette. The man fit the profile of a workplace dweller better than I did. A 40-something year old Eastern European man with a round belly, strutting confidently in his basketball shorts, plugs of body hair sprouting through and around his wife-beater.
Five minutes after I saw him and I’d already constructed a back story for the guy. Laid off from his job at the warehouse, Dominic broke the lease for his apartment in Little Armenia and took to sleeping on his mother’s pullout couch in Sun Valley living room. After failing to follow through on agreed-upon chores like fixing the faulty shower head or tending to the aging molding on the garage window, and following one too many nights spending his severance at the corner pub, Dominic’s mom had kicked him out. With no place to go, Dominic turned to his only friend, Sergio, for help. For a small fee, Sergio would let him sleep in the cot in the back. But only if he promised to keep the place secure. After all, the watch repair shop was most definitely a money-laundering front for Sergio’s crack-dealing enterprise.
Clearly I’m prone to a little prejudgment myself.
Putting that aside, I began over the coming weeks to simply observe. And what I’ve found is a consistent “Dominic” presence on the premises. His van is present until about 6:30 in the morning (evidence of a morning shift!) and he can often be seen seated in the dark, chatting on his phone in front of the watch repair shop window. This is well after Sergio leaves. I know this because Sergio’s CRV is absent come 9pm.
Dominic appears to have no shame. And no one is the wiser.
Except for me. I admire the guy, or at least my version of what he is. As plain as day and right under our noses.
So for now it seems as if I’m not the only inhabitant in the building. It’s a budding little community, a nocturnal sanctuary for domestic misfits. Maybe one day we’ll run into each other and I’ll put the question to him. Ask for the truth behind his story. Until then, I’ll admire his feat from afar. Without having to go cross-eyed doing it.
-TOH