TONY
“You see that woman over there with that guy; the one who looks good enough to you-know what-with; the one with the body and the hair?”
PHILIP
“Yup, sure.”
TONY
“You know, she’s with that guy for his money, plain and simple. He just buys her everything she wants so she sticks around.”
PHILIP
“Where’d you get this? You know them?”
TONY
“Nope, never spoken to ’em in my life. But you know, I sit here all the time so you get to know what’s going on. It’s like I’m the local bartender but I don’t have a bar.”
Homeless Man Speaks 
July 14, 2007 at 1:31 am
tony’s a bartender minus a bar which makes him pretty tender i guess.
i live here in england and i’d like tony to know about my life and i wonder if he’d be interested in my life thousands of miles away like i am in his.
he’s tender.
there’s nothing wrong with that.
July 14, 2007 at 12:33 pm
so.. I never heard back.. and I’m wondering..
hmmm… yes it’s insightful to hear the thoughts
of a homeless man, yet… isn’t the idea of homelessness
to – assist – people to get off the street? You did ask
that in one post, so?
.. so I’m wondering, Philip, you being a Harvard MBA,
wouldn’t you have some way of rounding up some
local people to assist Tony to get a room somewhere,
a room of his own? He could still come and spend
days on the street, lament, give his thoughts ..but there
would be a safe place for him to got to at night, with a bed,
a washroom to wash in, you know, have some
fundamental things of life, fundamental in this culture…?
..one person at a time…
… so…?
July 14, 2007 at 4:38 pm
hello, been reading for a while, and this is my first comment. I think Tony hit the nail on the head. He is a watcher, and he can see alot of things! I for one would just concentrate on getting myself and the kids to where we need to go.
July 14, 2007 at 6:14 pm
I wonder if he feels the same about you. That you just stick around him so you can put his words on this blog.
July 14, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Maya, Sorry to be longer than you’d hoped in following up with Tony. His response to your first question was that “you’ve done lots for me, including that time you tried to get me into that public housing place.” In that instance, where he ultimately decided not to pursue what seemed t me great opportunity to get a roof over his head. I can remember feeling like whacking him upside the head with a 2×4 for being so unreasonable and recalcitrant (IMO). As Tony also said, I’ve made other attempts to get him off the street, with equal success, as is evident.
He didn’t answer your second question about doing a blog without an intermediary (e.g., without me). IMO, Tony doesn’t take doing so as a serious possibility. FWIW, Tony’s PoV is that he gets to be on the Internet and have editorial control (which he has regularly exercised) while need putting in no effort other than chatting with me.
Philip
July 15, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Thanks Tony and Phillip, I really like reading this.
Strangely there’s often more insight in one of these short posts in many of the other long slabs of text that go up around blogs.
Rebecca (from Australia)
July 22, 2007 at 1:32 am
Thanks for explaining Philip and Tony. To walk a mile or km in your shoes, or anyone’s for that matter. Very difficult to imagine.
I know we can all fall into states of being, get entrenched in ways of living, from which there seems almost no escape. So a current reality, as limited as it may appear – such as let’s say the familiar milieu of a city street – becomes a refuge, a type of home, and is difficult to leave. Resistance looms when shelter in the form of a roof, a room, some safety becomes a possibility.
Now if there weren’t freezing winters, and nights full of hunger, if there were no old bones aching, or night vandals looming perhaps we could say, so let it be the street. But there are and that’s not the solution, is it. Also as conscious human beings we can’t just abandon those suffering, in our vision in our midst, we can not turn away from our brothers who are perhaps frozen in their states of impasse, can we?