So Who's The Bum?

Some years ago, a half-baked dream, more of a thought really, was to better appreciate what might be deemed the largely hidden underclass community. The plan was simple. Seek out random local homeless souls with the goal to better understand their respective life stories. In exchange for a dinner, each would relate their background, the circumstances of their current condition, and their overall take on America. With their permission, of course, their stories would then be compiled into a book.

The project was abandoned for several reasons, the principal one being the effort would come across as rather intrusive and condescending. Maybe others would be able to pull off such a delicate undertaking, but not me. The “tell” was in my choice of the title for the would-be book – The Bums Of Boulder.

Now, as it turns out, the very term “bum” may be less of a pejorative and more of an honorific, even an aspiration of sorts. Enter this most interesting man named A.M. Hickman, the author of our focus piece, The Dying Art Of Being A Bum. What a unique individual he is, this combination of a distinct writing talent along with his unabashed desire to be a vagrant, a refugee from upstate New York and the “civilized” world beyond.

He hitchhiked for years in a “search for America” as he “slept out in the open, ate from dumpsters, and brushed elbows with provincials and rustics of every flavor in many of America’s boondocks and backvelds,” all captured in sparkling prose. The highlight of my New Year’s Eve was reading his piece and then reading it again after experiencing an epiphany of sorts after the first go-around.

The piece chronicles the human condition far better than anything that might have been gleaned from that abandoned book. It sets the scene by describing a rather colorful bum (hereinafter “Bum”), one among the many you might see panhandling on the street corner as you try to avoid eye contact. We get his living story, this character who represents a “throwback from a bygone era in the long and lazy history of bumhood.”

Where have they gone, these characters from a different age? Just as our towns become gentrified and our country homogenized, so does the traditional notion of the classic bum as it submerges into that “gigantic, blaring, blinking, flashing, globalized techno-culture.” Those who refuse to participate in the rules of the bureaucratized welfare office are sometimes lost as they “drift to the extremest margins of psychosis, addiction, and madness of the worst variety.”

Some others with the means or the support to do so might drop out to become the basement-dwelling millennial gamers, or the entitled trust-funders, or the retirees sitting on a healthy 401k. They may share the common element where man's search for meaning becomes reduced to man’s (yes, or woman’s) search for distractions.

The above-referenced epiphany was the realization that if the mark of a bum is one who may be outside the earning-and-spending consumer hustle, another candidate needs to be added to the roster . . . . the one in the mirror. Just as the Bum waddles from his daytime perch to that ramshackle cabin “where the land in front of the house looks like it forgot to shave,” there’s not much difference between his routine and my own, differing mainly in terms of the quality of our respective refuges.

So what’s become of you in your own post-hustle life, the one after what David Brooks referred to as the first mountain, characterized by that culture-driven need for success, comparative achievement, reputation and judgment (MM 10/17/19 Second Mountain). Have you transcended to that second mountain, marked by a certain spiritual awakening and ego dissolution or are you stuck in that distraction mode marked by trips to the casino, on-line kvetching, endless been-there-done-that travel, or pseudo-philosophical musings?

The last bastion of human purpose once defined in terms of the Protestant work ethic may now be under siege. You, too, members of the younger generation – after all, we’re all just different cars on the same train – as you behold a closing future. It comes down to the way one values human life. The bums, vagrants, and layabouts of today would seem to have actually trod the path of infinite idleness pretty well all things considered.

Wait until AI manifests that dystopian future in which a perfectly efficient society renders man redundant.

Bums, indeed.

Please note the following RSVP Policy for Member Monday: RSVP sign-up opens up at 11:00am on Fridays via the City Club weekly Newsletter. Seats are first-come, first-served: the first 14 secure a spot at the table, the last 3 on the couch. Cancellations must be made 24 hours in advance or the standard Social Lunch rate applies.