Hobos

Hobos are hep. Not hip, for everyone is well aware that the word hip lost any oomph long ago. It has gone the way of right on and the dreaded neat-o into the cultural vacuum cleaner. Maybe it will be recycled five years from now. Maybe never. But hep is right fucking now.

Even though hobos are hep, I do not know a thing about hobos.

The vacuum, you see, is with me. And Wonder Bread is not the culprit; my mother would not buy me a single square, fearing the chemicalization would push my already pale skin toward, for lack of a better song title, a whiter shade of pale. My friends, I reasoned, could begin to fear their former friend, now florescent, the one with the skin disease that Michael Jackson has. You know: vitiligo.

I have never met a hobo with or without a viscious skin disease but the fact that I was - in part - raised in suburbia makes me believe that if vitiligo is really out there, and not just something my mom made up to scare me into eating whole grain food, then hobos have it. Not whole grain bread mind you but vitiligo. They must. With no family pet save a rusty can of beans, no car waiting on their sixteenth birthday, no remote control set up inside a boxcar, how can a hobo possibly survive?

I say in part above to emphasize that a small portion of me just might be hep. You know how I know this? I have eaten dirt. Hobos no doubt have eaten dirt. Thus, the bond between me and hobos has been cemented by the soil of the earth.

Hobos eat dirt; eating dirt equals street cred; street cred is most definitely hep. By way of soil eating, I, too, have gained hep points. Here is my lament: because I contain both ‘burb knowledge and hep cred in my cranium, I can conceivably get into the hottest clubs and pay five dollars for water bottled in Idaho. Hobos cannot do that – they have the hep but not the knowledge of who to bribe. Neither of us has been on television, and neither of us is likely to, unless a body is found floating in a creek somewhere. The fact remains: hobos have no chance. None at all. This is perhaps the single biggest reason why hobos are hep.

I guess what I am saying is that I want to be a hobo.