The Solution to Homelessness: A Study of Fame and Celebrity in America

In the quickly approaching two years that I have lived in Greenpoint, I've become enamored with the homeless, vagrant, drunk or — in the case of one very grumpy lady who wears vibrant, ornate hats, carries several stuffed grocery bags, wheels around a Samsonite suitcase and lives at the McDonald's — the strange fixtures of my neighborhood. They're as much my neighbors as anybody else around here, and their varying levels of public intoxication, odor and migration patterns make them that much more noticeable to me. Whereas I can go weeks without seeing friends who live mere blocks away, they're always on parade. Maybe it's because I'm more apt to notice a person who passed out on the street while eating a tin of Vienna sausages with a toothpick than my friend at the fruit stand buying bananas, but I don't think that makes me a bad person.

Anyway, it has me feeling somewhat friendly toward them. Like, I feel like saying "hi" when I pass them on the street. I haven't done it. (Actually, not true: I sorta mumbled "hey, okay" as the Herman Munster lookalike with PTSD recognized me from the coffee shop and said, "NO COFFEE, NO ICE CREAM, ONLY JELLO!", but I'm not sure that counts. Then he tucked his umbrella under his arm and searched through a garbage can.) But as I approach certain "stars" of the local transient street life, I can't help but feeling like I know them — and, even weirder, I get the feeling that they recognize me as one of the only people in the world who notices them. I know I'm not the only one who feels like this, because my favorite person and I have tossed around ideas about how to keep tabs on these real-life rock stars. Because that's what they are in a way: Rock stars. They rarely shower, drink copious amounts of cheap booze regardless of time or day, hang out wherever, do whatever they want, disregard the law, piss on the man, and generally don't give a damn about anything ... these old men make Keith Richards look like a choir boy. Okay, maybe that's just hyperbole, but the middle finger they give society is pretty damn "Exile on Main Street" sessions Rolling Stones, when they partied in that house in the south of France (while evading tax evasion charges in England) and wrote maybe the greatest album of all time.

One idea is an iPhone app called "BumTracker 2.0", basically a GPS-based system where app users could "tag" spots where they spotted a street-life star and note any fun activities/laws broken, so you could find your favorite urban urchin and track his (or her) movements. This idea is temporarily on the shelf due to lack of round one angel-investor backing and a lack of kickstarter donations.

But the idea that I really like is neighborhood-specific homeless people trading cards. Just like baseball cards, only better, and more relevant to daily life. Think about it: US Weekly, that celebrity-driven rag of a magazine prevalent in check-out aisles, has a national circulation of roughly 1.9 million copies per week so that people can compare their mundane, nose-picking and grocery-shopping boring lives with those of their celebrity counterparts. The section "Stars, They're Just Like Us", does exactly that.

Who the hell is Shanna Moakler? Oh, the ex-wife of a guy from Blink 182? Tell me more.

Look, I find it mildly entertaining to see a picture of anyone, let alone Russell Crowe, picking his nose, but I'd rather see action shots of a guy drooling on a bench than the Asian woman from Sideways wheeling her groceries out of a Ralph's Whole Foods. Plus it isn't like these celebrities are getting any money from these photos; instead, a bunch of acne-ridden masturbators with cameras make their living in LA from stalking. I want to make a few people laugh and "give the homeless the kind of change they can really use" (NYC PSA, you're welcome). So check it out: my prototype for "un-sheltered persons trading cards", in all its glory.

Believe it or not, they were jackhammering the pavement mere feet from this man who sleeps on the bench outside the coffee shop almost every day. Sometimes he is joined by his friend with bad posture, "Schlumpy."

Notice the tasteful thickness of the card stock. High-quality photo, name, team affiliation, primary position on the "field of life", right there on the front, just like a baseball card. I would like to transform the back of the cards to involve statistics, similar to those that would be on a baseball card. Stat categories could include: beers consumed, cans collected, average daily change collected, favorite places, etc. I don't know. Can you laugh at someone and help them at the same time? Can you sneeze and pee at the same time? Yes, but it hurts. Maybe that's the same as with these cards.