Lord of the Flies

Mark from the book club sat in front of the grocery store hawking the newspaper advocating for the homeless. A copy of Lord of the Flies rested on the concrete near him. A pint of Old Crow rested inside a shopping bag, along with a can of malt liquor and several pairs of new socks.

He was clean shaven and looking good. He wore a moth-eaten Pendleton shirt I'd given him a month ago in preparation for the winter. He greeted me with his usual gusto. I purchased the newspaper and a special holiday zine containing poems and prose written by the homeless of Portland.

A couple months ago, a documentary filmmaker who had read The Old Crow Book Club had reached out and wanted to know if he could produce various media about Mark and my (and others') efforts to get him into housing and could I set up something with Mark. I said sure, the more storytelling on this subject, the better. Maybe a book wasn't the most effective medium to promulgate the story anyway in the digital age.

I had set up an initial meeting with Mark and recorded an audio interview with the filmmaker.

The filmmaker now wanted to see if Mark would be willing to carry a smallish Go Pro camera with him for a “day in the life” sort of project. I told him I'd ask Mark and here I was asking.

Mark was all for it.

He held up Lord of the Flies and asked me if I'd read it. I had. I had taught it multiple time to secondary students and told him the students hated the prose but grasped the theme. Mark and I agreed the book was more relevant than ever in the age of social media. Everyone gets to stone Piggy every minute of every day of the week and social media behemoths make billions of dollars off it and highly paid tech workers don't bat an eye about their complicity.

Mark offered me a belt of Old Crow. Not today.

We moved on next to 1984. I'd taught that book many times and knew it by heart. Orwell never imagined that it wouldn't be a state-sponsored Big Brother who took over our lives and destroyed humanity. It would be private Big Tech and we would willingly pay for it and receive ads during our enslavement.

We talked more books and then it was time to go. I told Mark if I saw him reading Dune again, I would try to have him committed to a mental institution. He laughed. I laughed and I walked away from my friend and tried to forget we still had no new strategy to get him into housing. We hadn't said a word about it.