Alexander the Grate: preference

Transcript context

…Give us the rant, please. Yeah, so hold that question. I say NFA euphemistically, but homelessness or those experiencing homelessness . . . May I inform the world that everybody is chronically experiencing homeless because you are just as homeless as you are naked. Your essential condition — as naked as you were born. Otherwise, why would you be wearing clothing? Desmond Morris, Naked Ape. Apes have a built-in covering. If someone says, “Are you homeless?” I say, “Well, aren’t you?” I don’t see a turtle shell or a conch shell on your back. That’s your essential nature. If you had your own shelter built in, you wouldn’t need an external shelter. Everybody’s homeless because any of you here, including myself, have some degree of shelter insecurity. That’s my new narrative for the relative states of shelter insecurity because none of you knows — the turkey in the apartment or the house next door was smoking in bed and burned his house down, and it spreads through the whole block. Your apartment building might be ashes at this point — or home or whatever. The plane out of the sky — that happens. You see that in the news… That’s the irony, or the paradox at least, especially in California after the wildfires. Tens of thousands of people with million-dollar homes — they were essentially, personally shelterless at that point, but they had a low level of shelter insecurity because they had back-up resources. It amazes me. They say you can’t understand until you walk a mile. Empathy grows with experience in the situation, but they haven’t learned. They’re still choleric about this smelly, grungy infestation of their nice, manicured, water-guzzling green spaces and stuff. It’s not just the shelter or the home as long as you can replace it. I have a high degree of shelter insecurity. I don’t say shelter security. Everybody’s shelter-insecure because ultimately, our most basic shelter — the body we’re in — we’re going to lose that, too. So everybody is ultimately shelter-insecure to some degree. You can have the most Bezos style mansions in this world, but everybody loses their . . . if you subscribe to the personhood-in-a-separate-soul notions, and this is a temporary dwelling that you’re in in the flesh, everybody loses it. Now, you’re lucky if the soul is just an emergent phenomenon, and after the body dies, that’s kaput. That’s wishful thinking. I wish that were true, but I’ve been exposed to too much theology and Christian aspect and stuff. Anyway, I’m hedging my bets, and taking what they say literally just in case because it sounds pretty convincing. You’ve had 2,000 years of people maintaining this point of view. Tell me about stratification amongst the homeless. There’s higher-class, lower-class homeless? Who thinks who is not good enough for whom? How does that all work?…

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