I didn’t prepare to be homeless for an entire three hours. I didn’t tell anyone that I was going to be doing an elaborate stunt for the sake of a column. That’s because I didn’t actually plan on being homeless. I mean, there is naturally the philosophical question of who does plan to be homeless, really? In this case it’s more that I accidentally locked myself out of the house when taking out the garbage.
Still, given that I couldn’t get in the house, I knew that my time without a home would last at least until my fiance was back from work, which was three hours later. I could have, in theory, called a locksmith, but why do that when I could just endure three hours of cold? I had a warm jacket.
At first it wasn’t that cold, so I entertained myself by listening to music in the garage. Naturally most homeless people don’t have a garage, but my garage could easily be a substitute for any makeshift shelter, since it’s a basic structure with no heat. Do homeless people have a phone to listen to music on? Maybe, and I’m sure they can leech off Tim Horton’s wifi in the same way I was just using my home internet if they did.
For the first hour, it was fine and roughly aligned with my extremely ambitious plans for the evening, which mostly involved listening to music. Luckily my lawn furniture was also fairly comfortable so it wasn’t that far off from sitting on my couch. I assume real homeless people do not have excellent reclining lawn chairs.
The thing is, even if it wasn’t cold at first, the cold accumulated, leading me to start to question how I could warm up. I decided to walk to a nearby gas station, because it was open and also had heat.
The issue with going to a store was that typically a store expects customers to buy things, and my wallet was in my house beside my keys. I was also the only person in the gas station, which made it slightly awkward when the nice man who was working watched as I studied bottles of Mountain Dew intently, as though the secret of life could be found on their labels. As a result, I left because it was weird.
The problem with being homeless was a combination of cold and boredom. I decided to walk around my neighborhood mostly because it took time and I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
I couldn’t really type on my phone because the cold made my fingers move slowly. Eventually I just didn’t know how to spend the time anymore. I had exhausted the amount of entertainment a phone could provide and my fingers didn’t particularly like being outside of my pockets anyway. I counted down the minutes before my salvation finally got home from work.
I didn’t have any deep insight to gain from my brief time being homeless. I already knew that being outside on a cold day wasn’t very enjoyable and I also knew that being homeless was bad, too.
I also knew that being stuck without money limits the amount of stuff you can do. Really, the only thing I managed to learn from the experience is that I should probably take my keys along when I take out the garbage. It’s a valuable lesson from which we can all benefit.
