Area homeless man mistaken for trendsetting hipster

Eyewitnesses impressed by fashion sense, surprised by lack of home

By Jacey Gibb, Senior Hobo Correspondent

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]wo college students, Whitney Stanson and Ajay Harris, were shocked late yesterday afternoon when they discovered that the man they had been observing from across the coffee shop was in fact not an arts major like themselves, but actually a homeless man who’s been squatting in the area for over a month.

“My friend and I just started coming here recently, mostly because the coffee shop we used to go to refused to go vegan-only,” Stanson explained to The Other Press. “Anyways, we were just sitting there, discussing the significance of Holden’s hunting hat in Catcher in the Rye when in walks this guy. At first, we thought he looked like someone that maybe goes to the same grad school we do, but then a girl working overheard us talking about him and said that he was actually just some homeless guy.”

Whitney noted that the scraggy, poorly-maintained beard that the man was sporting as the first thing to draw her attention. “I’m around a lot of terrible beards at my school, but his was a mess. Noticeably patchy, with what I at first thought were crumbs of food in it, but it was actually just bird shit. So raw and unconformed.”

For Harris, the man’s innovative garbage bag belt was the main thing that caught his eye. “He had this awesome garbage bag tied to his twine-belt, which he was using to store cans and bottles that he’d dug out of the coffee shop’s trash. I wish I cared enough about the environment to riffle through disgusting garbage and carry empties around with me. I wonder if he got that bag off Etsy.”

Harris also praised the pungent odour emitting from the man, adding that “bathing is definitely overrated” and that the reason the man wasn’t wearing deodorant was probably because of “all of the aluminum and stuff that they put in it,” which apparently is “super bad for you.”

Footage from the shop’s security camera shows the man entered the store at 3:15 p.m., clearly intoxicated and dressed primarily in baggy neon-coloured clothing that someone could only find nowadays in a thrift store or dumpster. “His clothes were so fresh!” Whitney praised.

Despite his poor hygiene and pessimistic world views, one of the baristas working at the time insisted that the man wasn’t an aspiring musician or self proclaimed expert on human interactions, but in fact, just homeless.

“He comes in all the time. Usually just digs through the garbage, but if there’s a new person working, he’ll ask for the bathroom key and go shoot up in there. It’s really quite sad.”

When The Other Press approached the homeless man/fashion icon at his residence in a cardboard box behind a neighbouring Arby’s, he simply asked for change, followed by a barrage of racial slurs.