incomplete

I met Eric a few weeks ago. I was exploring a construction site in the area that had been intriguing me to no end. I wasn't sure why I went in there. But after I met Eric, he told me the answer. It's interesting that someone can have the same restless curiosity and appreciation of strange beauty as me. I had thought that I was alone in that.

Eric used to be an accountant. When he was twenty-six he abruptly left his job, his home, and his girlfriend of three years. When I asked him why he just tossed his life, he said, "That wasn't my life. Those were my circumstances. If I'd stayed much longer, I wouldn't be really alive any more."

That night, in the construction site, I was just poking around idly when Eric and I stumbled upon each other. He was looking around for a suitable place to bed down, while I was framing up a shot of what looked like an empty elevator shaft on my SLR. When we both realized that the other was harmless, we got to chatting about what the hell we were doing there. I think he was impressed that I fancied myself a photographer - even more so that I hadn't gone digital. He got talking about how this place was a work in progress, and that's why he dug it. I realized that's exactly what drew me to it in the first place. Leave it to a total stranger to make you realize what you're thinking.

He told me about another site he'd seen that he really wanted to get to before "they ruin it" by completing construction, and he said that with the floodlights filtering through it I could get some great shots there. The next night I took the bus to meet him at this place. I brought my camera, as well as two rolls of film and a few bottles of beer. After I'd shot the rolls, we sat down to drink and we shot the shit. It turns out that after he "dropped out," Eric started wandering around the city, sleeping only in construction sites that he could break into at night. He's twenty-nine now, and although he looks ten years older, he swears he's never felt more youthful.

When I asked him how he managed to survive when he had no job, he just shook his head and smiled a bit. I asked him what that was supposed to mean, and by way of reply he pulled several folded sheets of lined paper out of his coat and handed them to me. I read the pencil-written text for the next ten minutes or so. I was absolutely enthralled. Here I was, in the company of an enlightened soul, a philosopher-tramp.

It turns out that Eric writes whenever he has a chance. He'll write anything - short stories, non-fiction, manifestos, editorial work. He freelances and is published by some small papers and magazines. This gives him enough money to eat. What really got me, though, was his admission that he writes far more than he publishes, and that if he had his way, none of his work would be published at all. "Whenever I know I'm going to need some more damn money, I'll submit a few things. But only when I have to. Getting them out in the popular media just cheapens them. Besides, most of my stuff is unfinished - I write best that way."

I could write a book about our conversations, but I'm sure he's going to actually do that before I could motivate myself to bring pen to paper. I know if he writes that, he'd die before it got published. I know I wouldn't want to publish it either if I wrote it - a little bit of Eric, rubbing off on me. Right now I'm just trying to get into this creative process, this state of mind that this man lives every day.