“L” train platform, last car. Empty. A man is slouched over himself sound asleep and face-planted into a pile of plastic bags bungee-strapped to a rolling cart. Can I feel more awful in comparison? I feel homeless. A sort of homelessness comes over me. I guess that the extreme is to just give up. To end up giving up, to fall into nihilism. No, I can’t. I don’t want to. These are real individuals, real circumstances. This man passed out on his plastic bags, his black baseball cap stitched with the words “HIGH LINE” in lime green capitalized serif. Hands folded together in a deep sun tan. Fingernails disheveled and broken, peeling back on the tips like they clawed for a while at something. Worn, weathered claws. Every knuckle adorned with stainless steel rings, various sizes, and ornamentation, plastic jewels. His neck crooked over his chin, back curved and folded in half, head plopped down through long wavy gray hair and scraggly beard as if voluntarily suffocating himself onto thin black matte plastic deli bags stuffed full of rags. Somehow he breathes. The various sized bags on the rolling cart are stacked like a neat bundled totem ascending largest to small, efficient, pragmatic, bound to it with multicolored bungees like the ones used to tether a hood over a lawnmower thrown into the trunk of a car. Black tee shirt with some silk screened scene that looks like a dirty burning landscape or something powerful described by carved stone text. His black jeans are clean. He is groomed. Steel ear studs. New military style boots laced up right tight. He looks about sixty years old. Deep sleep. The train jostles our bodies over the tracks. We have the same black rolling cart. Mine is a mobile studio. His, a pile of plastic bags each filled with something. I park my cart next to his. What if they were switched? I sit down across from him and stare. Is this man more modern than any painting I will ever be able to make? I can’t believe that I’m thinking that.