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Matt Green wants to move every kilometer of the street from New York, that’s around 13,000 in total. He’s been on the road for almost seven years. What drives him?
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New York – Matt Green often has to hear that he is a good-for-nothing, that he is wasting his life pointlessly, that he is not doing anything that will advance society or even humanity. Green thinks it is unfair when he hears something like that; for him what he does makes perfect sense, very much indeed. Only – he cannot really convey this meaningfulness to the majority of his fellow men.
Green walks every day. He’s been doing this for ten years. First he hiked across the United States, from Rockaway Beach in New York to Rockaway Beach of the same name on the Pacific coast of Oregon. When that was done after almost two years, he decided to start a new hike. Green wants to wander every kilometer of the street from New York, that’s around 13,000 in total. He’s been on the road for almost seven years.
His daily budget is $ 15
During this time he gradually dismantled what was left of a bourgeois existence. Green no longer has a residence and hardly any possessions. He sleeps with friends on the sofa, on the floor or sometimes on the pool table. In return for the shelter, he feeds the cats, goes shopping or walks the dogs. His daily budget is $ 15, which is enough to get around on the subway and warm up rice and beans. More, he says, he doesn’t need anything, he doesn’t miss anything.
When people on the street ask him what he would like to do with these expeditions – maybe a book or a company for city tours, he usually says that he doesn’t really want to do anything with it. The fact that a documentary about him is now being released is not his fault, a friend persuaded him to do so
Green collects impressions, takes photos and uploads them to his blog
It is completely sufficient for Matt Green to collect impressions and encounters and to post them on his blog. In retrospect, he often researches the background to curiosities that he encountered. He was interested in why there are blobs of paint on sewage gullies all over New York. It turns out that the health department uses these blobs to mark a test for communicable diseases that has been carried out. Or where the bullet holes on the outside wall of an old bank building on Wall Street came from. It turns out that anarchists carried out a bomb attack there in 1919.
Often, however, Green just uploads photos of things that catch his eye – a puddle on Staten Island that reflects the evening sky, for example. Or a fig he picked in a front yard in Coney Island. Or a group of old men sitting in a front yard in the Bronx.
Matt Green has no theory about the essence of the city
None of this is intended to become a complete lexicon of the city. Green says he knows exactly how fragmentary and incomplete his notes are. “My impression of a residential area is shaped by the time of day and the season, by the people I meet. A quarter of an hour, a day, a month later everything is different again. ”Over the years, Green has developed a feeling for the aspects of this huge city more than anyone else. But he does not have a communicable knowledge of the city, a theory about the essence of the city.
Something like that doesn’t interest him. Green only collects. For example, on his hikes he noticed that barbershops like one of the Hip-Hop use borrowed spelling when promoting their business. “Barberz” is often written on the awnings or “Kool Kutz”. “I could now philosophize about how hip hop culture expands to different areas of life and influences everything,” says Green. “But would I really have said something by that?”
Sense, meaning, knowledge – for Matt Green all this arises from walking and experiencing itself. Again and again he emphasizes the almost clichéd mantra that the path is the goal. Getting ready, arriving doesn’t interest him.
His fiancée broke up with him two weeks before the wedding
The life plan chosen by the former engineer has its price. Green’s last two relationships have broken up. His fiancée, who broke up with him two weeks before the wedding, says: “It was just not possible to plan anything with him. He just doesn’t want to think about what’s next. “
Hiking the way Green does it is incompatible with bindings. As long as he walks, Green remains alone with himself and the city, a lonely pilgrim on the streets of New York. The American romantic, Henry David Thoreau, whom Green worships, wrote in his famous 1862 essay on hiking: “Only when you are ready to leave father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child – when you have paid your debts and Have made your will and are a free man – only then are you ready for a hike. “
Matt Green seems happy to walk freely through New York and soak up the city with all of his senses. He doesn’t need more. What if the pilgrimage is over at some point? That will be found. Thinking about it would take him far too far out of the here and now.
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