New York –
Matt Green often has to hear that he is a no-brainer, that he is wasting his life pointlessly, that he is not doing anything that will advance society or even humanity. He thinks it is unjust when he hears something like that. For him, what he does makes perfect sense, very much.
Green is running. Every day. He’s been doing this for ten years. First he ran 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. Block by block. He’s still not done.
Matt Green is out and about every day.
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Michael Berman/ Greenwich Entertainment
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During this time he gradually dismantled the remains 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.
15 dollars a day
In return for the shelter, he feeds the cats, goes shopping or walks the dogs. His daily budget is $ 15, which is enough to ride the subway and buy 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 he doesn’t really want to do anything with them.
Filming for the cinema documentary
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Michael Berman/Greenwich Entertainment
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The fact that a documentary about him is now in the cinemas (“The World Before Your Feet”) is not his fault, a friend persuaded him to do so.
It is enough for Matt Green to collect impressions and encounters and use them to enter on his blog. In retrospect, he often researches the background to curiosities that he has discovered.
Encounter with street cleaners while walking through Brooklyn
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Michael Berman/Greenwich Entertainment
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He was interested in why there are splashes of paint on sewer gullies all over New York. As it turned out, the health department used these blobs to mark a test for communicable diseases that had been carried out.
Or where the bullet holes on the outside wall of an old bank building on Wall Street came from. There was a bomb attack there by anarchists in 1919.
The route is the goal
Often, however, Green just uploads photos of things that catch his eye – a puddle on Staten Island that reflects the evening sky. Or a fig he picked in a front yard in Coney Island.
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. The life plan chosen by the former engineer has its price. Green’s last two relationships have broken up.
Separation from fiance
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. “
Greens hiking is not compatible with bindings. He seems happy to roam New York freely and soak up the city with all of his senses. 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.
And somehow he seems to have lost himself in the streets. The most recent pictures he posted are from September 2015. The others are still in his memory.
Here go to his blog.
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