Subject: Circus

Please don’t post my messages, or talk about it with your strangers, including your Shaggy friend; I’d prefer to remain off the roster.

I’m ill and stuck in bed mostly, and have watched all of the Stranger videos. I think watching makes me feel iller, but I have some fascination, similar to seeing mosquitoe larvae swimming in a dirty puddle.

My general impression is that NYC must be heavily centered around cultures related to the performing arts. The strangers all share desires related to the spectacle. It seems obvious that many of the people you record from the steps are seeking you out, and putting on a show specifically because they’re aware of the camera.

Even social characters supposedly with psychological problems, like Dusty, seem to me to be clearly acting. But it is a blend with their personality, where their act isn’t entirely separate from their real persona. Which is partly why most of these people would be diagnosed with personality disorder.

It’d be interesting to go through the list of people and try to diagnose them to identify their specific motivations and dysfunctions.

But I hope you’re open to critical analysis pointed at you too, because it looks like you’re part of that same thing. Except, rather than being a trashy dysfunctional actor, you’re the director. Rather than be the spectacle, you play the quieter top-down behind-the-lens kind of overseer who puts the show together.

It’s a free public circus, and you claimed them as your freaks, to create a park of novelty and drama, that through the clearer defining of what already exists, you are able to brand in your name and essentially charge admission.

Except I looked at your numbers, and product, and you’re at the level of the bums asking for change. Which makes it interesting, because you’re kind of like a homeless director.

This gives you freedom, but what you do with that freedom is apparently build family with the mentally retarded and disorderly. Which makes your issue as interesting as theirs, because why would someone do that?

You apparently grew up in Christian land, so maybe when you were little there was tremendous desire to break out of that restricted lifestyle. Maybe that’s where you developed appeal for “punk”, and atheism. Maybe it is your own fetish, but you still haven’t been able to free yourself completely, so you find comfort in watching others do it for you, where you can pretend to be “normal”, when really you know you’re nothing of the sort.

Maybe in Christian land you felt like the freak, because compared to them you were. Maybe that bothered you, so you moved into a garbage dump, where relative to them, you’re Mother Theresa. But you’re also freer to act out, and embrace your inner punk.

But you’re an old man. Don’t you want a functional family? Are you married? Children? Did you escape a heart break when you ran away to the island of the freaks? Maybe you suffer from something similar to Shaggy. He seems to have a developmental problem where he is rooted in the persona of a 12 year old, along with low intelligence that might classify as mild retardation. You seem smarter, and more like 16, but still, similar in that you’re choosing to hang out in middle school for years.

It looks like maybe you started out with more documentation, and “freaking out squares”, which you learned can bring income with the magnets. You need to do more than sell some magnets, and shocking the world with trash TV is another opportunity to get attention, which really shows that you yourself are in the business of the spectacle, just like them.

But after a while you seemed to get really integrated into the native culture and it became your family, possibly even a main source of love. In the process, you create drama that wouldn’t exist, because you’re living as savages who are part of a family.

Like with Zippy, he clearly admired Shaggy, and that attraction to the love of the park family had him talking crazy of wanting to throw his life away for this tribe.

I feel the whole situation is being neglected. The park should be a facility built for the mentally ill, where qualified people are cleaning them up and preventing things like tooth loss and infection. They shouldn’t be brought to a hospital and released, they should all live there permanently. New York is really failing, in that they seem to leave wild wounded animals to infest the parks, only providing police to overlook.

One thing I can’t figure out is this:

This gem I never really talked about on the site. It’s moments like this that make me wonder if I’m the only one who totally appreciates what I do.

Describe what happens here to your buddy and he’ll look at you funny and say, “You subscribed to that channel why?”

In my eyes however, it’s a red ribbon.

It’s a video of you apparently mocking the dog molester guy. Put that together with your Christian bashing, and chuckles when Shaggy puts others down, and I’m wondering if your main motivation is to attack people. Is what you’re doing here to appreciate making fun of some guy where he sees it but doesn’t get it or whatever and walks away? To communicate with the wildlife through hand gestures? Is your red ribbon that you chased him out? Put down a retard and declare victory? Surely you’re not that stupid are you?

Maybe it has a lot to do with lust and love. Maybe the punk girl you fetishize is far more common there. Maybe the fleeting wins of catching the punk girl on camera, sometimes in states of undress, to have her coming to you confusing the attraction for the camera with attraction to you, opportunity to be close and interact with her, is worth much more than money to you. Maybe sometimes you have sex with them, maybe the masturbation material is enough, maybe you hold out on dreams one might bond with you.

Maybe you, like the rat in the hat, are under delusion that your production could be the next big thing.

Mister Nobody

misternobody@hush.com

In response to your more ugly assessments of me, I think you only reveal your own sad outlook while you are stuck sick in bed living life through YouTube videos. Instead of giving me any sort of break and considering that I’m attempting to be as honest as possible in these videos, like it or not, you assume most of my reasons are devious. What you see as “exploiting the retarded” or making fun of people with psychological problems, I see as showing real street life without sugarcoating or patronizing.

My main source of income is in the Jesus magnets, which is about 90% wholesale to stores across the US and worldwide, none of whom found me through my Amazing Strangers videos. I don’t know where you got your “charge for admission” accusation, or thinking I have some money-making agenda behind all of this. This probably reflects your perception of others (and in many cases, rightly so). However, anyone who actually knows me knows that money is not my first, or even my tenth motivator (I mean, I actually went and produced Mohammed Dressup fridge magnets! For profit?). There’s going to be no mainstream show from what I’m doing (too raw & politically incorrect). I put no ads on my videos, and charge nothing for anything I’m doing there. I actually lose money by making the postcards and giving them away, which I do because it’s fun, and I’m very proud of it.

Believe it or not the #1 motivator for me making these videos is because it’s a priceless truth-stranger-than-fiction diary of my daily experiences. The events that happen here are like nothing else, and documenting them is something only those involved can truly appreciate and understand. If you’re not at the park all the time like we all are, you’ll never fully get it. This fact is proven to me again and again in the comments section under the videos.

Anyone who actually comes to Union and experiences what’s happening there in real time immediately gets put in their place. You may have some grand solution for how we should be acting in each video, but the second your ass is there on the steps you’ll see how your ideas flop, and the way Shaggy and I handle ourselves actually works, and the lessons learned of value. The social experiment of it all should leave no question as to why it’s so interesting and so worth documenting.

When I first began my site I knew one thing I’d have to endure would be viewers assigning me the worst possible traits for why I’m doing what I’m doing, and then hearing their vivid analysis like it’s somehow so insightful. But since day one my main concern is not for what people on the internet think of me (a radical idea in today’s world), but instead only caring what people who actually know me in real life think. This is why my site has had such longevity (13 years), while others fail.

Having a wife & family has never been on my todo list. Expressing myself artistically I’ve found to be extremely fulfilling, and I’m having way too much fun being unmarried, kidless and free to change my mind anytime soon.

Thank you for your feedback, but next time please take into account your bedridden illness distorting how you perceive others before you put it all in print and hit “send.”

Btw, NYC is clearly not the city for you.

Normal Bob