Jake Parkinson

I watched a University of Utah custodian flush a middle-aged homeless man from behind baggy curtains and walk him outside. That was a little after midnight, two weeks before Christmas, almost three years ago. Today outside the Union I passed the same man tacking a handwritten message to a campus bulletin board. To publish his thoughts he pushed a combination of pins and thumbtacks into the pine board.
The headline read: “YOU BREAK IT, YOU OWN IT!”
He quoted a passage from The Great Gatsby. “They were careless people. …They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"
Fitzgerald wrote the statement referring to Tom and Daisy, but the homeless man was talking about our country’s military actions overseas.
He wrote the message on what appeared to be a Xerox copy of a statistics textbook. A section in bold letters was titled “Results of Hierarchical Multiple Regression Analysis.”