Thursday, September 15, 2016

"Meet the LA man who walks people for a living"

"As the digital age makes people more lonely, Chuck McCarthy created a service to stroll with strangers – but the job is more people whisperer than walker."
“The more I thought about it, the less crazy it seemed,” said McCarthy, draining a bottle of water – he now takes hydration seriously – and heading out into the sunshine for another walk, this time with the Guardian trotting in step.

A homemade scrawl across his T-shirt declared him The People Walker, low-budget, mobile advertising. “I’ve been doing walks almost every single day for the past week and I’m getting repeat clients, which is what you want.”

A stroll with this soft-spoken, hirsute hulk seems to be what much of LA wants, judging by the response to his Facebook page and homemade flyers.

“Need motivation to walk?” they ask from lamp posts. “Scared to walk alone at night? Don’t like walking alone at all? Don’t want people to see you walking alone and just assume you have no friends? Don’t like listening to music or podcasts but can’t walk alone in silence, forced to face thoughts of the unknown future, or your own insignificance in the ever expanding universe?”

“I try to listen more than talk,” he said this week, striding past handsome houses in Los Feliz, a leafy neighbourhood near Hollywood.
Dog thinks he has a bunch of friends

6 comments:

Amartel said...

For people who never learned to self-soothe.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I remember posting something similar to this going on in Japan. I can't remember.

ndspinelli said...

A great, albeit dumb breed. We had a big Golden Retriever. We kept him trim but he was in the upper stanine of size. The kids named him Kozmo. I thought we should change his name to Lenny, from Of Mice and Men.

Amartel said...

Yeah the Japan thing was something like rent a guy to listen to you or something like that. Rent someone to pretend to give a crap after you've driven everyone out of your life with your nonstop immaturity and narcissism. Something like that.

rcocean said...

Actually that dog doesn't think he has a lot of friends, he's just playing. Dogs deal with reality through the sense of smell, that's why very few dogs think their reflection is another dog - if it was another dog it would have a smell.

Cats OTOTH can be fooled into thinking their reflection is another cat.

Methadras said...

My dog knew he was himself in the mirror. He would just stare at himself, walk in and out of the field of view of the mirror. He would be studying himself. Eventually he stopped giving a shit.