Spontaneous Human Invisibility

Photo by theroyakash on Unsplash

Have you ever been invisible? I have.

I first suspected that I was becoming invisible after I dropped out of high school. Wandering the streets of San Francisco, sleeping on the ground, and having no way to bathe, I accumulated a layer of grime.

People looked away when they passed me on the street. I couldn’t very well go back to my parent’s house, because they had sailed away to Hong Kong to be Baptist Missionaries. Besides, I was now eighteen, and no longer their responsibility.

When you’re down and out, people don’t want to see you. Perhaps they think you’re a junkie, or suffering from a mental illness. I wasn’t on drugs, but I was depressed and hungry. Some of my friends from high school were now students at Cal, and I could sometimes cadge a bite to eat from the leftovers of a dining commons. The dormitories in Berkeley were pretty good at chasing off non-students in the sixties, so I couldn’t hang around students too much.

Years later, when I was a prosperous advertising designer, I had become visible again. I wore tweed sports coats, white shirts with colorful ties, and people could see me, and would talk to me. Applicants for jobs at my agency would show me their portfolios.

By the time I was middle-aged, my hair was going gray, and by the time it turned white, I again started to suffer from spontaneous human invisibility. At a summer pop-up cafe in Manhattan, I sat at a table in the sun. I had a history book, and an hour to spare before I had to meet my wife and our college-aged daughter, who were off shopping.

Young hipsters were sitting at the other tables. Waiters and waitresses were hovering around them, but an old guy with white hair (me) was completely ignored. I tried to flag down a waiter, but was obviously invisible to the staff of this trendy establishment.

Bowing to the inevitable, I walked up to the bar, ordered a beer, and sat down at my table. I was irked being ignored, but happily drank my beer, smoked my pipe, and read my history of the Peloponnesian Wars.

It was only a year later that I realized that my newfound invisibility could have some advantages. Around the year 2000, after I retired from Advertising, I was able to sculpt, travel, and make videos of both. When shooting in public spaces, I found that nobody paid much mind to a senior citizen with a video camera.

You can see some of the results on my YouTube channel

Being invisible was nothing new for me. When I was a kid, I was so ugly that my folks had to tie a pork chop around my neck to get the dog to play with me. Now that I’ve written two books during a global pandemic and recession, I worry that I’ve again become invisible. In the economic chaos that the publishing industry is struggling through, it’s hard to get noticed as a first time author. If you are curious, check out my memoirs. Before you do that, please like or leave a comment on this blog; sometimes I wonder if anybody has read it.

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