Sitting with Peter involves long, thoughtful pauses before he speaks, indicative of the mathematical mind working inside.
Peter majored in mathematics and he said he loves working with “formal pure math, proof theory and computational disciplines.” He is also quite practical. He began working at the age of 14 as a busboy and gradually moved into food safety and quality control. Work gave him food, clothes and a sense of self-confidence as a young man, as well as an opportunity to establish friendships.
He described his upbringing as difficult. He said the absence of a father made it hard to develop a healthy understanding of his role as a male. His father was a building engineer for the Fairbanks, Alaska, school system, and didn’t get to spend much time with Peter.
After high school, Peter found himself working 10- to 12-hour days in his various food service jobs, often taking graveyard shifts that disrupted his sleep. He recalled going through a phase of drinking wine to pass out after “grinding through another day.” The monotony of work made him feel de-energized, and the long hours stripped him of humanity, he said.
He didn’t want to live like that. He switched jobs, quit drinking and moved in with his mother in an attempt to stabilize his life and hers. Living with his mother did not, however, prove to be the healthy solution he was hoping for.
Peter has found continued support through Alcoholics Anonymous and Adult Children of Alcoholics and has been sober for some time now. His struggles with alcohol taught him many things. First and foremost: “Never put anything debasing or negative at the bottle; don’t put people down,” he said. “Stay only with those things that lead to a forward and progressive direction for society. Check yourself before you wreck yourself.”
Peter loves to create art and write. He paints abstract expressionistic landscapes in both oil and acrylic, as well as fractal renderings. He sometimes sets up his work on downtown benches for display.
He is also an experimental musician, remixing and sampling classical and contemporary music and overlaying it with industrial noise. He views his creations as an attempt “to inspire people to appreciate the natural environment.”
Peter has been aware of Street Roots for many years and said he always imagined he would be involved someday. He became a vendor several months ago and is learning the sometimes frustrating ins and outs of finding a successful sales turf. He would like to continue with Street Roots, to improve his “social and financial mobility” and also because he doesn’t believe homelessness should exist.
“Any society that cannot allocate resources or solve the homeless problem is unfit for high tech,” he said.
He views society’s inability to respect the need for housing individuals as a pathology. He likes the fact that Street Roots is a “hands-on paper, geographically independent of the biases of society.”
Ultimately, Peter would like a quiet, peaceful place to live and a good-paying job.