Lucky Stick: The Nuanced World of @furby_hancock's "Bindle"

A complex statement - if not at surface level

Bear with me on this one.

This moderately popular June 2024 Tweet might not seem particularly interesting at first. The surface joke is pretty straightforward - the Great Depression/Dust Bowl-era "hobo" who carries all their worldly possessions in a bindle is being contrasted with the more modern context of a Reddit post, like a fish-out-of-water type thing - but the deeper you go into the image, the more subtlety and depth is revealed about the imagined world the post was made from. Let's put on some hobo music.

First of all, let's inventory the contents of the bindle. Starting clockwise from the top right, we've got a hardcover book (though I can't make out the title) under several notebooks and notepads. Under that, we have an unopened box of tissues, a shoebox, two Rubix cubes, and a SET game. Looking leftwards, there's a Himalayan salt lamp with an extension cord (probably the most important item here, more on that later) and a wooden box with two metal containers (possibly scented candles) on top. On the bottom left, there's three boxes of bran flakes, two small spice bottles, a jar of salsa, and some sardines and herring. Finally, there's a portable metal coffee server and a huge pressure cooker.

We're meant to believe this is all carried by a hobo - perhaps a novice one, given the innocent phrasing of the question in the post, though it should be noted they already have a "lucky stick" that couldn't handle this heavy a load, suggesting past hoboing attempts with less resources. 

Though it seems like a small point, that Himalayan lamp with the extension cord is absolutely *crucial* in establishing the setting and character. Not only is our protagonist on the internet, they're expecting to be around outlets - and were once stable enough to own an extremely fragile lamp. Ditto with the pressure cooker, which definitely seems tough to come by, carry, or use on the road. The setting is clearly at least this century, so this can’t possibly be an authentic ‘30s hobo posting. Perhaps they're returning to the hobo life after a while in one place, or after accruing some wealth and material possessions.

In fact, almost none of this stuff is good for the road, making me really question the hobo's wisdom. What's the scented candle for? Why three boxes of the same cereal? Where's their bedroll??

Actually, I think this character isn't a real hobo, but merely exists in a world where "hobos" are romanticized, or at least thought of as stock characters like samurai and cowboys. Taking heavy electric implements for long-distance foot travel is a blunder even an inexperienced person with a bit of common sense would know to avoid - it implies unintelligence, something Reddit users clearly have in large quantities (note that a couple of @furby_hancock's other posts also imply a disdain of the site, if you dig a bit). This is backed up by how expensive some of these things are, like that pressure cooker - no hobo in their right mind would splurge on that. It's like they're just role-playing a hard lifestyle they can only imagine, in the same vein as those British '60s musicians who idolized '40s Black American blues music without really understanding the struggles its singers went through. 

This interpretation makes a lot of sense when you look at the food. This stuff has been consciously chosen: not the most nutritious or varied diet, but the food that most closely fits with the public image of a "hobo" - the bran, sardines, and herring all evoke what a young person thinks an old person eats. That means the irony goes deeper than surface level: the writer isn't just picking comically stereotypical hobo foods, but satirizing the foods that a character that idolized hobos to an absurd degree would choose. In the same vein, that SET game looks pristine and unopened, and the notebooks are new, not worn around the edges. The "lucky stick" was probably just something they found on the ground somewhere. 

So what's the statement at the core of the joke when you peel back the irony in this interpretation? I'd say it's a negative, cynical depiction of privileged people playing at the aesthetics of poverty online. Considering all the established facts (the impracticality of the load, the wealth of the character, and the generally clueless attitude) it just seems like the obvious moral idea guiding the composition of the post, start to finish.

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