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Street Roots • October 13-19, 2017
Vendors
V11DO1 PROFILE
Peter Eschright
BY HELEN HILL
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
itting 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
S
Answers to Page 15 Puzzles
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.
Sheeptoast
by Elizabeth Considine
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