Blair and Nate are walking down the street and Blair makes a whiny joke about New York University admitting people she would not fuck with Kristen Chenoweth's dick. Then my phone rings, so I get up and leave the room because my brother is still watching. He has to go to bed early because he goes to work at 6 a.m. so it would be rude to make him pause the show and wait for me to finish my phone call. I miss most of the exposition. Speaking of my brother, he was walking down our block Sunday night when a man approached and asked, "Do you recognize me?"

My brother said no, and the man explained that he used to be a security guard in my brother's office building. The man was able to name several distinguishing features about the building, other people who worked there, even the day my brother's company moved in. The story was credible, if bizarrely coincidental. The man was laid off recently, and his mother died around the same time. My brother says he remembers someone taking up a collection for the mother's funeral service, again reinforcing the man's story. The combination of losing his job and his mother and maybe (probably) some other preexisting conditions led to a nervous breakdown, which led to not finding another job, which led to running out of money. Now the guy is homeless.

He's staying in a shelter near Canal Street and trying to establish residency so he can get another job as a security guard. This requires $31 a week, an amount that he has so far found difficult to obtain. We live in the financial district-not absurdly far away from Canal-but far enough that my brother asked why the man was wandering our deserted-nights-and-weekends neighborhood, where presumably there are fewer opportunities to beg for change. The man said that it's the safest part of the city after dark.

Perhaps this was a chance encounter, perhaps the guy somehow knows where the employees in the 58-story building where he used to work live and he tracked them down because it would be easier to get money from them than from strangers who go to great lengths to avoid making eye contact with him, or maybe this guy didn't even work there and just follows people to work for six months so as to learn enough about them in hopes of extracting the price of an express bus ride. I don't care. When a bad thing is pulled out of the abstract and shoved in your face, it is far harder to deal with than the general dislike of bad things. I can't stop thinking about it and I wasn't even there.

This is probably the naive and annoying kind of guilt but that doesn't change the fact that there are people in the world for whom knowing where the safe streets at night are is vital. That guy is out there, and my cable bill is more than his rent.

There is no inspirational conclusion. My brother gave him all the cash he had: $5. But we didn't go back out and find the guy and write him a check, we didn't get his name and we didn't buy him a meal or offer him our couch.

Conor Griff used to work in the film industry until he stupidly quit his job at the onset of a recession and moved to New York. Now he just goes on interviews that lead nowhere. He suspects he is disappointing in person.