After graduating from college, I decided to spend five weeks living as a homeless man in Sin City. So on New Year's Eve, I boarded an airplane and flew to Vegas to be homeless (and, yes, I noted the irony). All I had on me was a backpack with one change of clothes, a cheap blanket, and some pens and notepads. The first person I saw as a "homeless man" was a cop. Actually, there were three of them, and they quickly pointed out that I was on the street and that I needed to hop the long fence bordering the casinos to get out of traffic. In the process of doing so, I unwittingly cut my hand open on the fence and was immediately surrounded by police and paramedics. Two ambulance rides and twelve stitches later, I found myself outside a hospital miles away from "The Strip" with no money, no insurance, and no identity. Over the next five weeks I slept in shelters and in drug infested lots, worked day labor jobs for minimum wage only to lose the money at the casinos, and met an array of interesting individuals ranging from Tiger Todd, motivational speaker to the homeless, to Black, a very high and horny gangster with a gray glass eye and a seemingly endless supply of cocaine. That said, the overwhelming majority of people I met living in the shelters and on the streets were compassionate, interesting, often inspirational individuals. Check out The Hobo Diet: Eat Less Walk More, and Try Not to Die. It's like reading a firsthand account of homelessness if it were produced by Vh1, only with a lot less lists and a lot more drugs.