Here Lays A Titan. A God Amongst Men.
Edit: just realised I said Posting instead of Chosting in the title of this chost. A shameful display!!!
i take a moment to remember Unknown Man every year. i get very emotional about him tbh and even went viral on twitter about it a couple years ago (twitter always treated me weird when i became emotionally vulnerable)
anyway, the story goes like this: a nearly-starved-to-death man comes to Goldfield, Nevada, possibly a prospecter looking to get a piece of the previously mentioned Gold in them there Fields, possibly to deliver a letter that's later found in his jacket
but before he could find work or the letter's recipient, he was desperate to find food. he went to the library and in their trash he found what probably smelled like sweet bread—library paste, which was made largely of flour and water. he took his last meal and ate behind a nearby garage
unfortunately, the flour and water made up only 40% of the paste. the rest was alum, hydrated sulfates of aluminum (usually with one other metal), which is toxic in high enough doses. i'm not sure which alum it was exactly (i'm guessing potassium alum), but whatever it was was too much for our Unknown Man
he passed away, alone in an alley
no one in town knew him, so they put what they knew on his headstone—a pretty nice one at that for a poor stranger
it's so nice, in fact, that many people online think it's a hoax. it looks too new to be from that era they say. newspaper articles from the time confirm it happened, and the fresh paint has an easy explanation as well—the community does this for every headstone in the cemetery. the lettering has faded with time so they paint it in with a bright red to make it legible. so he isn't forgotten
i'm sure my yearly tradition of reflecting on the Unknown Man has more than a few things to do with my own upbringing, suffering from malnutrition for large parts of my childhood among other troubles. i see some people online make fun of him and think about how i could've met a similar fate. i did plenty of dumpster diving and ate questionable food to survive. if i had found library paste back then, i probably would've eaten it too
i don't know where i'm going with this, it turned into a bit of a ramble... take a moment today to consider the Unknown Man. consider how his story is not unlike millions of others in this country to this day. consider how we can change things so no one else has to suffer like he did
