Wild Wild West

Last Wednesday I was warned by a resident of the Maginot Line kitty-corner to me that someone had been seen in the neighborhood going through belongings left behind by some of his neighbors during the day, and was also "messing with people" during the night. I didn't ask what was meant by "messing with", but I found out Easter Sunday. At around 4:30 AM that morning I was woken up by a beam from a flashlight flickering across my face, and when I peeked out from around the corner of my shelter I saw a shadowy figure scurrying away from my spot. I was perturbed but remained nonetheless because relocating would have been a pain and probably have prevented me from getting back to sleep before dawn. Half an hour later he reappeared, this time sneaking around from behind me! Again I was startled awake by his flashlight; this time I peered out and stared at the guy, whereupon he muttered some balderdash about how I may "lose something", pointing at my backpack I was using as a pillow but trying to play it off like he meant the shopping cart I'd wheeled there the night before in preparation for the morning's marathon canning run I'd planned. I feigned ignorance of his larcenous intentions and patted the shopping cart by my head and asked him "What, this thing?", to which he answered yes and asked if it was mine. I responded in the affirmative, after which he wandered off. Goddamn CREEPY!

I was far beyond perturbed by now and couldn't go back to sleep. I've never been good at fighting and I don't possess the killer instinct that makes someone a quick and brutally effective study in the martial arts; I can't even bring myself to beat an assailant or burglar with a makeshift weapon when the need to arises! This inexplicable Buddhist-seeming aversion to violence (or is it just simple cowardice?) is a liability for a homeless man and one I'm deeply ashamed of; I feel like I'm only half a man and a painted target of opportunity. I was lucky the guy wasn't so thuggish as to simply attack me the moment he saw me wake up! In panic I decided to move to another spot, but I was thwarted by a dearth of sensible overnight camping spots in the area; I ended up spending a fitful night's sleep beneath a transformer mounted on a freeway pylon a few blocks away. After complaining the next evening about my unwelcome visitor to the same bumsteader who tipped me off to the Midnight Creeper, one of his neighbors showed up and assured me that he beat the hell out of the guy when he caught him rooting through his stuff and the ghoul was hauled off by the cops because he had some warrants out for him. As we were speaking the three of us watched a complete stranger suddenly attack two neighbors already bedded down around the corner from the Maginot Line! He ended up with a face full of mace, running down the street screaming.

Two incidents within twenty-four hours, and it's not even May! This is the kind of bad homeless behavior I expect to occur in July, not BEFORE the rains have relented and the tourist season drives the more unsavory street folk out of downtown. I'm going to get some damn bear mace before the end of May, if I manage to make enough money to; I just ask that anyone who wishes to ruin my day attempt to do so downwind from me. I could move, of course, but my shelter apparatus is limited in how and where it can be erected; once I get a small tent I'll have more time to scout a location farther out from downtown and have many more options available to me than I would with my current set-up. This will take some time, however, so until then I'll just have to cross my fingers by day and sleep with one eye open by night.

I don't think there's anything the homeless fear more than being robbed and/or assaulted while asleep. It's pretty much accepted by each of us that at some point or another our belongings will get destroyed or lost or stolen; you just never know what will happen — you can get drunk one night and leave your sleeping bag at the library, or the cops may roll up on your camp and confiscate your shelter and it ends up "lost" when you go to recover it, someone may wander by in the middle of the night and steal your backpack from you (like almost happened to me!), and then of course there's the simple matter of wear and tear due to heavy use and constant exposure to the elements. You're vulnerable when you're asleep, and because no one wants street people around we often find ourselves roosting in places that are more dangerous and less patrolled by the police than neighborhoods where "respectable" people dwell comfortably and with some security indoors — not that the police are of any help to us; most of them are either indifferent or hostile to us, perfectly content with us eking out an urban Lord of Flies existence so long as we don't offend or frighten our betters. I've seen a police officer kick homeless people in the head with steel-toe boots to wake them up and snarl at them to get the hell out of there; we fear them second only to our peers, and for good reason.

And, unfortunately, incidents such as what occurred to me Sunday morning are bound only to increase in frequency and severity: the rising cost of living surpasses the wages required to meet it, forcing more and more working-class people out of their homes; gentrification pushes us out of formerly hospitable enclaves and encourages aggressive eviction tactics by the police; the swelling ranks of the homeless taxes steadily further our abundant but limited social services and charity resources, meaning increased competition; and Oregon is a haven for dangerous criminals and predators due to its liberal laws, lax reporting requirements, limited jail space, and bounty hunters being prohibited. Our formerly peaceful, tolerated, and abundantly provided for homeless population is turning into a Dog Eat Dog World, to the point where anyone not in housing will be living precarious and perilous lives similar to those suffered by street people right now in cities like Las Vegas and Miami.

Bottles and Cans Just Clap Your Hands

Canning is a job, and a dirty, tedious, frustrating, and humiliating one at that. Of course most people probably don't view it as being legitimate work, and insofar as I'm not a part of the production of a desired good or service they're right. But it IS labor, and it does pay, though seldom more than a third Oregon state's minimum wage and half of the federal. That stark nickel-at-a-time reality puts to shame my youthful resentment toward food and service work; how grateful I'd be right now to earn ten bucks an hour washing dishes! I wouldn't be making a pitiful spectacle of myself rooting through trash cans in public, only to lump heavy and unwieldy garbage bags or trundle a noisy shopping cart full of a sticky, leaky mess that smells like a whore used Purple Jesus for a sitz bath ... culminating wearying hours and blistering miles later in fighting with fickle and often broken-down deposit return machines at grocery stores, reluctantly tended to surly "courtesy" clerks plunging wood stakes through my heart out of the corners of their eyes. All the while hoping I don't cut my hands on broken glass or contract hepatitis C from a casually discarded syringe. Yessir, I'll stoically don that goofy wage slave uniform, choke down my ire at the one or two unflappably incompetent and jackass bosses, and not groan inwardly at my tax withholdings every time I get paid.

I do this because my stamina isn't meet for day labor and I refuse to panhandle, or "spange" in street vernacular. Except for when I lackadaisically fly my "Without whiskey it's just another day" sign on New Year's Eve, which I don't do every year. I just don't believe in getting something from nothing; "ex nihilo" isn't the lodestar by which I navigate my personal microeconomics. I already receive food stamps and am medically insured, and my eventual return to subsidized housing will also ride sidesaddle on the back of taxpayer largess; that's enough government dole for me, and don't think for a second I'd pin my reliance on it as a proud merit badge on my sash! True self-sufficiency may elude me to the grave — having backed myself into the dismal corner that I have — but I would grievously affront both my dignity and the fruits of my fellow man's labors if I didn't at least strive to defray some of the cost of my burden to society. What gets me is when one of my peers tries to panhandle me as I pass by portaging my filthy lucre. As much as I try to bite my tongue, I still end up expressing my contempt toward able-bodied kids sitting on their asses hitting an obvious fellow bum up for money — are these guys for real? On the flip-side of that coin, occasionally someone will offer me a dollar or two when they see me schlepping down the street, which I turn down on principle but mentally kick myself for doing.

Godlessness, how fervently I hope the Employment Access Center can place me in a part-time job that I can even enjoy and keep! My résumé is disgraceful enough that I REALLY need an advocate to sell me to prospective employers sympathetic to helping people get on their feet. It seems that employers' demeanors toward prospective employees have shifted from viewing them as potential assets to being unavoidable liabilities, making for a work environment rife with suspicion and hostility. What with credit reports, criminal background checks, personality tests, and all the other flaming hoops people are required to leap through in order to land even a minimum-wage part-time retail or service job ... you practically have to stream behind you throughout your life a paper trail that gleams as brilliantly alabaster as a swan plying the shallows of fabled Avalon on a balmy midsummer afternoon! Let's just hope this Central City Concern advocacy pans out; I've been with that outfit for nearly four years and have only just started thinking they may actually end up helping me out — I'm fed up with canning every day I do it. I'm also going to try to work for Funtastic and other temporary gigs throughout the festival season coming up.

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Guess the song this post's title came from and post it here in a comment!

Let's Ride Ride How We Ride

The rain has finally let up, except for some lackluster midnight drizzle earlier. It even looks like we may see a few more days of mostly dry weather, but of course you never know. Sure, April showers bring May flowers; but it gets old, scrambling under cover every time the clouds darken and the wind grows skittish, to wrap a rainfly over your backpack to prevent your sleeping bag from getting soaked, as does smelling faintly like moldy bathroom tiles from the dampness that even days spent in the local library can't dry out. Alas, I won't be sunbathing in Speedos™ — I've work to do. I've been canning for the past couple days to pay for another month's locker use and to improve my overnight shelter by making it more modular and lightweight — I'm working on a two-tarp lean-to design, since a quality free-standing two-man tent would cost me around a hundred dollars and be a bit more conspicuous than I care for.

If you want to get by on the streets suffering a minimal amount of police harassment you want as small a "bumprint" as possible. After all, not even the liberals who advocate for increased social welfare spending want any of us around. The cops were buzzing all over my neighborhood Sunday and yesterday while canning downtown I saw cops rousting panhandlers, both of which presage the coming of the sweeps that begin before the tourist and festival seasons enter into full-swing. As I'm writing this down (in my composition book) I'm looking across the street at a line of shopping carts draped in tarps — around eighteen of them — standing glum sentry like a Maginot line of dereliction. And it's only April! Exactly the kind of "bumprint" you want to avoid leaving unless you enjoy being ushered from one crack in the edifice of society to the next. These guys are a lightning rod for citizen scorn and Johnny Law's ire; a morning jogger trotting past may wonder if that's where her car stereo ended up that morning she started her commute to work staring incredulously at the passenger window shimmering all over the sidewalk ... and, if I'm around when it all goes down, I'm just another miscreant.

Which brings us to a fundamental social dichotomy of homelessness: some of us "camp" whereas others of us "nest" (I prefer to call it "bumsteading"). Bumsteaders hunker down in semi-permanent villages of shopping carts and tents, usually almost buried in piles of junk reminiscent of the old Road Warrior movies. Not me: I pin my GoreTex™ coffin motel up to a chain-link fence with carabiners and rope to sleep in at night and am gone by 7:30 AM every morning, packing everything out with me and picking up whatever rubbish I may have left the night before. I may not tread as softly as a cat or lose myself instantly in grass like a snake, but I certainly can at least do things like bathe, launder my clothing, and not piss myself passed out drunk in a doorway alongside a busy street! In other words, it's both practical and dignified to act like a human being even when diminished to life as an urban coyote. I don't even see how bumsteaders go about their business during the day without grinding their teeth in anxiety over their abandoned belongings. I suppose if it looks like a pile of junk, they figure it's unlikely even a fellow tramp would steal any of it.

To be fair, though, slovenly hoarding isn't a monopoly of street people; how many people have we all known who refused to clean their cats' litter boxes even after the cats refused to use the damn thing, or who left their sinks full of dirty dishes for weeks at a time, or whose garages were a fire marshal's incendiary nightmare? It's just more noticeable when packrats and slobs live out in the open; like urinating in public or domestic disputes on a bus. Besides, while I may be predisposed toward the reticent, tidy, and Spartan, in another life I could very easily have become another two-legged draft horse in a Burnside Cadillac convoy.

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I dedicate the embedded video to the assholes in blue who like to take their insecure masculinity out on those of us who can't buy off judges with slick lawyers.

Time to Stop Moping

This spring has been a lot harder on me than I thought it would be.

That point was underscored this morning when I realized that I actually felt comfortable for once! Up until then I've been going to bed in a single sleeping on a thin thermal pad, which has resulted in over two months of waking up to pain in my hip whenever I rolled around in my sleep trying to get comfortable. I've never been good at sleeping, really, being apparently very much a Princess and the Pea kind of guy on top of being a very light sleeper and having a hard time even falling asleep in the first place because of my mind's tendency toward obsessional restlessness and disquiet ... I guess I forgot somehow just how poor my sleep had been in previous forays out on the streets, which is strange considering how poor my sleep was even when I was living indoors this last time around. I have sleeping medicine, but it's a case or too little or too much: one pill won't do enough for me, but two of them will leave me dopey for much of the early part of the next day unless I take them twelve hours before I plan on rousing myself into the day. Of course, living beneath a freeway isn't any help, either, but options are pretty limited for homeless people in this town, and this freeway is much less noisy than any other place I've tried to camp out at.

Well, it's also been a rather chilly and soggy spring, too. That's one thing I've always disliked about the Pacific Northwest, the fact that the weather can be mild but depressing and inconvenient for seven to nine months out of the year of what ends up feeling like a dark, drizzly monsoon that smothers my psychology in a wet blanket. You just never feel dry and comfortable in this kind of weather and it wears on you even when you manage somehow to keep yourself at least acceptably damp and avoid soaking your sleeping bag. It's a rather subtle kind of discomfort, too, and one you wouldn't notice unless you live or work outside. I think I'm going to need to talk to my case worker at Central City Concern today and tell her about my problem with depression and discomfort, and maybe see if there's things I can do to help me feel better and remain motivated to make the best out of my situation and to work with the organization toward improving my lot; I can't wait the year or longer until I get back into housing to deal with my problems with depression, alcohol abuse, and just sitting around not doing anything but reading, dicking around on computers, and schlepping from one free meal to the next in an aimless drifting around in dismal circles of human flotsam. In other words, get pro-active instead of wait for a ray of hope to fall into my lap like a Coke bottle dropped out of an Ultraflight.

Yeah, I've been blowing off appointments at Central City Concern, appointments which may result in me getting part-time work and alleviating somewhat the pain in my legs and hips that seem to be a daily curse for me. I'm just so used to being resigned to nothing working out for me — be it due to the vagaries of fate or my own foibles and failings — I seem to have institutionalized myself into laziness, self-medication, and fickle and cheeseparing opportunism ... in short, being a bum. This can't continue, not unless I want to die next to a shopping cart and empty bottles of fortified wine twenty years from now, or even sooner.