Multnomah Safe Rest Village

Sometimes raising hell works.

I now live at the Multnomah Safe Rest Village, in a plastic shack that's actually big enough for me to not just sleep in but also park my bike in and even cook simple meals in with my hot plate and rice cooker. I raised a lot of hell getting here, some of which was straight up me being ineffectually mental on the phone … but a (♥️ OMFG super gorgeous!) KGW news reporter decided to help me after I emailed her; she even put me on TV! Which, by the way, I found utterly terrifying. Resulting from that, some street social worker-ish chick and a weirdly eager fire fighter met with me and offered me a berth here, and then whisked me out of Northwest Portland in a cab (this safe rest village is way out in the hills in Southwest Portland).

I didn't know what to expect, but all in all I'm pleased with the change. I can lock the door, I can turn the heat up, and I can stay up and sleep in; I can shower, I can even cook stuff on a nice propane grill if I feel like it. A couple of my neighbors even watched a football game earlier in a covered common area with a projector. I even have a cute little Chinese crab apple tree in front of my shack, along with a little emergency rain shelter I cobbled together for my neighbors' cats out of a chair, collapsible poles, Gorilla™ tape, a garbage bag and a couple shirts. Sometimes it gets kinda noisy at odd times here, but for the most part it's peaceful and drama-free … which is significant because we all engage in some form of substance use.

This is so much better than those crappy HAP housing projects (I've "lived" in three of them, also a Central City Concern housing building — I know whereof I speak)! I'd rather stay here than move into a fucking welfare silo full of shithead neighbors and mismanaged by villainous slumlords. More facilities such as these should be erected, specifically by community gardens adjacent to city parks, perhaps also incorporating feral cat colonies to give us opportunities to be purposeful and busy. Far's I'm concerned subsidized housing's just a taxpayer boondoggle that harms the physical and mental well-being of the poor while benefiting career bureaucrats and corporate grifters.

A World Full of Bullshit

If there's one thing that happens to you after living on the streets for a while, is you just get so sick and tired of everyone's bullshit.

Well, I am. Nobody's normal out here, and hardly any of them are even agreeable to me because they're too crazy, too creepy or thuggish, too strung out on dope, or are just run-of-the-mill boorish louts. And, the longer you live out here the worse you and everyone around you gets: the constant stress, all the idiotic drama, and the oppressive weight of the stigma we all bear chisel away at the character we each possess that specifically pertains to engagement with the social contract — in my case, I just don't care anymore about playing nice with the neighborhood Yuppies that ignorantly despise me and seek to criminalize me and shove me in a ghetto where they can't see it's all just a little Dutch boy's fingers stuck in the crumbling dyke of the American Dream. I even only minimally interact with my peers now, because as far as I'm concerned, they're each of them some combination of bore, annoyance, competition, and threat (besides I really can't relate to members of younger generations or hard drug users).

So, I pretty much just stick to myself, at present desperately trying to find ways to occupy my time more constructively (and economically!) than meandering from perch to perch throughout the neighborhood drinking crappy beer. It's pretty boring and lonesome right now, but it won't last too much longer. As much as I dislike it, I'm going to resume canning, because I'm unemployed and have WAY TOO MUCH TIME on my hands. I'm also going to set up a few weekly litter pick-up crews next month, when I can afford the necessary supplies, though I won't lift a finger to clean up Yuppieland — all my good citizenry will be applied to the nearby industrial neighborhood. I'd also like to volunteer at a local food pantry, but I'm having a hard time getting a hold of the one person at the one place who would probably let me work there even though I have an active arrest warrant; I may just have to show up in person. As for whether or not return to work in the near future, I doubt it: my storage unit access hours make me available only a limited time during the day, also there's the matter of the stupid warrant. Hell, maybe eventually I'll start a couple weekly game sessions of some kind?

Ugh. Whatever the case may be, it's all bullshit. Even when you manage to insulate yourself from it as best as you can, it still hovers around you like the odor of a nasty crap in those cheaper doggie poo bags made from porous plastic. And it affects you, no matter what preventative measures you take. lol Not only that, but you get more and more full of shit yourself as time passes.

Die Yuppie Scum!!!

I'd really like to know just what's wrong with the pyschopathic people of Portland, who have chosen to scapegoat and wage an outright war against us homeless.

I resent the hell out of it, because it feels like I'm being demeaned and pushed around by a garrisoned foreign army; most of the people who have any authority or advantage over anyone else in Portland are from out of state — most of them from California. The same people who gentrified my city into a chichi strip mall for privileged Dilberts I can no longer afford to live in are now indiscriminately criminalizing me merely because I'm unemployable in mainstream work environments and am unable to afford to pay rent even in the dingiest of slumlord hovels. Sure, a lot of us on the streets are engaged in thefts and vandalism, end up starting fires that sometimes spread to neighboring properties, and even some among us are legitimately dangerous thugs … but, aren't we progressives supposed to punish actual REAL crimes, instead of manufacturing criminals like they do in benighted states like Florida and Texas?

For example: the police were called on me yesterday evening because I yelled at some jackass Yuppie for driving the wrong way down a street in the bike lane and then parking in the bike lane. In a city where the police shortage and related problems are so bad that police seldom arrive within an hour, 911 calls are on hold for the better part of an hour and ambulances sometimes don't even show up, a sniveling Yuppie twat who felt "threatened" managed to get her state-sanctioned goon squad sicced on me (no doubt at the expense of responding to a REAL crime somewhere else!) … whereas the owner of the strip club I help out at couldn't get the police to show up at a protest in which the picketers were trespassing on the property, aggressively harassing dancers and customers, and even blocking a couple of the doors! What fucking bullshit is this!?

What makes it worse is that there's simply hardly anywhere left where a homeless person can go and be left in peace. It used to be that we lived in separate worlds: they went to work in offices downtown during the day and hung out at home in the evening to watch TV while we hung out in the more obscure corners of parks or beneath freeway overpases or alongside railroad tracks, and we basically avoided each otehr and left each other alone. But, gentrification is filling in the formerly industrial wastelands and the professional class is now mostly "working" from home, so even when I'm sitting on my loading dock in industrial Northwest Portland I regularly have to put up with Yuppies jogging or walking their dogs past me. It's gotten even worse lately: these Yuppie assholes have chosen to embrace a beligerent classist territorialism whereby they actually go out of their way to make us feel uncomfortable and unwelcome by conspicuously injecting their presence into where we "live" and hang out in a chickenshit passive-aggressive psychological operations terorist campaign against us.

I've decided I hate what we homeless call housies or I call normies (I call my homeless peers homies, though not always in the spirit of camaraderie because many of us misguidedly prey upon each other), that I will NEVER forgive them for this persecution of theirs and that I'm not going to play nice with them or be an ambassador to them. They're despicable ignoramuses and narcissists who embrace a corproate consumer caste heirarchy while fooling themselves into thinking they're decent, thoughtful people because they drink wine, donate to charity, and constantly blow virtue smoke signals up each other's asses in an infobubble that resembles a guarded gated community more than it does anything like a liberal forum.

I can't wait until I get my silk screening kit and start printing out t-shirts. I'll have a lot of ugly things to say about the assholes who torment me and my pers.

Friendly House = Wingnut House

I'm seriously reconsidering my membership and engagement with the Friendly House community center.

It was supposed to be a boon, a place where I could shower, sit down and enjoy some unhealthy but sustaining food, and use the computers. But, it seems like I'm just too damn sensitive to boorish, noisy, wingnut behaviors by other members to spend any appreciable time in this place. For example: this morning T— got pissy when I objected to having to listen to his obnoxious video he was playing out loud on his phone for everyone to hear (we're all supposed to be using head phones r ear buds when doing that sort of thing), then some fucking crazy fool sat across from me looking in my direction with his ridiculous sunglasses on talking to himself and accused me of being crazy and sharting shit when I asked him if he was talking to me. It just seems like yet another typically Portland institution, where the lunatic inmates have completely overrun the asylum; I've experienced this problem with Transition Projects and with Central Cty Concern, and the result is always the same — introverted and well-behaved people like me who are sensitive to chaos and noise get alienated and effectively shut out because deference is given to flamboyantly crazy people or cartoonishly animated dope fiends.

The lame thing about it is this kind of bullshit not only goes cntrary to the mission statement of the social services and community centers but is the result of selective enforcement of rules. It's blatant hypocrisy and discrimination, carried out by woke virtue-signaling assholes.

I'm very probably going to withdraw my membership from the Friendly House after I move all of my stuff out of my locker and figure out another place to charge my electronics and shower. Then I'll insist on a pro-rated refund of my membership and locker fees, or I'll complan to the Better Business Bureau, the Department of Justice: Consumer Protection Section, the local neighborhood paper, and possibly even hire an attorney when I get "paid" nexty month to sue the place for the money plus legal fees and emotional damages. I'll talk to the director of the community center first, but I have no faith in improvement, especially considerin how she's ignored my email complaints for a couple weeks.

Two More Bikes Yet Nowhere to Paint

I received an old Univega ten-speed yesterday when I was doing laundry; I think it's from the early 80s but it can be difficult to look that sort of thing up sometimes…now that Google has polluted the Internet with mostly useless, pornograhpic, hate-filled, parasitically profiteering or delusional garbage.

It was super sweet of the girl, who told me used to ride the thing up the nightmare hill going to Lewis and Clark College. But, now I'm left with a conundrum: how in hell am I going to strip and paint all the frames I have? I just ordered a 1990 Trek Singletrack 950, which means once it arrives I'll have two complete bikes and SIX full framesets (one missing a headset), three of them desperately needing to be repainted and one of them probably benefitting from a complete repaint. I need to get these damn things painted and built, and either donated or sold, not just to make room in my storage unit but to give me something more productive to do than grit my teeth at my weirdo peers in the Friendly House or drinking crappy beers in public. I just spent a couple hours on Google Maps and on the phone looking for places I can rent for the purpose, but the cheapest workspace I could find that would let me do this costs $350/month (with a $525 deposit)—it just wouldn't be worth it. I'm just going to have to find a way to become situationally extroverted and civil enough to find someone willing to let me use a garage or whatever for the purpose.

I hate to say it, but alongside my inability to prepare and safely store food, this is another reason I refgret having lost my housing. I still don't miss the poverty pimps, the slumlords, and the shitty part of town and lame-ass neighbors, but I'm definitely having a hard finding ways to work around the lack of kitchen and workshop facilities.

So Much for Working Part-Time

Well, hell, it looks like the Social Security administration was correct in its assesment of me being unemployable...or at least I think that's why they granted me my disability status.

I've tried and failed repeatedly to get a part-time food service job, mostly just to give me something more constructive and engaging to do with my time than drinking beer; for some reason I just either can't get a job or keep it when I get one. I've alienated employers by being snarky about their hiring processes and requiremnets, I've outright called out a business for wasting my time because it didn't have its shit together, and I've blown off interviews and flaked out on first shifts at least a dozen times. I guess I really am just too mental to put up with that obnoxious corporate Dilbert "culture" that's crept into every corner of society (when was the last time you said "moving forward" in a casiual conversation?), or to even work with anyone else. Don't get me wrong: I like work, but jobs and other people just plain suck — and even when you find something that doesn't dehumanize you or suck your soul or destroy your body in other ways it still won't pay enough to provide you with a modestly comfortable and secure life (you have to work about seventy-five hours a week at minimum wage here in Portland to afford to live properly, which includes saving for retirement). And this isn't just a problem for service and blue collar workers: even well-paid professionals end up giving up too much of their time to The Man and can't enjoy their pseudo-posh lives without constantly juggling debts.

So, I'm no longer lookling for work. I'll just resume canning starting Saturday, May 20, though non-competitively because I collect disability benefits and don't feel right depriving my less-fortunate peers their means of income. I'm also going to start looking for places to volunteer at, probably at the Friendly House and LiftUp PDX, maybe also join some Solve litter pick-up crews. Gotta do something, right? lol Especially when the beer no longer appeals.

Settled In (for Now)

So, I've spent exactly three weeks out here since I left that awful housing project downtown, and all things considered I'm doing remarkably well given the circumstances; I managed to land on my feet instead of on my ass.

I've settled on a loading dock near the freeway confluence in Northwest Portland, with my foxhle buddy R— who fled that failed camping experiment beside the freeway shortly after I did. The company that owns this property has allowed the homeless to sleep on its loading dock for as long as I can remember: the rules are simply 1) GTFO by around 6:30 AM (except on Sundays, when we can sleep in and loiter all day) and 2) don't mess the place up. We're the only guys living there; occasionally some random stranger overnights down at the other end, but other than that the place is ours. Nobody wants to join us because today's homeless are dysfunctonal dopers and nutters who insist on erecting permanent structures — there's a small compound of such structures across the street and down the block from us. As you can see from the photo, thanks to my disability benefits I'm well provisioned with a cot, an air mattress, a sleeping bag, and a pillow (R— sleeps on a sleeping bag on a foam mat inside a two-person tent). It gets a little noisy at times, and last night it got kind of sketchy when some guy in the compound down the street busted his car horn and screamed threats at us for an hour, but for the most part it's alright and once I get my peper ball projectile pistols to add to my stun baton I feel reasonably confident I can deter or defend myself against most assailants. One worry of mine is that eventually the streets will get more dangerous after the homeless have been herded into the city's mas encampments, because the only ones out here will be those who can't behave well enough to stay in shelters or camp sites or be housed.

Not only that, but I'm going to start washing dishes at a nearby Mexican restaurant on Friday, working fridays and saturdays mid-shifts. I'll only be working fifteen to sixteen hours a week, but I'll need to take extra care not to let myself get victimized by Morlock zombies or let myself get stupid and drunk or sleep deprived. In fact, I may need to use one or two spots in the neighborhood for daytime napping to ensure I can adequately perform on the job. Whatever it takes. I hope it works out for me! Figuring out taxes earning income from work while collecting disability benefits will be educational.

Failed Camping Experiment

So, I've been out here for two weeks, and I'm starting to acclimate to my situation just as the weather is finally warming up and drying out. Not only that, but I'll have my disability the morning after tomorow. A lot has happened since I last posted:

I moved from my spot near the old Esco to spend a couple nights on a loading dock closer to my storage unit, after which I let myself get convinced to borrow an acquaintance's moldy four-man tent and move next to the freeway in the Pearl District. I've never done the permanent-tent thing and after three nights of it I've already decided to move to a loading dock as soon as I receive homless camping supplies from Amazon. As nice as it is to be around trustworthy acquaintances and to be able to sleep in, the cons BY FAR outweigh the pros: I'm right next to a freeway with its noise and pollution, the ground we're camping on is gross from the previous occupants who sullied the site with fires and trash, it's in the Pearl District and closer to downtown so there's less privacy and more sketchy passers-by, I'm regularly getting sidelong glances and outright hostile and disgusted stares because of the stigma against homeless camps, I'm closer to downtown, I'm farther from both the Friendly House and the storage unit I use daily, and because I'm on public property I anticipate we'll get evicted regardless how clean we keep the camp and how positive our relationship is with our housed neighbors. Besides, the "leader" of the camp gets a bit pushy and bossy, so it will probably be better for our acquaintanceship that I leave before I get angry about it.

Okay, I'm DEFINITELY moving back to the loading dock tonight. The "leader" of our camp just decided I need to move my tent to make room for another member of the camp...but on both sides of my tent the ground is too lumpy for me to slep comfortably on without an air mattress I don't have. I like the guy, don't get me wrong; I like not being pushed around a lot more — if I wanted people bossing me around I'd sleep at a fucking shelter. Besides, I'm looking for work, so eventually I'll be dealing with that for a good reason (for money)...well, at least I hope I will.

Frontier Justice

Last night was CRAZY!

At around 2300 some black dude in a whelchair rolled up to one of my neighbor's tents and started ransacking it after confirming it was empty. Of course when the occupants returned I totally told them what happened and described the culprit to them, because anyone who steals from the homeless is a planet-sized pile of shit. The fool returned to the scene of the crime at around 0800 asking them if they found a gray cell phone, and almost got stabbed with a survival knife and beheaded with an axe by the couple he robbed! Savage, but it's pretty much frontier justice out here on the streets: we don't have police protection or the means to criminally charge or litigate in the courts — cops and judges are our enemies, for the most part, because American society despises the mentally distressed and impoverished desperate citizens it creates. Of course, I found it all viscerally disturbing and barbaric, but I also get it; people need to realize all the undersirable and disturbing or destructive traits and behaviors of human beings are usually appropriate within their social context — the passive-aggressive complaining and lawsuits of Yuppies will just get you laughed out of the neighborhood or worse when you're homeless.

On a positive note, I got to see a bat fly overhead just a few feet above me around midnight. Bats fly around me every night because the old Esco property has been cleaned up and turned into an empty grassy lot with a drainage pond on one side, so there's a lot fo juicy bugs for them to eat. Yes, I love bats.

Evicted from Housing!

I left my housing at the Fountain Place Tuesday, after having lived in my old renovated Fountain Place building for only just over six months. Now I'm sleeping in a makeshift modular lean-to made of tarps and a sleeping bag and air mattress carabinered to a fence next to the old Esco property in Northwest Portland.

I guess I just stubbornly decided to be an asshole to Home Forward and to Pinehurst Property Management, knowing it would undo me. I could have been diploamtic in my complaints and criticisms, but I consider it inappropriate to kiss the hand that slaps you, and I firmly believe those who hold the cards in American society slap our faces constantly in underhanded softly spoken ways (just spend enough time talking to Amazon customer service reps on the phone!). I also consider it important for us to rise up against those in power and their underlings who wield authority over us and stand up for ourselves, even if it results in calamity; being convenience-obsessed narcissistic cowards has enslaved us to predatory Big Business and to a corrupt and dysfunctional not-all-that-democratic government, while simultaneously empowering all the devils of our natures into becoming belligerent, deluded, violent Stasi informants. Being a nice guy and having good manners and treating others with civility has nothing to do with sticking it to The Man, whomever that person may be for each of us (for me it was the local housing authority and their property management contractors).

Besides, why should I have been sweet on the povery pimps and their slumlords? I was thrown out for talking shit and being a jerk, but as I type there's punk kids in unit #403 disturbing their neighbors with fights and loud music on a daily basis, and I know for a fact there's at least two highly active drug dealers in the building. Kicking me out was an act of spiteful revenge, not a calculated response to a threat to the property or to my neighbors' physical and mental well-being. Not only that, but the construction company in charge of the Fountain Place renovation abandoned the project before it was complete! There's gaps between the floors and the walls, also the walls and the ceilings, throughout the building; there's exposed wiring visible here and there; the fountan and the entrance marquee were never replaced like they were supposed to (because it's now on the historical registry); the courtyard is still hazardous to walk on when wet; and the back entrance is full of street-trash dopers and freaks whenever it gets dark out, making it unsafge to use half the day. I had a feeling I would be disapointed or worse when I returned: this is what I waited three years to return to!? The entire time I lived there I felt like a squatter instead of a dweller.

lol Of course I got completely soaked my first night outside! I was smart and paid for a public storage unit (no way I'm going to lose all my bike frames, parts, and tools!) and Friendly House membership and one of the lockers at the community center...but I was pretty dumb and got wasted with Gino that night and failed to properly batten down my lean-to hatches. Were it not for the public strage unit I wouldn't have been able to dry out my sleeping bag, also were it not for my Friendly House membership I wouldn't have ben able to shower and change into dry clothing and warm up to a hot cup of tea. Alas, I'm going to be broke until I receive my SSI on the 27th, so I won't have many opportunities to repeat my folly...though, really, I'm getting tired of drinking. One thing I must say, however, is that I lucked out and have a couple "neighbors" I don't have to worry about; one of them even has this crazy cool shaggy dog that's a mix of Pomeranian, si tsu, and Chihuaha.

Still, it gets awfully boring out here! And, thanks to being both homeless and disabled collecting SSI I have no idea when I'll be able to return to work part-time. I'm going to have to start volunteering, if I'm to engage in life a little more fully than just siting at the Friendly House all day eating Chef Boyardee and putzing around on the computers waiting for my electronics to charge.