Private. Keep Out!

I stared at the paper for a few minutes until I see what I'm going to talk about as I sit on the edge of my bed. Privacy. It's been four or five years since I've had any. The sweet nectar of privacy. When my wife left me I had tons of privacy. Although I think I was pushing my chemically imbalanced limit at that time. I was pounding down Jack Daniels like it was water. It sent me to the hospital with heart failure. Chain smoking didn't help either.

Then my brother moved in, and that spelled the end of my privacy. That spelled the end of my laying around in my apartment on the couch, naked, watching television, with a plate of food on my belly. It spelled the end of my bringing foreign women home and banging away all night, or as much as a drunk can. It spelled the end of a great many things.

When I lost my apartment, it spelled the beginning of my using public restrooms, public bathrooms to wash up, and sleeping on the streets. Two years at the Hotel, with Sith Lord and Mike meant people around even when I lived on the streets. When it became too cold to sleep outside any longer, and I did my stint inside Port Authority, and Penn Station, I had Electra there as a close companion. Sleeping all night in a Starbucks or a waiting area was not private.

And now I'm living with twenty men, and there is still no privacy. I have to admit that just the thought of getting my own place has made me excited. I've spent a year thinking about it, planning on it, being an exemplary inmate in the Box. The thought of privacy, something that I took for granted at one time, is heady.

Just the thought of using a toilet not shared by scores of people, by hundreds of people, is a sobering thought. You wonder just how tough your ass has become to disease and infection. Even if I move into a room, it would be a room of my own. SRO means SRO, Single Room Occupancy. That is fine by me. As long as it has a door and a lock, you've got my attention.

That's very little to ask for, but it's so hard to attain in the city. The city where every penny has to be pinched because things cost so much here. You have to be rich to move about freely, buying this and that. That's why the homeless get along so well in the city, and that's because they don't want nothing. In the summer months, all they want is a bench or a sidewalk without a lot of pedestrian traffic, and they are in heaven.

But in the winter, they pay a mean toll. The winters are brutal sometimes in New York. Sometimes there are Noreasters, and brisk, blistering cold weather. But there's still hope yet. With the enormous greenhouse emissions from the increased population, the greenhouse effect is starting to take a hold, giving New York the mildest winters on the Northeast coast. Ha ha ha. I learned that from one of the articles that I researched. But with this being said, there still may be some hope for the homeless from freezing this year.

Bloomberg has no real plan for these people. He has no real idea what the homeless go through. All he sees is a blight on the streets of his fair city. His master plan for the homeless in the cold? To have the police round them up, and give them only two options. One, a drop in center or two, jail. Now this is what I wish: for fucking Bloomberg to spend a night in a drop in center, just once. He'd probably choose jail. Drop in centers are the biggest joke here in the city. They are the living pits of Hell.

Be that as it may I wobble on the edge of my bed, the TRAMADOL taking effect. I'll retire early again tonight. I put away my baby and crawl into bed, ready for another night's sleep.

I'll deal with all of tomorrows troubles tomorrow.

Hobobob