Have you ever felt that you were being assaulted from all sides?
I mean, in reality you aren't, or you don't think that you are, and yet, trouble seems to find you like a guided missile. I find myself feeling like that at times. I find myself backed in a corner with all that life throws at me, and it makes me anxious. I get punchy. I feel like I'm fighting a battle with both hands and feet. That's stressful.
I really felt this way when I worked at Thomson Financial. It seemed like things were coming at me from all directions. It seemed as if I was being buried under blows and underfoot. I was working hard just to keep my head above water and the water kept inching higher and higher. You get up in the morning with a certain dread, then you move through your day, ducking and swinging, sticking and moving, fading and charging.
Your day is a busy one, you keep on the move. You have very little time to fuck around. You stay on your toes and dispatch your foes, be they visible or invisible. Many obstacles are laid before you, many. When you're not homeless it's easy to take for granted the little things, like leaving your personal items out, doing the things you have to do with one eye while keeping another eye on your shit, and keeping your third eye on your ass.
You take for granted living on your own, without twenty people in close contact. Shitting and pissing and eating and sleeping together. Nothing separating you from them save the thin wall of respect. You don't have to deal with the myriad rules of others. When to wake up, when to go to sleep. When to eat and when to take your meds. It goes further than that with the rules in the library, when to come in, not to eat, not to sleep, not to make noise. You have no real freedom. It takes money for freedom. The only real freedom is when you head to the streets. Once you live in the streets you are honestly free of any rules or restraints that I can see. When it gets cold and you have to go in for shelter, be it a train station, bus station, overpass, shelter, you're going to get a handful of rules. Trust me.
And that's the real trick isn't it? None of us are free. We can imagine that we are, we can believe that we are, but none of us are. We're enslaved by something. Someone is telling us what to do. And we follow their orders because our shelter is intrinsically involved. That's how it goes. When people lose jobs and fortunes and money, some jump out of windows, some shoot themselves and their families. Why? Because they can't see life outside of a home, in the streets.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not bragging about the streets. Thats two heaping scoops of hard living, trust me when I tell you that. BUT it's survivable. It'll make you a different person, a stronger person, but you won't die out there. You'll be tested and become inventive, but not dead. For all of you out there that become new to our ranks over this world wide meltdown, this is my encouragement to you. You can survive this. But I'm no longer a streeter for now. I'm a shelt. A fucking shelt, of which I was too proud to be not much longer than a year ago. See how easy one eats crow? I'll take my plateful. I've been socialized into needing a home now. I've got swag that can't be carried on my back. I've grown roots.
What does that mean for me in the future? That a TC is on my horizon? Smitty tells me horror stories about going to a TC. It's like the land of the lost, the walking dead, where they put you while you wait for your SRO. Why wait in a TC for an SRO when I can wait here at the Box. Oh, I forgot, I'm getting a little tired of the Box. I've seen these four walls for about a year now, and life is not getting any better. People come, people go and I watch them pass through these doors. Soon, they'll no doubt shuffle me off to a TC, a Therapeutic Community, as if I was a child being shuffled off to school. This to me seems like some form of dumping ground for the hopeless.Here comes the new trash folks.
Hobobob
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