Mending Poles

Still standing by Houston
We are going over the bypass to the AE25 circuit and can find no way of doing so. Not unless we get a successful firing of the second stage. We've already started the countdown and are hoping for the best. Cross your fingers Houston. Like Hobobob said, here is where the fireworks begin! Yeah Houston!

I remember walking with OBSIDIAN one day and we were trying to explain ourselves to a news reporter recently and he was relating that we are homeless poets... were homeless poets, because now I'm in an SRO. I let him get away with that, because I believed that. I believed that just because I had a roof over my head, I had a home. Well, I had a roof over my head when I was sleeping in front of the Public Library. Did that make it a home?

New York State does not consider me as being written off their books yet. This is not a home to them, and they're goddamned right. This is a room, this is an SRO, this is what they call 'Transitional Housing'. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a home. This is The Space Pod. A life support system, a device to protect me from the elements. To protect me from everything, of which it does a damn good job. But ITS NOT A HOME.

So, I retain my right as a 'homeless poet'. I don't have to live the life of an indigent to keep such a moniker. An even if I did find a home, it won't make me any less of a poet, now would it? Am I changing my tune from what it was three years ago when some of you were reading this blog. You bet your sweet ass. Like I said, I learned a lot about poetry and the poetry circuit, and a lot about myself, and I came away from the experience richer and more enlightened. Still, I've come away with even a treasure, something valuable, that would never have come across in my travels living in New Jersey, so to speak.

And while I'm beating my meat on this topic, the moniker HOBOBOB. is one word, meaning ME. It is a name, not a designation of my circumstances. So it doesn't turn into SROBOB, or GOTAHOMEBOB, or even SMOKETOOMUCH- DOPEBOB. It's HOBOBOB. That is my pseudonym like Mark Twain. It'd didn't become Mark Drunkard because he drank too much. Trust me, if I don't want to be called HOBOBOB anymore, I have a real name. Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

Yeah, I'm testy. I'm very snappish and snarky. Why? Really, well, I know you probably would rather me talk about exciting things, funny things, useless things, but I rather talk about important things, like how cold it was in my room last night. Yeah, that's right, that's important, because my Black ass turned blue! That's a lot of cold, huh? I turned off the air conditioner around Ten O'clock and it was chilly. I got up and looked at my little piece of Styrofoam that I have separating me from the outside, since the accordion partition of the A/C doesn't reach all the way across the window.

The maintenance man, Nacho, who put it in, made up the space difference by cutting a piece of Styrofoam from the box and patched up the gap. This worked fine in the summer, but I can see that it won't do shit for the cold winter breezes that come in, like a questing finger, searching for warm flesh. This is the Finger of The Man. The most hated person of the homeless. When the Man Comes Around. This is his is his time of the year. Him and I have come to an uneasy truce. I stay indoors and he stays out of my ass. He is the worst individual that you want to meet when you are homeless, and he is the only one who fills homeless people with terror. You may call him by other terms, Old Man Winter, Jack Frost, so on, so forth. I call HIM, The Man. OR mor exactly, When The Man Comes Around.

Well, The Man broke our truce last night, by finding me in my bed, naked, and stuck his finger straight up my ass. I grabbed at my sheet and wrapped it around me, but it could not keep me warm, and I refused to reach for my blanket. It's still September for Chrissakes! Why do I want to let Winter win so soon. Winter, which seems to last an eternity. Longer than need be. Winter, which goes on and on and on. Who the fuck needs Winter?

I had a bad nights sleep, rising up tired and cranky. I hit the coffee maker and turned on my laptop, and immediately surfed over to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. I'm trying to get a handle on this fucking ID, or more exactly the New York State ENhanced Non-Driver's license IDentification (ENNDID). What I planned to do was photocopy all of the shit that I had, and put it with all of the shit that I need and see how close I can come to having all the documents. Well, I printed out all of the online forms, and copied everything that I could produce, and came away with being a hair's breadth of proving My Name, Date of Birth, and my US Citizenship, but I can prove that I live in New York State. This is not good. So now I just have to concentrate on tiny bits of data that I can get, and then build my ENNDID proofs from that. Bricks make the wall, baby. People just don't put up the entire wall, they put it up a brick at a time.

It's time to get some help. It's time to go to my social worker. It's time to bring out the big guns and go to Snow White.

Hobobob