Why I was homeless 3 years ago.

I certainly never thought I would be homeless in my lifetime.

I grew up in an upper middle class family.

I have a college education.

When I lost my job in 2009 I was making 62K a year. In Cincinnati that is comfortable for a single person.

I had an excellent management job that I expected to keep and continue to be promoted in.

I had lots of friends and family. In fact a few month ago, I found something I wrote about being grateful which included something to the effect that I was grateful that I would never face homelessness because I had family and friends, so if everything else went south I was at least safe from the depths of hell.

I think no one would think that I was the person who would be homeless. So what happened?

Depression.

Non Functional Depression.

It didn’t start as nonfunctional, of course. It started as an irritant in an otherwise rather lovely life. I found myself unable to focus. I didn’t want to go to a job I loved. I began to call in due to the depression more often.

But I didn’t do anything about it. Because Depression. That’s what it does. It makes you both irrational and unmotivated. And I was convinced that I wasn’t depressed because my life was pretty damn good AND because I was big on projecting how strong I was and I didn’t want people to know I was actually a fucked up mess.

So I ignored it. And it got bigger and stronger until one day – I couldn’t get out of bed at all. That’s when I thought it might be a good idea to call the doctor. She referred me to the psychiatrist who told me to take 6 weeks off and get my brain back online.

This is a career melting thing to do, but I didn’t have a lot of choice. I wasn’t getting out of bed. When I got back to work I was feeling pretty vulnerable and exposed and I was NOT feeling a whole lot better. But I was DETERMINED.

Until I fell apart again 6 months later. And took another 6 weeks off. At this point my career was shot, but I still had a job. They sidelined me and this gave me a chance to work on a project dear to my heart. It didn’t require much interaction and allowed me to just wander down a labyrinth of writing up documentation. I also spent a good deal of time training people.

My project was a success and the VP decided to forgive me, so she gave me a department that was drowning in a backlog of work and bad process. So, despite not really loving that job, I did it. While I did the job, the work got caught up, I got the employees engaged in making a better process, promoted several who needed the recognition, and improved the overall quality of the work.

And I was late to work everyday. To be fair, I was actually late because I was working from home, but this wasn’t a particularly enlightened company and my new supervisor was both very old school and not particularly fond of the fact that I fixed a department she had run for 10 years without any change of the issues I fixed in 6 months. But you know. Different styles. I cared and I asked the folks doing the work what would make it better. She showed up on time but couldn’t be bothered to talk to them. But I’m sure being on time is helpful.

Anyway, she didn’t like seeing emails from me timestamped 630am and then having me walk in at 9am. I liked working at home because I wasn’t interrupted. At the office, if I wasn’t in a meeting, I was on the phone, or there was a line of people at my door waiting for me to solve a problem. Its impossible to do any productive things in that environment. And there were things I needed to get done.

So. She put me on warning for being late. Eventually she fired me.

I should have been on time. She had a boundary and I couldn’t seem to make myself adapt to her boundary. That was the depression. You see in depression – its hard to change direction. Imagine you are driving somewhere and you realize you missed your turn. The fastest solution would be to turn around but instead you feel compelled to drive 6 miles out of your way to get there by NOT turning around. Depression is like that. Its on a track and once its on the track it doesn’t want to turn around or change tracks.

That’s why people with depression don’t take out the garbage or clean the house or get lots and lots of things done. Because they are in a track that doesn’t include that task. Its sort of like OCD but usually without action. Usually the track is just non-movement.

For me getting ready for work was a change of track. I was sitting in my pjs at my home computer getting a lot of stuff done. But getting ready for work was an a different track. And it was so hard to do. So I decided to stop doing the work at home. But then it was hard to get out of bed and get ready.

In anycase. I lost the job. And the depression then enveloped me like a black fog. I got in bed and lay there. If my mother hadn’t become bed ridden I don’t think I’d have moved.

But she did and so my life took on a new purpose. I cared for her. But she died 2 years later and that was the last tether holding me up. I sank into the abyss and I haven’t been out since. I lay in bed for 2 solid years until I had no money left and I was evicted from my apartment.

When I told my sisters I was deeply ashamed. I was expecting to be evicted in 10 days when I finally made the call. They came over to my apartment and this is what they said.

You need to put your animals to sleep.

You need to go into the hospital for depression.

You need to go to a homeless shelter.

I only heard the first part. For the first time in 5 years all of my soul roared and I exploded in anger. I refused to kill my pets because I was broken. It was unfair. It was wrong. It was awful. One of my sisters agreed to take the dog because she thought her son would adopt it. But the cat, Lily, was not part of the deal.

I called my friends and one of them agreed to take Lily until I could find a way to get her back.

That relief was palpable but it was followed by the realization that the last part of their plan was for me to go to a homeless shelter. They didn’t want me in their homes. They were rejecting me.

They used terms like “you have to hit rock bottom” and “tough love”. But I firmly believe that those are just ways to make their choice feel righteous. They certainly had the right not take me into their homes. I recognize that. I even understand why they would be reluctant to do it. But I HATE that they want to feel righteous about it. Because the act of putting a mentally ill person on the street is NEVER the helpful choice. EVER.

I was spending 23 1/2 hours a day in my bed and they put me in a situation that would overwhelm a mentally healthy person. I couldn’t cope with even minor things.

I drove myself to the hospital and they never visited me in the week I spent there. I’m not sure what their logic there was.

They put a bit of a cherry on the rejection by renting a uhaul and a storage locker, packing up most of my stuff and putting it in storage. They paid to keep my things safe and sheltered after I had already told them it didn’t matter to me if I lost all of it. I just watched them numb and useless.

They drove away from me after handing me some money and a map to the homeless shelter. I slept in my car. It was early March and it was cold.

On the 2nd or 3rd night I was arrested because I hadn’t filed my taxes in the town where I lived. I went to jail for a night. The judge, upon recognizing that I didn’t actually OWE any money, I just didn’t file the form for 3 years (yeah depression), let me go. When my sister picked me up from the court afterwards, she asked me if the friend who was taking care of my cat could take me in. She also said it God’s blessing that the judge was kind and that I was arrested on the night that it snowed 6 inches so I was inside on that night. I was arrested at 3am.

She gave me a gift certificate for a couple hundred dollars and I used it to get a night in a motel, so I could wash off the jail and sleep. It turns out sleeping in a car was mostly NOT sleeping for me. And there is NO sleeping in a jail.

My friends on tumblr set up a fundraiser and got me 3 weeks in a motel. And then I was in the car again. I did that for about a few weeks when my friend who took the cat in, got me a job with her sister. The job I currently have.

Another friend got me a week in a hotel after I got the job. His position being that as long as I was trying he was willing to help me with some money.

After I had the job a couple of weeks I got a paycheck and was finally able to move into a rooming house.

I have just barely sketched out what happened. I was homeless for about 2 months. Its was a terrible experience from a lot of points of view, but it doesn’t even come CLOSE to how terrible it can be for people who live on the street. I own my car outright and I lived in it. I never went to the homeless shelter because I was terrified of them.

In the end, I was still depressed, I had a dramatic increase in Anxiety and whole new boatload of emotional pain associated with my sisters. I am now functioning. Sometimes barely, sometimes reasonably. But I am not well.

Adam Savage reminds me of my Grandma Allen

He has a youtube channel called tested. On it he occasionally buildS something that intrigues him. I love watching people make things and so I always watch whatever he is building, even if the things he is making have no particular interest to me.

My grandmother was a maker. Of course in her day they didn’t use that term. But she and Adam would have gotten along like a house afire, as she would say.

She would have loved his cave of infinite tools and machines. She would have enjoyed spending hours working out the solution to a particular maker issue.

Unlike Adam, Grandma would not have collected every possible thing that she might use on some future project. She was frugal to her bones. She raised a young family during the depression. So having 10 of the same type of pliers would be an unwise use of her money. But she would NEVER project any of her own frugality on to him. She would enjoy his 10 nearly identical pliers and more so enjoy the fact that he enjoys them. Grandma’s gift was accepting people for who and what they are. She never wanted the world to be her way.

In this latest video, he’s making a car seat bed for his dogs to keep them from ripping up the leather. As he measures and cuts, its apparent that he is no longer going to a TV set where a makeup artist is making him and his hands presentable. His nails and hands are a MESS. He’s obviously been working on something that stained his hands and nails. Not something we get to see him make sadly.

Grandma, being a woman, had a very hard time with this aspect of the maker life. Because when you work with oils and stains and just work with your hands, they get grimey. Its the natural outcome of the work. She had more types of nail brushes, pumice stones, and horrible harsh handwashes than I can bear even remembering. But she never sat down to dinner with her nails dirty. She would not have criticized him for his though. She would only have wanted to know what he was making.

I wish I had the natural energy that permeates Adam and Grandma. That energy that makes things. That has an idea and then just MAKES it. I have ideas and then I realize I can’t do it. Before it even lives for long in my brain it dies. I think most people are like me. We don’t walk dauntless into a project. We recognize its many mistakes in embryo and abort the idea before its flaws are made into reality. Grandma and Adam, the makers of the world, they are OK with the mistakes. Its part of the process. Its OK. Because they love the process as much the finished product. More probably.

I miss Grandma a lot. And of course she would never had met Adam. But its fun to imagine her in his cave discussing ways and means for some project, unafraid of the huge buzzing machines, revelling in creating a new thing or revitalizing an old one. I think he would have liked her too. Well, to be honest, I don’t think there was a soul on earth who didn’t love Grandma. She was just one of those people.

Life is More Expensive When You Don’t Have Money

This is a VERY hard concept to make people living in the comfort of middle class understand. But I’m gonna give it a shot.

3 years ago, I was homeless for a couple of months and when I finally got a job, I found a rooming house the let me have a 6×10 room for 60/wk. This seemed like a miracle. It was shelter I could afford.

But it turned out to be expensive shelter. Because I had no kitchen facilities in the room. And rules against any kind of heating device in the room. So I ended up buying fast food, which is both expensive and bad for you. If I tried to avoid eating 3 – .99 cent burgers a day, I was into much more expensive range.

In the end, I was able to get an apartment for $375/mo and found that my expenses were only a tiny bit higher than when I lived in the rooming house.
BTW – I only got the apt because of a government program. I did not have the money together for a security deposit. Nor would most landlords look at someone who was evicted.

Where you live is huge. Its not just being able to cook, but also being near a decent grocery that has reasonably priced food. The stores in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods called Dollar General, Dollar Store – all more expensive than Kroger (large grocery store). If you are lucky you have an actual Dollar Tree, where things are a dollar.

Being able to buy a lot of something when its on sale sounds frugal. But I live in a very tight budget. When Toilet Paper is on sale, I can’t buy enough to last until the next sale. I can only buy what I can afford now, which is maybe one extra pkg, maybe no extra. Maybe I’m just glad it’s on sale because the last light bulb went out and that’s not a weekly expense for me, so now I have more money toward new light bulbs.

I’m not buying LED bulbs. I’m buying whatever is cheapest. So my electric bill isn’t going down because I can’t afford the immediate expense of an LED bulb. They pay off in the LONG run. But I can’t plan for long run. I can only plan how this pay check will be used.

Most people without enough money do not have credit cards. Many don’t have debit cards because the banks charge them money to have an account because they can’t hold a minimum balance. Or they have been overdrawn too often and the bank refuses to open an account for them at all. Banks will often charge them to cash a paycheck that is DRAWN on the bank because they don’t have an account. So in order to get the money from their paycheck they need to pay money.

Because they don’t have a debit card, they buy pre-paid cards. These are VERY expensive compared to a debit card. So in order to spend money they have to spend extra money. This is why people in lower socioeconomic areas are using cash. Its cheap. But increasingly you need some form of electronic payment card. For example, if you want to rent a nice cheap movie for a $1 at redbox – you need a card. You want to buy or pay for anything online – you need a card.

I won’t even get started on the corporations whose ENTIRE business plan is to prey on people without money. Check Cashing and Pay Day Loan businesses are one of the moral atrocities of this country.

My point is that its easy to save money when you have money. Its cheaper just get and spend the money you already have. It’s easy to get to the cheaper store. It’s easier to buy a lot of what is cheap to save for the future. It’s easy to cook because you have the appropriate tools and appliances. Its easy to choose because you can still get the other thing in case its necessary. Its easier to buy something that is more expensive now but will be cheaper in the long run.

Mostly though, think about will power. Will power is something we exercise when we feel strong. Being poor is a constant drain on your mental and emotional energy. It’s harder to make a conscious choice to not spend money on a frivolous thing when your life is in tatters. And when you are poor, everything is a choice – this OR this. Its rarely this AND this.

Poor people are seeing all the same ads on TV that you are. They are constantly bombarded with the same manufactured desires that companies want you to feel about their products. Do you think it’s easier for them to avoid those wants because they don’t have money and should be just content? Its actually harder to make a good choice when so many things in your life are bad and when everyday you have to make so many of these choices because every damn thing is a value choice. There are studies that show that every choice you make lowers your will power for the next choice.

Poor people are disproportionately overweight and far more of them smoke. You know why? Because life sucks and when life sucks it is WAY harder to make a good choice. Even when you know what the good choice is. So the poor end up spending too much money on things they don’t need like cigarettes and junk food because life just sucks and you grab comfort where you can. And relatively speaking these are easy cheap comforts.

Being poor is not only more expensive, it is littered with hidden obstacles that are invisible from the glorious heights of middle class American security.

I know. I was born in that security and I lived there until 3 years ago. The middle class is blind. It’s more comfortable that way.

CAVEAT: I’m saying this from a US viewpoint. I have no idea if the same is true world wide, but I’m going to guess that it is.

Humans continue to suck

There are humans in the world, adult humans, in their 40s, who do elaborate prank calls just for the fun of it.

And the internet has allowed them to create a gathering place, to feed off of each others ideas and be even greater oozing pus boils on the ass crack of mankind.

Listen to this podcast for the story. But to summarize, a guy had a problem with comcast. He tweeted about it. They resolved it and gave him a discount. Story that happens all over the internet.

A few months later, he gets a call from a comcast rep asking him to delete the tweet. They go back and forth, with the rep comparing keeping the tweet up to keeping a mean tweet up about your girlfriend which you posted during a fight. The rep eventually calls him a dickhole and then he deletes the tweet. Eventually she’s mean enough that he hangs up.

It was a prank. For fun. Not to steal anything, just because this person finds prank phone calls entertaining. Manipulating people is entertaining to her bored self and so why not choose a random stranger and make them severely uncomfortable for awhile.

I’ll be honest. I find prank phone calls with no other purpose than self gratification to be SEVERAL rungs lower than some asshole who would con someone for money or ID over the phone. And I think those vermin are the shit stuck in the butt crack of dirty heroin addicts. But the shit vermin are at least working toward a productive end, not just idly entertaining themselves like the oozy pus pranksters are. It does not justify the behavior, but as a motivation for doing vile things, the search for money is more understandable to me than the search for entertainment.

Humans have always been terrible, but the internet allows us to find other people who enjoy our worst selves. And they create subreddits and websites and skype and then – poof – we have a club of people who support and grow this terrible behavior. Its the dirty underside of all the good things that are the internet. And sometimes I worry about it.

Why don’t I recognize Earth?

I follow the astronaut Scott Kelly on twitter. While he was in space he did this thing with earth pictures where he likened them to art without identifying the place in the picture. I could never figure out the place – although sometimes I think a cartographer would not have been able to. Because he’d focused on a gorgeous pattern but it didn’t have an easy reference point.

But sometimes he challenged people to identify the place and it did have something you could reference if you knew something about geography. I could NEVER identify it.

EVEN when he said what I was looking at, I was at a loss for several moments because it’s not oriented the way my schooling taught me the earth is oriented.

I think we do a big disservice to kids in constantly orienting maps with the north at the top. It makes us internalize the idea that there is a top to earth. AND THERE ISN’T. No up. No down.

North at the top is just a function of tradition. Yeah, I know the magnetic pole thing – but honestly – in space its just a ball floating in a whole lot of vacuum. And while the planets are on a sort of plane with the sun, AGAIN, is that really related to how the continents are on our sphere?

This is a Dymaxion map designed by Buckminster Fuller. Its designed to give land masses their proper ratios. Notice that Greenland is NOT the same size as Africa. Of course this means none of the water is accurate. Maps, man. Can’t be trusted.

Anyway, I guess I think that if you taught geography as a kind of wild puzzle, without orientation to the north, it would be far more captivating to kids. If you showed them all the crazy ideas that cartographers have come up with to map the world that challenge their ideas of how the world is actually carved up – it might wake them up a bit. They might actually learn where Malaysia is vs Madagascar

Dear GOP: We Can’t Save You If You Won’t Save Yourself

Source: Dear GOP: We Can’t Save You If You Won’t Save Yourself

Its real.

“Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune.

It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed.

You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage.

You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation.

If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.

It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too.

No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families.

You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself.

Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary.

Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression.

Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.”

—-

That was written on tumblr by ~sherunsfromdarkness, 4 years ago.

Everytime I re-read it, I’m awed by how accurately she captured depression. There it is. That’s it. I could write more, but essentially – that’s it.

Things that will annoy us in the future.

I been thinking about some of the implications of smart cars. Because it wouldn’t actually play out like the comic says. In all probability the car would only respond to the voice command of the person it currently thinks of as the driver, otherwise it would randomly react to conversations in a car.

Think about it. The cars come linked to the owner with a voice or the fingerprint or something. So, lending a car – You don’t just hand the neighbor the keys to your truck so he can run to Lowes and pick up something too big for his Prius. You have a glitchy app, probably, that gives temporary access to the neighbor, which probably fucks up after he parks in Lowes and now he can’t get back…

Imagine if the Owner dies. You have to get the dealer to reset it or something.

The car will probably have some government access so that they can impound your car as necessary. Also the loan company will have that access.

In fact the loan company could just send a message to a self driving car to come in to their lot. A whole group of people whose job it is to repossess cars will become slowly obsolete.

Police chases will end as soon as a cop sends a message to the self driving car to pull over. Probably no siren needed in those cases. Its not like the world needs to be aware of what can be communicated through the car. And the cars themselves are going to go about pulling over in the safest possible manner with all the cars around them cooperating.

From a law abiding stand point all these things are good things. Less cost, less injury, more socially acceptable behavior.

So, why do I feel like we are losing something?

Choice, even the choice to do something illegal, seems so paramount to me. And so when I think about a world in which the speed limit is always obeyed and the stolen car will never be missed in traffic and will always pull over safely, and the interest rates on car loans go down because the repossession of default is cheap and easy… all I can feel is sad. It feels dystopian instead of utopian.

But it is in fact utopian. Right?

Well, not completely. How do you make sure the loan company gives up that access when you pay off the loan? How do know someone won’t hack the loan company and now some random asshole has potential control of your car. Because there is always an asshole.

There are lots of things like that. But like most things, the convenience and effectiveness will out weight the outlier negatives. And we will numbly hand over control of our cars to corporations and governments because it now is easier to stare at a smartphone on the commute to work.

And if you are thinking, as I did for a moment, well, I just won’t buy one. This is what I think is going to be the most insidious part of it. At some point the saturation of self driving cars will be say 75%. And the vast majority of people not using them will be people without enough money. And criminals. And we will then place a stigma on non-self driving cars.

And then people will begin to say it won’t be truly effective until EVERYONE is using a self driving car. So they will ban the old ones because only criminals use them (because who thinks people won’t oversimplify it to that?). Which will effectively take a huge amount of mobility and freedom from a whole lot of lower income people who can’t afford a self driving car or to take a self driving taxi everywhere. And the likelihood of public transit being pervasive enough to fix that, especially in rural areas, is unlikely.

The net effect 100 years after that will probably be positive and no one will do more than comment in history books on the social implications of the change. Those people won’t know what we lost, because they never had those choices, can’t see why I would think the ability to choose to do something I would never do is important. They will feel distantly that the plight of several million people who lost mobility was sad but they won’t understand because we will probably have solved that problem with a wider net of public transit. But during the change, which will happen in our lifetimes, it isn’t going to be so nice.

In the gutter

In the gutter
was a silver CD,
“To Lativa”
Handwritten
on its side.

In the gutter
was a heart discarded
by Lativa,
while driving by.

Today I saw a CD in the gutter and this story walked into my brain and wouldn’t stop yammering. So here it is.