Trying to Survive

Because in a lot of sense we are.

This needs to be prefaced by the fact that homelessness is hard work. If you strip down the scheduling, employment hierarchy, and other arbitrary components of what encompass a “job,” what you’re left with is work: exerting effort to manipulate and create change in the world around you.

Homelessness is a lot of work. From sunup to sundown you’re carrying either a 50+ lb hiking backpack or pushing a shopping cart laden with all your possessions. Simple travel becomes a work of creativity and high-intensity interval training. Even trying to walk a shopping cart with 200+ pounds (say, you and your partner’s backpacks, a tent, several blankets, some clothes, a stove, a bit of food, and some goods you picked up in hopes of selling) onto the sidewalk from the regular wheelchair on-ramp usually causes it to hitch on the small bump. If you’re alone that means you have to push down on the bottom bar with one foot, leverage the shopping cart up on enough of an angle to shove it forward with your shoulder, then run around front and grab the mesh to pull it up the rest of the incline before it rolls back into traffic.

That’s just one example of the sheer amount of strength and willpower required to be fully homeless. Now imagine that except every fifteen minutes, all day, every day. That’s a part of the reason that homeless folks are worn down: having to push their bodies to the limits, with or without drugs, without adequate nutrition.

But anyways, why do you think homeless people are better off than working people? Your perception of them is probably similar to the reason that I decided to travel close to the ground in my early 20s. I was, technically, homeless, but I don’t and never did refer to myself as homeless, nor did I really equate what I was doing with homelessness.

Being homeless by choice and being homeless by circumstance are two completely different things, and the latter is horrible. But even so, some people think that people who are homeless by circumstance are just lazy bums trying to feed off of the system.

A lot of them are. Especially the younger folks. But after a certain age when your strength starts to wither and you find yourself so frail that you can’t muster the strength to be “On the Ball” long enough to ace a job interview, and your resume is sorely lacking due to being homeless for so long, and the difficulties of trying to juggle the message you received from the homeless shelter on Monday Evening, which told you that you had a job interview on Wednesday afternoon, prompting you to rush back to the shelter only to find out that the laundry facilities were booked for the night; register a laundry machine first thing in the morning and try to weigh the pros and cons of spending your last $2 on clean clothes for the interview or on a bus to get there, skimping on the latter might result in you having to sprint and soak your new clothes through with sweat anyways, defeating the purpose of getting them.

Anyway, you decide to wash your clothes Tuesday morning, get them by the afternoon, have dinner at the Church. (Meanwhile, during all this, onlookers have been staring you down and thinking

• As you walk to the laundromat to clean your clothes, “what a stinky bum, he should learn to clean his clothes,” as they angrily finger the change in their pockets
• As you’re walking from the laundromat with your clean clothes, still looking disheveled as ever, “what a stinky bum, get a fucking job.”
• As you’re entering the shelter with other homeless folks they swarm you, demanding spare change for favors that they may or may not have actually done for you weeks/months/years ago because your clean clothes are a status symbol indicating you’ve got enough money to spend some on things besides drugs.
• Luckily the shelter has an extra bus ticket. You ask them to wake you up before your interview tomorrow. On the bus you put on the best clean clothes you have. Now you look like a down-and-out depressed bachelor in a wrinkled, oversized blazer and dress pants. Once you finally managed to identify the exact amount of <whatever substance you feel the need to self-medicate with in order to actually have the energy to do any of this> to take that would leave you unimpaired, but put the withdrawal symptoms at bay for long enough to be able to articulate a sentence without soaking through your shirt with sweat or shitting yourself.
• Starting to feel yourself shake and your thoughts beginning to fragment and interfere with your ability to speak properly. You shake hands and thank him for the chance to let you interview him. I mean, to let me have you interviewed… for the job. Thanks… thanks for the interview,” you say, humiliated already, certain that you blew it by being a fucking idiot and already your mind is telling you that you need another toke if you want to feel like some semblance of a human. Not to get high. Never to get high. It hasn’t been about getting high since ‘03. It’s about chemically enforcing an about-face when it’s necessary to function under the rules that society demands its denizens shape themselves into.

Does the guy call back? Who knows. Does it matter? I dunno why I chose this example, but it just illustrates one example, one thing. One thing that most people would do without even thinking about. For a homeless person, there are infinitely more variables to stack on to literally anything you do, and all these extra steps leave them looking haggard, dishevelled, broken-down, tired, fatigued, and late. This of course is just tied to their character and they’re judged as being useless, as if these traits were the reason that they were homeless in the first place. Then addiction enters the stage because they want to be able to function in society and get off the street, but if that doesn’t work right away, then they’ve suddenly got a lot more on their plate.

But on the other hand, you can make $60/hr panhandling and get high all day if you don’t mind getting bootfucked by a cop first thing in the morning and sleeping with anything you want to keep tied to your person under your shirt. So you win some you lose some.