What a difference a year can make... or a week...

One year ago tonight, in the woods between Bolton Park and Hanes Mall, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I was homeless and sleeping in a large tent at night.  I spent my days drawing my Sharpie drawings, about one a week, which I was selling consistently, in an attempt to get back on my feet financially.  But on May 14th, 2018, a bunch of men, at least 6 or 8, came out to my tent, well hidden in the woods, and started stomping around.  I was laying down, under my covers, getting ready to call it a night, and eventually go to sleep.  The guys, at least 6, I'd say were right by the tent, several more were off in the distance, and they repeatedly threatened to beat me if I didn't stop blogging.  Yeah, blogging.  THIS blog.  I wrote about my artwork, I told stories of my days in BMX freestyle in the 80's and 90's, and I wrote about my thoughts on the economy, and the big picture of where I think our society is heading with high technology and changing social ideas, and that I saw a serious financial recession coming before too long. 

I don't know who they were, although a couple had been out near my tent in the couple of weeks before that, at times, talking mostly about Google rankings and the fact my blog got something like half of the organic traffic looking up "Winston-Salem."  Something like that.  They were pissed about me, a guy with no college education, but who's read dozens of books on the subjects, and watched the financial markets for 30 years, writing about the economy.  They said that a homeless person had no business writing about anything.  One guy said he had a baseball bat, and he wanted to use it.  They threatened to kick in my tent and beat me.  After all the weird stuff I've been through in the last 18 years or so, I just wasn't in the mood to be intimidated anymore.  I told them to go ahead and kick in the tent and beat me.  That seemed to puzzle them, and they talked, within earshot, saying if they beat the crap out of me, I might be in the hospital for 2 or 3 weeks, but when I got out, I'd just tell the story in my blog.  I said, "Yeah, that's pretty much what will happen."  One guy stepped up and offered to break all my fingers.  I actually laughed at that point, a little. 

There was a thunderstorm coming in, I knew that from the weather report.  They were outside my tent for 20, maybe 30 minutes, I'd say.  I just waited.  I just didn't really give a fuck, I'd already be harrassed for a month or so in various ways.  One guy said, "Everyone knows that every homeless person is a worthless piece of shit."  I thought, "Fuck you, mother fucker.  If I survive this, I'll make "Worthless piece of shit" my business name, for the business I want to start some day."  That was a bit wordy, but "WPOS" has a nice ring to it.  So the WPOS blog is being built, the first post will be finished tomorrow.  Actually, it's morphed into "WPOS Kreative" over the last few months.  I'll share a lot of my thoughts on using today's media for small businesses, and stuff like that.  More on that later. 

So much crazy shit has happened since the "lynch mob" night, as I think of it, that it seriously feels like 10 years have passed.  I have hundreds of stories from this past year, and few will ever be told.  I'm trying to move on. 

Now, a year later, I'm back in California, for a week now, and I'm doing blogging and social media to build up my friend's online bike store.  I have a roof over my head now, and things are in the early stages of recovering from my couple years on the streets of Winston-Salem and Richmond, Virginia.  It's been a weird ride.  I nearly died from an allergic reaction to medicine in Richmond, and spent 7 days in the hospital.  For a couple months, I woke up every couple of nights, sleeping on a porch of an abandoned building, hearing people say, "That homeless man there has the highest I.Q. in the country, it's 198.  We're trying to figure out what to do with him."  I still don't know what that crap was about.  I later slept on the banks of the huge James River, where I met a pair of otters and saw a nutria one morning.  It's been a weird ride. 

Now, hopefully, I can finally work towards making an actual living at some point, and actually start seriously rebuilding my life.  We'll see what happens.  But things are a lot better now.  What a difference a week, or a year, can make.