Gotta listen to the lyrics at the start. It was either this or "Beds are Burning" by Midnight Oil.
As most of you know, I'm currently homeless again, after a 2 month reprieve staying in a friend's spare room in Newport Beach. It was supposed to (and did) rain last night, so I was next to a road, under a bridge, out of the rain, under my trusty, $9 U-Haul blanket, and a sleeping bag. Pretty decent and warm set-up, as homelessness goes.
"Put your ass over his head and take a selfie," I heard early this morning. I had my covers over my head, and I've heard more weird shit than you can possibly imagine, while living on the streets, so priority one was figuring out if I was awake or not. I just laid there. More voices, young guys, sounded like 3 or 4, maybe 60-80 feet away, pretty belligerent sounding. "That homeless guy over there, put your ass over his head and take a selfie," one guy dared another. Real voices, I was awake. Not a dream. Fuck. Then laughter. Yep, I was awake, I could hear hardly any traffic, and it was pretty quiet out, which meant early morning, 3 or 4 am, was my guess.
"No, take a shit on his head and take a picture." OK, hearing stupid people, most likely drunk, is not great in the morning for average people, especially if you're a nun, or live alone. Hearing somebody talking about taking a shit on your head for an Instagram post is just plain fucked up. But they were a ways away, so I stayed where I was. I'm old and fat, and it's hard enough to get up when half awake, and I've learned usually just waiting to see how things play out is the best thing to do. Plus I was fucking tired, and wanted to go back to sleep... if possible.
"Let's light him on fire!" What the fuck? I peaked out of my covers, twisted at a weird angle, and I could see three young guys, they looked high school age, maybe college age, white kids, on a corner nearby. They were joking around and acting like the drunk idiots they were. I thought about just waiting under my covers, pretending to still be asleep, and then screaming something crazy, as loud as possible, if they came close. But they seemed to stay on that corner.
I pulled my covers back over my head, and waited. The drunk laughter faded soon after. A few minutes later I heard a quick blip of a police siren on the freeway nearby, then a voice over the P.A., "Hey, you guys get out of the road!" Apparently they were running drunk across the freeway, never a great idea. I didn't hear any more sirens, so I'm assuming none of them got hit, and hopefully they caught an Uber home and are miserable and hung over right about now.
I'm homeless because, well, it's a long fucking story. It really started with taxi driving many years ago, and things have been sketchy since. I make about the same money selling artwork every month as I would getting a fast food job, if I could even get one. So "getting a job" is not the answer.
To rent a weekly room, the next reasonable step in my current situation, which costs about $400 a week, I need to actually bring in about $2,500 to $3,000 a month as a little art business. That would be enough to rent a room, buy art supplies, ship out the stuff I need to ship, and save a bunch of money to pay taxes in April.
There's no "real job" I could get right now, after the ten fucked up years of not being able to get hired for ANYTHING in North Carolina. I have no work history, anymore. I'm 53, a little under 300 pounds, and have fucked up teeth, so working in retail, construction, or as a male stripper, is not really in the cards. So I keep making artwork, I sell most of it sooner or later, and I scrape by. I'm working on a plan to help small businesses with content creation and social media promotion, things I've learned promoting my artwork. Those talents hold the most promise at the moment, I just need to scrape up some money to give it a realistic shot.
While hearing drunk people talking about setting me on fire at 4 am is unusual, as a homeless guy, I have stupid shit happen every single day, the kind of stuff most people would spend days talking about. I don't blog about all the day to day homeless nonsense, because no one wants to hear it.
If you've read this blog from way back, you may remember me blogging about the bug that got lodged in my ear (for a month), the snake I found in my tent on my birthday in 2017, and a few other things. But I haven't written about the the cold and rain, the wild turkey, the mountain lion, the bobcat, the 7-8 foot python I almost stepped on (released pet, I assume), the raccoons, the opossums, the cops, the thugs, the crackheads, the night I slept out in Richmond when it snowed 10 inches, or the temperatures down to 11-12 degrees. Those are just a few of the things I've encountered in years in years of homelessness. Nobody really wants to hear about that day to day bullshit. Unless I write a really cool, and funny, memoir book about it someday. But weird shit happens, pretty much on a daily basis. I keep pushing on, doing creative work, and working slowly to get to where I can make a reasonable income, and rent a place to live. It's a long, slow, grinding path.
So there's my rant about a slightly more crazy than normal morning, as a creative, working, homeless guy, who doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, and drinks way to much Diet Coke. Rant over.
Oh, and here are some of my latest doodle drawings, which I do when bored, in addition to my Sharpie scribble style drawings...
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