Some People Just Don't Get It - But Then Again, How Could They Possibly Ever?

Illus: Sassoon Kosian

"Get a fucking job!" As a protester at Occupy Wall Street, you'll hear that all the time. It's normal. But to have old friends tell you that, or to have relatively new friends just deny the fact that you're homeless AND out of work is quite the other thing. Yet that's what I'm hearing and dealing with every day. And before anyone says to me again, "Why doesn't your family help you?" let me tell you another feature of going homeless or going poor: Your family denies it. Your family won't talk to you. Truly. I have sister in Iowa who felt ballsy enough to fire back at me through a comment on a YouTube video of me, but won't write me a personal letter. And yes, she has my mail. People hate being inconvenienced by friends and relatives who are not doing as well as they are. It makes them look bad. It shames them. "Is that your brother I saw in the Wall Street Journal protesting with this OWS thing?" - they don't want to hear at the mall. It let's them know just how close they might be to the same. They hate your situation even more than when you are doing better than they - and yes, I've experienced that as well - doing so well that it engenders jealousy and malcontent from those who you mistakenly believe are your closest supporters. People. They're just hard to figure sometimes.

Just this week I received a mail from an old friend in another city who was acting under the premise of "tough love". She pretty much chewed me a new one, said she wouldn't help me at all with a phone and advised that I get a factory job to make money, fully not remembering or realising that I would be going in as unskilled labour (a fifty-five year old, 140lb man trying to compete with 18 year olds to unload trucks or sweep the floor, or do whatever other unskilled jobs they might have) or having a full grasp of the economic meltdown that America is currently going through. I know she means well, but meaning well and doing well or being constructive are not always mutually arrived at.

A few weeks ago another friend of mine asked me to make a photo for her of her art at an exhibit. And this to me, whether there was any money in it or not, was considered a job - something that I could do that was of value and put me in a position of being professional and needed and not homeless or jobless or what those two things equal to the world at large: worthless. But at the last minute she had a shuffling of organisation and got someone else to do it - without telling me of course, until I showed up at our agreed time. So when I arrived there was no job. No nothing. Just me being given the bum's rush. And of course, I was not happy. But she had no idea that what I had lost was just some moment of self respect - some satisfaction of being valued. To her it really was just work. But to me it was more.

And nothing makes you any more unhappy than people thinking that you don't care about work, or have lost your mind, or don't know how to solve your problem, or worse, are somehow the cause of your problem. I heard this recently described as "blaming the victim" in relation to homelessness, but the concept is more historically related to racism or crimes of sexual abuse. "He didn't obey the rules", or "She made him do it". That the concept itself has now grown legs is scary enough - that people can justify abhorrent behaviour because you yourself are just such a complete fuck-up. 

I'm currently reading a book on the contemporary history and proliferation of homelessness in America written by a medical anthropologist. And I am not reading it quickly - not because the academic concepts or jargon are beyond my grasp, but because the situations described in it are just way to close to home for me. 'Close to home', that's certainly a pun unintended. Nobody wants to be in this situation and nobody, for sure, thinks they ever will be. My point being that even from a medical anthropologist's standpoint, or especially from that standpoint - the true feelings I experience are masked by statistics, or more jargon, or more simply, denial. Standing so far away you can't see the trees for the forest. So if people, my friends, or even academic professionals, can't understand how I feel or what to do about it, I need to understand that. How could they? No matter how much one views or opines or studies a subject, that does not make them an expert or an authority on it. Only being there can do that. It's one of those "you had to be there" things.

iPhone Phund Now Up $200. Thanks Sylvia

Want to know who your friends are? Get mugged. Or go homeless. Or ask for help. That'll sort the men from the boys for sure - or the women from the girls in this case. "You are on my prayer list and I worry about you, especially when I hear things like 'mugging'. I think you need to get out of that city", Sylvia writes. And I appreciate the thought, but I'm not going anywhere any time soon. I was born here, and even when another friend writes of all the avarice and greed and shit that flies around here, that doesn't deter me at all. For all the people who think making it here is tough, or feel some hardened cynicism about the place, I would like to invite them to take all their money, their life savings, retirement and all, and start a business in Seoul, Korea - like I did.  Because, I can tell you from experience, it was a whole lot scarier than anything I've seen here so far. People thinking that making it in New York is such a big deal, don't know anything about doing business in the largest market in the world. Asia. And I pulled that off - against all odds. And funny, what killed that business was America's stumbling foreign policy, and a president who embodied what rhymes with stumbling but begins with a 'B' (see right sidebar top intro). Thank you Sylvia. Thanks for having confidence and trust in me. And thank you for being you.

iPhone Phund Now Up $150. Thank You Pete

Pete had written me last week with some very nice words and promised to send me a meal or two by an antique transportation vehicle called The US Postal Service. Yes, they've all but shut the big office down here in New York with plans to turn it into a train station, and that's good for train lovers, but leaves us wondering whatever will become of snail mail - yet it worked wonderfully this week and I received another quaint vestige of the American system - a check. Yes, a piece of paper one can write almost any number they choose on, sign it, and it will be treated just like ordinary cash when deposited in a commercial bank. This one was for $100, and signed by Pete. Another signature on the back by me and it's worth exactly $100. Until you get mugged.

Yes, mugged. One more quaint Americanism, not yet of days gone by. In my case, it's what happens when a guy punches you in the face and thrusts his hand into your pocket to steal your wallet. Designed originally to take money from the rich and redistribute it to the poor, this new post-bank-bailout-still-crisis-economy style of mugging is simply taking money from the more well dressed poor and distributing it to the less well dressed poor - and what happens when you live and shop too near to the Port Authority Bus Terminal too late at night. Luckily, checks can be replaced.

And so that brings me to the iPhone. And you might ask, "Why in the fuck does a homeless guy need an iPhone?" And my answer might be, "because he doesn't want to be a fucking homeless guy any more", but that doesn't answer the question so totally as it needs to be answered. In today's world, things are a whole lot more complicated than that - a whole lot more complicated - like why we live in a country that spends 49% of the world's entire military budget blowing up stuff in third world countries whilst 58.5% of our fellow Americans will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.^[6] and 15.1% (46.2 million) will just flat stay there.

But facts like that don't mean anything to anybody. They don't even mean anything to people who actually study things like that. Those are just big round numbers and they don't have any faces attached to them. So I've come to use the Apple index in relation to one's relative poverty compared to what the average college student needs to attend class these days. A few weeks ago I was sitting with a professor friend of mine who was explaining a job to me that would pay $100 for an evening's work when I exclaimed, "Jesus, I don't need $100, I need $500, a thousand, three thousand", I cried. "Look at that girl over there", as I motioned to a student, one of many with similar electronics in this Upper West Side cafe, "That's my competition and she's working with $3000 more equipment than I am, coming out of the gate", I said, scanning her Macbook Pro, iPhone and iPad. And it's not like you can walk in with a Dell and a Nokia and beat that. You can't. You just can't.

If I walk into an interview and pull out a shitty phone, it's game over. If any potential employer finds out I write this blog, it's game over. And if I can't answer an email on the fly or operate a simple calendar app in setting up another appointment in someone's office, it's game over. Game over. That's what the world is telling me right now - and I don't like it one damn bit. So I'm going to fight the hell out of it until someone tells me I'm not allowed to fight any more - or until I'm just too damn old to give a shit.

Last week I participated in a panel for a university on Occupy Wall Street, and for all anyone knew I was just like the other panelists - taking time off from my day job to do a little teaching at night. But I wasn't just like the other panelists at all. They all had jobs to go to the next morning and I didn't. They all had rent to pay at the beginning of the month and I didn't. The only other thing that they had that I didn't have was debt, and I could have some small solace in that. At the end of the class we were all invited out to dinner with the professor and a few chosen students. It was the only pay expected by all for their time expended at a university that didn't seem to have ever had any trouble with money at all.

But in the walk from the school to a restaurant just down the street, things got crossed. I stayed a few minutes behind to talk to one of the other participants and the main crowd, once arriving at the specified restaurant, found the wait line to have been forty five minutes, and so the venue was changed. But I had no phone, with which for anyone to call me to tell me of the venue change. Yes, it would have just been easiest to have planted a student at the old place to tell me about the new place, but that didn't happen. Instead, I looked for them and they looked for me but never did we find each other. Besides, a student couldn't possibly have understood that a man didn't have a phone.

As I walked home in a cold rain I did think that others were enjoying a nice dinner and conversation and all the things that I remember normal people doing - normal people in at least those who had gone to good schools, gotten decent grades and lived in houses reasonably above the poverty line. But I wasn't one of those people anymore. I, instead, was in some sort of societal limbo that chided me for using public funds but refused to equip me properly for finding a job paying anything above minimum wage. I was simply extra.

"You (I hasten to tell you) are a curiousity, a monkey of sorts that they can study or for their entertainment. They go back to their nice homes and restaurants...think about this." I was told this tonight by another professor friend who teaches business. Unfortunately, I've thought about that before - this business of studying things - and I like to study as well, but only with the idea that I can use it to effect real change when the study is over. And for that, I'll need that phone. 

iPhone Phund Now Up $50. Thank you Freya

And yes, that's a long way from $500 (the cost of a used 4g) but then again, it's 10%, so no complaints.

But I need to be a bit more strong on my efforts to make this phone effort happen and so that's the gist of this post. Remember, the longer I don't have a phone, the longer I can't look for work and hence, the longer I stay jobless and ergo, homeless. And yes, the longer I bother you and don't write about solving real problems.

We are now $450 away from a real goal (see thermometer on left). And that's a goal we can reach in a week - with help. Please do.

Recently Meghan Barr, a writer with the Associated Press, called me for an interview last month based on the writing I had done regarding Occupy people living in churches - but when the story finally published, she felt more compelled to call me an "unemployed former advertising executive" than a writer and Occupier. This is the sort of thing homeless and not-employed-at-a-company people have to deal with every day. Help me do better. I need a phone to beat this. And the last thing I need is the Associated Press keeping me down.

To Donate or Not to Donate? A question.

You see these buttons all the time, almost as much as you see a homeless person sitting on the street with a sign asking for money. And mostly people roll right over the buttons or pass right by the people. It's just plain easier than any sort of confrontation - even a benign one sometimes. And what's the difference? What's the difference between an underemployed person or a stay-at-home mom seeking donations for work on a blog or a craft website and a homeless person? Is either one more a bum than the other? And does giving any money at all simply prolong the condition? Hell, if nobody ever got any money from anything they did, they'd just die and go away and that would be better wouldn't it? Getting all those people of no value out of our hair. That does seem to be what mayor Bloomberg wants these days.

But I can assure you that homeless people do have a job. They have a job being homeless and that's a job in itself. Whether living in a shelter or living on the street it's a job to simply maintain that bare standard to feed the government bureaucracy with all the mindless drivel they require or to shuffle off to one of what may be many 'spanging' spots throughout the day to pick up enough change for a meal. It's a job all the same, and not much different than sitting in an office and going through the inbox. The soup kitchen simply becomes your water cooler.

Just yesterday I received a note from a reader, and it turns out, totally by chance, that we both graduated from the same university. He's a retired journalist and had found this blog by way of its writing and subject matter. "You're not just homeless",  he writes, "you're persevering, surviving, informing, helping others, getting the word out." And that sounds like a job to me.

Thank you

If you've found the writing here of value, please donate. If you've read something you thought or felt but never put it to pen, please donate. If you'd like to contribute to something as valuable as a Kickstarter project in the form of a book I'm working on, please donate. I'm currently collecting funds for the purchase of a smartphone and name cards for the job search. Please donate. I thank you all for reading  and would appreciate your support.