X_Mas

Just a pre-holiday note to remind you what this site is for. Convenient link to the GoFundMe below.

Yes! I Will Donate!

When you’re homeless, everything is both urgent and inevitable. That contradiction is a spirit-killing moment in time, always ending and always beginning. The constant reprise feels very real.

Placeholder text. This is where I add detail on the things I will do when I have a normal life.

When you’re homeless, poverty isn’t a moment of sorrow, a day of hunger, or a week of misery.

Placeholder text. This is where I add detail on my adventures in gastronomy, education, travel, and how startlingly magnificent life can be.

When you’re homeless, panic is a close companion. It’s low-grade and slow-motion, but ever-present.

Placeholder text. This is where I add detail on my mindfulness routine, the pleasure of living every day like anything is possible, and the magic of simple pleasures.

When you’re homeless, hunger might be the thing. Or cold. Or pain. Or loneliness. They are familiar enough, features of a landscape barren of any more important landmarks.

Placeholder text. This is where I add detail on acquiring an annoyingly persistent interest in delta blues, and my assessment of the quality and value of brass (stone?) rubbings made at ancient temples.

When you’re homeless, poverty is an alarm in your head, constant. Always, it is either drowning every other thought in noise, or momentarily in the background only awaiting its return to prominence.

Placeholder text. This is where I add detail on creating a shell corporation just for fun, starting a small business, and beginning the more serious endeavour of establishing a non-profit organization for advocacy on homelessness policy.

When you’re homeless, time becomes an enemy, and the future becomes a threat. It forces itself onto you, then runs past and away. It laughs at your misery and revels in your frustration.

Placeholder text. This is where I add detail on my plans for the future, my hopes for a new generation, my goals in helping them flourish, and other grandad-type stuff.

When you’re homeless, people want a moment. People want an explanation. They want a story, a justification, an apology, a laugh. People want to see that no matter how much a fuck-up they feel, they’re not without a home, or a life. They want and want and keep on wanting more.

Placeholder text. This is where I add detail on how thrilled I am to have traveled so far, and how happy I am that homelessness is in my past.

When you’re homeless, your life happens to you. It’s not anything you’d want to call a life, and fighting to keep a whit of autonomy will cost, but you’ll do it if you want to live. You’ll fight for your dignity, and your self-respect. You’ll fight to remember who you are or you’ll disappear. You’ll fight for a reality true to those things you believe about yourself.

Placeholder text. This is where I add detail on my tips for time management, setting meaningful intentions, games which cultivate strategic thinking, personal agency as a way of living, and the new narrative series I’m working on.

When you’re homeless long enough, there is no other reality, and few real dreams. This is something I have been fighting against for so long it feels like forever. Normal people just don’t get how all-encompassing desperate poverty is. Pulling yourself out of homelessness is like eating sand for lunch — you can try it, but it’s not going to work out.

Placeholder text. This is where I add detail on my surprising successes, my favourite jokes, my favourite new movies and music, the home I am designing with my architect girlfriend, and loving having the good kinds of problems.