Outmoding statistics derives perspective about how we accept or refuse help, when realities unexpectedly change

In all situations, the dumbest question is the one we don't ask. Some itches often refuse their scratch, some birds won't be caged, and some of us just won't ask for help.

There are those we know so close to desperation, or worse, close to death.

Or worse, feeling without love.

For me, I know I've faced more difficult situations than homelessness, trying or having tried every means possible to get out of such circumstances. I've learned some powerful lessons, having had to have stepped out of my comfort zone.

First or second hand, or even hands up

We can use what's facing us, the immediate, the hands-on, the direct.

I know how I've had to use applied common sense, or statistics, or historical data, especially when I absolutely need perspective that I didn't have, so I wouldn't fall into outmodedness, so I didn't feel like a failure, so that I could carry on in the outmost reaches of where my life delivered me.

With the inference of all of us as being homeless, or virtually homeless, or even nearly so, we think of those we dearly love, those we've considered as neglected or ignored, our extended family, those we acknowledge as significant. At those times, we have to assess where we are, and we remember how we equivocate or compromise or furtively sense of those we truly love, or perhaps just care about their acquaintance, when we just assume we know where they are.

We must sometimes know what we may have neglected to know.

There are, which we often forget we are among, the free birds, those who have, regardless of their flitting around like hummingbirds in our lives, an importance to us (importance measured as testament to our assessment of our lives, as we come to know, through what we do in our lives, who we choose to befriend or marry, or how we deal with conflicts or grief or any anguishing reality, or how we learn to carry on without what we've had).

With reflection and perspective, we have a different mode of evading the statistical inferences, that that we may or can come to deny, at times, with our lives.

We then meet what's important and make our lives matter.

When we are quick to while away time

When I was first to discover how I had known how sure I was of my association to homelessness, there were those who I had to ensure my capability to ensile such that I've had to endure. They knew me. They knew I didn't belong among the numbers of those who I've had as close associates or acquaintances, those who know the harsh reality of homelessness. In homeless shelters. Or dole lines. Or free food congregations.

There are those who knew I'd survive. There are those who I'd seen reconcile their desperation. There are those who trusted my will to outmode the anguish.

I met Denny two decades ago when I had been more than solvent, making more than six thousand per month, feeling guilty that I was spending several hundred dollars at a time when I was generously, in his opinion, tipping out what was more than adequate for the nominal subsistence working people expected others to provide.

Denny has always been a leveling conscience, when we'd be meeting casually in bars, or for music, or other random encounters.

A retired Marine, he's always had a grace.

This last week, Danny grew weaker and he complained, finally, how he felt close to death. Many of his friends and extended family do not want to see him dying alone, in his van, or in a veteran's hospital bed.

Visiting him in his hospital room, I felt stunned.

Anyone who knows me knows how long I've been witnessing my closeness to survival's urgings to this point of death, due to realities that always unexpectedly change.

Yet we all die, sometimes alone, without the empathy of certainty in life's misgivings.

As far as misgivings, I met Sophia this last week, inured to a libidinous neglect, and seeking comfort. Yet she was a stranger. Despite the conversations through which I'd divulged my outlook, my experiences, my current survival issues, not everything was clear. What I'd not said was to ensure that neither of us would jeopardize any sense of entertaining love.

Anyone who knows me knows how long I've been neglecting my libidinous urgings to this point of selflessness, due to realities that always unexpectedly change.

Yet we all seek love and attention, remaining alone, without the empathy of reciprocity in life's blessings.

Intolerant of loathing life's miseries, Sophia and I happily shared laughter, music, and food. We'd had physical comforting, holding each other in embraces that had a lasting quality. An all too brief and decent encounter, there was then a quick falling: having read my writing, she had an overriding comment that left me overwhelmingly upset; "my first reaction to your blog, I'll just say," she said, "so what are you, really, a total fucking loser?" She had an expression of total seriousness, yet with a diffidence tending towards an unmannerly lightheartedness.

I was speechless, yet firm in my need to react, by walking away, knowing I couldn't pretend there could ever be any relationship between us with such abject contempt, such a determined judgment, such utter rejection.

Lacking suddenly my common loquacity, I felt stunned.

She'd subsequently texted me several times: "upset with me?" ("what was your first clue?" I'd thought to reply) "honestly, I wonder why you work so hard!" "you never have any time for yourself, me, or anything else" ("besides you?" I hesitantly considered replying) "I don't understand!" ("what my silence and lack of response isn't enough of a clue?"); I never responded.

Carrying on with vital needs

On the rebound, I was met with the shock from others who I'd told of these two people so influencing my recent experiences and the resulting fortitude of my being without them. I know how to land. On my feet.

Carrying on without others can be like a constant question. Shock fades, even anger and denial fade, yet the haunting loneliness of absence and rejection fade, yet slow as pain, stubbornly numbing and hurting simultaneously, perpetuating the sense of meaninglessness that life tends to bring.

Desire is our human weakness, which demands attention, so that the will to carry on life's blessing does not fade, so that we don't distract from vitality, or suffer long the will to contribute, to sustain, to fortify.

I have learned to make do. To carry on, regardless of circumstances. I have my plans to get out of scarcity, and to follow through with strength.

What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, due to what will always unexpectedly change.

And yet we are all after pleasure, or assuaging grief, knowing how to stand up, and put out.

Even after knowing how death and love play out.

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Homeless by the millions elsewhere deserve our help and empathy

Heedful of how over 2 million Haitians have suddenly become homeless, just over 700 miles away from the U.S., with all our possible food, medical and emergency services available yet frustratingly overwhelmed by the devastation, I wonder how to help (with my meager existence, cooking for those who can afford the indulgence of Irish drink and its accompanying sustenance), despite knowing the usual means that exist to alleviate the misery.

Google has been most helpful in creating a center for relief.

Yéle Haiti has provided the easiest means for Web users to contribute and for cellphone users to text donations (use your cellphone to text “Yele” to 501501), along with having pulled together a group of like minded organizations and first responders in order to help coordinate the delivery of emergency services and materials needed by victims of the earthquake in Haiti (you can also text “Haiti” to 90999 for automatic billing to your cellphone carrier's plan for your monthly account to help Red Cross work). Each of the organizations will undertake their own fundraising and on-the-ground operations, and they have agreed to sharing resources, collaborating when it makes sense and avoiding duplication. The members of this new Haiti Earthquake Alliance are:

• Yéle Haiti
• AmeriCares
• Friends of the World Food Program
• ONExONE Foundation
• Pan American Development Foundation
• Airline Ambassadors.

Aftershocks continue. Tens of thousands flee from the coast inland in fear of tsunami warnings, spread by word of mouth. Haiti has never had an easy life, whether you consider the poverty and oppression, the absolute tyranny that Haitians have long endured, or their rise from subjugation.

People across the world care yet don't have means to get even enough vital water to the survivors:

• UN peace forces, who have only so many C17 transport planes of supplies and troops and hospital ships, trying to get to Port-au-Prince or even getting to Haiti;
• Red Cross food and medical resources have limits to their capabilities;
• communications inundation, so that families and loved ones cannot get even simple relief in the bottlenecked networks of social connections.

Relief has its waiting, due to plain logistics, indifference and unfortunate reality of scams

Even while many of us wanted to contribute, instead we get alerts (some scams, not surprisingly), when we had wanted to provide relief smartly or essentially to the disaster's surviving victims.

However, there are ways to help (thanks to the folks at Google):

• UNICEF (1-800-4UNICEF)
• Direct Relief
• Yele Haiti
• Partners in Health
• Red Cross
• World Food Program
• Mercy Corps (1-888-256-1900)
• Save the Children
• Lambi Fund
• Doctors Without Borders
• The International Rescue Committee
• CARE.

Lastly, there are ways to get help, for those who may know of those in danger or other needs.

In whatever language or form, as the preacher always says, let us pray.

Elsewhere, homeless know the solutions that they get

In San Francisco, we can only assume how the numbers can be devastatingly horrid with respect to suffering loved ones despairing such crisis circumstances; we haven't a clue as to the magnitude of Haiti's problems or the survivor's needs and their dealing with fixes, as much as we know of AIDS and tuberculosis and the isolation of hypocrisy's nature towards indifference or intolerance (some just want to know someone else is alright or that those who'd been there are not suffering as badly as feared). Here in San Francisco, we know of the plans that mean to address the poor and those facing difficult predicaments. We don't need to have our anxiety worsen the havoc and despair.

For the worst disaster in modern times in our hemisphere, we must remember that, with all the attention given by the media and the corporate world to this Haitian crisis, that there are wars and other barbaric piracies that continue: considering the situations in Pakistan, the ways that Katrina's impacts still have not met the promises of political resolutions, and the ongoing reality of everyone's managing through the economy's worries.

And all we can do is hope.

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4D homelessness makes the Web 2.0: scavenging from a gutter confronts other presentability policies

I've been thinking, which is a dangerous activity for someone who'd been virtually homeless, or actually so as people who've known me know.

Containing my reality by denying the gutter, along with all the associations, the practicalities, the reproaches, the compromises, all is my privilege to appreciate. I haven't had the time to sit on a fence, and I can't keep managing the daily debris that accumulates, or keep replenishing what I've wasted, and I won't just walk past the chances to change the dichotomy I've long simplified: guttersnipes are always going to be with me.

What we've grown used to keeping is the dreamlike haunting of associations, the child that won't behave, or mature.

Escaping the circumstances of being destitute and homeless has been anything excepting ingenuous reverie for me, making me always familiar to the practicalities of the presence of managing survival and scarcity.

I know well the reproaches and the compromises I must match with dealing with a mission back to having abundance, although each day that I do have shelter is a blessing beyond abundance.

Knowing the gutter for its appreciation

Accustoming ourselves with the incriminations and discriminations humanity has known for ages ― the kings and queens always had their gardens (to have servants keep pristine) between their castle and the vulgar; all the dainty lettuces and delicate berries, the bounty of grains and the accordant mills and refineries had their roots in such blessed confines ― nowadays we have our more subtle compromises to contain what we get: supermarkets (whether Whole Foods or Safeway), farmers' markets (whether the ones who've managed to remain or the ones that have long managed a populace establishment, selling everything from the rare perfumery bergamot lemon, perhaps for ice cream, to the common tomato, for everything from a burger to a salad), specialty stores (the ones who retail a select consortium to the few who can afford the finest of the seasonal providence). We've lost the means to hunt, to forage, to harvest; we end up facing limits with obtaining what we've lost. Consequently, what we treasure of the rarities of sustenance and inducements of life, we must often sacrifice.

What we get these days is mostly little reward, and an unsatisfying perquisite for sharing with others when we do have such gifts. We've lost a propensity for sustenance beyond our indulgence of daily devices.

We live on dreams. Or recollections of dreams (mother's pie crust secrets).

What we get for all our dreams

When observing how people scavenge through urban trash, I wonder about picturing where recyclables go from San Francisco (interactivity would have been a splendid idea for this link's graphic). Of course I know where people go when they need meals or shelter or what passes for the amusements of the reasonably affordable means of a given day's passing, all the nuances of such mundane in-between contrivances of existence: showers, triage for healthiness, laundering, or fixing what's wrong with one's engagement in a bureaucratic system, or managing the aggravating consistencies of what's just plain stupid.

As much as I've always known to where people flock or insistently go for the best food or sustenance, people on the street know well why I salute the makers and producers and participants who've brought us the Web, just as much as they well know how I know the farmers, the purveyors, the select cast of where I get my bounty for providing food where I work.

Long before the Web, long since the pervasive televised instantaneous communication abilities we now endure, we had few celebrations of revolutionary acts; fifty years is no small feat for the Mime Troupe in San Francisco, for instance, to have survived, yet they were once known as the gadfly guttersnipes, the rabble rousers, the truth sayers soothing our gripes or bringing them to the public's eyes for scrutinizing: they made us laugh. Especially when all about us were crying, shouting grievances or spacing out in their miseries in some desperate denial.

When all of our society is forgetting what makes for barbaric practice, some of us tire of shaking our heads, wringing our hands, tapping our fingers. We waste time in the humility of giving up with how things are, as they've ever been, or we act as if the grievous acts of trying to do the right thing won't work, when for too long we've put up with a gallimaufry of sustenance, gallivanting through our lives with hubris.

We make do.

Getting out of the gutter

On any given day, we must face the disparagements of what we do in order to survive: someone can make some idiotic remark or some dig just to feel their uppitiness. Turning away or confronting the insistent damages can take a lifetime to learn, as if we have to make up a response anytime someone asks, utterly politely, "how do you do?" (Nowadays, it's shortened, of course to "'s-up?") I know often I reply with utmost sincerity, simply, "Fine. Yourself?" I don't go on and on with a whole litany of complaints or distracting summaries of the vivid details of what's on my mind; it wouldn't do me or the polite inquisitor a damn bit of good. However, there are ways to vent the frustrations and ways to laugh off the resentments.

Too many times I've played the stoic. Taciturn to a fault.

To those who've disparaged me, in their prideful yet repellent confidence, with their vestigial reverie, as a two-fisted drinker with ever a spry rebound last night showed by fiat, I've played the quintessential Everyman unafraid of the temerity, resolute, never cracking under pressure, never prone to insipid distractions or discombobulation, defiant to all yet not coming to blows with conflicts. That's me, taking a breath, knowing the gutter, knowing the right to bear arms, grudges, or reticence. If you can believe, I was at that time truly speechless without need for effrontery, or for matching wits or punches.

Last night, I'd finished a night cooking, with someone having just ordered food, after he'd made his assessment of his drunkenness during his sixteenth pint and thinking food would be his salvation, then abruptly puking out the three bites he'd had, only then to complain what my food had caused him to do. Sometimes one must laugh in the face of idiocy. Sometimes one must answer to the assault. Sometimes one must just disengage.

With his stench of vomit in my face, spitting out his words in a guile of contempt, I had to stomach my own assessment. And walk away, disengage, to remember the blessings of my life, to overcome the torrent of misery he'd encapsulated before me.

I could only mime back the gall with a gesture.

Childlike: two fingers down my throat, then one in each of my ears, then a subtle sideways nod to the ground, as if considering the gutter (I didn't cause his sickness anymore than I caused his indulgence; too often the imbibing can satisfy only an awakening to despair's denial).

The gutter then beckoned, with no apologies for its being there (he had enough money for feeding a dozen people, yet he chose to drink; then, suffer). Someone else had to clean up his mess, while many urchins of the night went elsewhere, never resenting the irony of his deprecation.

Where the gutter meets the road

Everyone had a good laugh. "He'd said you'd not know Kobe beef if you were sitting on it in its stirrups," one imbiber proclaimed.

"I suppose I wouldn't be riding on anything I'd intended to eat," I said.

Next morning, I'm sure all was forgotten. Yet the street-sweeper surely must've known I needed some kind of a fourth dimensional reality television with previously unknown avatars, providing me with being able to watch what I needed to watch and watch what I had to watch and watch was totally unnecessary, despite those over my shoulder who could never pay attention to what's going on around them.

The street-weeper knew what was on my mind, and the gutter would be the clue.

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Odyssey of overcoming the shock of homelessness is a big laugh

An alienating propensity impacts all of us, unless we change our story's intent, avoiding the unnecessary waste.

As we neglect or abandon our friends and families and the countless associates that make up our life, we see the intensity of our indifference overpower any sense of satisfaction in our common existence. Even when we've seen our way out of homelessness, like me, there is a reality to navigate, and a way to keep playing.

Instead, it's like the airwaves that reach out, letting them make a means for our happiness, such as after listening to a favorite tune on the radio and reacting to blurbs afterwards asking for support (KFOG, by example, continues to have donated over $4 million from what listeners provided for supporting San Francisco Bay Area food banks' resources). We learn how to play, or to have fun with life, even when desperation stares us in the face.

Changing our indifference changes us, when we change our scope and our intent, and changes the lives of millions of people, whether we know it or not (those who might have gone hungry, or worse, those who could be like us in the worst predicaments): $1 can provide an average of three meals, which amazes most people who grumble at the price of a meal at fast food outlets; however, when one sees how to get food, how to use volunteerism, how to make sense of the resources available to networks of people, the amazement vanishes: a little money or a little effort can go a long way for those who know how to use funds or energy.

Big dreams can have big poignant reality

I know from running a shoestring operation of a kitchen as I grow what was a bar's closet transformed into what provides means for providing sustenance while indulging.

I've had to have disciplines and creative abandon of strategies that I learned, working with so many Telemachus guides (aren't we always looking for someone, aside from our parents, for direction?), in my odyssey of outwitting my culinary plight: how do I satisfy others through the simple means of food?

My dream is to take the revenue that my food business will build and use that resource to help build a means for others (my friend, Bill, who's struggled with the reality of homelessness, has seen the help I've needed, for instance, and using his assistance as a means to help with overcoming his struggles, I keep order in my kitchen's operations, since I know I can't run things forever alone; just that strategy of getting help is a foothold to how we all can derive order in our human universal dilemmas, since we all need food from time to time). Simple work and physics compel me. Having fun with the work and the sense of overcoming the elemental physics of burnout, with humor, or lightedness, is my passion. I knew at some point that the work would become too much to handle. That it wouldn't take long at all before the few would become crowds, satisfied or wanting to be satisfied.

Just on a whim of fulfilling, actually providing, sustenance, while others were indulging, my worst reality came true: the other day, one meal that I'd put out was undeliverable, due to someone who'd overindulged too much, and, having ordered his eggs over easy with the big fry Traditional Irish Breakfast I served, when he'd almost instantaneously gotten 86'd, his breakfast fortunately became someone else's (funny how the little tragedies can have their righteous resolve; the recipient of the gift of the breakfast had only one comment: "perfect eggs, it would've been such a waste to toss them"), who told me the old joke: a chicken and an egg are lying in bed, with the chicken smoking a cigarette, a satisfied smile on his face and the egg frowning, looking a bit pissed off, to which the egg mutters, to no one in particular, "Well, I guess we answered that question!"

As I use my discipline to make my little dream build, the small potatoes of my work sustain me and show me my way through what could become resentments or griefs that otherwise might devise my downfall. Making food can get to primal instincts; after satisfying, after overwhelming, after jeopardizing any prospect of getting what can never quite live up to that last bite, that last taste, that last exquisite indulgence, the body wants the mind to forget, to yield, to comply, or to adapt.

Think oysters.

Chocolate.

Caramel.

Brie.

Once you've had the best, nothing else sustains, or confers what a righteous gift bestows. One just feels too good,

As we all learn, orgasms, savory, sweet or otherwise muskily intense, subside, even without sex.

The story completes itself over and over and over: we're only human. Irresolute, the mind still wavers. Life is too quick, otherwise, unlike an egg.

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Opportunities abound for getting involved with nobody's business

Our ostracizing tendencies and disinterestedness play a part in the social dynamics of our self-serving natures: when we really consider how we encounter or deal with our perplexing world, sometimes we don't know what we can trust.

Even when there are movements to organize overcoming abject poverty, no one seems to know or, perhaps, to have any need to participate (I didn't know, for instance, until afterwards, of the recent event of a Guinness World Record's 173 million people's mobilization for eradicating world poverty, and news of its lackluster "poor turnout" in San Francisco).

One needn't be a fool to know how hard it can be to escape the streets (especially for those who have low self-esteem and who honestly lack options) or to trust the systems that provide refuge from a hard life.

No matter how much we pretend to think that we have abiding love to help ourselves or others overcome desperate circumstances, and that we are in harmony with getting through tumultuous or conflicting situations, we still suffer and struggle with associations or with neglecting the stranger relationships that create aggravations or resentments and consequential reproach and loathing, many of which collectively perpetuate our singularity, our aloneness, and our world's collective problems.

We seek attention. And approval. And protection. Daily. Even when we have moments or remnants of profound realizations of how we can live in harmony and well-being, we often betray our instincts from such inclinations, ending up with a "what-about-me" mantra pervading our every thought and action.

How we regain and retain dignity in awkward realities

Carol was obviously trembling when she approached me as I was leaving my work for the day. "Buy me some food, anything?" she pleaded with a stammering in her voice.

I was immediately having to confront a stranger who was demanding something from me in my "what-about-me" mode. I shook off any self-regard, letting my parental, or friend-to-all response of reconciliation take hold.

The bridge of Carol's nose was freshly scarred, the blood still drying. As I initially suggested that, being a chef, that I'd make her something quick from my kitchen's céad míle fáilte shenanigans (out of where I'd just left, Ireland's 32, the place to which I pointed that she mistook, it seemed, for just a bar). She'd shook her head, demurred, and I suggested instead we walk a few doors up the street to a pizza place; I then bought a slice of what was ready, and she hastily devoured my meagre gift as if it was the first real sustenance she'd had in days.

Concerned about what I took for more obvious interests, I asked about her injury. "Boyfriend problems," she'd replied reluctantly, almost dissuasively, as if I'd avoid delving into the morass she may have already been presenting. Immediately I suggested places she could go (shelters, 24-hour crisis centers for domestic abuse, women's advocacy groups).

"I don't want the police involved," she answered, dismissively avoiding the issue of help. "I don't want to be a burden," she said. I wasn't about to act adamant, yet I felt a responsibility. Doubts of what to do. She'd simply refused anymore help.

She hugged me as I grievously left; I still felt her trembling.

Dismissive maladaptations continue, despite our resolve to change

Only two blocks away from encountering Carol, after what may have been only ten minutes, while I was waiting for the bus, I saw a guy sorting through trash bins for recyclables; I pointed to plastics discarded on the street to which he nodded his gratitude, picking them up as he shuffled down the street.

We live with the odd paradox that we, as a society, which can now speak openly and unabashedly about topics that were once unspeakable, still remain largely silent when it comes to dealing with significant problems. Some get dismissive: "what a buncha nutjobs, spacecases, no good lazy sonsabitches," some say to what appears our regards to this crazy world's bafflements.

This month, NFL players are rumbling onto the field in pink cleats and sweatbands to raise awareness about breast cancer. On December 1st, World AIDS Day will engage political and health care leaders from every part of the globe. Illnesses that were once discussed only in hushed tones are now part of healthy conversation and social activism (although when it comes to bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress, schizophrenia or depression, an uncharacteristic coyness takes over, and we often say nothing: the mentally ill frighten and embarrass us, and so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance). Our homeless shelters become the only place to contain those with whom we've been unable to provide help with their socially unadaptable behaviors: self-medicating with alcohol or other substances become the commonly acceptable means for maladaptive disorders, only compounding the problems that exacerbate all of us; getting work poses the biggest obstacle for many people who have no other solution to their dilemma than the shelter systems ("The fact that you're undocumented doesn't mean you're not a person under the United States Constitution, and if we can't stand up for the Constitution in San Francisco, then where can we stand up for it in this country?" Supervisor David Campos has said, well-knowing the containment of undocumented workers in California and the U.S. from his firsthand experience).

Such thoughts of societal ideological dissonance were running through my head as I waited for the bus. Doubts of disappointments of our once great democracy's culture and its current empirical disarray distracted me.

Our story has no purpose, it seems

The guy gathering recyclables shouted, "Carol! Over here! Cross the street! What're you doing?" I realized this was the boyfriend.

"You best be kind to that woman," I said to him, using my kitchen timbre voice (familiar to anyone who must work in the din of a kitchen's business), just so he knew I meant to get his and only his attention.

"Carol, what're you telling people?" he shouted. "She's just drunk," he said to me, almost apologetically (for her behavior, of course), telling me "she fell down some stairs." He didn't want to have any confrontation with me, he'd seemed to express, yet he seemed obviously the type to be the perpetrator of her injuries, from what I gathered of his sense of protectiveness, or tentative possessiveness, of his business, which he reminded me was, as he said from some distance, mumbling "none o' anybody's business, anyway."

I wasn't ready to pursue any course to involve myself with circumstances beyond my control. Yet I was in conflict, even as I boarded the bus. My reluctance to intervene had me in a daze. Sometimes I know what I could do only results in worse predicaments. Sometimes all I can do is mind my own business, despite knowing my alternative options.

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What the America dream can insist on such as us (or what's the crack in this day?)

What a difference taking risks makes.

With the desperation I encounter everyday in San Francisco, the men on street corners with their empty cups wanting change, the women walking with empty stares worrying of the ravages life has made of their once dignified beauty, the youth who turn to gangs to have some empty sense of belonging, all such grievous reality leaves me wondering about the sense of hope that America once held, just a year ago. I often must pause, without uttering a word.

As President Obama rushed through San Francisco's heart of Civic Center, the Tenderloin and to Union Square's destination the other day, the different encounters of brief looks out his limousine's windows that he must have had were surely not all politics with his agenda here of fundraising.

Afghanistan and Iraq trouble him, with all the mounting and pending costs.

Simple economics of a once stalwart and proud nation must concern him.

How we ever mean to survive with issues of health care, being in trillions of dollars in debt and overdrawn, virtually destitute as a nation, and incredulous with our dissipated or depleted savings ever regaining any value within our foreseeable future, or even at best remaining with any hope, all such scope must seem to him like some parallel galaxy and some discordant time, some impossible dream.

Yet somehow he keeps a smile on a brave demeanor.

Sometimes I wish I could see that same smile on the faces I encounter as I get around San Francisco.

The poor you will always have with you

At least I do hope. Being never poor in spirit. For those who scoff at enduring or defying odds at getting beyond scarcity, getting beyond survival, getting beyond abundance, I must attest to the spirit of such as us who can endure and defy the chance to reconcile or to redeem our natures. We aren't always who we appear to be.

Out of some hard work and a blessed opportunity, I have found a way out of the homeless desperation that I have had to live.

With, again, a summertime of feeding youth at Camp Mendocino (the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco's retreat at which I cooked for over 200 people daily), I took my savings to invest in building on what I know: a kitchen sharing blessed bounties from local farmers within a setting once familiar (for over 22 years, a local bar & grill, which never really had anything to offer from its kitchen, except reheated frozen concoctions or the rare happy hour offerings), Ireland's 32, a warm, inviting wood and mirrored pub, which has been transforming into a public house, what the Irish consider a refuge from the daily encounters of sometimes grievous and sometimes serendipitous existence. Hard work and the bollix of aggravation that we always incipiently seem to have to meet.

Often the character of Ireland's 32 has the character of a museum for its heritage of honoring Belfast, the IRA and the history of fighting for Irish freedom from the British sovereignty's tyranny, exploitation and oppression; plaques representing each county's coat-of-arms hang proudly around an etched mirror behind the bar, while paintings of famous Irish writers and pro-independence paraphernalia have long been the decor in the two-story building, with additions of the more timely Irish cultural mix of sports, music and other cultural remembrances adorning the space.

"What's the craic?" the Irish will say to bewildered looks from Americans who visit the place (Americans wonder what "what's the crack?" means, though for 50 years the greeting fulfills some sense of belonging, in my opinion, conveying a polysemic welcoming for any hint of joy). For me, the community that regularly converges upon Ireland's 32 is a mix of rebelliousness in the form of heavy drinking combined with a resolute moderation of conviviality with respect for the indulgences to which everyone's subject, from time to time.

Time is a healing device, by any view.

Such as us who keep respect and dignity do understand resentment and reconciling

Joss Stone sings, "don't tell me that I can't, I can; don't tell me that I won't, I will!" Ah, America! Do we know how to work, after the healing's done? Even after the hope's had its hurt beyond what we'd expected, what we'd endured, what we'd survived?

Joy that is often missing from people's lives often seems like the crack of a grin on the Ireland's 32 regular customers. Some are Irish by heritage having grown up in the States with only a hint of the true bearing of the Irish tradition, while many are wearing the full breadth of their Irish like a pride of armor. Such as us who have grown up in America knowing its reputation and diminishing pride will always keep a sense of the immigrant marching off to ever broader frontiers. Though we may have lost touch with ourselves and our natures, we may be there for the brief drink, or the brief encounter with a perfect unbeknownst mate, or to resent some twit's idea of what they may be assessing of us, or perhaps to an operatic respect for just the existential blessedness of a day in the life. Our day, our life, our reason for being.

Or to finding our place at a bar or a restaurant at the ends of the universe.

The drinks are often flowing mightily at Ireland's 32, and now so does the accompanying food, for "sustenance while indulging," as I've set the menu's direction and scope.

I'd have likely stayed in the desperation of homeless existence were it not for the savings from working and living at Camp Mendocino along with the consequent opportunity falling into place with opening up a kitchen of my very own doing. I've been accused of being out of my element what with all the serious dire realities, which I surely do know (first hand), of running and keeping a business, especially one dealing with the subject of food.

There is likely no greater failure than dealing with a business providing sustenance. People rely on their daily bread. And beverages. On the other hand, from those who I've known while in the harshness of homelessness, who have since accused me of gloating about my circumstance, I have received some reproach for not helping them out of their situations too; I will, yet the business needs to get its feet first into the mix. When I get comments about elements that need fixing, I instantly realize it's on me, not the operations. I am the operations.

Chef, steward, stocking superintendent and top bottle washer.

A job's to be done.

Forget about the bottlenecks, make it feng shui; forget about the ego, make it blessed. Forget about what others have done to put us in circumstances beyond our control, and forget about blaming God; the fun, the craic, the blessedness is on us to derive its purpose.

Thriving on spirit

The impeccability in my kitchen is what I'm after to offer; I know my position, titled yet impecunious. I must still deliver the perfect fish, meats, cheeses, sauces, eggs, herbs or whatever the comestible needs must be. Insistently. Being a one man show means a certain accountability before I can put the burden on others to share. Even how to wash dishes or to be stewarding the customer wishes and needs. I believe I can. Surely before I can put the burden on others to help me. Yet, after I do, I believe that anyone can follow, responsibly. And thrive.

Eventually.

I realize I can't be in two places at once, or promise to one while comprising another, nor can I stay afloat in business while insisting on promises impossible to make evident. My intent above all is to prove my spirit.

I am living the homeless hope. Or I am living the American dream, the human dream, despite being even still virtually homeless.

---

Pariahs, pundits and people on the tightrope play their parts

We see the worse getting worse with the poor populace growing in an ever worrisome peril. This isn't a lovely night at the opera.

A chill wind had been blowing.

At San Francisco's 150 Otis, about 100 of us had been waiting for a shelter bed assignment, having earlier that afternoon gotten on the signup list from the draw of numbers to get on the list and consequently getting priority ranking to get a bed; being among the 40 that evening who had the best chance, I'd been trying to be patient. I've come to accept there are reasons for the frustrating bureaucratic practices of providing daily beds. At San Francisco's main resource center, waiting for evening beds to become available, the regularly overflowing crowd inside often means for me and a few others being faced with shivering, or huddling crouched in ourselves, outside, braving the cold, turning away from the luff of the wind, hoping to get a bed, sooner than later.

With so many in my same circumstances no matter what predicament brought them here, I've learned how to be friendly yet without becoming a victim, or without becoming a preying pariah with others who also patiently or agitatedly wait. I have no spare change, no spare cigarettes, no spare bus transfer. Not much but neediness; I've learned to have only suggestions for help (since, when I was new to this predicament, there were few who directed me to the routines, which thousands have endured in San Francisco and, with the growing numbers, have had to make work for them, with no guaranteed prospects).

I watch the pundits of homelessness and learn the desolation and the survival skills.

Plurality of indigent reality

Many of the people who get into these homeless predicaments ― even if they've had work their entire lives and they are used to avoiding depending on anyone ― sometimes end up here at shelters, without a clue to its circus of characters and games. Not all of the people seeking beds in the shelters are addicts, alcoholics, mentally or socially challenged, or permanently destitute, as many of society's more cynical claim in dissuading the funds or resources or attention given the poor. Some of the poor are just ordinary people in completely dire circumstances.

Indigent types do, though, tend to need a sense of hope. Sometimes. In their dismay and with their frowzy appearances, the homeless population has its disparaging stigma that's an endless struggle.

Without the frustrations that are almost always the given, more and more of us face that we're not alone, that we're feeling temporarily isolated, yet we're all struggling with the same lack of resolve, that the divisiveness of which we play a part is often just a game. Sometimes we have no rules for the game, we just play how we've always played, like a teasing on the playground assimilating our will to outlast the worst of whatever bullies us.

Alex was being his uppity, mischievous self when a beautiful woman walked by San Francisco's main shelter resource center, 150 Otis, where we homeless get beds, or wait for them, most of us men with heads buried, and trying to distract ourselves from the purposelessness of the welfare preponderance. The woman was walking her little terrier and she seemed to know the neighborhood, ignoring the usual catcalls, or what passes for whistling in the wind. She seemed to have a confidence of her allure with a grace to her pulchritudinous aloofness.

"Très beau!" Alex shouted in his best try at French, wanting to make sure this stranger knew her attractiveness. To him. "An' I likes yer lil pups too," he added. In his hoodie and his heavy, long black leather overcoat, he can appear menacing, yet I've seen he's usually just another one of many, putting on a good face in an ominous reality.

The woman was nearly a block away before she turned around looking as if she was checking to see if she was safe, that no one followed her, while her little terrier stopped to smell a tree trunk, which was when I said to Alex, "you're scaring her."

"I is not! She know she likes it, you watch, she be makin' d'block and be back," he said in his familiar Louisiana Yat dialect. I've known Alex, and I know he's outwardly very gregarious, usually getting on with everyone. I know he's also apt to get into mischief. Yet I also know he's not one to pick fights or to take any conversation as challenge.

"Right," I said, "that's why she kept walking straight ahead and finally looked back after getting a block away, to see if she was safe."

"You 'on't know what you's talkin' 'bout," he countered, "she like th' attention."

Alex cocked his head at me as if I was disrespectfully castigating him. A half-sneer stuck on his face and then he smiled, looking me square in the eyes from 15 feet away.

Getting into other people's business

Tito had noticed Alex's sudden upset, Tito being one of the other guys who seems to hang around regularly at 150 Otis, seeming to be always scamming something, things he's found he'd sell for a quarter, the quarter in trade for a cigarette, or finding a discard ticket for the evening bed draw list, or someone's print-out for a nightly bed assignment, maybe even a bus transfer when he'd need to leave when it looked as if no beds were ever about to come up.

And Tito, being 18, loves to prove his ego's claims. He likes to spout his hiphop persona and dance about on the sidewalk as if it's his stage.

Tito has taken this section of San Francisco as his territory. He never seems to be waiting for a bed like the rest of us. And he has preyed on those of us waiting for shelter with his taunts. So it was almost too easy for him to come at me with his swagger and leer, a sillily half-diabolical murmur, coming within inches of my face, "don' be dissin' my boy, yo' ugly ass jus' jealous and he jus' be tellin' some truth." The stink of his cigarette breath gagged me, which he took for fear, as I reflexively gulped and exhaled through my nostrils.

"Truth?" I answered, "he's just hitting on some woman who's a block away now. I could see her fear from here."

"You boasting on me, cuz? 'Cause I'll take you out, sure as you're shakin'."

"For one thing, get away from me. I'm friends with Alex, else I wouldn't've said a word. And I'm not shaking out of any fear, youngster."

"You callin' me out, cuz?" Hostility wanted to rise in him, purely for the thrill. "'Cause you best not be callin' me youngster, ol' man. I'll put yo' punk-pussy-coward dumbass down."

"Pardon me, please," I said, "if you're expecting me to fall for your goading, I have no need or desire to fight. So let's just straighten that out right now." He was almost nose to nose with me, as if in some TV wrestling taunt. I was ready for the first swing or punch. "What you're doing is assault. Not battery. Assault. And that's against the law, as if you didn't know."

Alex came over to run interference. He could see us on the edge of suddenly coming to blows. "Tito, 'at's my friend, here, cuz, he not meanin' no spite. He on d'good side now. C'mon, we go make d'block, see if we can go find my girl." Alex grabbed Tito by the shoulder and directed him up the street.

Games we play when we forget frustration

Not more than 15 minutes later, Alex and Tito were back and Tito came over to me, with Alex looking on behind him. Tito made a fist pump gesture to me, "sorry, my brotha, didn' mean no disrespect. Alex be tellin' me you a good guy, 'at's cool, someone's gotta do it." He seemed to be patronizing me without intending to act forgiving, or putting on a face of one upping me without either of us acting disgraced.

"I'm just tired of the false sense of domination people try to have over others on the street," I said. "Streets belong to all of us, you know?" He nodded, with a kind of oblivious shrug.

I turned away as he walked away and I tried to get back to a sense of dignity.

The wind wouldn't let me (it knows what it is to be perpetually homeless even with direction).

---

Final solution to poverty gets our attention

Do not attempt to adjust the controls of your PCs and televisions. An emergency requires our attention: a 21st century solution, from the powers that be.

With the socioeconomic collapse and its crisis inundating us, and with the concomitant revolution mandating martial law, with measures for supervising the masses already having manifested, as conspiracy theorists warn, all the elements for responsive solutions are in place. We no longer have to worry about the debts and the mounting worries that trouble us.

Everything's manageable, so everyone can have the assurance of protection, permanently: trains are available for transport in the guise of evacuation, once martial law takes affect, and, due to any bacterial military actions resulting from revolution, biodegradable coffins are available for mass deaths; camps are ready, for containment, concentration camps, actually, internment prisons with inward and outward pointing barbed wire to prevent escape or infiltration; best of all, the usual distractions of the media will easily provide real control (we won't want to miss the ball games or the cooking shows or the talk shows entertaining us about face lifts and weight loss and child abuse).

So foreclosures and incessantly climbing unemployment are no longer the problem. The powers that be have had a plan, we can rest assured, for the growing numbers of poor and homeless.

Legislation (HR 645) already allows executive operations to proceed.

Trusted entities like Dow Chemical, Haliburton and Union Pacific have developed all the requirements while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have full authority for every aspect of the operation's needs.

We could find out more about the control measures before the real panic arises, yet our indifference predictably distracts us. For now, we can breathe. And let the truth give us pause, calmed by how those in power have long been listening, that they were aware of our impending now certain plight.

Poverty, which we know, has its problems

We will no longer really need the daily news. We've always had other concerns anyway that had never gotten the necessary attention for solutions to our worries.

Particularly those of us living in highly urbanized populations, with practical problems like overwhelmed emergency rooms, thousands of families living in cars, petty crime, violent crime, drug crime, a revolving prison system dynamic, alcoholism, drug trades, suicide and death by exposure to toxic waste, broken families, misspent lives, malnourishment, and billions of dollars going to the bureaucracies and non-profits maintaining the day to day infrastructure (churches, shelters, soup kitchens and local government resource centers). Fraught with misery and troubles, we have sought the infinite source to the speed of darkness in which we're all too familiarly caught.

And to think our prayers had no answers, we must have been out of our minds.

Millions of us are already using the systems that the government has established, so that, while the growing catastrophes have developed the grief and avoidable predicaments, there are these prepared, nearly ready-made, solutions.

Just for us.

For how long had we assumed no one was listening?

Risking collision with pedestrians on the streets of San Francisco, I keep my eyes straight yet my vision peripherally in focus, aware of those souls of the street who seem like ghosts or ephemeral non-entities to most people.

Yet there are some, particularly artists, like Anthony Holdsworth, who manage to capture what the urban life holds, as ways to sustain the precious sights and rights of America. He doesn't just paint the architectures and the typical landmarks; he captures the people, those who most of us miss in unforgettable caricatures.

There's also Bob Okin's pictures of today's poverty, what most of us ignore.

Here, as on the streets of many great cities like San Francisco, America's ranters and mumblers and conspiracy theory pundits have provided the warnings, and sometimes, often, in my hurry to find work and other despairing concerns, I wasn't listening. "Why encourage them by paying attention, or worse, engaging?" I heard a tourist say.

San Francisco Chronicle's Kevin Fagan recently had a fractured reminiscence of 1956 Skid Row in San Francisco, comparing the current similarities. A comment to the piece made me shake my head with what a reader then offered as a consideration about what to do with the homeless population: "give them a ghetto, throw 'em in, put a wall around them and let them die and rot away from the rest of us."

Just as we thought revolution had its place, that no one in power had been listening

Then there are the powerful who I didn't see appearing in the bigger picture.

Honorable Ninth Circuit Court Judge Kim Wardlaw, from Pasadena, a likely nominee as a Supreme Court judge vetted to replace Judge Souter, wrote a 2006 opinion providing for rights to the homeless.

Jones v. City of Los Angeles (444 F.3d 1118, 9th Circuit 2006), written by Judge Wardlaw for the court, held that arresting homeless people for sleeping, sitting, or lying on sidewalks and other public property, when other public shelter is not available, violates the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Because of such compassion, Judge Wardlaw invites dissent.

Or circumspection, as her likelihood for the nomination is gaining consensus. As promising as she is, President Obama won't need such compassion on the highest court, since law enforcement and citizen rights groups won't need such contingencies.

We'll see, for instance, in San Francisco (especially on May 19 after a rally protesting rights for tenants), if property owners have the power they seek from the courts.

All this while we've been letting our frustrations and intolerance build, the powers that be have been listening.

With DHS, FEMA, Dow, Union Pacific and Haliburton, there are those who have long had concerns for our situation's solutions in mind.

---

Isolated and celebrity homeless lives: selflessness, selfishness and self-actualization make a difference in the world

Contradicting epiphanies about homelessness have made me more cognitive about overcoming its prevalence.

No one will argue (reasonably) there aren't enough homeless.

Today, the situation is so overwhelming and has become so pervasive due to the economic craziness with which we're all struggling. Unlike the pervasive fear that the recent H1N1 outbreak will become a pandemic, the achievement of outlasting the current socioeconomic crisis is everyone's hope and duty, whose justice will prevail.

We must endure the struggles, the costs and the shortcomings, else all is desolation.

Faces of poverty up close

Poverty eventually affects everyone. Not everyone has to deal with its harms to the extent of becoming destitute and homeless. Yet the costs of poverty and its ordeals are unavoidable.

Last weekend, I encountered His High Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet (incidentally, seeing how far security precautions are necessary for him, such gentleness personified, was intimidating: surrounding him, or following him everywhere, there were 50 police officers, a dozen sheriffs and over a dozen men in suits, likely federal marshals and private security staff; with all this entourage, he has a presence, much like President Obama, exuding a minimum of paranoia and a legitimacy aiming towards true historicity). Likely the most well-known homeless celebrity, the Dalai Lama visited Martin de Porres soup kitchen, which is a popular Sunday morning destination for healthy free food.

The Dalai Lama beamed and grinned impishly throughout his hour-long visit to Martin's (formally, Martin de Porres House of Hospitality, rooted in the Catholic Worker movement), offering words of encouragement to the approximately 100 guests and volunteers at the Sunday brunch. He joked with the folks while there about being in exile and about President Obama and the international economy.

As I came from behind him to replenish the potatoes which he was serving, "pardon me," I said. "95% of life is just showing up with good action." I had meant it with grace and humility.

He simply turned to me, putting his spoon down in the chafing dish of potatoes, clasped his hands together in a gesture of prayer, looked at me directly over the rim of his glasses, and nodded. I felt a chill, a sense almost of suddenly becoming one of the crows of reincarnation. Perhaps I even blushed.

Although he is from Tibet, the Dalai Lama actually resides in Dharamsala, India, due to China's political takeover. He remains hopeful of one day returning to Tibet.

"Our lives depend on others," said the Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso, as he was originally known). "Me too." His characteristic baritone sometimes prevents hearing him clearly, so that many of us in the crowd strained to hang on his every word. "My life depends on others. You are still in human society, human community. Please feel happy and feel dignity."

Making a difference in the world

Throughout The City, we see what makes a difference in people's isolated lives, such as the Dinner With Grace program that Yahoo! recently subsidized through its grant (a $5,000 grant from the Yahoo! Employee Foundation will help provide kitchen equipment that's vital to getting food to Tenderloin SROs).

We look to suggestions of free things to do in The City (some of us like me don't have time, since we're too busy in the panic to survive looking for income).

Some give in to desperation. Then, there are some who, despite being beaten and refused shelter after those beatings, refuse to give up.

Still, most of society simply ignores the homeless situation. Still, charitable organizations face funding cuts.

Later that afternoon after being at Martin's, I went shopping at Safeway. It felt weird to experience staff cheerleading at the front registers while seeking contributions for charity. Not cheering for larger amounts, they were cheering for any contributions. The cheering could be heard throughout the store over two dozen times in the 20 minutes I was there at the Market/Church store. It reminded me of the "Forbes 500" homeless and struggling poor Americans: those who've faced foreclosures due to sub-prime lending practices, those who've faced layoffs with huge corporate icons, those who've faced bankruptcy of their 20-year businesses, those who've faced recession-proof jobs, the many too many nurses, coal miners, construction workers, mechanics, pharmacists, real estate agents, all those who've considered their jobs secure.

Some companies are contributing to the communities with funds as well as job-shadowing, such as Levi Strauss with its May Day ("501") efforts.

Outlasting the worst of our lives

Very young I encountered Paramahansa Yogananda and his teachings of ancient shastric scriptures, where I learned not to take deference to bargain-searching or bargaining, learning to be cognitive with regards to all of life's opportunities, learning that every moment is a blessing, sometimes in disguise.

I know that we all still face having to budget for food and to find affordable shelter. I'm not saying each and every one of us will be responsible for fixing the world's disparity anymore than we will all be capable of making the planet all green and bringing back the polar icecaps; likewise, we'll all determine our responsibility yet without necessarily being accountable for the poverty situations in each of our communities.

As long as we stay isolated from our world, no one is of any help to the world in which we belong.

---

How a strange needy situation happens

The guy in the suit stabbed Bobby, the guy who knew Bobby wasn't really a woman.

When we ask ourselves how we've ended up in such situations that we have to ask others for help, it's time that we looked at the bigger picture. No matter what we know is reality.

An ambulance rushed Bobby to St. Francis Hospital's Emergency Room. The guy who stabbed Bobby has not yet been found; "just another guy in a suit" was the description from a passerby who last saw him flee down Market Street chasing him toward Citicorp Center and watching him disappear in the crowds around Sansome and Sutter.

Societies know how grievances work and how balances of power work. Some of the neediest complain to no avail and some of the greediest complain to no avail. Some of us just seem useless.

Bobby would have discretionary rendezvouses in the financial towers or in the boutique hotels where the sex trade flourishes.

Just business as usual, that's how a strange needy situation happens.

Bobby was often working her corner in the financial district near ETrade or near the Fidelity digital ticker. She'd worked the Tenderloin yet had tired of the destitute and weary. She'd decided to maintain at Market and First, near Sansome, where all business meets the western frontier. She had her regulars.

And her business flourishes.

What we all know all too well

What she knew, according to two guys drinking at the Sutter Street Station saloon, one of whom who claimed to have written attributions about Bobby in his blog, was not easy to dismiss. How we discard people, and it's just business. How the one guy could flippantly write about Bobby without talking about the nature of the crime troubled me.

These two had been S.F. Chronicle staffers, and they had recently, so they claimed, been writing for the New York Times; seemingly sidetracked―although I knew they were speaking of society's rejective tendency―they told me about Bobby after describing a journalist's colony instituting charity for the diversity of our culture's most conflicted, showing how there was medical help or social concern for the neediest.

Even with people like Bobby, who many would say her needs were simply a matter of choice, not a necessity. Wanting to escape the reality of one's life rather than confronting one's demons and misunderstandings. We've all had our associations with escapism (52nd S.F. International Film Festival charitable contributions to the needy as an example―now, who's sidetracked?―much of it being escapism for the escaped; you have SFSU's disputes of the recent homeless count for The City's federal money allowances, like arguments of Macintosh and Windows, disputably in the eye of the beholder, there are always going to be those survive the worst, or like San Francisco's Paul Avenue cleanup of the homeless campground near the rail tracks, folks who couldn't fit in at shelters), and yet we deny our need of a place to get away from the world.

Likewise, we still need those who are the least wanted. Even among the Progressive's agenda of diversity, we find the dismissiveness: some aren't able to accept that there are transgenders across the U.S., counted among the homeless, the neglected, the loathed, the least of concern; there were those who know what it is to be destitute and deprived who themselves couldn't care less.

It hardly matters how San Francisco reacts to the saddest news, the incessant crime, the mundanity of kidnappings, the business profitings as usual (even the most powerful know of a list of banks receiving bailouts, the same bailouts destroying the U.S. economy), and how the world seems to just now be awakening to what was the same as it ever was.

Bobby had her means.

Old men. Old cultures. Old habits. No matter how strange, some realities perpetuate, despite resistance of the real world.

When we pretend we don't know the real story

How we ever came to such circumstances to get over the historical reference comes to be a human extravagance overcoming the modern contrivance (once we feel we believe our truth, we come to feel that we can convince anyone of the same truth, however much such a story departs from reality). We have another tendency to retrieve whatever we believe is our prerogative.

We have a Constitution. Despite the 27 amendments, there is still the foundation. Whoever believes we have no hope must face responsibility, to have respect for what has survived despite resistance to such foundations for change and for indivisibility.

Respect has a lot to do with hope.

Bobby had voted. She had the consternation of reconciling differences, whether differences even matter. She had enough years on her to know how to resolve street issues with regards to her history. Yet there was reality. She had to sleep at night. She couldn't at the city shelters. She was treated as if she were a man. She couldn't, even among the working realities that gave her her sustenance, get any allowances for her situation. She'd come to believe like the rest of us. In Obama. In history. In belief in America. That we could survive any affliction, any intolerance, any desperation.

Bobby knew which part of the city allowed her to sleep.

Privacy. Where no one invades or defiles you.

Any child would know. Yet there are still among us adults who avoid the intolerance that breeds the loathing, feeding the cultural depravity.

Meeting up today to catch up on all that's happened in her recent life, Bobby reacted to the television news account, to the suitcase dumped in the pond; she didn't have to be eight years old, again.

We both knew about the worst kinds of child abuse, Bobby long before me and me, having grown up with the Polly Klaas legacy having been from from Petaluma, seeing how such tragedy changed public awareness across the U.S., knowing that what Bobby knew went beyond parentage, linkage, umbrage.

As I'd listened to us in the bar, I realized there are those even in San Francisco who couldn't or didn't care in the least why Bobby deserved sympathy or plain human decency of caring.

What had happened six months before, and had culminated in the historical leadership epiphany and change just this year, with Obama, was helpful. What had happened to Bobby just six days before, and had culminated in no arrests, just more tragedy, was no epiphany. Bobby didn't have to have any Constitutional law background. She'd had enough street repercussions. Just in the last year alone, Bobby had been assaulted three times, once almost fatally.

She'd known what to know, what she'd avoided or circumvented.

Our U.S. Constitution has its foundations and the Sixth and Eighth articles provide for something we sometimes take for granted. Habeas corpus. Facing our accusers. We must never take for granted what we are, who we are, what we have become. That no one can take from us.

Life's a short story

Everyone knows a woman. By face. By presence. By a smell, or, if I may be so bold, a fragrance.

Bobby had told me one time about her life. We had emptied glass after glass. My heart's been broken enough in my lifetime to know presence. I heard her story and became a friend, without strings or reservations, without reasons or excuses, without illusions. There were these guys who'd one time broken into our conversation, when Bobby suddenly left, disturbed. They thought they could give us, or me, guidance. Of a different perspective.

Bobby had told me silly stories. Told me grief. Told me about American truth. How we must know redemption if we are truly to know reconciliation.

Diversity must have its way to change what matters.

To us all.

In the familiarities of America, we understand privacy, freedom, and value. Whether we admit we love or refuse to love.

We have a consternation about those who fight.

Else why do we have rights for what we have fought.

Our fathers and brothers and mothers and sisters understand. Justice prevails as long as those who stand up prevail.

I think that's why hope sustains people like Bobby, and what provides us with parentage when we have some disparate linkage with blood, roots, reasons, to what matters. We have what is us. Especially when linkages are long gone. Or gone to whatever we can retrieve.

Bobby's parents disowned her and all that she believed, as soon as she actually spoke out.

This morning, after I left the bar, I later found Bobby, at another bar, Chieftain's; I wasn't to have any newer, better perspective beyond the usual sense of intolerance.

We ended up leaving there, going out to the Bayview district to consider some projects (I know there are some people who always find creative ways to reuse goods):

• Building Resources in San Francisco, a nonprofit focused on building and landscaping materials.
• East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, an Oakland nonprofit that bills itself as "Every teacher's first stop and every artist's second home."
• Resource Area For Teaching (RAFT), a nonprofit in San Jose that provides classroom materials.
• Scroungers' Center for Reusable Art Parts (SCRAP), a 30-year-old nonprofit popular with teachers and artists.
• Urban Ore in Berkeley, a for-profit that deals in building materials including doors and windows and general items such as furniture and appliances.

Bobby will be alright. Maybe the police might actually catch the guy. Maybe we'll have a use for what we continue to discard.

---

What twittering does ("face value") for the poor and disenfranchised

America's average attention span allegedly has had its 15 seconds of available airtime. By summer 2009, television will no longer be as freely available a distraction as we have come to accept.

What passes for daily survival in the poorest parts of America, evident in San Francisco's North Beach, Chinatown, Tenderloin, SoMa and Mission central districts as just a microcosmic epitome, is small comfort. Soon taken, gone as modern opiate, blasted into the nether regions of the collective interest spectrum, like everything else, scarce.

People will soon require a tuner as means to get the TV signals, due to federal mandates for freeing up the airwaves for emergency services and wireless technology. The government gave out coupons by which people could claim the tuners for free; however, there were restrictions. Even the restrictions lacked reason. Nothing's ever for free.

Perhaps without TV, there's more time for upset, of which there's never a lack.

Without distraction, what will the poorest do?

Just as the poor wonder what's left to them, what goes better with no TV than no breakfast cereal? Because that's gone, too.

News for those needing food came this week with surprises, what with what Kellogg donated to S.F. Food Bank. Since Michael Phelps picture had been on its cereal boxes, with Kellogg feigning their endorsement, people were getting what usually never gets to such outlets, since it's too expensive; the real shock came when the still full boxes turned up on eBay (spoofs also provided fodder for the multitudes).

We forget what happens with the media until we become its victim, as Michael Phelps experienced going from eight Olympic medals hanging around his neck to learning about the albatross of his indiscretion, photographed, of him with a bong.

Most of his sponsors had stood by him. Not Kellogg. Phelps tells the public how he regrets his mistake, how he has no control over how the media's use of such indiscretions is out of his control, how he continues to swim. Time will tell whether history remembers his accomplishments or his indiscretions.

So celebrity continues to be the distraction, while the U.S. continues with grim reminders of being victims of AIG and the Bernie Madoff swindling hordes.

Sometimes it takes satire to blow the whistle on the talking heads of finance, as we saw when Jon Stewart interviewed CNBC's "Mad Money" financial entertainer/journalist Jim Cramer. Everyone it seems has had to endure the repetitive view of the clip from the Daily Show 12 March 2009. "I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it's not a f---ing game," Stewart told Cramer.

How such aggravation prevents serious inclinations of repercussions only makes us forget what we can do about the real harm. There's always twittering.

What more will be taken away?

Counteracting the distractions or their lack, ironically, is more victimization.

Blessings barely serve to hinder travesties abounding across the twittering world. Some wastes we don't want to know.

With recent rains this last month came wildflowers sprouting in the spring's greening hills. We'll forget the fact that the water's main use goes to agribusiness and utility companies using the resources for profit.

Past schemes of nepotism may have undone what hope can regenerate. We can only believe we may not soon heal what toxic assets that the past created. Though we may not have much, we still have life.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in an interview on "60 Minutes" (aired Sunday), said that the U.S. recession will likely end this year, and that a recovery would hinge on the health of financial markets. "The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis," Bernanke said.

Somehow we'll manage to distract ourselves, twittering away and frittering away the small scraps that remain, making the most of what we've got.

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Homelessness and writers examined: enthusiasm of perseverance is infectious, unless unfairness prevails

With today's economic collapse, as more and more of us fail to make a living, we look to those with real gifts who've often questioned why they can't make more of a decent living. Everyone's looking for answers to economic survival, especially us writers.

Faced with being homeless, we know the characterization of most homeless who've become homeless while grappling with addiction, depression, and some with jail time.

Many of us have gotten used to living paycheck to paycheck, and recalling better times. Now we're lucky to have the paycheck. Typecast as losers, those who are facing poverty know their place, rejected, resented and rebuked. As we try to turn our lives around to a sense of prosperity that we once had, we use whatever we can to rise above the squalor in which we find ourselves cast.

We don't like wasting anyone's time.

Homeless writer's reality's not atypical

Some of us who are writers know what it's like to have our time wasted.

Most people rarely know about writers that we're in it for the love, such that we would suffer low pay, endless rejection and multiple side jobs, merely to follow our intent to make points of significance.

People often tend to be envious yet resentful of the fact we can express anything of value, and so we're cast as just being blowhards. And people wonder why a select few writers get so rich, which makes me wonder what happened to the myth of starving writers, a reality I've always known as no myth.

J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, Danielle Steele, Stephen King and others can attest to the real rewards: not every writer dies rich and happy.

Writers are always going to be the ones foraging, scrimping, avoiding discouragement and then enduring the disparaging stigma of being failures. Writers aren't always just seeking attention. Often they're genuinely needing to share their gifts for gathering and providing information. Rejection is a familiar experience.

Most of my life, I've used cooking work to make a living, especially when writing work wasn't available, or augmenting writing work to get a little more ahead of the game (in San Francisco, restaurants now struggling must contribute to health benefit plans for their employees, to ensure for providing the necessities that few of us, individually, can afford; I've been wanting such luxuries most of my life, often having to pay for most medical expenses out of savings or on credit). Even cooking work is hard to get, competitive and beyond demanding.

Over this last few years, I've seen the gradual demise of opportunities and the consequential reduction of decent survival standards.

Foreclosure rates across California this last year have had up to 500 people a day losing their homes.

Coupled with massive job cuts that have seen one in ten workers laid off, many people who once enjoyed a middle class existence are now forced into third world conditions.

Rage seethes in an unending darkness

During the last year, I've come to know there are those of us who don't see the figurative daylight in the economic crisis.

For some of us, hanging out on street corners in paroxysmal blathering, frittering away the time we could be out finding work with seeking friends or annoying strangers, apoplexy has been the only comfort. Losing our rights to vote can bring us to such desperate action.

Our outrage has its reasons, as one woman found who lost her home recently to the FDIC. Banks have not had such failure tendencies since the 20th century's Depression.

Imagine how it feels to many of the eldest among us who must experience an even worse looming of a 21st century Great Depression.

America has begun to seem like the pictures we see of refugee camps in Third World countries.

People survive how they can. They form communities where they can, such as Tent City in Sacramento (a gathering of tents, lean-tos and shanties pitched on the wrong side of the tracks just east of Midtown, near the American River, where the old city dump used to be; Oprah has just put the camp in the spotlight, although its presence has been an ongoing nuisance to neighbors, its recent influx is what gives the inhabitants there the attention), Dignity Village in Portland, Oregon (a growing community of chronically homeless and recently impoverished folks whose members have their own democracy and civilities to create order), and "Nickelsville" in Seattle (named after the mayor, Greg Nickels, and where residents, Nickelodeons, have established rules ― no smoking, drugs or visitors between 9 pm and 7 am ― and set up an arbitration council to mediate disputes; they have nightly gatherings around barrel fires to conduct "rights and responsibilities" assignments).

Even Warren Buffett wants to know where the $50 trillion of investments vaporized in markets worldwide in less than a year's time.

It's like an idea, about which we're speculating its value with strangers, often what we writers regularly do.

We forget we're putting into our messages not only our key ideas but all the fine details we think (or insist) are important. We forget about our readers. Even if they read, they skim. They don't see the significance to their world.

Perhaps even saving it for another day, readers'll come back yet they'll have lost the thread or the original idea's trigger, with writers emphasizing like homeless individuals ranting on street corners.

Just as rejection is a common experience for writers, we can also learn to reject the failure. Persevering through a crisis, we writers are able to share how we overcome such adversity.

Links for homeless and writers

With the Web, writers know they can share links to the world:

• A Society Without A Name
• Aberdeen Cyrenians
• Agape Homeward Bound Ministries
• Alaska Veteran Foundation
• Almanac of Policy Issues (Homelessness)
• American Friends Service Committee
• American Homeless Pictorial
• American Homeless Society
• Another Way Drop-In Center: Montpelier, Vermont
• Annual Homelessness Marathon Website
• Association of Kamagasaki-Patrol, Osakal
• Association of Poor People, Nagai Park, Osaka
• BIGnews
• Blazing Star
• Canadian Annual Homelessness Marathon
• Canadian Homeless
• Care of Poor People
• Causes Effects
• Casa Alianza - Covenant House Latin America
• Center for Citizen Media
• Cleveland Homeless: Cleveland, Ohio
• DrawBridge
• Ecclesia Ministries
• Economic Security Project
• End Homelessness
• Everyone Deserves A Roof
• Forum de Populacao em Sitacao de Rua de Sao Paulo-SP
• Georgia Coalition to End Homelessness
• Hardline Straight Edge
• Heartside Ministry
• Helping America's Homeless
• Homeless Arts Project
• Homeless Grapevine: Cleveland, Ohio
• Homeless Guy: Kevin Barbieux of Nashville, Tennessee
• HOMELESS in Baltimore, MD
• Homeless in Long Beach
• Homeless in San Francisco
• Homeless Man Speaks: "The word from the street"
• Homeless Missing Persons Project
• Homeless Nation Blogs: Canada
• Homeless on the Internet
• Homeless People's Network
• Homeless Services in San Francisco
• Homeless Youth Among Us
• Homelessness & Homeless People Australia
• Homelessness Marathon Blog
• Homelessness Wikipedia
• Homelessworld International Daily News
• How Homelessness Works
• HUD Official U.S. Site
• Humboldt County War on the Poor
• InfoXchange
• Jamie's Big Voice (United Kingdom)
• Jericho Project
• LA's Homeless Blog
• Life Haven
• Living (a home for Seattle's homeless writers)
• Los Angeles Mission's Blog
• Love Thy Neighbor Fund
• National Alliance to End Homelessness
• National Coalition for Homeless Veterans
• National Coalition for the Homeless
• National Health Care for the Homeless Council
• National Homeless Awareness
• National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty
• New Hampshire Homeless
• North American Homeless News Network
• On Homelessness In America
• Options Services to Communities Society
• Ottawa Innercity Ministries
• Outside In
• Partnership for the Homeless
• People Serving People
• Poor People's Guide
• Project Homeless Connect
• Righteous Invasion Of Truth
• Seattle Information and Referral Network
• Senior Resources
• Simon Community
• Social Services Sector
• Solutions At Work
• SPITTS
• Stand Up for Kids
• Stewards Corporation Movement
• Texas Homeless Network
• The Sanctuary
• Union Rescue Mission
• United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UN Habitat)
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
• U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessnes
• View From the Sidewalk: Michael Brown of Greensboro, North Carolina
• Volunteer Institute - Child Outreach Center
• WanderingScribe (United Kingdom)
• Western Regional Advocacy Project
• WordPress Blogs of Homeless Artists
• Yahoo! News of Homelessness
• YouthCare

(For any other resources with appropriate links, please provide as comments!)

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Misanthropes know their homeless solutions fit into their solipsistic Web

Homelessness 101 is a Web 2.0 experience people ought to learn for themselves.

This isn't to suggest living like the homeless must live (in shelters or on the streets). It's not to suggest becoming a whore for homelessness sake. Or suggesting undertaking the desperation and the intolerance such as those who are actually experiencing the incredible survival skills of poverty.

Maybe it could be just to learn the skills used by the church or social workers who help the poor in the 21st century approach.

Sometimes we're oblivious to such a void in our universe.

A world where heuristics engages us

Lt. Col. Joe Posillico, the Golden State Division commander of the Salvation Army here in San Francisco, talked recently about needing help. The Salvation Army hadn't got what they needed in their red kettles from the usual Christmastime bell-ringing. And times have gotten worse with ever more homeless and poor wandering helpless.

Posillico used newspapers, with his message requesting donations due to the overwhelming need. His real support came from the virtual community, the Web response after the help request's online version. The Web has its infinite capacity for private donors. What Posillico got from the intractable print world was like having a red kettle outside an empty bar, a pittance compared to the virtual red kettle of the Web's permissive generosity.

Posillico saw that people online don't want the connection to the homeless; they don't want to be in the church basements, in the welfare offices, in the inner city help centers. Still, they want to help, to assuage some human longing. Homeless could be acquaintances, associates, distant cousins without help.

Such heuristics encourages solutions with a plasticity that we humans have learned we sometimes, for whatever reasons, can't fully engage.

Yet with the postings online come the necessary evil, the public commentary; by its nature, an online news item's open to any remark, and the majority of comments come from a sabotage of negativity ― an avalanche of disparaging, incendiary, agitating consternation ― those who cannot put up with any charity, any compassion, any collection that's offering no return on its investment (save getting a free set of steak knives). Most of the comments seemed to see no risk or hazard in ignoring the problem.

Sure, life would be perfectly lovely if we were always ready, willing and able to endure fulfilling the momentary needs of an indigent streetperson, as if those fulfillments were our enduring of Lazurus.

Often we're too stoic or stubborn. Or too distracted. With a self-absorption beyond expression, although morally conflicted, as if we could actually discover the redeeming value in helping others. Yet won't.

Opportunities pass us without our realizing when we lack the focus or attention to catalyze the world's gifts.

As if we're shy. Or stupid.

What controls our world besides us

Before we know it, misanthropic solipsism has its control over us.

Just as we have had to adapt to modern models, which we have used as life strategy signifiers, we aren't always ready to adapt to change: when we must abandon everything, from homes to making a living to how we educate or reeducate ourselves to having a family and friends, we are suddenly juxtaposed with being needy.

Without using technology's latest tools, most people wouldn't have a clue what to do when encountering someone who's homeless and actually getting them help, anymore than they'd know what to do in that part of the city or that part of the Web where homeless go.

We've grown up with books that have given us linear or hierarchical learning experiences that we might never have imagined 200 years ago.

And we've grown up with TVs and remote controls that have allowed us to have heuristic approaches to our learning (though usually for our relaxation experience), which we might never have imagined 100 years ago. We want what we want and we want it when we want it (usually now). Yet what we really want, and what we really could have, is dependent only on technology to keep pace with our socioeconomic thriving or its lack.

We've now, with 3G wifi radio tools, abilities that we might never have imagined just 20 years ago. Our distraction capability is pervasive.

With PDAs and laptops on their way home from work, commuters put up with compromises of power-hungry devices and eye strain. Much like the optic nerve having millions of fibers transmitting pulses of information to the retina and to the visual cortex of the brain's perception sensors, within its hippocampus and amygdala, we strive to keep up with what we see with what we experience (the cellular operation is after all binary, and a complex process still occurs); we have come to feel we should be able to have what we need forever in the evolving now.

Rather than see media devices as distraction, we have come to consider them as being solutions in our living spaces, enabling us to have freedom, which is essential to our adapting, to our survival, to our imagining beyond the scarcity and adversity we know is no illusion. Yet they could be transporting us, figuratively, literally and metaphorically (when they face the collapse of the economy, the poor must consider alternatives to what they've relied upon to survive).

History shows us as urban land values have increased, once the properties emptied and the buildings were demolished, with the displacement of people who lived in the inner cities where they've found livelihood, that SRO hotels have had exponential increases. Indigents who just can't cope on the streets must traipse from one SRO to the next every month, since there's no place else they can afford. They could no longer move to rural areas, since those have become suburban areas, not accepting anyone.

Families have recently experienced the fact that they could split (along with their belongings in storage or lost and, most significantly, their animals having been given up, adopted, or worse, euthanized). What we're recognizing in societies is lifestyles becoming more fluid, adaptive. Yet we have also become more isolating.

Posillico hopes differently.

What keeps us controlled besides us

In my lifetime, actual slumlords are hard to find, although their properties are as prevalent in the poorest neighborhoods as cockroaches and drug dealers. If you go to the civic bureaucracies to locate a property owner, you're hard-pressed to locate any individual.

In San Francisco, you'll find TNDC and CitiApartments and other entities. You won't find anyone to ask about the problems with which you live, with pest control or leaks or poor security or inadequate heating.

When you do have a property manager or someone to ask about specific fixes or needs, you risk jeopardizing your tenancy. You won't find any Shorensteins or Morgan Stanleys. What you will find are their lackeys who pass on the problems. As property managers, their reality is that they work like clerks for an agitative firebrand. Their negligence is like an act of a poster child, ready to spark any conflict or bias, yet they're someone who you can't scold for their demeanor anymore than you could scold them for their palsy.

Traditionally SROs have been populated by low-wage workers, transient laborers and recent immigrants. Today immigrants still find SROs as some of the only truly affordable housing for the low-pay jobs that await them. In many Tenderloin, Chinatown and Mission SROs, immigrant workers may be found living three or more to a single small room.

Across San Francisco, the poor have no other choices. One of the oldest hotels in San Francisco, The National, next to California's PUC headquarters and across from UN Plaza, its typical rooms are 8x10 feet. Occupants pay $725 per month for a bed, a sink and decent heating; they're lucky to have the distraction of a TV and yet they do have the politically correct wifi convenience, due to the legislative advocacy for its necessity, with which tenants can share their devices. It's likely the nicest affordable property in the city, due to its closeness with City Hall, and its base of tenants.

Such solutions have the watching eye of City Hall, or beyond, as the world watches a world class city manage its small world. Were solutions as evident as the reality principles of videocams and smartphones, what we have for our use is the capability to capture the moment that evades us.

Such an environment is an apt signifier for the news media's customer base: these nearly indigent need the news, to track scarce jobs (in classified ads ― from craigslist or other virtual network postings, which have become increasingly inadequate), to hunt for clothes (clearly bargain basement markdowns, the marketplace having had its loyalty or its sabotaging betrayal, where even the discount stores struggle to compete with rummage/secondhand stores), or the latest distractions (the Web's twitterings point the way to the cultural currents).

The world needs our collective intelligence

Sometimes, only harsh news concerns us.

Posillico hopes differently.

Stability may be missing from the lives of the poor, yet the world they contain in their culture is a nickel, a dime, or a dollar away from getting or losing their daily bread. People need to know, and sometimes they can't afford the current dire news.

Still, they know if they're not working, no matter what the time, that someone else is.

Still, they know at the end of the day, they must compete with the market.

And still, they must keep up with the latest challenge, either for themselves or for their virtual neighborhood.

With the collective intelligence that we have available with the Web, with smartphones, with networks, we can regain that which we have lost, either through indifference or intolerance. We really do live in a very small world.

When we used to loathe the misanthropes among us, consequently avoiding them, we believed their "my country, right or wrong" bullying enough to give them power. Now, with the world getting smaller every day, it is not even about "my world, right or wrong," since the universe belongs to all of us, and we must protect it: someday we'll embrace the fact that climate catastrophes and nuclear proliferation do none of us any good.

Neither does neglecting homelessness.

There must always be something handy to comfort the poor, to show them, to keep them, to help them, out of their empty red kettle void.

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