When I'm having to sleep on the street like I am right now, I do not.
It is hell.
What people don't neccesarily realise is that you can't sleep, not easily, and generally only out of absolute exhaustion.
Why? because you're prey to every half wit or sadist that walks the street, the police, the pimps, the pushers, some other homeless people as well, and you know you are, and you jerk awake everytime you hear footsteps coming down the street, or every time a car passes down a road.
Oh, and the weather, always the weather, which is either oppressively hot, with the pavement underneath you and the walls you lean against radiating heat during the night on top of general mugginess (that makes you smell impressively, but hey! Get a job ya bum!*), or freezing cold, and as your body starts to crash from a lack of sleep and the mind destroying ache in your legs and arms from having to lug your crap about town, you end up with shivers that won't go away, and you cannot sleep.
And that's if you've got food. Add starvation ontop of that and the fun reaches new levels of agony.
This is pretty much why homeless people tend to resort to drugs or booze, it's a simplest way to get a good night's rest.
I should also note that most of the crap that homeless people go through is horrible and nasty and leaves you fucked up if you ain't careful, but it's still a mere shadow of what we do in the torture camps.
Which is the one comparison that fits, being in gitmo is like being homeless, except you're chained to the floor, and you're protected from the elements, and everytime you hear footsteps coming nearby you know, rather than merely fear, that someone is probably going to kill you.
And you can't self medicate, and you only get the "get a job you bum!" types, and you know that your only ways out are death or madness.
Last time I was homeless was in LA, that lasted about a month before I found the little anarchist squatter's commune** who took me in.
Tonight I shall sleep on a couch of a friend while I search for a new apartment, but the last two nights, with work as well ontop of it all, was really fucking trying.
And there's far far worse happening
* I made what you could, if you squinted and tilted your head just so, call a living from picking the pockets of those people, I consider theft almost too justified in that situation.
Though I did see some ridiculously smart ass beggar once run after some one who threw money at them with that phrase attached, and proceed to try to give him change, which I guess is the more christian thing to do. I still got the asshole's wallet a few yards further down the street and bought that smart ass some socks for that though, becuase it was so deeply amusing.
And because it's socks, not cigarettes or booze, that the homeless spend the majority of their money on, socks are like the gold of the homeless.
** This was the time where about 10 of us shared a run down house, with one toilet, no door on it.
And the rad fems piss and moan about potential transwomen spying on them peeing in their gender segregated bathrooms.
Bah! Lightweights!
8 comments:
yeah i hear you. it's not fun. it sucks. it's lonely. and worst at dusk when you're seeing all the happy people go about and wander, eventually, into their warm, well lit little boxes. you begin to hate them.
hang in there, amiga.
but i still think everyone should have to do it once.
nope, no fun at all.
yup yup. i did that gig once, and almost another time as well. but it wasn't so bad since so many people in my community were in the same boat -- Roger and Me style. You need money? email me.
Also, you remind me why, while I thought the movie'd be great, it sucked: The Pursuit of Happyness. Yeah, if we all break our asses, we'll move from being homeless to being millionaires. Whoever said that you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots wuz just wrong.
Checking in, hope all is well....
and if you need some $$$, paypal perhaps?
Maybe you can try a laundrymatt? A few are open 24 seven, and if you throw a coat in a dryer and fall asleep, y'can tell any suspicious people who come in that it must've finished drying when you were dozing. Only works if all you're carting around is clothes and it's an empty laundrymatt, though. Hospitals work all right too, if you can pop some change and get a soda you can sit in the cafeteria and possibly doze, although I never could. Can't sleep with noise. Once spent most of a night wandering around a hospital to get out of the rain, just look purposeful and people don't really bother you. It's sheer hell on the legs, though. If you need money, say something. Pride isn't worth it, imho.
but i still think everyone should have to do it once.
Mmhm, but I can think of a few people I know that it wouldn't sink in until it happened several times. Memory of fish.
I used to go to the bathroom of the computer pod at the local college, sit on the bowl and put my head down. Eventually it's forgotten you're even in there.
I used to go to the bathroom of the computer pod at the local college, sit on the bowl and put my head down. Eventually it's forgotten you're even in there.
The trouble is that I tend to stretch out as I sleep, so my feet end up sticking out under the door.
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