Category Archives: Homelessness

Jimmy, part 2

Dependency, Homelessness, Job search/Job prospects, Local news, Thursday posts, , , ,

Thursday 2014-07-03.  Jimmy came up to me at McDonald’s yesterday and sat down and talked about the incident.  He doesn’t say he’d been drinking.  He says people thought he’d been drinking.

Recall his psychiatric diagnoses.

Pastor sent me this clipping about the homeless squatters’ camp underneath the Jones Falls Expressway, which the City was about to raze — again. He thought the housing vouchers it mentions might be available to me. They’re not. A different detail caught my eye: the remark that many people in the camp “struggle with mental illness and addiction.” Note the “and.”

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Job search update, 09/01/14

Homelessness, Job search/Job prospects, Thursday posts

INTERVIEWS IN AUGUST:

Secretary II – City Health Department, 08/26/14

Tuesday 08/26/14:   I interviewed this morning for the position of Secretary II with the City Health Department.

My success depended on my performance overcoming my appearance.  This was the fourth interview I’ve had since becoming homeless, and the first time that my appearance was an issue.  As things went, by the time I left McDonald’s for the interview itself, my nerves were shot.

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My bud thinks he’s engaged to this woman.

Homelessness,

He had told me they met online, that she lives in Brazil and is rich.  Then in a recent voicemail (He has no phone.), he gave me her name.  So I looked her up on Facebook.

He’s 60+ years old, like me; homeless, uses a wheelchair, and looks a mess.

He could be her grandfather.

But “she” leaves passionate comments on his FB posts.

What I don’t understand is what this person possibly thinks “she” can get from a 60+ year old homeless man.

Note that the pictures aren’t selfies; these are professionally done. Continue reading My bud thinks he’s engaged to this woman. →

In playground murder, 12-year-old boy charged as an adult

Dependency, Homelessness, National news, The Way of Peace, Thursday posts, World News, , , , , , , ,

Bookmarks:
In playground murder, 12-year-old boy charged as an adult • Homeless woman beaten by cop speaks out • Russian “aid” convoy in Ukraine • First steps in dealing with a problem drinker

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Out of reach

Homelessness, Jacob's Ladder, Motivations, Poverty, Squalor, Thursday posts, , , ,

From my diary:

Thursday  2014-06-19.  13:30.  In a recent column, Dan Rodricks mentioned Manna House, which I’d never heard of before.  At McD this morning, Roy was talking to somebody and mentioned having been at Manna House last night — “with the critters and the crazies.”  I was quite surprised to hear him talk like that, since in my book, he’s “a critter and a crazy.”  The people who frequent that place must be really bad off.  I would recall [a former therapist, whose principal practice was in addictions]‘s saying, when I asked many years ago about the mentally ill among the homeless, that “they’re so sick they can’t be treated.”  Part of my heart reaches out to them; can it be that I might sink so low as to become able to see the world as they see it?  What does the Gospel look like to a hopeless schizophrenic?

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Andy Kessler: Guilty as charged

Clippings, Get on your feet, Homelessness, National media, National news, Poverty, Thursday posts, Yahoo! Voices,

I participate on a certain online discussion board. My premiere antagonist is a man who got trounced by a playground bully in fifth grade. He never fails to seek to re-enact that battle with me (or any of certain others), hoping for a different outcome this time. He casts his opponent by turns as the bully he wants to be or the chump he fears he was; and interacts with those projections. It has nothing to do with me. He might as well be playing with his G.I. Joe dolls.

Andy Kessler’s 07/08/13 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Summer Jobs for the Guilty Generation,” is little different. In his quotations of others’ expressions, I hear compassion; he hears guilt. I hear gratitude; he hears guilt. I hear hope; he hears guilt. What’s up with this?

Kessler projects his own guilt feelings onto his son’s generation. That’s easier than owning them, but solves nothing.
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