Category Archives: OUR BEST POSTS

* Hope and vision

Get on your feet, Homelessness, Jacob's Ladder, Job search/Job prospects, Motivations, OUR BEST POSTS, Squalor, , , ,

As of March 7, I will have been homeless five years.

This morning I took first concrete steps to get myself into transitional housing.

This is essential if I’m to get job.  For some time, I’ve been living off life insurance policy proceeds, but in the near future, that money will run out.  It’s urgent that I get an income.

The shelter where I’ve been staying is extremely comfortable, perhaps too comfortable, but it has very rigid hours that make it nearly impossible to hold a job while one stays there.  Currently, having to carry my two heavy bags and backpack with me wherever I go, severely limits my ability to commute.  Transitional housing will spell having a place where I can stash my stuff, and freedom to come and go as I please.  I will, for example, be able to take a night job.

Related:  Obstacles to my prosperity

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* Self-comfort

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I have suffered with obsessive-compulsive disorder and genetically-based clinical depression all my life.  I first became medicated for these conditions, with SSRIs, in 1991, and the improvement was so drastic I never wanted to be without those medications again.

On or about December 6, 2015, however, it seemed as if they abruptly became ineffective.  I was not in a position to find a medical doctor competent to change them.  So, on the one hand, I’ve lived with clinical depression from then till now and continuing.  On the other hand, a positive is that in this state I’ve obtained certain insights that I never could have “seen” any other way.

One insight in particular would have changed my entire course in life, had I only learned it as a child.

It occurred in four steps.  The blue block quotes below are excerpts from my diary.  However, I recall that C.S. Lewis referred to diary-keeping as a “time-wasting and foolish practice;” that a diary is, “even for autobiographical purposes,” far less useful than one might suppose.  As to the first two steps below, I lost a good deal of time and effort searching for diary passages that didn’t exist.

In mid-December 2015 …

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* This program turned me away.

Bible, Career goals, Get on your feet, Homelessness, Job search/Job prospects, Justice, National news, OUR BEST POSTS, , , , , ,

Adapted from a 12/03/15 e-mail to my brothers and some others.

Given instability at the shelter where I’ve been for almost five years, I decided to apply to a certain program affiliated with a major national charity and major local soup kitchen.  This program is residential, has a nice facility, and (as I understood it) was geared toward taking men with histories of addiction or homelessness and rendering them self-supporting.

Since it is a residential program, I would no longer have to carry my bags everywhere I go, vastly increasing the radius within which I can look for work; and, I supposed, I would be able to work any shift.  After all, unlike the shelter where I’ve been, they’ve got a big shove towards self-sufficiency.

They rejected me.

I wrote:

Baptismal grace means: when you get knocked down, you get back up.

Blog post (from October ’14, about getting back up): Life in the outer darkness

In the immediate future, I will be checking out options in transitional housing, and case management services at the clinic where I’m currently in treatment for everything I’m in treatment for.

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What happened?

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* “Seeing red” is real. But how does it happen?

Clippings, Justice, OUR BEST POSTS, Science, , ,

The scientific reason your world brightens up when you do

This study affirms some common observations about color perceptions and emotional states. When one is enraged, the color red appears more vivid in one’s perceptions; when depressed, the color blue. When one feels elated, all colors appear brighter, and in times of severe depression color perception can all but disappear; the world looks black and white.  Or, perhaps, bleak and white.

The study attempts, and IMO fails, to attribute these things to the activity of neurotransmitters such as dopamine.  But there is no finding of direct action by such neurotransmitters on the color-perceiving apparatus of the visual cortex.

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* Bootstraps

Bible, Get on your feet, Homelessness, Justice, OUR BEST POSTS, , , , ,

Psalm 150:6:  “Let all things that have breath praise the Lord.”

At the homeless shelter where I stay, we’re required to attend chapel every night.  Monday, for the first time in months, Jervis Ray preached.  His text was Psalm 23.  However, he was soon enough back to his same old same old, haranguing us that we’re not grateful enough for our “blessings.”  “God woke you up in your right mind,” with the use of two arms and two legs.

He calls us to praise God that our bootstraps aren’t like others’.  “There are lots of people in hospitals who don’t know where they are.”

That stung me, as my oldest brother will be soon enough in just that state.

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