Homeless Person Quotes

Where did you get that dress? I stole it from a homeless person," I say straight-faced. "She was lying right beside the stripper that gave you yours.

She tied her blond hair back with a strip of denim torn from her pants leg, and in the fiery light of the river, her grey eyes flickered. Despite being beat-up, sooty, and dressed like a homeless person, she looked great to Percy. So what if they were in Tartarus? So what if they stood a slim chance of surviving? He was so glad that they were together, he had the ridiculous urge to smile.

‎Homeless person or business person, doctor or teacher, whatever your background may be, the same holds true for each of us: life takes on the meaning that you give it.

How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure but it is news when the stock market loses two points?

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished. It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.

I might cry later, at home, while watching Steel Magnolias and dressed like a homeless person. Sometimes I applied mascara before crying just to heighten the experience.

Half of the time, the Holy Ghost tries to warn us about certain people that come into our life. The other half of the time he tries to tell us that the sick feeling we get in a situation is not the other person’s fault, rather it is our own hang-ups. A life filled with bias, hatred, judgment, insecurity, fear, delusion and self-righteousness can cloud the soul of anyone you meet. Our job is never to assume,instead it is to listen, communicate, ask questions then ask more, until we know the true depth of someone’s spirit.

It is not the homeless, mentally ill or extremely cunning people that we have to be afraid of. When someone loses everything that meant something to them is when people should get very afraid. A person that has nothing to lose is the scariest person on earth.

You can be a drunk. You can be a survivor of abuse. You can be an ex-con. You can be a homeless person. You can lose all your money or your job or a husband or a wife, or the worst thing imaginable, a child. You can lose your marbles. You can be standing inside your own failure, a small sad stone in your throat, and still you are beautiful, your story is worth hearing, because you--you rare and phenomenal misfit--are the only one in the world who can tell the story the way that only you can.

When YOU stop believing one person in the world cannot make a difference; differences in the world will be made.

Sometimes what a person expresses in their eyes is more than all the books you could read on suffering.

Don't ever allow yourself to feel trapped by your choices. Take a look at yourself. You are a unique person created for a specific purpose. Your gifts matter. Your story matters. Your dreams matter. You matter.

homeless person or business person, doctor or teacher, whatever your background may be, the same holds true for each of us: life takes on the meaning that you give it.

But now I felt trapped, like a homeless person who’d been given their dream home only to suffer from intense wanderlust because we always want something until we have it.

The duty of the moment is what you should be doing at any given time, in whatever place God has put you. You may not have Christ in a homeless person at your door, but you may have a little child. If you have a child, your duty of the moment may be to change a dirty diaper. So you do it. But you don't just change that diaper, you change it to the best of your ability, with great love for both God and that child.... There are all kinds of good Catholic things you can do, but whatever they are, you have to realize that there is always the duty of the moment to be done. And it must be done, because the duty of the moment is the duty of God.

I know what party you’re talking about. I might have to swing through. Especially if you’re going to be there in a costume.” He winked and leaned back in his seat. “I’m going as a homeless person.” “Sexy.

I sat up. Slowly. Between the belly dancing, the fire, the visit to Dave and it's aftermath, the night had taken its toll. You look like crap!" Cole said merrily. "I like the hair though." He made a camera frame with his thumbs and forefingers and in the genie voice from Aladdin said, "Now what does this say to me? Homeless women? Tornado victim? Britney Spears? I've got it! Preschooler who's misplaced her gum!" I regarded him balefully. "You're a morning person, aren't you?" You make that sound like a bad thing." Not if you stop talking.

I don't know why anyone would be scared of a homeless person. The truly scary people are all the murder mystery writers. They spend all day thinking of the perfect plot on how to kill someone and get away with it.

Take care of the people you love without expecting a reward for being a giving and caring person. Otherwise you will end up living in your big, beautiful house alone. Unknowingly homeless.

He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served his dish, he would promptly cut it in half and ask for a to-go container. Portions are too big anyway, he’d grumble, patting his waistline. He’d only give away his food if the corners were cleanly cut, as he believed a homeless person would just feel worse eating food with ragged bitemarks at the edges – as if, he said, they are dogs, or bacteria. Dignity, he said, lifting his half-lasagna into its box, is no detail.

You might lose battles in your life time. However, every person that stands bravely on the side of justice, for people that have no voice, wins the true battle---Gods.

The only person who had ever wanted to fuck me was a homeless lady who used to stand outside of Ralphs and tell me I had a “sad face that she wanted to sit on.

Although both home and mental illness are complex, modern ideas, we have fallen into the habit of using phrases such as "housing the homeless" and "treating the mentally ill" as if we knew what counts as housing a homeless person or what it means to treat mental illness. But we do not. We have deceived ourselves that having a home and being mentally healthy are our natural conditions, and that we become homeless or mentally ill as a result of "losing" our homes or our minds. The opposite is the case. We are born without a home and without reason, and have to exert ourselves and are fortunate if we succeed in building a secure home and a sound mind.

Don’t you like them? (Nykyrian) Did you see the price? (Kiara) I’m more than capable of supplying you with several wardrobes from here. (Nykyrian) But– (Kiara) But nothing, mu Tara. Start shoping. (Nykyrian) This really isn’t– (Kiara) Kiara. Buy clothes or go naked. Personally, naked works for me. (Nykyrian) Fine. When you’re homeless and bankrupt, remember I tried to stop you. (Kiara)

Let your love be the kindness to make a homeless person believe that a soul needs something more than just four walls and a ceiling.

If a homeless person has a funny sign, he hasn't been homeless for that long. A real homeless person is too hungry to be funny.

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.

You will never know the moon or stars, unless you breathe in their solar system and inspect it from many diverse vantage points as possible.

... In our family, if you said the words 'I feel,' they better be followed with 'hungry' or 'cold'. Because we didn't get personal, that's just how it was.

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices." JAMES FERGUSON, 1757† Long before anyone knew that the universe had a beginning, before we knew that the nearest large galaxy lies two million light-years from Earth, before we knew how stars work or whether atoms exist, James Ferguson’s enthusiastic introduction to his favorite science rang true. Yet his words, apart from their eighteenth-century flourish, could have been written yesterday. But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farmworker. Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity’s place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated.

I’m not sure I can think of anything sadder than a homeless person with a homeless dog.

Narcissism is as profitable to a model as scruffiness is to a homeless person.

I was a dog lover. I trusted them. There was something about the way a dog looked at you; they didn’t care if you were a famous rugby player or a homeless person on the streets. They only cared about how you treated them, and once they chose you as their human, you had a faithful friend for the rest of their lives. I didn’t think humans were capable of such compassion and commitment.

If all the Christians- I mean all of 'em- got outta the pews on Sundays and into the streets, we'd shut the city down. We'd shut down hunger. We'd shut down loneliness. We'd shut down the notion that there is any such of a thing as a person that don't deserve a kind word and a second chance.

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farm worker. Not the sweatshop workers. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity's place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated.

It empowers people,” one of the social workers said about the personalized budget. “It gives choices. I think it can make a difference.” After decades of fruitless pushing, pulling, pampering, penalizing, prosecuting, and protecting, nine notorious vagrants had finally been brought in from the streets. The cost? Some £50,000 a year, including the social workers’ wages. In other words, not only did the project help thirteen people, it also cut costs considerably.5 Even the Economist had to conclude that the “most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.

If a person cannot solve a conflict with a friend, how can they possibly contribute to larger efforts for peace? If we refuse to speak to a friend because we project our anxieties onto an email they wrote, how are we going to welcome refugees, immigrants, and the homeless into our communities? The values required for social repair are the same values required for personal repair.

I've often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless. You may be able to pass in mainstream society, appearing acceptable to others, even desired. But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe. Even while you're out in public, feeling fine and free, inside you cannot shake the feeling of rootlessness. Others may even envy you, but this masks the fact that at night, there is nowhere safe for you, no place to call your own.

It was like giving a homeless kid a night in a luxury hotel. It only made a bad situation worse. Once a person knows that kind of pleasure, they just wanted it again. And again.

When you look away from a homeless person, you diminish their humanity and your own.

Please understand that not every person living on the street is homeless; nor is every homeless person an addict.

This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.

Didn't go in, just hovered outside like homeless person because (a) place was too small and Detta would have spotted me, and (b) once you're through doors of shop like that, if you try to leave without buying anything, they shoot you in the back with sniper's rifle.

But the same receptivity to experience that can make life difficult for the highly sensitive also builds their consciences. Aron tells of one sensitive teen who persuaded his mother to feed a homeless person he’d met in the park, and of another eight-year-old who cried

When it comes to happiness, our soul is like a colander, a tire with a nail in it, our grandfather's memory. It feels like there is a homeless person inside of us, wandering around pushing a shopping cart.

So I'm sitting in that damn chair, ready to die, and I say to her, 'You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I'm so damn glad you're going to kill me instead of some brainless, toothless druggie." Beckett smiled again at the memory of his almost-murder. "Then she traded the knife for her lips, and now she works for me." Beckett put his hands behind his head and flexed his giant biceps. "She won't tell me who hired her to come here. She's the deadliest person I've ever encountered. I still think she might kill me, but I can't stop looking at her.

There are millions of homeless people in the world because humanity does not have a proper conscience!

What do you do in your spare time?” Arthur asks. What is it with this guy? Hope flinches, feeling less like she’s been interviewed and more like she’s been whiplashed. The spare time question was code for questions, you were, by law, not allowed to ask. Did she read books to sick kids? Find housing for the homeless? Support underprivileged women to build careers? Did she have a demanding husband? Two kids under five? And aging mother? But Hope had never put down stakes, either in the home or the do-good camp. Where she came from, at the end of a workweek, a person deserved a cold beer and some down time. “What spare time?

If Stuart is a freak... it is because he has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation. It is because he has had the almost unbelievable social adroitness to be able to fit in smoothly with an educated, soft-skinned person like myself and not make me frightened half to death. If Stuart's a freak, I salute freaks.

Is there such a thing as public good? That's all I'm asking. I mean, is your good the same as my good? I doubt that seriously. So, if we do not agree on a common sense of good, then how can there be any larger public good? What about some homeless person who sleeps on a heat grating down the street from that sculpture? Does he feel the public good when he stares up at this excessive interplay of metallic shapes? More likely he interprets this art through the way its form and function are relevant to his life, making this piece fairly useless. Such a lost soul's aesthetic viewpoint is overriden by the terms of his subsistence. Maybe he feels frustrated and hopeless that a behemoth made almost entirely of metal contains no surfaces large enough that he could use as shelter from rain or snow. Seeing the abstract metaphors, analogies, and conclusions that they invoke, or just laughing at the artist's pretense or the corrupt visions, which are particularly rife as this century comes to an end, requires taking your bank account for granted. That's a fine luxury for those with places to sleep and clothes that are clean.

The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don't lie, don't cheat, don't fuck or steal or kill, and you'll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That's the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he's buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.

But I know I didn't love school for school's sake. I had never really been what people call an 'academic' person, nor did I see myself becoming one. Instead, I took pleasure in the fact that my work existed in a social setting, one that was based on the promise of a brighter future. I knew that what I adored about school was that each of my assignments - readings, essays, or in-class presentations - was inseparable from my relationships [...] If I loved school at all, I loved it for what it provided me access to: bonds with people I grew to cherish. And nothing was better than working toward my dreams alongside people I loved who were doing the same.

Smells like homeless man's crotch. Not that I've ever been up close and personal with a homeless man's crotch, but...

A homeless person should know that many souls feel utterly homeless in spite of living into the bodies of wealthy homeowners

If I see a homeless person begging for change, I might give them money, if they’ve got change for a nickel.

While surrender negotiations were under way—a Dutch officer had come to German headquarters near the bridge to discuss the details and was returning with the German terms—bombers appeared and wiped out the heart of the great city. Some eight hundred persons, almost entirely civilians, were massacred, several thousand wounded and 78,000 made homeless.

Getting a rejection letter from a place you’ve been thinking about is bad enough, but how shitty do I feel getting a rejection letter from some place I don’t even remember applying to? That’s like a homeless person walking up to me and saying, “You don’t know me, but in case you’ve forgotten, you’re a loser.

In the unlikely event that my bank accounts are not depleted or overdrawn, the total value is to be withdrawn as cash and bequeathed to the first homeless person encountered whose Christian name begins with a vowel.

Dear Yesteryear, I do not feel alone anymore. I have found love. Maybe I should say love has found me. Well, to be fair, we found each other. Yesterday, I didn’t have a home. Yesterday, I didn’t have a pillow where I could lay my head. Yesterday, it was hard to find peace. Yesterday, I wondered if morning would ever come. Yesterday, I was unable to love, dream, and trust. Yesterday, I didn’t understand life. Yesterday, I was walking in my shadow. I didn’t know if I had meaning or a purpose. I am healing from my yesteryears. However, I am still rough around the edges and still have a lot to learn. I used to be so empty inside, but now I have lovely people to fill my no-longer-empty arms. Yesterday, my path was different. I was confused, not knowing if I should go right or left— move forward or turn around. I do not know what life has in store, but I know for a fact that I do not have to worry about the deadly and narrow path anymore. Yesterday, my sun was blocked by my shadows and everything thing else that came along that didn’t serve me. However, today, the sun is shining brighter than it ever has in my entire life. Yesterday, I will never forget you. You’ve taught me many lessons. I was taught lessons that a young person should never experience or even know about. Some lessons in life leave permitted marks. There have been many lessons I’ve learned that have left so many scars on my heart, but life goes on. I use to be overwhelmed by hate, disbelief, and not knowing if I was going to make it. Now, I am surrounded by warm hugs, smiles, love, and peace. Yesteryear, you will never be forgotten. I am healing, and it is a beautiful thing.

There was and still is a tremendous fear that poor and working-class Americans might one day come to understand where their political interests reside. Personally, I think the elites worry too much about that. We dumb working folk were clubbed into submission long ago, and now require only proper medication for our high levels of cholesterol, enough alcohol to keep the sludge moving through our arteries, and a 24/7 mind-numbing spectacle of titties, tabloid TV, and terrorist dramas. Throw in a couple of new flavours of XXL edible thongs, and you've got a nation of drowsing hippos who will never notice that our country has been looted, or even that we have become homeless ourselves.

Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass murderer, and a war hero.

Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farmworker. Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity's place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated.

In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence.

Let’s say that Person 1 thinks their hair dryer is telling them to shoot every redhead who gets on the 9:04 train. And let’s say Person 2 thinks their hair dryer is telling them to volunteer twice a week at a homeless shelter. Is it better to volunteer at a homeless shelter than it is to shoot every redhead who gets on the 9:04 train? Of course it is. But you still have a basic problem — which is that you think your hair dryer is talking to you.

Intellectualization is very commonly encountered as well, since it is a defense mechanism of great power. It can have disastrous results, however, when the mind ignores the vital messages of the body (see my reflections on Nietzsche’s illness in The Untouched Key [1990] and Breaking Down the Wall of Silence [1991]). All these defense mechanisms are accompanied by repression of the original situation and the emotions belonging to it. Accommodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the “as-if personality.” This person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self. He cannot develop and differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it. Understandably, this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. A process of emptying, impoverishment, and crippling of his potential actually took place. The integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut off. In childhood, these patients have often had dreams in which they experienced themselves as at least partly dead. A young woman, Lisa, reported a recurrent dream:

At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, "the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter." We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, "what was once man's confident expectations for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, 'I am all right,' there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.

Children love. It isn’t hard for them. They don’t see race or economic class, ex-con or homeless person. They only see people they love. It is a risk to take our children into the mess, and we think we are teaching them how to minister there, but in reality they are the ones who teach us to love because they are Love. And perfect Love casts out fear.

It is hard to determine what is most disturbing about this book—the devious and immoral tactics used by leaders and recruiters to get women to join the military, the terrible poverty and personal violence women were escaping that lead them to be vulnerable to such manipulation, the raping and harassing of women soldiers by their superiors and comrades once they got to Iraq, or the untreated homelessness, illnesses and madness that have haunted women since they came home. The Lonely Soldier is an important book, a crucial accounting of the shameful war on women who gave their bodies, lives and souls for their country.

The trouble with good fortune is that people tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and as well for others, we think they must have done something to have brought it on themselves. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, what but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness, and to find equality where none may have existed in the past.

I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless.

Frankly, you're the most homeless person--emotionally--I ever met.

Whenever I see a homeless person on the street, I think ‘That could be me in a few years time’.

every single person you see—from the homeless woman panhandling on the corner to the movers and shakers in high-rise office suites—carries within a spark of the divine Spirit of God.

Let's say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bathing. Which makes it hard to leave the house. The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they're closer to the bed. We've all been this person, so there is no place for judgment, but the solution is simple:Fewer dishes.

I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions—poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed—which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

Keep in mind, we are past the age of enlightenment. This is past reason. We are pretty deep into modern history and the decline of religion. This is when nature itself has been stripped bare of its cozy personality and we all feel homeless in our natures as well. "The Limits Of The World

Number 1 was the hardest to think about now. After. But Blake let himself go there as Chaos pressed into the deepest punctures. Blake liked the train station because the trains offered reliable percussion for the songs he played in his head. When Livia had first stepped onto the platform, Blake had tried his hardest not to stare. He knew moneyed people didn’t like their women getting ogled by the homeless. But she was so friendly, even in this place where people built their own personal bubbles and stayed in them. When she smiled she looked like a walking ray of the sunshine he had to avoid. Her eyes had found his and shocked him. Blake was used to the blank, anesthetized eyes of those looking everywhere but at him. Her smile was resuscitation for his soul. Me! She sees me.

Tonight, though, he could not help seeing his mother as a spiritual sister to the beautiful, needy and depressive girl who had broken apart on a frozen road, and to the plain, homeless outsider now lying in the chilly morgue. Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deathsm therefore, were not classed as "tragic", in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives. How easy it was to capitalise on a person's own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree tnat it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.

would not cry, not in his apartment anyway. I might cry later, at home, while watching Steel Magnolias and dressed like a homeless person. Sometimes I applied mascara before crying just to heighten the experience.

Every person I ever knew or had come across always spoke about falling in love with the rain. They dreamt of dancing in it like there is no tomorrow but I never heard someone speaking about falling in love with a wildfire. No, it is not for the weaker ones. The moment you fall in love with the wildfire, it starts burning everything that you have ever built or grown all these years around you. It changes the way you had always imagined and looked at how the love would be, making you end up homeless. It makes you a weakness intertwined with strength, a love intertwined with hatred. It makes you a puzzle that you yourself could never solve.

Being a living trans person means vigilance. For a non-passing trans person, there is no safe space. It is not who we are kissing, but our very heights, our voices, and the size of our hands that catalyze hatred and violence. Forget activism; simply negotiating one’s world every day, constantly judging, adjusting, scanning one’s surroundings, and changing clothes to go from one role to another can be overwhelming. Add to that cases of family disownment, poverty, homelessness, HIV. When a recent study of transgender youth reports that half their sample had entertained thoughts of suicide, and a quarter of them had made at least one attempt, I am not surprised.

Trickle-down economics "So long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody, everybody, has to be committed to one overriding goal, and that's to make sure that the rich folk are happy—because, unless they are, nobody else is going to get anything. So, if you're a homeless person sleeping in the streets of Manhattan, let's say, your first concern must be that the guys in the mansions are happy—because, if they're happy, then they'll invest, and the economy will work, and things will function, and then maybe something will trickle down to you somewhere along the line. But if they're not happy, everything's going to grind to a halt, and you're not even going to get anything trickling down.

People stare at the floor. Even to look at a homeless person is to sign a contract with them. I dabbled with joining the Samaritans once. The supervisor had been homeless for three years. I remember him saying that the worst thing was the invisibility. That and not being able to go anywhere where nobody else could go. Imagine that, owning nothing with a lock, except a toilet cubicle in King’s Cross Station, with a junkie on one side and a pair of cottagers on the other.

Ah, grief, I should not treat you like a homeless dog who comes in the back door for a crust, for a meatless bone. I should trust you. I should coax you into the house and give you your own corner, a worn mat to lie on, your own water dish. You think I don't know you've been living under my porch. You long for a real place to be readied before winter comes. You need the right to warn off intruders, to consider my house your own and me your person and yourself my own dog.

People stare at the floor. Even to look at a homeless person is to sign a contract with them. I dabbled with joining the Samaritans once. The supervisor had been homeless for three years. I remember him saying the worst thing was the invisibility.

For the mentally disturbed, Marie knew these sandwich visits might be the only dependable moments in their lives. She also knew she delivered the sandwiches for her own sanity. Something would crumble inside of her if she ever walked by a homeless person and pretended not to notice. Or simply didn't care. In a way, she believed that homeless people were treated as Indians had always been treated. Badly. The homeless were like an Indian tribe, nomadic and powerless, just filled with more than any tribe's share of crazy people and cripples. So, a homeless Indian belonged to two tribes, and was the lowest form of life in the city. The powerful white men of Seattle had created a law that made it illegal to sit on the sidewalk. That ordinance was crazier and much more evil than any homeless person. Sometimes Marie wondered if she worked so hard at anything only because she hated powerful white men. She wondered if she went to college and received good grades just because she was looking for revenge.

...back to the USA where there is honor and integrity and Lord knows what else, I thought. I got confused. President Bush and Clarence Thomas and antiabortion and AIDS and Duke and crack and homelessness. And everywhere, MTV, cartoons ads, magazines--just war and sexism and violence. In Mexico, at least a can of cement falls off a scaffold on your head, no Uzis or anything personal.

A love I was in no position to receive despite desperately needing it. No. Not I with my castaway, homeless body. Where would I store it? It would fall right through me, sink into the depths of my void. I would have needed so much love, more than any one person is capable of giving, to fill that gaping hole at the center of my life. And, besides his love had been capricious, inconsistent, flighty.

Christopher Miles is a very special person, and I don’t know any man, let alone a playboy billionaire, who would put their hand up to adopt a homeless kid off the street. This is going to change his whole life, and he doesn’t care. He’s so selfless. Caring and brave.

Life is a series of problems to be analyzed and addressed. How do we fix our failing schools? How do we reduce violence? These problem-centered questions are usually the wrong ones to ask. They focus on deficits, not gifts. A problem conversation tends to focus on one moment in time—the moment when a student didn’t graduate from high school, the moment when a young person commits a crime, the moment when a person is homeless. But actual lives are lived cumulatively. It takes a whole series of shocks before a person becomes homeless—loss of a job, breakdown in family relationship, maybe car problems or some transportation issue. It takes a whole series of shocks before a kid drops out of school. If you abstract away from the cumulative nature of life and define the problem as one episode, you are abstracting away from how life is lived. All conversations are either humanizing or dehumanizing, and problem-centered conversations tend to be impersonal and dehumanizing. The better community-building conversations focus on possibilities, not problems. They are questions such as, What crossroads do we stand at right now? What can we build together? How can we improve our lives together? What talents do we have here that haven’t been fully expressed?

Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view in life? Not the migrant farmworker. Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity’s place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discovery can be routinely disseminated. By those meaures, most citizens of industrialized nations do quite well.

Rea­sons Why I Loved Be­ing With Jen I love what a good friend you are. You’re re­ally en­gaged with the lives of the peo­ple you love. You or­ga­nize lovely ex­pe­ri­ences for them. You make an ef­fort with them, you’re pa­tient with them, even when they’re side­tracked by their chil­dren and can’t pri­or­i­tize you in the way you pri­or­i­tize them. You’ve got a gen­er­ous heart and it ex­tends to peo­ple you’ve never even met, whereas I think that ev­ery­one is out to get me. I used to say you were naive, but re­ally I was jeal­ous that you al­ways thought the best of peo­ple. You are a bit too anx­ious about be­ing seen to be a good per­son and you def­i­nitely go a bit over­board with your left-wing pol­i­tics to prove a point to ev­ery­one. But I know you re­ally do care. I know you’d sign pe­ti­tions and help peo­ple in need and vol­un­teer at the home­less shel­ter at Christ­mas even if no one knew about it. And that’s more than can be said for a lot of us. I love how quickly you read books and how ab­sorbed you get in a good story. I love watch­ing you lie on the sofa read­ing one from cover-to-cover. It’s like I’m in the room with you but you’re in a whole other gal­axy. I love that you’re al­ways try­ing to im­prove your­self. Whether it’s running marathons or set­ting your­self chal­lenges on an app to learn French or the fact you go to ther­apy ev­ery week. You work hard to be­come a bet­ter ver­sion of your­self. I think I prob­a­bly didn’t make my ad­mi­ra­tion for this known and in­stead it came off as ir­ri­ta­tion, which I don’t re­ally feel at all. I love how ded­i­cated you are to your fam­ily, even when they’re an­noy­ing you. Your loy­alty to them wound me up some­times, but it’s only be­cause I wish I came from a big fam­ily. I love that you al­ways know what to say in con­ver­sa­tion. You ask the right ques­tions and you know ex­actly when to talk and when to lis­ten. Ev­ery­one loves talk­ing to you be­cause you make ev­ery­one feel im­por­tant. I love your style. I know you think I prob­a­bly never no­ticed what you were wear­ing or how you did your hair, but I loved see­ing how you get ready, sit­ting in front of the full-length mir­ror in our bed­room while you did your make-up, even though there was a mir­ror on the dress­ing ta­ble. I love that you’re mad enough to swim in the English sea in No­vem­ber and that you’d pick up spi­ders in the bath with your bare hands. You’re brave in a way that I’m not. I love how free you are. You’re a very free per­son, and I never gave you the sat­is­fac­tion of say­ing it, which I should have done. No one knows it about you be­cause of your bor­ing, high-pres­sure job and your stuffy up­bring­ing, but I know what an ad­ven­turer you are un­der­neath all that. I love that you got drunk at Jack­son’s chris­ten­ing and you al­ways wanted to have one more drink at the pub and you never com­plained about get­ting up early to go to work with a hang­over. Other than Avi, you are the per­son I’ve had the most fun with in my life. And even though I gave you a hard time for al­ways try­ing to for al­ways try­ing to im­press your dad, I ac­tu­ally found it very adorable be­cause it made me see the child in you and the teenager in you, and if I could time-travel to any­where in his­tory, I swear, Jen, the only place I’d want to go is to the house where you grew up and hug you and tell you how beau­ti­ful and clever and funny you are. That you are spec­tac­u­lar even with­out all your sports trophies and mu­sic cer­tifi­cates and in­cred­i­ble grades and Ox­ford ac­cep­tance. I’m sorry that I loved you so much more than I liked my­self, that must have been a lot to carry. I’m sorry I didn’t take care of you the way you took care of me. And I’m sorry I didn’t take care of my­self, ei­ther. I need to work on it. I’m pleased that our break-up taught me that. I’m sorry I went so mental. I love you. I always will. I'm glad we met.

What a waste of headspace. What a waste of consciousness. What an insult to every person struggling with illness or poverty or homelessness. What a diss to the sunshine and the sky and the birdsong and to any number of small pleasures or preoccupations that could have more joyfully and usefully occupied space …

When describing the importance of duty, that is one of my favorite phrases: “If not me, then who?” It isn’t just applicable to joining the military; it applies to everyday life. If you won’t help that homeless person get a meal, who will? Why is it someone else’s job? If you care, if you really care, then why not take action?

That's why I can't understand why some personal trainers are out of shape. That's the equivalent of a fucking homeless success coach. Someone might argue, “Well, he knows his stuff though, just because he's not in shape doesn't mean he doesn't know what he's talking about." Who gives a fuck what he knows? It's what he does that counts.

Cops are not trained to deal with the homeless, especially the mentally ill and the addicts. The jails are overcrowded. The criminal justice system is a nightmare to begin with, and persecuting the homeless only clogs it more. And here’s the asinine part: It costs twenty-five percent more per day to keep a person in jail than to provide shelter, food, transportation, and counseling services. These, of course, would have a long-term benefit. These, of course, would make more sense. Twenty-five percent.

Note that the best rationalizations are those that have an element of truth. Whether you vote or not will almost certainly have no influence on the outcome of an election. Nor will the amount of carbon you personally put into the atmosphere make a difference in the fate of the planet. And perhaps it really should be up to governments rather than the charities that are soliciting your contributions to feed the hungry and homeless in America or save children around the world from crushing poverty and abuse. But the fact that these statements are true doesn't mean they aren't also rationalizations that you and others use to justify questionable behavior. This uncomfortable truth is crucial to an understanding of the link between rationalization and evil—an understanding that starts with the awareness that sane people rarely, if ever, act in a truly evil manner unless they can successfully rationalize their actions... [The] process of rationalizing evil deeds committed by whole societies is a collective effort rather than a solely individual enterprise.

All too often, food is given to a poor person only because the giver is too lazy to go to the dustbin, or to look for one.

every person you meet is two or three bad decisions away from being a junkie, homeless, dealing with a horrible disease, or getting a bullet to the back of the head.

Sure, the Electric Man, solving the city’s problems from his cardboard hero lair, shouldering the mantle of Great Responsibility.

Take care of the people you love without expecting a reward for being a giving and caring person. Otherwise you will end up living in your big, beautiful house alone. Unknowingly homeless.

I, Zebra, am recrossing borders I have already crossed in order to map the literature of the void and prove once and for all that any thought worth preserving in our pitiable human record was manifested in the mind of an exile, an immigrant, a refugee"--my mind and mouth had aligned themselves to perfection--"persons fleeing from persecution, and/or otherwise homeless beings.

I thought I should call a matchmaker. For me, this seemed like a radical step. It never occurred to me to hire a matchmaker when I was younger because I always believed I'd meet a man on my own. He'd be sitting next to me on an airplane, waiting in line behind me at the dry cleaner, working in the same office attending the same party, hanging out at the same coffeehouse. It seemed ridiculous now, when I thought about the odds of this happening. After all, we don't subject other important aspects of out lives to pure chance. When you want to get a job you don't just hang out in the lobbies of office buildings, hoping an employer will strike up a conversation with you. When you want to buy a house, you don't walk aimlessly from neighborhood to neighborhood on your own, hoping to spot a house that happens to be for sale, matches your personal taste and contains the appropriate number of bedrooms and bathrooms. That's too random. If that's your only method of house hunting, you might end up homeless. So you hire a real estate broker to show you the potential homes that meet your needs. By the same token, why not hire a matchmaker to show you potential partners?

It was the Die Trying promotion tour, and I wasn't mugged. In fact, I mugged the other guy. Promotion tours are hard work, but the compensation is freebie visits to places you might not otherwise go, so I always make a habit, when the day is done, of taking a stroll, usually about midnight. I was in San Francisco, so figured I'd go look at the Tenderloin part of town, which is rough. This guy stepped out and basically said, "Give me your money." ... I was amazed how quickly I snapped back through almost 40 years and suddenly became that tough city kid again. I got right in the guy's face and told him he had to give me his money or I'd break his arms. Just a purely instinctive reaction from long ago. Never back down. Never show fear. He only had five bucks. I gave it to the next homeless person I saw.

Sometimes the ideological principles we turn to depend on what we have been thinking about lately. If I read a news story about a crime committed by a homeless person a few minutes before my walk down Franklin Street, I am more likely to think about the next panhandler I see in negative terms, simply because those ideas have been brought recently to mind. Psychologists call this phenomenon “accessibility.

I noticed that when people get themselves in some shit, they get stuck in their own mess. They are confident that they do not have to deal with the consequences—because they know the ‘kind’ person will bail them out.

When the elevator doors open there is only one other person inside it, a homeless man with electric blue sunglasses and six plastic grocery bags filled with rags. "Close the doors, dammit," he yells as soon as we step inside. "Can't you see I'm blind?" [...] From the back, the homeless man shoves between us, his bounty rustling in his arms. "Stop yelling," he shouts. though we stand in utter silence. "Can't you tell that I'm deaf?

I’d love to be considered unselfish and Christlike, but as a woman it’s nearly impossible. Jesus had a penis, so he could feed a homeless person without the dude saying, “Hey, I know phones haven’t been invented yet but can I have your number?” Jesus could be nice to strangers without them getting the wrong idea and calling him a tease. And let me remind you once again that Jesus, aka the original Oprah, did not have children either. 7.

The kind of music you listen to influences who you are as a person. That’s why I make my own, with the help of the birds, the breeze, and a homeless man named Dale who lays down the rhythm by beating on a metal trash can.

I hope that global warming will go away. I hope that people won't be homeless. I hope that suffering will not exist. I want to believe that my hope is not in vain. I want to believe that even though I hope for things that are so magnanimous, I am not a bad person because what I really want to believe in is purely selfish. I want to believe there is somebody out there just for me. I want to believe that I exist to be there for that somebody.

Walking back home that afternoon, I felt more aware of the poverty and opulence on every sidewalk—we brushed past a raven-haired lady with a thousand-dollar handbag and a skinny child with toeless shoes begging for change.

I usually give guys like tha twenty or fifty euros; whatever's in me wallet, ya know? But you've opened my eyes and so from now on, I think I'm gonna just take them out for a meal instead," I said "Really? Well how about if I dress up like a homeless person, will you take me out for a meal?" said Ashling and my heart started to beat a little bit faster because I knew that she wouldn't even be joking about that unless she wanted a second date with me.

That was all it took. I was formerly homeless, a pity hire, and there was no possible way I could ever be as deserving of comfort or compassion as they were, because poverty is always a personal failing, no matter how it came about.

Grammar can erect a false wall. Look at how I keep falling into this trap, writing this piece. To refer to the thousands of diverse individuals with unique histories who are sleeping on the street tonight as "the homeless" certainly expedites a sentence. But it inadvertently reinforces an ugly and false idea, perhaps secretly consoling: that "the homeless" are a monolithic population, a different species of person from those of "us" lucky enough to have jobs and homes.

We view a depressed upper-class woman from a stable family background dealing with depression as “having the blues,” while the homeless woman on the street corner battling auditory hallucinations is a thing to be feared, a threatening monster. Not a person in need of help. Not someone with thoughts, dreams, fears, and needs of their own. Not a fully formed human being with agency and identity, suffering from an illness and doing their best to function as well as they can.

If I came to your town and asked any person on the street, “Which church should I go to if I want to get involved in helping the poor or homeless in this community?” would your church be the first one mentioned? Make this identity your goal.

One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I went as a hobo. It's a word you don't hear anymore. Along with 'tramp,' it's been replaced by 'homeless person,' which isn't the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, the hobo roughed it by choice. Being at liberty, unencumbered by bills and mortgages, better suited his drinking schedule, and so he found shelter wherever he could, never a bum, but something much less threatening, a figure of merriment, almost.

Conventional transitory happiness carries a subtle undercurrent not only of loneliness but also of fear. When things are going well, when we are experiencing pleasure and are getting what we want, we feel obliged to defend our happiness because it seems so fragile, unstable. As though our happiness needed constant protection, we deny the very possibility of suffering; we cut ourselves off from facing it in ourselves and in others because we fear that it will undermine or destroy our good fortune. Thus, in order to hold on to our pleasure, we refuse to recognize the humanity of a homeless person on the street. We decide that the suffering of others is not relevant to our own lives. We cut ourselves off from facing the world’s suffering because we fear it will undermine or destroy our own happiness. In that highly defended state, we withdraw into so terrible an aloneness that we cannot experience true joy. How strange our conditioning is: to feel so alone in our pain, and to feel so vulnerable and isolated in our happiness.

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns. I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not? Normal people think of recovery as a kind of abstinence: they imagine us sitting around white-knuckled, sweating as we count our hours trying desperately to distract ourselves enough to not relapse. This is because for normal people, drinking is an activity, like brushing their teeth or watching TV. They can reasonably imagine excising drinking, like any other activity, without collapsing their entire person. For a drunk, there’s nothing but drink. There was nothing in my life that wasn’t predicated on getting drunk—either getting fucked up itself or getting money to get fucked up by working or slinging this drug for that drug or that drug for cash. Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and fuck and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not punch every person who talks to you in the face. There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no self-will. It’s a chisel. It’s surrender to the chisel. Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet. —from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx by Cyrus Shams

The trouble with good fortune is that people tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, we think they must have done something to have brought it on themselves. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, what but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness, and to find equality where none may have existed in the past.

I didn’t understand how people could hurt any animals, but especially dogs. They were too good for us. Humans didn’t deserve the love and loyalty dogs gave them. I was a dog lover. I trusted them. There was something about the way a dog looked at you; they didn’t care if you were a famous rugby player or a homeless person on the streets. They only cared about how you treated them, and once they chose you as their human, you had a faithful friend for the rest of their lives. I didn’t think humans were capable of such compassion and commitment.

To feel safe, you need to control what the people around you are going to say and do. This is not achieved by going after the root causes of violence. This is not even achieved by working to slowly improve social conditions. It is achieved through silence and disappearance, by moving the offending object or person out of sight. . . . [However] [d]o we want to live in a world that is safe? Do we want to push the homeless out of our cities and call that a victory over poverty? . . . Or do we want to do the very hard work of recognizing and addressing the actual causes of harm to women? Safety is a short-term goal and it is unsustainable. Eventually, the unaddressed causes will find new ways of manifesting themselves as problems. Pull up the dandelions all you want, but unless you dig up that whole goddamn root it's just going to keep showing back up.

I am lost in a maze that you set up for yourself—and you too are lost in your own maze. When a person gets lost in their own maze, they are really fucked up. However, this maze shouldn’t be left for me to figure out. Unfortunately, I am in it, and I have to find my way out one way or another.

When someone else puts you in their mess, you do not know how to clean up the mess they’ve made. You do not know how to start over because you do not know where to begin. I look at it this way; it is like telling a dead person he/she can start over. How so, when that person’s life no longer exists?

He was one of the first people to complain about the increasing encroachment of the state into personal lives, but, actually, shouldn't there be a little more encroachment, when it came to things like this? Where was the protective fence, or the safety net? They made it hard for you to jump off bridges, or to smoke, to own a gun, to become a gynecologist. So how come they let you walk out on a stable, functioning relationship? They shouldn't. If this didn't work out, he could see himself become a homeless, jobless alcoholic within a year. And that would be worse for his health than a packet of Malboros.

Sometimes the most important finding in a scientific study is a simple observation, free of any hypothesis or pitting of theoretical perspectives against one another. And this was true in our daily diary research: people experience awe two to three times a week. That’s once every couple of days. They did so in finding the extraordinary in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity to a homeless person in the streets; the scent of a flower; looking at a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk; hearing a song that transported them back to a first love; bingeing Game of Thrones with friends. Everyday awe.

Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.

KODO SAWAKI: During World War II, when I visited a coal mine in Kyushu, they allowed me to go into the mine. Like the miners, I put on a hard hat with a headlamp and went down the shaft in an elevator. For a while, I thought the elevator was going down very fast. Then I started to feel as if it were going up. I shone my headlamp on the shaft and realized the elevator was still going down steadily. When an elevator starts descending with increasing speed, we feel it going down, but once the speed becomes fixed, we feel as if the elevator were rising. The balance has shifted. In the ups and downs of life, we’re deceived by the difference in the balance. Saying, “I’ve had satori!” is only feeling a difference in the balance. Saying, “I’m deluded!” is feeling another. To say food tastes delicious or terrible, to be rich or poor, all are just feelings about shifts in the balance. In most cases, our ordinary way of thinking only considers differences in the balance. Human beings put I into everything without knowing it. We sometimes say, “That was really good!” What’s it good for? It’s just good for me, that’s all. We usually do things expecting some personal profit. And if the results turn out different from our hidden agenda, we feel disappointed and exhausted.

I was in San Francisco for the quake, and much was made of the fact that fancy downtown hotels opened their doors to house people needing shelter. It’s worth noting that this generosity was for people made homeless by the quake, not people who were already homeless. For them the earthquake was just another day of scrabbling. The hotels supposedly required a credit card from people, not because they’d be charged for the room, but as evidence that this was the sort of person whose homelessness mattered. This well could have been apocryphal; it’s hard to imagine that the staff at reception needed to see someone’s plastic to tell the difference.

Homelessness today is more than just mere accommodation or pathways in or out of it. It is about the capacity to bear rights and the normative exclusion which exposes to the violence and the decision of sovereign power. Home Sacer is Latin for (“the accursed man”) is a character of Roman law: a person who is banned and may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. Home(Sacer)less is a character of UK’s austerity political practices: a person who is banned by fines and may be killed or set on fire by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a political ritual. Homelessness certainly involves concepts of visibility, oppression, domination and also a political decision of neglecting basic rights. Homeless people are under an oppressive and disempowering political discourse. Home(Sacer)less is a character of UK’s austerity political practices: a person who is banned by fines and may be killed or set on fire by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a political ritual.

Uchiyama Roshi says that modern people in developed countries who enjoy convenient lives without personal effort are like these heavenly beings. People at the top especially enjoy their lives. However, everything is impermanent. When they lose status, they experience much suffering, just like the heavenly beings of ancient Buddhist cosmology. Heaven is a manmade idea of what’s “better.” When we feel more successful than others, we’re in heaven. When we feel others are more successful, we’re in hell. To leave this way of life based on comparison is to free ourselves from samsara. Living on the ground of the true reality of life is finding nirvana within this world.

Dear Lord, let us pray for the persons who don’t have a family and spent Thanksgiving alone. Through the twist and turns, and events in their lives, or any situation that’s left them emotionally lost, alone and possible homeless, that they find warmth. The warmth you bring dear God, and your strength to change their situation. In Jesus name, we pray.

Homelessness in the context of austerity-led welfare reforms involves more than concepts of accommodation and pathways in or out of homelessness. Seen in this way, a homeless person in the contemporary political climate can be understood through reference to the concept of the “Homo Sacer” (the “accused man”) in Roman law. Homo Sacer is a person who is banned from Roman society and may be killed by Roman citizens and slaves, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual having been deemed impure for such ends. Therefore, one may argue that homeless people in the context of austerity politics are comparable to the Homo Sacer – i.e. a group who are punished by political practices and silenced from the political arena.

such ingratitude. those drinks were expensive.” “i hate you.” “take a number and get in line with the rest of this team. i won’t lose any sleep over it.” “don’t sleep. i’ll kill you.” “will you? will you do it yourself, or will you pay someone else to handle the mess? you certainly have enough money to outsource it to a proper hit man. one wonders what a no one like you is doing with such a fortune.” “i found it on the sidewalk.” “really. is that why you won’t spend it, or do you just like looking like a homeless person? the team is split, you know. most of them think you’re trailer trash like dan. renee knows better. so do i. i think you’re something a little more like us.” andrew leaned toward neil and enunciated every syllable. “a runaway.” - andrew & neil

Girls don’t learn the difference between personal victory and team victory or personal loss and team loss. Girls learned that if you don’t do it yourself, it doesn’t get done. Girls were never asked to fight the war in Vietnam or any other war. But if they had been, girls would have won. Girls would have felt guilty for not winning it sooner, and girls would have restored all of the roads, rebuilt all of the bombed homes, adopted all of the orphans, established daycare centers, domestic violence shelters and homeless shelters, and girls would have processed endlessly about what we could have done to have prevented the war and what we still can do to prevent it from ever happening again. Because girls believe, in the end, everything that happens is our own personal fault.

During our first months in the house, we hosted a homeless couple we only ever saw slinking off in the dawn: at dusk, they would silently lift off the latticework to the crawl space under our house and then sleep there, their roof our bedroom floor, and when we got up in the middle of the night, we tried to walk softly because it felt rude to step inches above the face of a dreaming person.

Did some people hang on to hope longer than others? Were physical condition, age, and strength major factors in a person’s survival instinct, or did mental stamina play the largest role? Did a happy student with a bright future have a greater desire to fight death, a stronger will to live, than a homeless runaway? Or was the survival instinct an inborn trait as independent of life events as eye color

The weavers I’ve met are extremely relational. They are driven to seek deep relations with others, both to feed their hunger for connection and because they believe that change happens through deepening relationships. When they are working with the homeless or the poor or the traumatized, they are laboring alongside big welfare systems that offer services but not care. These systems treat people as “cases” or “clients.” They are necessary to give people financial stability and support, but they can’t do transformational change. As Peter Block, one of the leading experts on community, puts it, “Talk to any poor person or vulnerable person and they can give you a long list of the services they have received. They are well serviced, but you often have to ask what in their life has fundamentally changed.

What I want for Christmas is to believe. I want to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, there is hope. [...] I don't understand how to process this stuff sometimes. Like, here in New York, we see so much grandeur and glitz, especially this time of year, and yet we see so much suffering too. [...] It's just too much to process. All this hoping for something - or someone - that's maybe hopeless. [...] And yet, for some reason that all scientific evidence really should make impossible, I feel like I really do hope. I hope that global warming will go away. I hope that people won't be homeless. I hope that suffering will not exist. I want to believe that my hope is not in vain. I want to believe that even though I hope for things that are so magnanimous (good OED word, huh?), I am not a bad person because what I really want to believe in is purely selfish. I want to believe there is somebody out there just for me. I want to believe that I exist to be there for that somebody. [...] I want to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it is possible for anyone to find that one special person. That person to spend Christmas with or grow old with or just take a nice silly walk in Central Park with. [...] Belief. That's what I want for Christmas.

Pressure is a privilege,’ said tennis legend Billie Jean King,” the homeless man shared. “You get to grow. And ascending as a person is one of the smartest ways to spend the rest of your life. With every challenge comes the gorgeous opportunity to rise into your next level as a leader, performer and human being. Obstacles are nothing more than tests designed to measure how seriously you want the rewards that your ambitions seek.

Throughout this book, we've tried to argue that America has gone astray by perceiving poverty or drugs simply as a choice or as the consequence of personal irresponsibility. Yet in another sense, poverty is a choice. It is a choice by the country. The United States has chosen policies over the last half century that have resulted in higher levels of homelessness, overdose deaths, crime and inequality--and now it's time to make a difference choice.

For most of my life, I’ve felt homeless, left out in the cold, to starve and die. But I found something without even searching for it. A life-line threw out to me in the depths of my drowning. ‘Words’ I swallowed them and they restored my body. If you look closely I am no one fragments of a soul, a person, broken. They built me up, there is no me without them, every thought, every cell are words a mix. They take root in me, warm my soul, and gave me a home.

• Can I give a smile at almost everyone I see even if I have a bad day! .. Yes I can • Can I tell a new co-worker a shortcut way to come to work instead of the long one he told us to save him/her sometime every day! .. Yes, I can. • Can I buy a flower or a bouquet and visit a sick person that I do not know at the hospital maybe once a week or once a month! .. Yes, I can. • Can I say Happy Birthday to someone you don’t know but you heard like today years ago he/she was born! .. Yes, I can. • Can I congratulate my neighbor for their newborn child by sending a greeting card or even verbally! .. Yes, I can. • Can I buy a hot meal or give away a coat to a homeless person when it is too cold or the same meal and an ice-cream when it is too hot! .. Yes I can • Can ask someone about another one who is important to the first to inquire about his health, condition, how he/she is doing so far! .. Yes I can • Can I give a little bit of time to my child (or children) every day as a personal time where we could talk, play, discuss, solve, think, enjoy, argue, hang out, play sports, watch, listen, eat, and/or entertain together! .. Yes I can. • Can I allow some time to listen to my wife without judgment but encouragement almost every day! … Yes I can. • Can I respectfully talk to my husband at least once a day to show respect and appreciation to the head of our house and family! .. Yes, I can. • Can I buy a flower and give it to someone I care about and say "I love you" and when the person asks you "what this for" you reply "because I love you". Yes, I can. • Can I listen to anyone who I feel needs someone else to listen to him/her! .. Yes, I can. • Can I give away the things that I do not use anyone to others who might need them! .. Yes, I can. • Can I buy myself something that I do adore and then enjoy it! .. Yes, I can. • Can I (fill in the blanks)! .. Yes I can.

Cesca sipped from her coffee cup as she peered through the windshield into the darkness. Rain was falling hard on a San Francisco she didn’t recognize from her own universe, or from her time in the other Matt’s universe. The real darkness here had nothing to do with night. This San Francisco mirrored the moral corruption and decay of the society which inhabited it. She and Ariel had been here two days, scouring streets filled with perversion and hopelessness; alleyways inhabited by the homeless and mentally ill; sex shops catering to every perversion imaginable and unimaginable; sidewalks teeming with drug addicts and male prostitutes — some dressed as women; street corners inhabited by once lovely young women prematurely aging from selling their bodies to all takers — male and female; children of both sexes, from as young as seven and eight, dressed by pimps to attract pedophiles who cruised this part of the city nightly. Many of the children would be sold on the spot, never to be seen again. Sun-faded and now graffitied wall mosaics of galvanizing yet transient political cult personalities, erected by their blinded followers centuries ago, marked this alternate world’s gradual slide into an ethical, and finally moral abyss, from which it had never crawled out. "God, I can’t believe this is San Francisco,” whispered Ariel from the seat next to Cesca. “I feel like I need to run a bar of soap over my soul.

The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey has been tracking trends, attitudes, and behaviors in American society since 1972. One section of the survey asks questions about income inequality. The results showed that Americans who strongly oppose redistribution by government to address this problem gave 10 times more to charity than those who strongly support government action: $1,627 annually versus $140. Similarly, compared to people who want more welfare spending, those who believe that the government spends too much money on welfare are more likely to give directions to someone on the street, return extra change to a cashier, and give food or money to a homeless person. Almost everyone wants to help the poor. But depending on whether they have a dopaminergic or H&N personality, they will go about it in different ways. Dopaminergic people want the poor to receive more help, while H&N people want to provide personal help on a one-to-one basis.

Ideologically mindfulness serves very well the neoliberal-capitalist’s construction of reality which softly dictates that one must deny the roots of personal and social issues. We are manipulated into the self-repair mode, but what is actually broken is the system. Therein, the problem we face is our own selves and not a world based on oppressive values which leave us feeling oppressed and powerless. You must be meditation 24/7 for the rest of your life to deny that meditation alone won’t house the homeless, will not end contemporary social and physical apartheid. It will not provide free health care to all in the community and it will end social exclusion. Said that, yes, you might feel that you are feeling less anxious, but only because you are being ‘drugged’ and you are being denied your full humanity. We need to feel more, sympathise more and act moved by our love for humanity – those who are outside of ourselves. Here’s something that you will not find in a self-help book that might help you: the problem is the oppressive system and not you. It is the system that violates us by imposing since birth to us that there is one way to be and feel human. And it involves heavily looking good, competing against others and to compete against your own self – the system says that we must be functional machines to fulfil the system’s need. Our body is controlled and our minds, our being controlled via instruments of normalisation such as self-help books and mindfulness meditation.

I’m talking about the Aramaic-speaking, rough-hewn, odiferous, road-soiled, itinerant Jesus who nonetheless would be able to look straight through me just as he looked through the woman at the well, whose every fault and vice were visible to him, leaving me vulnerable and shivering. Nor is it a coincidence that the direct, unwavering gaze of Jesus would make me every bit as uncomfortable as the intense look of a desperately homeless person on the streets of my hometown of Chicago. It would make my heart race. A convicting gaze. An unblinking and slightly overlong gaze. If indeed we are to treat the poor and hungry and naked and imprisoned as though they were Jesus in disguise, then there is a deep significance in the comparison. The question is not so much “Dare I look into those eyes?” as “Dare I look away?” Is it possible (to paraphrase Tillich) that there is more presence of ultimate reality in the face of one homeless person than in all the sermons in all the world? Say amen, somebody.

But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships. A grandmother has been sheltering without a visitor for months, and a friend's business closed its doors. Doctors, nurses, and frontline workers are acting as levees, feeling each surge of the disease crash against them. My former students, now serving as pastors and chaplains, are in hospitals giving last rites in hazmat suits. They volunteer to be the last person to hold his hand. To smooth her hair. The truth if the pandemic is the truth of all suffering: that it is unjustly distributed. Who bears the brunt? The homeless and the prisoners. The elderly and the children. The sick and the uninsured. Immigrants and people needing social services. People of color and LGBTQ people. The burdens of ordinary evils— descriminations, brutality, predatory lending, illegal evictions, and medical exploitation— roll back on the vulnerable like a heavy stone. All of us struggle against the constraints places on our bodies, our commitments, our ambitions, and our resources, even as we're saddled with inflated expectations of invincibility. This is the strange cruelty of suffering in America, its insistence that everything is still possible.

Every person comes into the public discourse with histories and challenges. The worst political spaces are the ones where voters are told that everyone has the exact same narrative and everyone faces the exact same obstacles. The myth of the self-made man coexists with the stereotype of the welfare queen and the homeless junkie and the Spanish-speaking laborer. When political leaders homogenize our experiences or, worse, reduce them to insults or aberrations, they evade the hard work of understanding whom they represent.

I had never seen this type of clock, carved from hardwood into the shape of our homeland (...) Some craftsman in exile had understood that this was exactly the timepiece his countrymen desired. We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return? Refugee, exile, immigrant — whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time-travelers. But while science fiction imagined time-travelers as moving forwards and backwards in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles

whose experiences are primarily those of suffering and marginalization—those in whom we can hear the echoes and see the image of original Israel and the Lamanites. Those who are despised, and rejected, and scattered. Those who are deemed by some as filthy. Refugees and displaced persons. Immigrants. The poor. The homeless. Racial minorities. Those who suffer from disabilities or mental illness. Victims of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. That’s where God’s particular work of restoration will happen today, as part of the general restoration of all his people.

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns. I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not?

I once read a question that somone used to begin their self-assessment: who do you most admire and why? If you are an american and have a TV in your house, you'd probably be tempted to list some sports figure, actor, singer, artist, successful businessman, or influential leader. We have been led to equate greatness with success, talent, power and recognition. Would we include on our list a single mom or dad who has faithfully served their family, the person who volunteers at the soup kitchen or homeless shelter, the guy who shovels snow for the elderly couple down the street or the soldier serving somewhere around the globe?

I want to make it clear that I am not implying here that all housing issues can be solved through market solutions. Many cases of homelessness, for instance, particularly in affluent cities, stem from social welfare policies and require and immediate government action. It is important from the beginning to clearly separate emergency social welfare from housing policy. Too often, housing policy is conceived as an extension of social welfare applied to the middle class. In every large city, a small number of households - some may be one-person households - are unable to pay for their housing. They end up in the streets. These households may be permanently or temporarily disabled - physically or mentally - or may have experienced bad luck that results in long unemployment periods. It is certainly the duty of the government to provide a shelter for them as an emergency service. Once in an emergency shelter, social workers can identify those who are likely to be permanently unable to earn an income and then direct them toward a social housing shelter, where specialized staff will follow up on their case. Other homeless households may need only temporary help to find a job and a house they can afford before they rejoin the city's active population. The provision of homeless shelters is not part of housing policy, as it has little to do with supply and demand.

A President J.G., F.C. who said he wasn’t going to stand here and ask us to make some tough choices because he was standing here promising he was going to make them for us. Who asked us simply to sit back and enjoy the show. Who handled wild applause from camouflage-fatigue- and sandal-and-poncho-clad C.U.S.P.s with the unabashed grace of a real pro. Who had black hair and silver sideburns, just like his big-headed puppet, and the dusty brick-colored tan seen only among those without homes and those whose homes had a Dermalatix Hypospectral personal sterilization booth. Who declared that neither Tax & Spend nor Cut & Borrow comprised the ticket into a whole new millennial era (here more puzzlement among the Inaugural audience, which Mario represents by having the tiny finger-puppets turn rigidly toward each other and then away and then toward). Who alluded to ripe and available Novel Sources of Revenue just waiting out there, unexploited, not seen by his predecessors because of the trees (?). Who foresaw budgetary adipose trimmed with a really big knife. The Johnny Gentle who stressed above all—simultaneously pleaded for and promised—an end to atomized Americans’ fractious blaming of one another for our terrible 151 internal troubles. Here bobs and smiles from both wealthily green-masked puppets and homeless puppets in rags and mismatched shoes and with used surgical masks, all made by E.T.A.’s fourth- and fifth-grade crafts class, under the supervision of Ms. Heath, of match-sticks and Popsicle-stick shards and pool-table felt with sequins for eyes and painted fingernail-parings for smiles/frowns, under their masks. The Johnny Gentle, Chief Executive who pounds a rubber-gloved fist on the podium so hard it knocks the Seal askew and declares that Dammit there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame. To unite in opposition to. And he promises to eat light and sleep very little until he finds them—in the Ukraine, or the Teutons, or the wacko Latins. Or—pausing with that one arm up and head down in the climactic Vegas way—closer to right below our nose. He swears he’ll find us some cohesion-renewing Other. And then make some tough choices. Alludes to a whole new North America for a crazy post-millennial world.

Some mental healthcare workers are aware of clients with high needs, such as dissociative disorders and personality disorders, who have histories of sexual abuse (contact offences), usually from early childhood, involving two or more adults acting together and multiple child victims (Gold et al., 1996; McClellan et al., 1995; Middleton & Butler, 1998). This has been defined as “organised abuse” (Bibby, 1996; La Fontaine, 1993). Excluded from this definition are cases where a child is sexually abused by multiple perpetrators who are unaware of one another, such as survival sex amongst homeless youths, or where abuse is limited to a single household or family and there are no extra-familial victims (La Fontaine, 1993). Organised abuse: A neglected category of sexual abuse. Journal of Mental Health, 2012; 21(5): 499–508

We’d be walking downtown, and I’d hear, “Chip. Hey, Chip!” and I’d turn to see a person approaching us who, frankly, might have scared me if I was walking downtown by myself. Chip wouldn’t be scared. He’d know the guy by name: “James! How’s it going, brother?” It seemed as if every homeless guy in Waco knew Chip Gaines. On the flip side, every banker in Waco knew Chip too. And he talked to those two very different groups of people the same way. There was never any difference in Chip’s demeanor. His enthusiasm for life and work and people was just infectious, and he surprised me with it again and again. At least once a day I caught myself thinking, Wow, this guy! Best of all, as happy as Chip Gaines was, he seemed happiest around me. I’m a generally happy person. My mom says I was a happy baby. But it’s a fact--I was always happiest around Jo. And I still am.

And meanwhile we decayed. When I was born, when I grew up in the fifties, we believed our country was the land of opportunity, where nobody was doomed to remain poor, where every person of goodwill had a chance to rise. By the time my child was born in the nineties, beggars were crowding the streets of every city, accosting shoppers in the malls. There were camps of homeless in the parks and empty lots, young people going to war with each other for drugs and booze and a few bucks. Our compassion eroded faster than the topsoil, and when we began to notice the earth changes, the droughts and the warming and the die-offs of the animals, the hole in the ozone layer and the epidemics of strange diseases that showed our own immune systems faltering, when we still had a chance to save so much and avert the worst of what followed, we continued to distract ourselves with war.

For the refugee, for the homeless, the lack of this crucial coordinate in the placing of the self has severe consequences. At best it must be managed, made up for in some way. At worst, a displaced person, literally, does not know which way is up, because there is no true north. No compass point. Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity. A nomadic people learn to take their homes with them – and the familiar objects are spread out or re-erected from place to place. When we move house, we take with us the invisible concept of home – but it is a very powerful concept. Mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same house or the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside – and that structure is built in part by what has happened on the outside. The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

Capitalism is rotten at every level, and yet it adds up to something extraordinarily useful for society over time. The paradox of capitalism is that adding a bunch of bad-sounding ideas together creates something incredible that is far more good than bad. Capitalism inspires people to work hard, to take reasonable risks, and to create value for customers. On the whole, capitalism channels selfishness in a direction that benefits civilization, not counting a few fat cats who have figured out how to game the system. You have the same paradox with personal energy. If you look at any individual action that boosts your personal energy, it might look like selfishness. Why are you going skiing when you should be working at the homeless shelter, you selfish bastard! My proposition is that organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will add up to something incredible that is more good than bad.

The rest of the house was perfectly in order, as it always is, thanks to my system. It doesn’t have a name—I just call it my system. Let’s say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bathing. Which makes it hard to leave the house. The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they’re closer to the bed. We’ve all been this person, so there is no place for judgment, but the solution is simple: Fewer dishes. They can’t pile up if you don’t have them. This is the main thing, but also: Stop moving things around. How much time do you spend moving objects to and from? Before you move something far from where it lives, remember you’re eventually going to have to carry it back to its place—is it really worth it? Can’t you read the book standing right next to the shelf with your finger holding the spot you’ll put it back into? Or better yet: don’t read it. And if you are carrying an object, make sure to pick up anything that might need to go in the same direction. This is called carpooling. Putting new soap in the bathroom? Maybe wait until the towels in the dryer are done and carry the towels and soap together. Maybe put the soap on the dryer until then. And maybe don’t fold the towels until the next time you have to use the restroom. When the time comes, see if you can put away the soap and fold towels while you’re on the toilet, since your hands are free. Before you wipe, use the toilet paper to blot excess oil from your face. Dinnertime: skip the plate. Just put the pan on a hot pad on the table. Plates are an extra step you can do for guests to make them feel like they’re at a restaurant. Does the pan need to be washed? Not if you only eat savory things out of it.

We are here this afternoon to mourn the passing of two good friends, Terrence Dace and Felix Beider. They were homeless. Their ways were not those we most desire for ourselves, but that didn’t make them wrong. We seem determined to save the homeless, to fix them, to change them into something other than what they are. We want them to be like us, but they are not. The homeless do not want our pity, nor do they deserve our scorn. Our judgments about them, for good or for ill, negate their right to live as they please. Both the urge to rescue and the need to condemn fail to take into account the concept of their personal liberty, which they may exercise as they see fit as long as their actions fall within the law. The homeless are not lesser mortals. For Terrence and Felix, their battles were within and their victories hard-won. I think of these two men as soldiers of the poor, part of an army of the disaffiliated. The homeless have established a nation within a nation, but we are not at war. Why should we not coexist in peace when we may be in greater need of salvation than they? This is what the homeless long for: respect, freedom from hunger, shelter from the elements, safety, the companionship of the like-minded. They want to live without fear. They want to enjoy the probity of the open air without the risk of bodily harm. They want to be warm. They want the comfort of a clean bed when they are ill, relief from pain, a hand offered in friendship. Ordinary conversation. Simple needs. Why are their choices so hard for us to accept? What you see before you is their home. This is their dwelling place. This grass, this sunlight, these palms, this mighty ocean, the moon, the stars, the clouds overhead though they sometimes harbor rain. Under this canopy they have staked out a life for themselves. For Terrence and for Felix, this is also the wide bridge over which they passed from life into death. Their graves will be unmarked but that does not mean they are forgotten. The Earth remembers them, even as it gathers them tenderly into its

With its rapidly increasing population, religious and royal wars, Irish ethnic cleansing, and fear of rising crime, Britain excelled among the European imperial powers in shipping its people into bondage in distant lands. An original inspiration had flowed from small-scale shipments of Portuguese children to its Asian colonies before the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as the world's premier long-range shippers. Vagrant minors, kidnapped persons, convicts, and indentured servants from the British Isles might labor under differing names in law and for longer or shorter terms in the Americas, but the harshness of their lives dictated that they be, in the worlds of Daniel Defoe, "more properly called slaves." First in Barbados, then in Jamaica, then in North America, notably in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, bound Britons, Scots, and Irish furnished a crucial workforce in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1618, the City of London and the Virginia Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children. London would pay £5 per head to the company for shipment on the Duty, hence the children's sobriquet "Duty boys." Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children—a quarter of them girls—were then sold into field labor for twenty pounds of tobacco each.

People who worked and proselytized on behalf of homeless people formed a loose confederation, with one shared interest and many differing opinions. In recent years Jim had heard that some in the alliance claimed that the Program belonged to "the homelessness industry," which misspent resources that should be used for creating permanent supportive housing. Also that the Program was an insidious part of that status quo: It propped up an unjust system by successfully treating homeless people with diseases like AIDS, weakening one of the housing movement's chief arguments— "housing is health." Almost always the criticism came indirectly, from friends of friends. This was convenient for a person who hated confrontations. Jim could reply forcefully but indirectly, to a friend of the critic, or sometimes to me in the privacy of his office or car. Often he'd start by invoking Barbara, "The older I get, the more I realize how wise she was. I remember somebody coming into the clinic, and saying to Barbara, who was working like hell, 'What are we going to do to fix this problem of homelessness?' And she looked up and said, 'Are you kidding me? I'm too busy. Don't ask me a question like that.' That was her way of saying, 'Stop torturing me with what society isn't about to do. Let's just do the best we can right now and take care of these folks.

Now, what on earth does that mean, especially if one does not spiritualize it away, as Matthew immediately did, into “poor [or destitute] in spirit”—that is, the spiritually humble or religiously obedient? Did Jesus really think that bums and beggars were actually blessed by God, as if all the destitute were nice people and all the aristocrats correspondingly evil? Is this some sort of naive or romantic delusion about the charms of destitution? If, however, we think not just of personal or individual evil but of social, structural, or systemic injustice—that is, of precisely the imperial situation in which Jesus and his fellow peasants found themselves—then the saying becomes literally, terribly, and permanently true. In any situation of oppression, especially in those oblique, indirect, and systemic ones where injustice wears a mask of normalcy or even of necessity, the only ones who are innocent or blessed are those squeezed out deliberately as human junk from the system’s own evil operations. A contemporary equivalent: only the homeless are innocent. That is a terrifying aphorism against society because, like the aphorisms against the family, it focuses not just on personal or individual abuse of power but on such abuse in its systemic or structural possibilities—and there, in contrast to the former level, none of our hands are innocent or our consciences particularly clear.

Dear Wildfire, Ember, you are a wildfire that is out of control. It doesn’t matter because nobody sees it; they only feel it. I burn and set fire to everyone who crosses me because they deserve it. If they don’t deserve it, so what, fuck it. Nobody deserves my kindness. My kindness to them is a weakness, so I created a wildfire in my mind and around me. My skin is brass, and I do not burn easily. I am a human hazard because I destroy everything and everyone who gets in my way. They made me this way. Every time they neglected me, I was slowly fuming with heat. Every time they ignored me the fumes grew hotter from the smoke. Therefore, I became a human being gone bad because I was a dangerous person. Every time they inhaled my fumes, I would cut them with my tongue's quadruple swords and kill them with my words. My fumes surrounded everyone with darkness because they couldn’t ever figure me out. They couldn’t read my thoughts; I became fearless in the worst way ever. When I was born, I was a wildfire, but the flames were smothered by me, always having to find a way to survive. Wildfire defines me perfectly because, just like a wildfire, I was unplanned, unwanted, and now I am uncontrollable. Everyone says, Ember, you’ve come so far, and they are shocked by my actions. I don’t know why they are surprised. After all, it is not my fault. I was born this way. I have officially exploded

Dear Curses and Blessings, How could there be two in one? I never knew a person could be cursed and blessed. There’s no such thing as having both. There no such thing as taking sides when it comes to blessings and curses—I always thought that a person had to pick one. I would never have made the decision to be cursed. It was given to me. Well... Kace and I apparently have been the chosen ones. We’ve been the main target. When curses shot their arrows, they hit the bullseye faithfully, without fail. Why couldn’t we have been the chosen ones for bountiful blessings? It is a blessing that Kace is alive, but it is a curse that he was in danger. My emotions are a waterfall of never-ending thoughts of what is going to happen next. Kace has so many tubes in him—it is like he is being smothered, dissolving in webs of lies one after another. The same lies that my mother told him—she told me when I was younger. I am sure she told him she would keep him safe. I am more than sure she told the judge she had changed. Kace was coiled in a web of lies. Now he is coiled in wires to survive. Our lives are surrounded by many curses, but I know there must be a couple of blessings to be spared. Please. I am begging you to show us some mercy. I will accept our blessings even if they are thrown at us like breadcrumbs. I will fall to my knees and scramble to pick them up one by one. When will mine and Kace’s lives be gentle as a flowing stream without any worries? Right now, I have to pack my feelings and tears away. Cruses and blessings, please think about what I said.

Dear Windowpane, Aren’t you lucky? The sun rays of faith beam on you. How does it feel? Is it enlightenment? Do you feel free, loved, or suffocated? I admire you and envy you at the same time. I admire you because you have the ability to freely open up and let go. I am jealous of you because you have the ability to feel the warm embrace. You get to travel to different places. I know I might be thinking silly, but Windowpane, do you endure a lot of people’s pain? I mean—because many people lean on you, and I am sure you feel their energy, or maybe they tell you their problems. How do you handle all of that? Do you wait for the rain to come; therefore, you can wash off everyone’s problems and create new ones? It seems like you would be filled with clarity because, after all, everyone can see right through you. With that being said, you do not have anything to hide. What is so amazing about you—is that you remind me of water. I can see right through you, and I can see my reflection too. Now that is pretty cool. However, it is a Catch-22 as well. Now, I see you do not carry other people’s problems. You let us look at our reflections and go within to seek the answers we are searching for. Aww, you are something else. I want to give you some advice. Although I love your strategy, make sure that the person who is resting their head on you doesn’t quiet their mind too much. If so, their quiet mind might be filled with too much noise. We do not want that. Here’s a little secret, if a person starts thinking too long, then they are thinking wrong. Keep that in mind. Well, I love the scenery, and I enjoyed the talk. Best of luck to you.

O, Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who turn to you. Amen. . When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. I saw this happen today as the sun went down. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! No herons, no distant music, not even the taste of his lips. How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? . Life moves very fast. It rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds. . I smile and say nothing, . If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself. . Everything is an illusion - and that applies to material as well as spiritual things. . She had spent a lot of her life saying 'no' to things to which she would have liked to say 'yes', . My dear, it's better to be unhappy with a rich man than happy with a poor man, and over there you'll have far more chance of becoming an unhappy rich woman. . Love isn't that important. I didn't love your father at first, but money buys everything, even true love. . Hail Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who turn to you. Amen. . She would never find what she was looking for if she couldn't express herself. . At the moment, I'm far too lonely to think about love, but I have to believe that it will happen, that I will find a job and that I am here because I chose this fate. . Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant. . A writer once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone's mind is love. What nonsense! The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin. Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person's whole life, from one moment to the next. . Again, she seemed like a stranger to herself. . I let fate choose which route I should take. . Some people were born to face life alone, and this is neither good nor bad, it is simply life. . I'm not a body with a soul, I'm a soul that has a visible part called the body. . She was doing it because she had nothing to lose, because her life was one of constant, day-to-day frustration. . Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings. . We are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel. . No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. . However tempted she was to continue, however prepared she was for the challenges she had met on her path, all these months living alone with herself had taught her that there is always a right moment to stop something. . He knew everything about her, although she knew nothing about him. . She had opened a door which she didn't know how to close. . Our experiences have been entirely different, but we are both desperate people. . Free yourself from something that cost your heart even more. . One moment, you have nothing, the next, you have more than you can cope with. . Does a soldier go to war in order to kill the enemy? No, he goes in order to die for his country. . What the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't grieve over. . Because we don't want to forget who we are - nor can we. . This was simply a place where people gathered to worship something they could not understand.

The more that injustice, exploitation, inequality, unemployment, poverty, hunger, and misery prevail in human society, the more Che's stature will grow. The more that the power of imperialism, hegemonism, domina­tion, and interventionism grow, to the detriment of the most sa­cred rights of the peoples-especially the weak, backward, and poor peoples who for centuries were colonies of the West and sources of slave labor-the more the values Che defended will be upheld. The more that abuses, selfishness, and alienation exist; the more that Indians, ethnic minorities, women, and immigrants suffer dis­ crimination; the more that children are bought and sold for sex or forced into the workforce in their hundreds of millions; the more that ignorance, unsanitary conditions, insecurity, and homelessness prevail-the more Che's deeply humanistic message will stand out. The more that corrupt, demagogic, and hypocritical politicians exist anywhere, the more Che's example of a pure, revolutionary, and consistent human being will come through. The more cowards, opportunists, and traitors there are on the face of the earth, the more Che's personal courage and revolution­ary integrity will be admired. The more that others lack the ability to fulfill their duty, the more Che's iron willpower will be admired. The more that some individuals lack the most basic self-respect, the more Che's sense of honor and dignity will be admired. The more that skeptics abound, the more Che's faith in man will be admired. The more pessimists there are, the more Che's optimism will be admired. The more vacillators there are, the more Che's audacity will be admired. The more that loafers squander the prod­uct of the labor of others, the more Che's austerity, his spirit of study and work, will be admired.

There are things I can confess only after swallowing a bottle of ink. How i crushed a moth between my palms before it rushed to the fireplace. These hands that are used to killing things midflight. Like my mother tongue. Before I can roll out my rounded R and O. Because women like me are believed to practise witchcraft and blackmagic. We swallow men and spit out their bones. These hands that danced with your ghosts on the bluest 4 AMs. These hands that raised a knife to its throat. How deep was the longing to be nothing more than an empty bed, an empty room. If someone asks you tell them writing was the closest I came to witchcraft. Poetry was the closest I came to being possessed. I wanted to leave behind more than emptiness so I wrote. . They say it takes 7 seconds for the eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. I glide across the dark room like the light was never here. Your body imprint on the mattress lost to the frenzied waltz of sunray and dust. How easy was it to just grab a handful of you before you dissolved. If someone asks tell them loving you was the closest I came to seeing god. . On some nights I open the curtains and you are the moon. I am the darkness surrounding it. Which is to say I don't know how to love without being consumed. If they ask you tell them remembrance was the closest I came to being sick. . Once I met a homeless man who spoke in madness because he had forgotten his mother tongue. How long do you hide yourself from the world before you forget your beginning. Like him - I too am full of silence. My beloved - a handful of you, your body. There are things I could only tell the moths but they no longer visit. I have put off the fireplace. Which is to say they too don't know how to love something that won't kill them. . My phone always autocorrects I love you to I live you and what is love if not living the other person. One summer afternoon our bodies turned into each other's. Your breath played lye strings on my neck. If they ask you tell them that was the closest I came to being alive.

In Gethsemane, Jesus experienced the pains of a person dying of cancer. He experienced what it is like to be a queer kid who is constantly bullied. He experienced the birthing pains of every mother who ever lived or would live. He experienced the embarrassment of a gay boy having an erection at the sight of his school crush in the locker room. He experienced conversion therapy. He experienced rejection. He experienced the brutal physical and psychological attacks that trans women endure. He experienced the acid poured on a woman’s face for her defiance to the patriarchs. He experienced the fear, grief, and sorrow of every parent who has buried their child. He experienced sex slavery. He experienced his first period. He experienced menstruation, not simply from a vagina but from every pore of his body. He experienced rape. He experienced catcalls. He experienced hunger. He experienced disease. He experienced an ectopic pregnancy. He experienced an abortion. He experienced a miscarriage and stillbirth. He experienced the Holocaust. He experienced war – both the killing and being killed. He experienced internment camps. He experienced depression, anxiety, and suicide. He experienced sleeping on the street with the homeless. He experienced the slave master’s whip on his back and the noose around his neck. He knew the fear of every black mother who kissed her son before he left the house, praying he would return home safely. He experienced the effects of unrighteous dominion, corrupt politicians, and all manner of injustice. He experienced the migrant mother with no food or diapers for her baby as she desperately walked north in search of a better life. He experienced having his child taken away from him at the border due to “legal complications.” He experienced it all – every death, every cut, every tear, every pain, every sorrow, every bit of suffering imaginable and beyond imagination. He experienced an onslaught of suffering, which was so great that it took a god to bear it. He experienced death and came through the other side to show us the way.

Jamie guessed he wasn’t sure if calling it a homeless shelter when it was filled with homeless people was somehow offensive. He’d had two complaints lodged against him in the last twelve months alone for the use of ‘inappropriate’ language. Roper was a fossil, stuck in a by-gone age, struggling to stay afloat. He of course wouldn’t have this problem if he bothered to read any of the sensitivity emails HR pinged out. But he didn’t. And now he was on his final warning. Jamie left him to flounder and scanned the crowd and the room for anything amiss.  People were watching them. But not maliciously. Mostly out of a lack of anything else to do. They’d been there overnight by the look of it. Places like this popped up all over the city to let them stay inside on cold nights. The problem was finding a space that would house them. ‘No, not the owner,’ Mary said, sighing. ‘I just rent the space from the council. The ceiling is asbestos, and they can’t use it for anything, won’t get it replaced.’ She shrugged her shoulders so high that they touched the earrings. ‘But these people don’t mind. We’re not eating the stuff, so…’ She laughed a little. Jamie thought it sounded sad. It sort of was. The council wouldn’t let children play in there, wouldn’t let groups rent it, but they were happy to take payment and let the homeless in. It was safe enough for them. She pushed her teeth together and started studying the faded posters on the walls that encouraged conversations about domestic abuse, about drug addiction. From when this place was used. They looked like they were at least a decade old, maybe two. Bits of tape clung to the paint around them, scraps of coloured paper frozen in time, preserving images of long-past birthday parties. There was a meagre stage behind the coffee dispenser, and to the right, a door led into another room. ‘Do you know this boy?’ Roper asked, holding up his phone, showing Mary a photo of Oliver Hammond taken that morning. The officers who arrived on scene had taken it and attached it to the central case file. Roper was just accessing it from there. It showed Oliver’s face at an angle, greyed and bloated from the water.  ‘My God,’ Mary said, throwing a weathered hand to her mouth. It wasn’t easy for people who weren’t exposed to death regularly to stomach seeing something like that.  ‘Ms Cartwright,’ Roper said, leaning a little to his left to look in her eyes as she turned away. ‘Can you identify this person? I know it’s hard—’ ‘Oliver — Ollie, he preferred. Hammond, I think. I can check my files…’ She turned and pointed towards the back room Jamie had spotted. ‘If you want—’ Roper put the phone away.

Dear, What’s the Point of it All? What is the point of being nice? When you do not know what you are going to get from it? Knowing eventually sooner rather than later someone and maybe that person you are being nice to will turn their back on you. I always have to stay grounded and focused. When I am there for people, I feel like I am always punished for it. I am always treated as if I committed a crime. I was there for my mom; however, she was killing me slowly but surely. Like my mom, I noticed that when people get themselves in some shit, they get stuck in their own mess. They are confident that they do not have to deal with the consequences—because they know the ‘kind’ person will bail them out. What’s the point of being kind? Like my mom and the officer, there are so many people in the world who are judgmental and tainted because of their selfish needs. What’s the point of my life? Here I am in a library filled with many books. I can read them and go anywhere I want to in my mind, but after I close the book, I will have to snap out of my fantasy world and welcome the cruel cold world, which is reality. If I was a book, I would be better off left on the shelf. There is no excitement in my life—only struggles. What’s the point of living and loving life when the only thing I do is read between the lines and tread carefully? Come to think about it, I am a book that nobody can understand or read. They think they know what is best for me, but if they only take the time to listen, I would be so happy to tell them about me and my needs and wants. My actions scream for attention, but time after time, I am ignored. Sadly, without a care, they were quick to rip out the pages. Yet, once again, nobody noticed me. What’s the point of it all when I never had an opportunity to make a mistake? If I did one thing wrong, they would give up on me and send me to one home after another. I’ve always been fully exposed and had to walk in a line filled with sharp curves from disappointment to disappointment. Sorrow is my aura, and sadness hugs me tightly. It is hard to cry when my eyes are closed shut by the barbed wire fence of my eyelashes as they prohibit tears from falling. What’s the point of complicating my life? I am always back to where I started, and then ... I relive the same patterns, but on a more difficult journey. I believe when you put yourself in your own mess that you should clean it up and start over. What’s wrong with that? Nothing. However, when someone else puts you in their mess, you do not know how to clean up the mess they’ve made. You do not know how to start over because you do not know where to begin. I look at it this way; it is like telling a dead person he/she can start over. How so, when that person’s life no longer exists? I know my life isn’t over. However, I am lost in a maze my mom set up for herself—and she too is lost in her own maze. When a person gets lost in their own maze, they are really fucked up. However, this maze shouldn’t be left for me to figure out. Unfortunately, I am in it, and I have to find my way out one way or another. What’s the point of taking Kace from me? He was safe and in good hands. Now he is worse off with people who are abusing him. He didn’t ask for this—I didn’t either. He deserves so much better. Again, what is the point of it all? What’s the point of making me suffer? Do you get a kick out of it? What are you trying to accomplish? I am trying to understand; what is the point of it all? What is the point? I don’t know why I am here.

Are- her experiences at the Copacabana, she knew that she wasn't the only person who felt lonely. Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings. Like her, these men, and the many others who sought her company, were all tormented by that same destructive feeling, the sense that no one else on the planet cared about them.

Roper was sulking. He didn’t like this case and it was getting worse for him by the minute.  They had no solid leads and the one person they needed to speak to the most hadn’t been seen since before Oliver’s body was found. With what they knew so far, there was a good chance that someone else was involved in their relationship, and when you factored in the drugs, the azithromycin, and what Reggie had said about their supposedly new tent, things were starting to get muddy.  They needed to speak to Grace and find out exactly what was going on, and they needed to do it fast.  The longer time went on, the less likely they were to find a fresh lead. The longer there was for evidence to get destroyed or misplaced. The longer there was for people to shore up their stories. The longer there was for people to forget exactly what had happened. Time was getting thin, and their investigation was hanging on the testimony of a heroin-addicted teenager who may or may not be missing herself.  It’s what Jamie’s father would have called a shit-clap. The image was explanatory enough.  They kept a good pace through the streets, opting to walk rather than drive, retracing the route that Ollie and Grace would have taken every day to get to the shelter.  They caught up with and passed several nomads trekking back from lunch towards their nests, but none of them were Grace, or prepared to tell them whether Grace was there.  Maybe they didn’t know, or maybe they just didn’t want to help. The homeless and the police had a frosty relationship to put it mildly. Putting it more succinctly, neither liked the other.

Nothing changes in the life of a homeless person unless you slow down and take the time to earn trust and develop a lasting relationship. Consistency and presence are essential. Have a coffee, play cards, share bits of yourself. Never judge. Remember that people have lived through hell and listen carefully to their stories.

Photographs from Distant Places (1) In distant villages, You always see the same scenes: Farms Cattle Worship spaces Small local shops. Just basic the things humans need To endure life. (2) ‘Can you stay with me forever?’ She asked him in the airport, While hugging him tightly in her arms. ‘Sorry, I can’t. My flight leaves in two hours and a half.’ He responded with an artificially caring voice, As he kissed her on her right cheek. (3) I was walking in one of Bucharest’s old streets, In a neighborhood that looked harshly beaten by Time, And severely damaged by development and globalization. I saw a poor homeless man Combing his dirty hair In a side mirror of a modern and expensive car! (4) The shape and the color of the eyes don’t matter. What matters is that, As soon as you gaze into them, You know that they have seen a lot. All eyes that dare to bear witness To what they have seen are beautiful. (5) A stranger asked me how I chose my path in life. I told him: ‘I never chose anything, my friend.’ My path has always been like someone forced to sit In an airplane on a long flight. Forced to sit with the condition Of keeping the seatbelt on at all times, Until the end of the flight. Here I am still sitting with the seatbelt on. I can neither move Nor walk. I can’t even throw myself out of the plane’s emergency exit To end this forced flight! (6) After years of searching and observing, I discovered that despair’s favorite hiding place Is under business suits and tuxedos. Under jewelry and expensive night gowns. Despair dances at the tables where Expensive wines of corruption And delicious dinners of betrayal are served. (7) Oh, my poet friend, Did you know that The bouquet of fresh flowers in that vase On your table is not a source of inspiration or creativity? The vase is just a reminder Of a flower massacre that took place recently In a field Where these poor flowers happened to be. It was their fate to have their already short lives cut shorter, To wither and wilt in your vase, While breathing the not-so-fresh air In your room, As you sit down at your table And write your vain words. (8) Under authoritarian regimes, 99.9% of the population vote for the dictator. Under capitalist ‘democratic’ regimes, 99.9% of people love buying and consuming products Made and sold by the same few corporations. Awe to those societies where both regimes meet to create a united vicious alliance against the people! To create a ‘nation’ Of customers, not citizens! (9) The post-revolution leaders are scavengers not hunters. They master the art of eating up The dead bodies and achievements Of the fools who sacrificed themselves For the ‘revolution’ and its ideals. Is this the paradox and the irony of all revolutions? (10) Every person is ugly if you take a close look at them, And beautiful, if you take a closer look. (11) Just as wheat fields can’t thrive Under the shadow of other trees, Intellectuals, too, can’t thrive under the shadow Of any power or authority. (12) We waste so much time trying to change others. Others waste so much time thinking they are changing. What a waste! October 20, 2015

I prefer to sit on the sidewalk and share a hotdog with a homeless person than sit at a fancy restaurant and have dinner with a billionaire.

They will call the police, who will arrest this person, and for a night or two they will have a place to sleep in a jail cell. The police cannot solve poverty, joblessness, and the housing crisis—the actual culprits in the lives of the homeless. But if we’ve deemed the homeless, not poverty, the problem, then what the police can do is make them disappear. The major tools the police carry are handcuffs and guns; they can arrest or kill. The police can go forth and round up the homeless, then place them in cages. And to grant them the authority, local governments can criminalize the existence of the homeless: they can criminalize sleeping outside, or criminalize panhandling, which begins to look a lot like the criminalization of vagrancy as part of the Black Codes in the era that ended Reconstruction. And then, our local governments can fund a separate police force for the subway system to punish turnstile jumpers, arrest women selling churros, and clear out more homeless people, while neighborhood associations ensure no new homeless shelters get built near or in affluent neighborhoods. The streets remain the only place for them to call home.

Jabez found men that had a certain propensity to kill in the first place. Then there was the baptism," Deathstone said, "To take your place in the circle, you had to be baptized. You had to kill a person of Jabez's choice. Usually, a homeless person or someone else who would not be missed.

The situation finally got resolved when Leigh Anne came marching into the gym before a game one day carrying a video camera. She introduced herself to the referees, pointed me out to them as her son, and let them know that there had been some problems about a lot of unfair fouls being called against me in the past. She told the ref that she would be personally recording the game, and if there were any blatant calls against me that clearly were not accurate, she would be sending the tape to the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association to make sure that the ref never called another game tor Briarcrest. That did the trick. Any foul called after that was one I deserved.

What? And have you tell me ‘I told you so’? Remind me that I didn’t listen when you warned me? No, I prefer to meet you in your professional mode. If you are going to be schoolmarm-strict and po-faced then at least you’re only doing your job. In your apartment I’d find you insufferable and I’d take it personally. This is better by far. I fucked up, I am homeless, a refugee, I go where the hopeless fuckers go, to Marienfelde, to Fräulein Burkhardt.” “You don’t have to . . .” “Nell, please . . . I expect no favours. I don’t want to jump any queue. I’ve jumped far enough for one day. So stamp your foot, put on your cast-iron face and oblige me by asking if there’s any ice for my ankle.” “I am not po-faced!” “Really?” “No.” “Oh God, Nell. You’re impossible.” §81 Nell found ice. And then she found a wheelchair. Stuck Eva in it and pushed her to the S-Bahn station. “What are you doing?” “You’re coming home with me. To Wilmersdorf. You will have to learn to live with my ‘po-face.

How you dress totally matters. Why? Because people evaluate your worth and treat you based on your appearance. How you dress is a huge part of that. Dress like a homeless person and you will be treated like one. Dress like a respected businessman and you will be treated like one. It’s that simple.

Yesterday, I will never forget you. You’ve taught me many lessons. I was taught lessons that a young person should never experience or even know about. Some lessons in life leave permitted marks. There have been many lessons I’ve learned that have left so many scars on my heart, but life goes on. I use to be overwhelmed by hate, disbelief, and not knowing if I was going to make it. Now, I am surrounded by warm hugs, smiles, love, and peace.

Dear Halo, I see you. You are the light around the moon, and I know that you are the light above my head. You are a reflection of what and who I want to be. Therefore, tonight is the perfect time to reflect. There have been so many times, if not all the time, that the halation of light has spread in my life beyond its boundaries and has formed a fog everywhere. However, I have you right above my head to help me direct my path. I have changed. I have worked so hard on—me, Ember. I feel like when it comes to my mom, I am like water in the sink. My emotions go around and around in circles because she has drained me and taken everything from me. She is so good at pulling the plug on everything I’ve worked so hard to accomplish. I never gave away my power—it’s just that I am depleted. Right now, just for tonight and tomorrow, I am in hibernation as I unfold the memories that once hunted me. These memories have taken me to the highest point, and they most definitely have dragged me to my lowest point. They have dragged me so low to the point that my feelings and emotions are deeper than the sea. The name I use for Mom is—claustrophobia. She is the person I fear most, for Kace’s sake. Every time I see her, she closes me in—in a confined space in my heart and in my mind. Anxiety takes over me because I knew this day would come—that she would try to get custody of Kace. When I see her, I lose control... seeing her and thinking of her sends my mind to claustrophobia. The memories and remembrance of her close me in, and they trap me every single time—that is why I am in here. I have to control it. From this day forth, I am not surrounded by death. I am not mentally folding up in a ball. I am a parachute. I am free. I am flying like a bald eagle. I’m going in a direction where I cannot and will not carry dead weight. From now on, I am dealing with certain people with a long-handled spoon.

The name I use for you is—claustrophobia. You are the person I fear most. Every time I see you, you close me in—in a confined space in my heart and in my mind.

Regardless of how these momentary glimpses of oneness manifest, they change us—if only in the moment. We become our best, true, and divine self and act accordingly. We say a silent prayer for the homeless man on the street, help the older woman place her heavy suitcase in the plane’s overhead compartment, and leave a generous tip for the young college person who just waited on us. Each of these small acts matter, for each helps to make the world a better place.

I never thought in my wildest dreams that a person had to beg to be loved.

We could talk about the diathesis-stress model of psychopathology, the well-accepted notion that individuals may carry genes that predispose them to a mental illness such as schizophrenia, but the illness lies dormant unless a traumatic stressor (such as sexual abuse, homelessness, and of course, imprisonment) arouses it.4

Do you want the window seat?” he asks. I stare at him as my brain misfires. He gestures to the seat beside the window. “You don’t mind?” I frown. “Not at all.” He smiles. “I fly all the time. You can have it.” I force a smile. “Thanks.” That was code for “I know you got upgraded, you poor homeless person, and I feel sorry for you.

Of particular concern to Simmel was how people coped. Unable to react meaningfully to every new piece of information, overstimulated citizens were apt to become “blasé” or, simply put, apathetic. They learned to suppress their feelings, to treat one another transactionally, to care less. After all, they had to. They heard terrible news from around the world daily, like the eruption of Mount Pelée, which killed twenty-­eight thousand people in minutes, or the horrors of British concentration camps in Africa. Meanwhile, they tripped over homeless people and tuned out strangers packed tightly in the streetcar. How could they possibly extend empathy, or even simple acknowledgment, to everyone they met? Instead, they closed off their hearts out of necessity. Their demanding outer world had devoured their inner world and, with it, their ability to connect.

When Jesus meets the poor during his public ministry and treats them with compassion, and when he directs his followers to care for the poor, it is not simply the stance of someone looking down from on high, as a wealthy person might pity the homeless man he passes on the way to the office. Rather, it is the stance of the person who himself came from a poor town, and who may have felt that compassion for years.

Halfway through the day, Megan started dicking around on the internet. She made her browser window as small as she could, paused for a second, and then looked up “Carrie Wilkins.” She found Carrie’s website, and on it, this bio: Hi, my name’s Carrie. I’m 26. I make things. I paint and I write, but mostly I design. I like to make things beautiful, or creative. I make my own food and I’m trying to grow my own beets. A lot of people around me seem unhappy and I don’t understand why. I freelance because I know I’d go insane if I couldn’t make my own schedule—I believe variety is the zest of life. I know I want a dog someday soon, and sometimes I make lunch at 3 a.m. I believe in the power of collaboration, and I’d love to work with you! What a total asshole. What does she have, some kind of a pact with Satan? The picture next to Carrie’s bio had some kind of heavy filter on it that made it look vintage, and she had a friendly but aloof look on her face. She was flanked on both sides by plants and was wearing an oxford shirt with fancy shorts and had a cool necklace. It was an outfit, for sure, like all of Carrie’s clothes were outfits, which Megan always thought of as outdated or something only children did. The website linked to a blog, which was mostly photos of Carrie doing different things. It didn’t take too long to find the picture of her with the llama with a caption about how she and her boss got it from a homeless guy. And then just products. Pictures and pictures of products, and then little captions about how the products inspired her. Motherfucker, thought Megan. She doesn’t get it at all. It was like looking at an ad for deodorant or laundry soap that made you feel smelly and like you’d been doing something wrong that the person in the ad had already figured out, but since it was an ad, there was no real way to smell the person and judge for yourself whether or not the person stank, and that was what she hated, hated, hated most of all. I make things, gee-wow. You think you’re an artist? Do you really thing this blog is a representation of art, that great universalizer? That great transmigrator? This isolating schlock that makes me feel like I have to buy into you and your formula for happiness? Work as a freelance designer, grow beets, travel, have lots of people who like you, and above all have funsies! “Everything okay?” asked Jillian. “Yeah, what?” “Breathing kind of heavy over there, just making sure you were okay and everything.” “Oh, uh-huh, I’m fine,” said Megan. “It’s not . . . something I’m doing, is it?” “What? No. No, I’m fine,” said Megan. How could someone not understand that other people could be unhappy? What kind of callous, horrible bullshit was that to say to a bunch of twenty-yearolds, particularly, when this was the time in life when things were even more acutely painful than they were in high school, that nightmare fuck, because now there were actual stakes and everyone was coming to grips with the fact that they’re going to die and that life might be empty and unrewarding. Why even bring it up? Why even make it part of your mini-bio?

If you think our country is too big to fail, you’d be among the millions of Venezuelans who thought so, too. Regarded as the richest country in Latin America just two decades ago, Venezuela is in shambles today. The average person has lost 20 pounds due to food shortages and there is no relief in sight. Millions of citizens are now in exile.[18] ​Once some of the most beautiful and safest cities in America mere decades ago, are now mired in filth, degradation, homelessness, crime, drugs, etc. San Francisco, L.A., Chicago and Detroit are on downward spirals. The common denominator: all have been under Democratic rule for decades.

I will have to send a text, with a screenshot of a donation to a homeless charity, explaining I have gone for a green and worthy option. Although in my heart I know this is a better thing to do anyway, I also know it will in no way abate the mounting rage at the pile of cards with their accompanying smug letters about how Jocasta has just passed her Grade 7 flute while climbing Kilimanjaro to raise money for orphaned kittens, and how she is really looking forward to starting school next year, and Sebastian is doing so awfully well at Some Obscure Sport, and is now the youngest person to play for the British Obscure Sport Team, and aren’t we just simply maaaarvellous?

What a waste of headspace. What a waste of consciousness. What an insult to every person struggling with illness or poverty or homelessness. What a diss to the sunshine and the sky and the birdsong and to any number of small pleasures or preoccupations that could have more joyfully and usefully occupied space taken up with worry about body weight.

The value of homelessness is that it makes you value your home.

If a lot of people are suffering because of a few people, why didn’t the majority do something about it a long time ago? Why’d everyone let it get so bad?” “If you drop a lobster in a pot of boiling water,” Zyrha tells him, “it’ll thrash around for its life.” “Wouldn’t we all?” Darrion smirks. “If you drop the lobster in a pot of cool water and slowly raise the temperature, it’ll die without a struggle. It’ll get used to the incremental increases until it’s too late to know it’s dead. You asked how we got here. The temperature had been rising in the Old States for a long time. People were dying left and right without a struggle. A few leaders had control over everything: money, power, the military, health care, schools, utilities, transportation, laws, courts, and the media. They had everything. Everything except the one thing every person in power needs.” “What’s that?” Darrion asks through a strained quiver. “An enemy.” “An enemy,” he repeats. “The question became which one. There were so many to choose from.” Zyrha claps her hands and gives a sarcastic laugh. “Black people. Brown people. Asians. Mexicans. Arabs. Women. The biracial. The multiracial. Old people. Young people. Short people. The overweight, the underweight, the sick, the helpless, the homeless, the unemployed. The asexual, the bisexual, the homosexual, the transgendered. People with special needs. The neurodivergent. Pot-smokers. Immigrants. Socialists. Communists. Atheists. Jews. Muslims. Intellectuals. Influencers. Athletes. Academics. Writers. Pacifists. Celebrities.” Zyrha pauses to draw in a long breath. “They were all contrived of course. They were invented enemies designed to occupy the amygdala—that’s the brain’s fear center—so the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for rational thought and good decision-making—wouldn’t take over. Anyway, there’d been a lot of manufactured enemies, and, frankly, they’d been done to death.