The weird thing about being homeless is that you have nowhere to go.
It seems obvious, doesn't it. It's true, though. It's really a very odd feeling. Imagine walking down the street and having nowhere at all to go. No home, no work, no store, no friend's house, not even a car to "go" to. Where ever you're at, you're already "there". You become a feature of the urban landscape, like a park bench or a trashcan or a manhole cover.
Yes, it's a very odd feeling, a very exposed feeling, a very nowhere-to-turn feeling. There are many other considerations, such as what to eat, where to sleep, etc., but at 3 o'clock in the afternoon you're just standing there on the sidewalk or under a lightpole, waiting, waiting. Waiting to grow tired, waiting to grow hungry.
You can go to the Mission for a place to sleep if you get there by 9 pm and blow zeros on the breathalyzer. If you're late or buzzed, you have to stay outside like a bush. You can also get a meal there, once a day, at 9 am. In my experience it wasn't the 'soup kitchen' you always hear about. They had other things. It was more like the school lunch program when I was a kid: fluorescent frozen veggies, a chewy fishstick-looking thing, a gooey pile of mushed potato product. I don't know what they feed kids these days, but in my day they tried to kill us or at least stunt our growth.
The simple pleasures in life, like tobacco or alcohol, are very frowned upon when you have nowhere to go. Society says you're not supposed to have escape even though you need it more than anyone, certainly more than the chubby people sitting on their couches and bitching about how there's nothing to watch while they flip through their 400 channels. No, society wants you clear-headed and sober as a judge when you're wallowing around at the very bottom of life. They want you to take it all in and feel it vividly. Your pain, if anything, should be increased, not dulled. You're a worthless piece of homeless trash who doesn't deserve even a moment of simple, chemically-induced pleasure, so says society as it pops anti-depressants like candy and stomps its feet like toddlers and insists that it's sick, mommy, sick. Suffer, motherfucker, they say, by not giving you change for a pack of smokes or a bottle of cheap wine. Suffer like me, and they go off and get fatter and sicker, go off and sit in their cubicles waiting to fill their prescriptions, waiting to finally die.
The worst thing about being homeless, however, the very worst thing of all, is not that you have nowhere to go or even that you have nowhere you CAN go, it's that it felt like the most honest and dignified way to live in the modern world.
