Tag: Addiction

Letter From a Homeless Man

Posted in HousingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

  • Hollywood Freeway Offramp, Western Av., Homeless, 2020
  • Old Post Office, Van Nuys.

From the LA Times article, “Garcetti’s A Bridge Home Homeless Problem Has Mixed Results.”

A formerly homeless addict refutes all the tolerant and feel-good ideas that are bandied about by Garcetti and other enablers. Here is what WEHO LIBERAL said in a letter to the LAT:

“I’m someone who once was homeless multiple times, but always stayed in shelters no matter what. NEVER, ever camp outside! It’s a dead end and that behavior is only for people with serious behavioral problems, alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness. If you lose your housing? You do NOT camp outside. Period.

I’ve posted multiple times about homelessness on LAT over the years. The last time I did, Nita Lilyveld (not sure if I spelled her name right) wrote about 2 young homeless people in their early twenties that I reached out to offering support and even to take them to dinner. After 2 or 3 texts between one of them where they kept saying they’d follow up with me, they flaked. No more texts. They didn’t follow up or stay in touch.

I am done with this nonsense. And I say that as a liberal Democrat who supported all of these shelters being built. Enough is enough. My mother was mentally ill her entire life and constantly refused treatment.  Even when I was struggling with my own addiction, I ALWAYS made sure I had shelter.

I live in Hollywood.  You see these people every day.  I see them sitting or lying around their campsites when I leave for work. I come home from work and they’re still there, doing nothing but eating, urinating, defecating, some listening to the radio or watching TV on their phones. But they are always there and they make zero effort to change their lives or better their situation.

They ask me for cigarettes, they ask me for money. Their laziness and refusal to change infuriates me. I was homeless, multiple times. I’m sick and tired of LAT columnists like Steve Lopez and Nita Lilyveld pleading to help people who simply do not want to help themselves–or in the case of Lopez, only interested in finding a charity case that they can champion in press and on TV for his own ego.  No, I do not care to hear about how hard Nathanial Ayers’ life is when he refuses to take his medication that would help save his life and better his living situation. My own mother refused treatment for years so I have zero sympathy for people like him who literally are victims of their own refusal to simply do what could get them housed and improve their lives.

Look, being homeless and living in either a shelter or housing provided by local government was no picnic and no fun. I was miserable. My addiction was my responsibility and I deal with it and take responsibility for it. But Lopez, Lilyveld and others like them have their own faults and shortcomings, too.  It’s morally right to have compassion for others, absolutely.  But people who refuse to help themselves even when others try to help them and move Heaven & Earth to do it are not worthy or deserving of compassion.  They are not money pits; they are emotional black holes who will drain the time, energy and resource of everyone around them because they refuse to do what they need to do.

I’m living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yes, I’ve been lucky and yes, I have white male privilege. But as an incest survivor and an HIV+ positive drug addict in recovery, I no longer buy what Lopez, Lilyveld, LAHSA and others like them keep preaching. It is infuriating and it’s becoming obscene. I tried to help 2 homeless young people less than half my age last year after reading about them here.  For God sakes, I offered to feed them more than once. They kept making excuses and then just stopped reaching out to me.

I am done with supporting this policy and their behavior. We all need help sometimes. God knows I spent years exhausting people and it took me a long time to get my act together. But sooner or later, you have to reach deep down inside yourself, confront your problems and change your behavior as much as possible to save your own life.

I am not perfect and all of my problems are not solved. But as someone who sees homeless people every day who sit around all day doing nothing, my compassion for all but a select few is pretty much drained and gone.”

Last Night I Left My Smart Phone at Home. And it was Glorious.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , Leave a comment

Last night, I did something quite daring. 

I left my smart phone at home, intentionally, and it was frightfully glorious to go out, un-tethered. 

I felt guilty, as if I were doing something quite illicit, not certain if I were violating the law, or taking advantage of my own autonomy by robbing tech companies, influencers, governments and corporations of a means of controlling me. I was alive without geographic monitoring, without something measuring my drive time, my mileage traveled, my steps walked, my calories burned.  None of my actions or activities would be used to sell any product, and nothing I did or said or saw was promotable when my phone and I were apart. 

On the road, it was just me in the car, behind the wheel, foot on the accelerator and the brake, going where I wanted to go, without mechanically voiced narration.

Childishly, I used my sense of direction to find my way, going back to those old 1960s concepts of navigation through landmarks, buildings, and street signs. I hadn’t a drop of alcohol in me but I was drunk with liberation, with the thrill of looking out the windshield the entire time I was behind the wheel! It was an extraordinary feeling!

Later, I learned that while my phone was off Rachel Maddow was tweating about climate change, and my cousin Ryan was completing his yoga degree in the Bahamas, and my niece Ava was on a hike in Marina Del Rey, and Jesse Somera, model, was eating eggs for breakfast at the Hotel Piranesi Duequattrosei in Milan.

I drove to California Chicken Café on Ventura Bl., about two miles from my house in Van Nuys and I went there without my phone, turning right on Victory, and left on Sepulveda, and right on Ventura, completely without voice or visual guidance.

I parked in the lot and went into the restaurant and ordered food, paid, sat down, and had nothing to do but look and think and wait.

Then the food came. 

I ate my salad, chicken and rice without an electronic device, and it was a revelation of existence, an empowering feeling, that I, a lone human in his own life with his own tastes, appetites, desires, and freedoms was allowed to go and have dinner and go about my night without notifications popping up every two minutes.

I dipped my chicken leg into barbecue sauce and ate buttered rice and stared at my food. And then I looked around at other people, and all the things I saw were right there in front of me and actually existed in their living form and material substance.

I was a freed slave and only I knew it.

Enslaved people walked into the restaurant staring at their phones, and they waited to order looking at their phones, and they walked to fill their water cups looking at their phones, and they sat down at the table and waited for their dinner to arrive while looking at their phones.

Outside the sun was setting and the golden rays were hitting the red bricks of St. Cyril of Jerusalem Catholic Church across the street. But I took no photo, because I had no phone, so I merely observed it. I watched the act of sunlight on a building without capturing it and storing it on a digital device.

Service was slow at California Chicken Café and they forgot my whole-wheat pita and I was tempted to post a review on Yelp, but I had no phone, and no app to open, and my private reaction to the gross disappointment of the missing pita bread was not posted online.

Back home, the dead phone was still off, and still plugged into the wall. 

And urgent, unseen messages from the actor’s agent directing me to shoot “shirtless” and “sexy” and “six looks” went unseen and unheard and unanswered for another twelve hours until I woke up the next morning.

With the phone still off, I knew nothing of the 39 strangers on Instagram who liked my photo of an orange tree. I heard nothing about the story on Next Door of that poor woman on Kittridge Street whose cat went missing, and I missed out on that long string of an argument about homeless people in Woodley Park, and I didn’t read that article Andreas sent me about a conservative activist who was once a leftist, and I didn’t answer those messages from Beth about what movies were worth watching on Netflix in July. 

I washed my face and brushed my teeth and turned off the light and did not look at my smart phone before retiring.

Before I went to bed, I turned on the fan and opened the window and the bedroom smelled of mint and lavender and I could hear the sound of the water fountain on the patio.

And then I fell asleep, and slept only dreaming of dreams that belonged to me and nobody else.