Migratory posts

To inaugurate the new blog, a brief recapitulation of the two relevant posts on the old blog.

Saturday, 31 January 2009

I participated in the 2009 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count on Thursday night. Thousands of volunteers scoured the entire area (except, oddly, Pasadena, Glendale, and Long Beach, which all have separate counts), counting the homeless people who were visible on the streets. Two years ago, the total came to 73,000. That is a fucking mind-blowingly huge number. Seventy. Three. Thousand. Every night, that many people sleep on the street, in boxes, in abandoned cars or RVs, under tarps, in makeshift tents. Just in LA. After counting my area with my partners (1 inhabited encampment, 2 abandoned encampments that didn't count), I trudged to the nearest bus stop to head home. At the bus stop, I became involved in a rather intricate conversation with a homeless man. Usually, I avoid eye contact with crazies at bus stops. That night, I couldn't justify doing so. Not after spending a few hours determinedly searching for the people whom I (we) so often would rather ignore. So I let him catch my eye, saw his weather-beaten face light up when he realized someone would acknowledge him.

He was very drunk and somewhat mad. He smelled awful, and explained the reason behind each aroma in uncomfortably honest detail. He was taking the bus to a liquor store for more booze, though he had no money for bus fare. Despite all of that, despite the fact that he occasionally patted my shoulder in a too-familiar way, we had a fascinating conversation about Rod Serling and our favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone. Mine is Mirror Image, by the way; his is either Long Live Walter Jameson or The Night of the Meek. He knew who starred in his favorite episodes, what years the series was a half-hour show and what years it was a full hour, and a great deal more. He acted out scenes from his favorites in the rightmost lane of Sunset Boulevard. His excitement was incredible; I would have believed him if he told me that nobody had ever been willing to listen to him talk about his favorite show before. He broke my heart.

I can smugly pat myself on the back for volunteering, for giving $30.00 a month to a homeless youth shelter, for taking time to really listen to this man whose name I still don't know. But at the end of every day, there are still 73,000 people sleeping on the streets of this sprawling city while I lie in my comfortable bed and blog, listening to my hedgehog run on his wheel. I don't know how to deal with that.


Wednesday, 18 February 2009

One of the most successful—if not the most successful—spin-offs in entertainment history is the television show known as Frasier. Spun off from Cheers eleven years later, Frasier had nothing to do with its parent show, beyond the existence in both settings of Dr. Frasier Crane, and it lasted another eleven. Similarly, Empty Nest and Nurses had very little to do with The Golden Girls; The Golden Palace had somewhat more to do with it, but tenuously. Spin-offs are usually done in this manner, departing from the parent's premise entirely (Maude, anyone?) but retaining a popular character or feature of the original (usually the impetus behind the spin-off) to boost initial popularity.

This brief television history disquisition is by way of announcing that this blog is getting a spin-off. I have been mulling over too many posts that have gone unposted lately, and they are all very clearly thematically linked. Therefore, I have now created (though not yet posted in) On The Street, Where You Live: encounters with homelessness in Los Angeles. I'll be using it mostly as a venue for sharing stories, stories either of my experiences with homeless people or of their experiences in their own words. This has little to do, really, with my personal/professional/political life that I regularly give an accounting of in this forum, and that's the point.

The lives of homeless people far too often have absolutely nothing to do with the lives of the homed; these people are invisible to me (us), except when they impinge on my (our) personal space—olfactory and visual, as well as physical. Part of Los Angeles' obsession with privacy/privatization consists in that determined invisibility, in the concealment of social/societal difficulties that are, in Douglas Adams' rather pointed phrase, Somebody Else's Problem. The nationwide demise of the public sphere results directly in this kind of everyday callousness, the insensitivity to human suffering that is absolutely necessary to live any kind of normal life in the big city.

Will this new blog do anything for these human beings I so blatantly ignore? Not really, not concretely. But their stories deserve to be shared as much as mine, and they probably don't have blogs. It will do something for me, the author, to pass the stories on and imagine that they get heard. It will do something to me as well, and I hope that that something happens to anyone else who chooses to read it. Maybe there will be a few extra volunteers at the 2011 Homeless Count. Maybe a shelter will get one extra donation.

Maybe a homed person will see a homeless person as person first, and homeless second. That's all I ask.