On The Road With Al and Ivy: A Literary Homeless Journal - March 2019

"…I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future..."

- Jack Kerouac (On The Road, The Original Scroll)

"It was my last observation that it was the custom of every man to call every other man a madman. The truth, in my judgement, they were all mad."

- Jack London (The Jacket, aka The Star Rover 1915)

Jack London is known (these days) as an adventure writer whose most famous books, Call Of The Wild and White Fang, are considered children or young adult classics (at least in abridged editions). He was quite popular in his time, and wrote several books that are considered classic.

His real life became legendary and many works like On The Road, a book about hobos, came from experiencing, and not just visiting, that life.

London treated writing as a discipline, and part of that involved churning out 1500 words a day. That resulted in a body of work that included short stories, essays, fiction and nonfiction books. Much of that went out of print until the digital age. There were hard copies around, but the rarer ones tended to command collector level prices.

One part of his catalogue that's become better known in the digital age are the books described in some circles as early science fiction. Which is sort of true, though it might be more accurate to describe the works as metaphysical, though his recreation of pre-Stone Age life, Before Adam, could be seen as speculative fiction.

My favorite London work in that genre, The Jacket, also known as The Star Rover, is a fascinating psychological novel that involves a prisoner who escapes torture by disassociating into past lives. London went all in with the concept and didn't label it as a descent into madness or fantasy. The prisoner actually connected with past lives, and unlike some modern treatments which portray glorious and successful adventures, recalled a variety with vastly different outcomes. Which is in line with London's life experience in environments where many a life was cut short by fate or failure.

London was a superb short story writer. In fact, that was probably his forte, and because of that, the various past lives are told in masterful detail. Even more impressive for his time, each episode accurately reflects the mentality of each era. Each is a superb short story within the bigger work.

What can be overlooked was how good the psychological detail was. The various prison characters are seen as personality types, each played or manipulated a certain way by the prisoner. In other words, each one didn't just do this or that, but also had psychological traits, motives and goals.

The process of disassociating from physical pain is described in minute detail. London's true life adventures certainly involved experiencing various forms of deprivation, thus giving insight into the thoughts and sensations that came from both the slow starvation of a prison diet, and being strapped into a jacket designed to inflict pain.

It's a prescient series of passages about mind over matter that was echoed in later works of art. One notable example is in an episode of the crime drama, Criminal Minds, where one of the agents is captured with the intent of torturing him into revealing information. The torturers are puzzled by the apparent indifference to pain until the head villain realizes that the agent has successfully disassociated into the past, and a psychological chess game begins to try and bring him back into the present. 

London was astute enough to make sure the fellow prisoners in the book had a variety of perceptions about that ability to regress into past lives. The prisoner who taught the main character how to self hypnotize was a believer in the method, but regarded the recollections simply as a mysterious trick of the mind to detach from reality. Others felt it was all crazy nonsense and self deception.

The Warden and his assistants were depicted as cruel, but of the "normal" world, who had no idea of what was going on and had no ability to see past what they thought was reality. Disassociation is now a familiar idea or belief, but back when London wrote the book, the characters calling the prisoner crazy may well have been drawn from real life skeptics.

One of the other themes is sanity, and what a core personality is. In other words, inside that mix of physical and psychological actions, was a person who came to see himself as a consciousness that would survive all that was happening.

For the purposes of this blog entry, the most interesting aspect of the story is how the various characters viewed (or were unable to see) what was going on in the Star Rovers mind, and the subject of disassociation. Also, the story had a cast of characters and there was no clear delineation of who was normal and not. As the story develops, it's clear that the main character is probably saner than his captors.

London didn't create a story with sane people dealing with the insane. He took a more metaphysical view in creating a mix of personalities and behaviors, and left judgement to the reader. That a character would visit past lives wouldn't have been an abstract to him. In his life, he'd encountered a wide variety of cultures and as a writer type, observed that many had deep spiritual beliefs that weren't common in the Western culture.

That the Star Rover's escape into the past was viewed with a variety of attitudes like skepticism, misunderstanding, or as a mystery that triggered reactions like fear or anger, it could be seen as a microcosm of how mankind has often treated the strange and unorthodox.  

...mental illness, and the strange...

The concept of sanity, norms, and mental illness is a subject that hasn't been covered in detail in this blog, though a sizable part of the homeless population is considered "mentally ill."

I had devoted over half of this blog entry to the technical aspect of the subject but found that it just led to an unwieldy morass of disputable data. Having people disagree with my opinion is OK, but it's always a good idea to avoid setting off chapter and verse disputes over data. I discarded the section and kept to the relative simplicity of generalities for this entry.

Another reason I discarded the previously planned section was that it became obvious that the issue isn't mental illness, but mental health.

For example, you hear people claiming that the homeless seem to want to stay that way and other overly broad statements that are actually a wrong diagnosis.

Apathy is often a symptom, and it's not really a general personality trait. Many drug and alcohol abusers are self-medicating, not partying away in a cardboard box in an alley. That's why general assistance fails so often. It's not treatment.

I'm going to revise the original essay and run it in the next blog.

...mental illness in the past...

Most people know that historically the definition of mental illness has differed in the past and that the "treatment" could be brutal. The supposedly normal people who burned women as witches were certainly not, though society tries to explain it as "ignorance." Calling it ignorance obscures the real issue, which is that the concept of sanity is often determined by majority rule, or those in power.

Blaming it on religion isn't entirely accurate either, as women who didn't fit the norm were persecuted or punished well before Christianity. For example, punishing a woman for adultery goes back to ancient times, or basically as soon as men decided they were property.

It's more complex than that of course, and the reasons for punishing someone judged as mentally ill can involve a wide range of motives that include social, political, religious, and emotional reasons that could be classified as insane. The mentality of attacking or punishing the unorthodox are human traits that have always been around and probably always will be.

We live in an era where people on opposing ends of the political spectrum, for example, take things past simple disagreement on issues and assert that the other side has a mental condition, or label people as sociopaths or whatever on the basis of what they've read in the news.

Society, or even smaller segments like peer groups decide for religious or political reasons which behaviors are normal and one can't automatically assume the standard will be fair. There is one constant, which is that sanity tends to be determined by majority rule. Not by doctors or leaders, but what the majority agrees with or is at least duped into believing. If were only up to leaders or experts, there'd be no disagreement about Global Warming, vaccines or whatever.

Mental illness still has a stigma, and a lot of it is based in fear. It's still a mysterious subject in many ways, as there's generally no obvious cause and effect like the flu, and odd behavior can be unsettling to those who are taught how to behave according to societal norms.

I hadn't decided how to treat the subject until the fifth draft. It's a complex subject, yet subject to the same dynamics that was described in the book by London. The mentally ill homeless population is actually complex and diverse, but tends to be viewed simplistically as under that one label, which is then interpreted in a wide range of often conflicting views, many of which are subjective.

The homeless problem has been around long enough for archetypes and cliches to develop, and thanks to short sound bytes and Internet forums, one can list the categories. That is to say, just one, the "mentally ill," all viewed in the same lens as the occasional person that goes off and commits a violent act or uses the sidewalk as a bathroom.

...odd ducks...

I lived for 14 months among more than a few "odd ducks" and people who needed help. I was uneasy at first around them, and often scared by their behavior. After a while though, I came to realize that most were harmless.

Many lived in fear, as they were easy targets for predators, and stuck rigidly to routines that helped them survive. I learned to not interrupt those routines and let them live in their own world. In fact, I learned a great deal about survival from predators by watching them. People can think the mentally ill homeless were all alike, just a bunch of crazies or whatever, but again, that's just simplistic.

Like all people, they had a variety of perceptions of the world around them, and in their own way, had good instincts and came up with various strategies for survival. They may have had problems, some had a lot, but most certainly weren't dangerous. 

...family....

Seeing the elderly ones affected me the most. There were men and women out there who in a perfect world should have had kids or grandchildren taking care of them. Having worked in a nursing home as a young man, I know that having family that care isn't a given. 

It requires a cold heart to be unmoved by the sight of a woman old enough to be a grandmother wander around out there with everything she owns in a shopping cart. If it pained me to see it, I couldn't imagine her pain from knowing there was family that knew and didn't come for her in that dangerous world. I came to feel that being detached from reality was perhaps a mercy in that place and time, and I don't expect society to understand why I and others felt that way.

There are various theories and reasons for there being so many mentally ill out there on the street. All may have some truth, but the most common cookie cutter solution seems to be, round them up and put them into forced treatment for their own good, with the underlying attitude that they're pests to be put out of sight and mind. Some might argue with that statement, but most decent people know that there's that element in any solution that involves involuntary detention.

More than a few groups or subcultures have found that it's not always safe to have sanity determined by majority rule. That why the subject is so contentious, and the solution won't be easy to find, though there's people out there doing their best to help, and frustrating as it can be, try to follow the rules and resist the temptation to join the more vocal in the crowd that want to treat the homeless like pests.

I gave the subject of mental illness a great deal of thought, and it wasn't until the final draft that a way to treat the subject evolved in a satisfactory way. The early explanations and essays based on research were discarded, including statements by people on both sides of the issue.

The reason is that, like a lot of subjects, it's rife with often conflicting theories and dependence on experts who aren't always vetted, particularly on the Internet. A good case in point is in a criminal trial where both sides can produce an expert to testify in their favor.

I decided to stick with what I saw, and what the homeless that I talked to, told me. Any descriptions of the mentally ill that described them as such were taken out. They were treated as characters in the story, and the passages written in as much in their point of view as possible, as with those respectable members of society who seemed to make it their businesses to get us arrested or chased out by any means possible.

I did come to one conclusion; that I had little to fear from the mentally ill out there, but there were members of respectable society that I'm glad didn't have any power over me. It's not the powerless ones that I feared, but the ones with it. Believe me, some of them were very, very scary

...the universe....

The homeless world wasn't some isolated tent city or skid row, but part of a larger universe that had all sorts of people that surrounded and interacted with it.

People picture a homeless camp or enclave as a discreet gathering of tents, like a separate world, and that's basically accurate, but in my book, you'll see that it also had subcultures that surrounded or orbited around it. Gilroy didn't have an extensive social service structure like San Francisco, so we didn't see aid workers or counsellors. 

But in 14 months in four locations, the periphery of any homeless gathering was active with vigilantes, hazers, dealers and couriers, pimps, religious cult members, sexual predators, animal activists, truckers, bike boosters, gypsies, possible police informants, tourists, and weekend slummers. 

Three of the locations were considered "gang territories," but I rarely saw gangs operating among the homeless. I've read (and heard at the time) that it was different in places like San Francisco, where tent cities were used to hide bike boosting rings and such. Also, as explained in earlier blog entries, certain places like county aid offices had gangs and businesses that targeted those who went there, but the homeless were incidental to the larger goal of harvesting the aid money paid out every month.

...life on a reservation...

There's a solution one hears now and then, which is to put them all in camps on public land (away from prime real estate), which would be a disaster for the mentally ill, especially the females. Homeless camps and shelters develop different dynamics depending on the demographics of the people there, but as you'll see in the book, it can quickly become Darwinian. In one chapter, I relate the experience of one homeless man who lived in a shelter for a while, and the dynamics resembled a loosely supervised school or reform school yard.

Any forced gathering of homeless would quickly turn into a refugee camp, and at best, be like a Native American Reservation.

The location of Native American reservations is no accident. The United States wanted the various tribes off of any land that could turn a real profit. The few times that such land turned out to be productive, like when gold was found in the Black Hills, commercial interests funneled wildcat miners into the area and the predictable conflicts forced the government's hand, bringing the Army in after the Sioux refused to leave.

The suggestion to ship the homeless off to camps is rooted in the same mentality, to get people seen as pests away from high value property (or areas in the process of becoming more valuable). The problem is that the only land suitable for a new "reservation" is public land, most of which is valuable enough that if it's not being exploited, business interests want it to be.

It's probably a good thing that such camps aren't created. One can look at areas like L.A. and San Francisco where ad hoc camps have become a humanitarian disaster area rife with drug use, crime, untreated mentally ill, and disease (like typhoid). Any such camp would have to be run like a city with services, so while it would cause many business types to shake their heads when I say this, the best organization to handle the homeless problem are city governments and that's where the money should go, and cities are where the homeless should stay until the problem is solved. 

In the long run, it'll still be cheaper than funding camps that create a permanent state of dependency. Some may argue that it's already happening in the big cities, but that's really more a situation where money is being poorly spent, and that can be fixed if society has the will.

"The experience of a long life has taught me, however, that sin is always punished in this world, whatever may come in the next. There is always some penalty in health, in comfort, or in peace of mind to be paid for every wrong. It is with nations as it is with individuals."

- Arthur Conan Doyle (Micah Clarke)

My favorite fiction books and movies tend to be historical adventures, and almost all involve some sort of journey. One favorite is Arthur Conan Doyle's Micah Clarke, which is about the exploits of three men who left their homes to join the Monmouth Rebellion in England. Doyle once said that his best writing wasn't the Sherlock Holmes stories, but the historical novels like Micah Clarke, White Company, Sir Nigel, and others. 

One thought that came to me after becoming homeless was that the characters left their homes to embark on the journey, yet were never labeled as homeless or transient even as they had to sleep out in the open or whatever shelter that could be found. Even Buddha today would probably be described as an enlightened homeless guy.

Arthur Conan Doyle was different in that he wasn't a stylist, like say, a Dickens or Joyce. He isn't quoted a lot, or has lots of people rhapsodizing about great passages, but anyone who's read Doyle knows that he was a no nonsense writer who was a great storyteller.

Being a writer who can efficiently narrate a story isn't a small feat. I've read lots of books where superfluous verbiage or detail seems to interrupt or stop the flow, or create scenes that fall flat. In addition, Doyle showed a satirical side (that reminds me of Stanley Kubrick) that wasn't always apparent in the Sherlock Holmes tales.

There's a couple of funny scenes that stand out in Micah Clarke. One is where the tough Mercenary becomes pious and devout in the presence of Puritan businessmen, to the disgust of Micah, and later, where two noblemen threaten each other with death, and a infantry officer respectfully suggests that there's a suitable place just outside where the gentlemen can have "proper elbow room for a breather." As the two lords get get more hysterical in their attempt to get the sergeant to intervene, he continues to politely direct them to a suitable dueling place. As the scene unfolds, you can imagine the smirk on Doyle's face as he wrote out that passage.

Doyle's historical novels rarely had a lot of long "detail" passages. He didn't fuss over fashion or equipment specs, yet the reader has a good sense of the atmosphere and look of the period by the end of the book. That's because much of the information was only fed in as needed, and a lot of the feel for the period came from the dialogue, which adds color and keeps the action moving forward. There aren't long descriptive passages about swords or armor, for example, instead the characters talk about the subject during conversations at various points in the story.

In the end, the historical novels were very much like the Sherlock Holmes series. Great story telling and characters that come alive and stay in your consciousness, like good friends you regularly visit and enjoy the company of. It was a book I reread in the car and was glad to enjoy the company of Micah and friends once again.

...the journey...

Micah Clarke wasn't the only adventure/journey book I read. I also read or reread "Travels With Charlie" by John Steinbeck, the reissue of Jack Kerouac's "On The The Road" in the original scroll form, and Jack London's "The Road."

All three are classic, of course, but each invoked a much different reaction than what might have occurred had my circumstances had been less dire.

Travels With Charlie, a travelogue by Steinbeck who decided to see the real America with his poodle, was the biggest disappointment. I thought that a book about a guy and his dog roughing it in a cross country trip would be full of insight into my situation but it read like a slight tale about a very well financed vacation. I refrain from calling it slumming as Steinbeck appeared to to be sincere in his desire to see the real America and talk to the salt of the earth.

Steinbeck by this time was a wealthy man, and the descriptions of the custom truck trailer complete with liquor cabinet and various hotels were so out of sync with my reality that it made me feel like Karl Marx to read it. Motel rooms were a real luxury out there, and run by corporations that charged such high rates that one often had to choose between a bed or eating a full meal. Some put all their money into a room and then panhandled to get cash to eat, though most just went without. All that could have been overlooked had it been an entertaining book, but my impression is that it was mainly a book for Steinbeck fans.

The Kerouac book was quite interesting, though a few decades down the line it's become a period piece, albeit a classic one. Kerouac originally typed the entire book out on a single roll of butcher paper, not even stopping to correct mistakes or do any editing or revisions. A cynic might say like a word processor with auto correct. It was, in effect, a stream of consciousness put to paper, though it did have a plot.

I liked this scroll version, as it's earthier and spontaneous. It was an adventurous book for it's era and place, which was 50s America, though Europe had already seen writing like this before. Kerouac had a freer sense of poetry or metre, influenced by American jazz, and is clearly less mannered than James Joyce or Henry Miller, who were more disciplined.

The lack of editing does show, and it's an uneven book, with brilliant passages and some real clunky sections that won't inspire rereading. Yet it's hard to imagine how Kerouac could have produced this book any other way, as any self editing process would have filtered many of the best passages into more "correct" structure, as it's now clear that it happened here and there in the original published version.

Although the book was a chronicle of a trip across the United States, the real journey was in the author's mind, as he attempted, and succeeded, in creating a new culture with it's own language. As I started my own book, I couldn't say that "The Road" was going to be a direct influence. For one thing, On The Road is a young book, almost innocent in it's enthusiasm, and very much about discovery. But Kerouac's writing was also was very brave and honest, and such qualities will serve me well in my own work.

...another Road book...

Jack London's book, "The Road," describes his experiences as a hobo, and it provided a lot of the background of later movies like "Emperor Of The North." It's a brilliant book, full of details that might shock or surprise those who think of hobos in terms of Roger Miller's 'King Of The Road" or Red Skelton's lovable tramp character.

The Hobo world was, and is a lot tougher, and very insular with it's own language and culture. I remember seeing hobos as a kid, they had set up a small camp near some tracks that ran though the then small town of Palo Alto. That area was a popular place for kids, as it had trees that were suitable for building ad hoc platforms, so we'd come into contact with them as they passed though.

The hobos were old school, and carefully avoided trouble, particularly with kids as that would quickly get the attention of the police. I heard and read stories later on that the hobo scene was changing, with younger men and a tougher environment, but that wasn't really true. Some of the hobos warned us even back then to be careful around hobos, and that's echoed in London's book, although not explicitly.

London's stories are an unglamorous view of such hobo staples as train hopping, which in reality could get one maimed or killed. There were murders, and a criminal element, yet among the mainstream, a sense of code and honor. They did go around and beg for food if short on cash, but their life wasn't entirely about avoiding work.

In an earlier age, many probably would have become mountain men or trappers, content to live an independent life away from civilization. Most didn't become town drunks or the happy neighborhood tramp. Their life was about travel, being in constant motion and London clearly found it an adventure with plenty of challenges for the type of man he was at the time. 

I was aware of hobos and similar wanderers out there, and most of the old timer homeless avoided them and advised me to do the same. I resisted the temptation to visit hobo camps and rail byways that had their codes written describing the area, and never stayed near railroad tracks at night. 

It wasn't a matter of whether the danger was truth or myth, but that there wasn't much margin for error out there. That's why the risks London took in his book looked even more impressive once I'd been out there for a while. A robbery or beating could be catastrophic to a homeless person, and danger was really danger, not like in a TV show or movie where people luck out or are too tough to take on.

I once saw a young man emerge one morning from the levee camp area after an obvious beating, and it was clear that if he couldn't have walked out under his own power, he'd have had to lay out there until discovered by someone (who didn't mug him). He was a big strong guy, not someone you'd pick a fight with, but like I said, it wasn't like the movies. The guys who attacked him had simply waited till he went to sleep that night. 

His strength meant nothing, and in fact was a disadvantage. The two assailants couldn't take the chance he'd get up and start fighting back, so the attack was sudden and very violent. Luckily he was smart enough to recognize that they weren't going to kill him so stayed down and took the beating, which could have been a lot worse.

That's a tough choice he had to make, and the best way to avoid such situations was to stay away from places like camps and railroad tracks where hobos hung out. That was possible because I had a car and could keep moving, which London didn't have, but he still adhered to the same principle, that movement was survival. Of the three books discussed, his was the most real to me out there.

I did research the subject of hobos, and learned some of the codes and such, but it's dicey to put things in a story purely from research. Much of what I read about the homeless gets a lot of things wrong, so figure it must be the same for tramps. As a result, they are a shadowy presence in the book, as it was in reality for me.

...Ivy...

It's been almost two years since Ivy passed away on March 17th, 2017, and she's been on my mind more than last year. Part of that is because as my book nears completion, most of the work is on the second half which includes her death.

The first draft of the book ended in February 2017, on the one year anniversary of us becoming homeless, and even up to the third draft, I still seriously considered keeping that original ending. However, Ivy had emerged in the second half as a major part of the plot, becoming the "face" of both the promo business and blog, and even in death, a catalyst that helped mobilize efforts that literally rescued me from the street. It was appropriate to make it about her whole life.

I've described her story in earlier blog entries, but one aspect stood out this month, her emergence as the face of virtually all of my projects. It started when I started my Twitter account a few years ago. It was intended to promote my music, but none had been recorded yet, so was treated as an internet radio station playing an eclectic mix.

It gained a thousand followers, and that seemed good enough as a place holder set up until some original music was created. The thing that was on my mind at the time was, how to go about growing the audience from there.

I had been taking pictures with my iPhone and was enjoying editing those on various photo apps. The long range plan was to be able to produce my own promo and album covers. Most of the people around me didn't like having their pictures taken, and neither did Ivy, but she had no choice in the matter. Thus, her career as a model began.

Ivy's reluctance to be photographed changed once it became a professional situation, with payment in extra treats and food after sessions. Her white hair and big eyes were ideal for creating photos with graphic effects, and I literally took thousands of pictures of her.

 I used one of her in a blue hooded jacket as my Twitter avatar, and the result was a surprise. People, particularly women, started to follow the account and it began to grow at a thousand a month.

One Fourth of July weekend, I was at a dinner, and put one of the festive American Flag napkins on her back (which slipped forward like a scarf) and took the picture you see today as the avatar on both the Twitter and Facebook accounts. Once that became the symbol of the Boogie Underground, the Twitter account grew to over two hundred thousand in a little under two years.

I've never changed that photo, except to put a copyright notice on it, and have always kept it as the company logo, so to speak. I've often wondered at the success of her image, and the main thing that comes to me is that Ivy projected a friendly and sweet personality along with the patriotic colors. A cute little dog is hard to resist.

Ivy probably never knew that she had become the Boogie Underground's super model, but did understand that something important was going on when the iPhone was pointed at her. She was a little diva, and limited photo sessions to a couple of minutes, but when engaged, would pose and make a wide variety of faces. 

The sessions were structured, and I always used the same words and tonal inflections so that over time, she knew when a big smile was required or when to show a more reflective air. It was always more effective if the camera set to rapidly shoot for a couple of minutes, as she had gotten into the habit of making the same face if it was a posed "smile for the camera" situation.

Her modeling skills became vital in 2017. Freelance drafting jobs were hard to come by, and job applications didn't go very far for a homeless person. However, some regular income did start to come in from promotion work on social media using ads featuring Ivy. It was an important development that helped me begin to feel productive again, and to have hopes that our ordeal could someday end.

Having a dog who could pose like a model was more than simply useful or a good selling point for ads, it was also a lot of fun during a time when things felt dreary and hopeless. We spent many wonderful hours getting good pictures, which were then processed into ads, and as payment was in advance from kind and enthusiastic customers, the rewards were immediate and concrete. In Ivy's case, it was slices of baked chicken, a real favorite. It helped our spirits to an extent that's hard to describe without it sounding like fantasy, but in the context of life as it was then, it felt like a miracle.

Ivy didn't make it out, and looking back, it was obvious that her heart condition was getting worse, and deep down, I knew that there was a chance she'd die out there. Still, it felt so sudden, and to this day, I still feel the loss of a good friend who was there at the lowest point of my life, and never broke faith with our friendship.

I've changed nothing since. Every picture is still up, and she's still the face of The Boogie Underground. It's not that I can't let go, but a matter of respect. People who do great things get statues or memorials, and in Ivy's case, she helped build this blog and it's social media presence, and so she'll live on here.

The book will have her statue in it. It'll have to be constructed with words, which I believe will last longer than stone anyway.

...update on the final draft...

I had hoped to have the final draft complete by December 31st, but couldn't manage it. Most of that month was spent trying to move the manuscript into the Windows 10 and Android environment and dealing with the technical problems that came up.

I eventually solved the problem by just staying in the iOS environment for now, and will deal with getting it into Word manuscript and ebook format when the book is done. Trying to do it all at once wasn't a good idea.

The book chapters are assembled, with a working total of 36 chapters, most of which are done. I'll need to rewrite three chapters, and do the final revisions on six.

The actual planned total will be 24 chapters. Some of the working sections will be combined into larger chapter, etc, but are being kept separate until it's time to do the layout for ebook formatting.

One of the things I saw was that the chapter order had to be changed and better transitions written. I've said in earlier blog entries that the book would be combining first and third person narrative, which makes the story more vivid, but wasn't happy with the flow because there was a chance that the reader could find the shift of perspective confusing or abrupt. You can get away with that in a movie, but not in a book written by anyone not named James Joyce.

I came up with a perfect narrative approach in January and am writing out the new transition passages. The various changes in mood, pace, and style now hang together and won't seem fragmented or abrupt. I hope it'll be a rich reading experience for any of you who read the book when it comes out.

I'm still thinking in terms of publication by late Spring or Summer at the absolute latest. As said earlier, there's reasons it shouldn't come out later so that's the deadline for all this.

- Al Handa

djboogieunderground@gmail.com

The Al & Ivy Homeless Literary Journal Archive:

There are earlier blog entries on the Delta Snake Review section of this site that aren't on the Road page:
http://deltasnake.blogspot.com

Cover Reveal For Hide In Plain Sight

This is the cover for the upcoming book, Hide In Plain Sight, hopefully out sometime in the summer of 2018.

-Al Handa

djboogieunderground@gmail.com

On The Road With Al and Ivy: A Homeless Literary Chronicle - Dec. 13th, 2018

"Homer died two hundred years ago, or more, and we still speak of him as though he were living...the others he wrote in his epic of the Trojan War. They are mere shadows, given substance by his songs; which alone retain the force of life; the power to soothe or stir or draw tears."

- Robert Graves (Homer's Daughter 1955)

I celebrated a half million views in the November blog entry, and this month should see another milestone; the completion of the final draft of the book.

It'll still need to be line edited (and possibly refined as a result) but I decided last month that it was time to finish. I remember good friend, author and editor, Melody Ramone, once telling me that there'd come a time when it felt "finished" and added half jokingly that I'd also might be sick to death of the manuscript.

That was certainly true, though being "sick of it" in my case is more a case of the musical equivalent, which is feeling that the work is as good as it's going to get and will risk becoming worse (or boring) if it keeps getting fussed over.

When McGraw and I worked on music for our Handa-McGraw International albums and YouTube channel (Electric Fog Factory), we differentiated between music for recording and live work.

We always stopped jamming and trying out new arrangements on a recorded piece when it felt right. After that, it was all about getting the right take, and technical perfection was always secondary to feel. For example, on the YouTube channel there are several numbers that were intended as demos, but never replaced. That's because a finished version hadn't been done that had the right feel.

My book is similar to an album, mainly because the artistic sensibility is musical. It had stopped being a chronological journal by the second draft and became a work driven by a musical sensibility.

...empathy, sympathy, and pity...

I also avoided passages, particularly about characters, that delineated some sort of main theme or "timeless" concept. There are several in the book whose lives are instead described dispassionately, or without judgement (as much as possible).

A neutral stance isn't always easy to achieve, because of the natural desire to steer the reader into feeling a particular emotion, particularly sympathy. There's temptation to slant or change the characterization to do that. Which isn't forbidden in a novel, of course, but not desirable in my case.

The neutral stance is the most empathetic. That can result in passages where the reader might ask, is Al condoning what the character is doing or lacking any pity for the person?

There are parts of the book, for example, where a person eating out of a garage can is described in detail. Not just the physical minutiae, but the mentality. It's a scene without declarations of shock or horror, and written from the point of view of an observer who was also hungry, felt hopeless, and could understand where the scavenger was coming from.

I found that the first drafts of the scenes (added in the fifth run through) were as good as those would ever be. Every attempt to revise it took it further away from the raw, effective description and "judgement" began to creep in.

It was transitioning away from a mentality that could only exist in that moment to a mannered one stemming from the detachment that comes later when being able to eat well. My view of those incidents also differed between the early incidents and those seen much later. 

In the earlier passage, I was seeing it for the first time, the second was after being among the homeless for several months and had a clear idea of who scavenged food and why. 

It is a stark, visceral act to scavenge food, especially in front of people. My own feeling is that it should never happen, that society must make sure that no one is ever forced to do such a thing. That's obvious to anyone with even a shred of humanity.

To write about it from my point of view would risk making it about me and my feelings. To describe it from their point of view, humanizes the image, and requires a dispassionate lens, but in the end tells their story in a way that has a chance to be revelatory. The pathos is greater if the character isn't turned into an archetype. 

When the later incident didn't shock me, it wasn't because I had "become hardened," or self involved. There was an understanding among many of the homeless that anyone that desperate should be helped. How some did so could strike you as weird, but motivated by a humanity shaped by the moment. There was one collective effort for a mentally ill scavenger, described in the book that at the time, struck me both as very eccentric but filled with human warmth.

Food and water was offered freely, particularly if the person was new, and being stingy was a rare act in the circles I traveled in. In the summer months, for example, friends would come by and make sure we had cold water to drink and enough to eat.

...acceptance...

The main thing people gave each other was acceptance. 

Most homeless are acutely aware that they're being judged, often harshly. If they saw a person going through a garbage can, they almost never interrupted the act. I go into more detail about why in the book, but there were good reasons for that. 

The best time to approach the person, as a fellow homeless, was later on when the person was done. For one thing, there were various reasons a person could be doing it. Some had nothing to do with hunger. 

One reason was that we lived among a great many who were mentally ill. Some were harmless, some weren't. Interrupting a mentally ill person at a dumpster could trigger a unpredictable reaction, particularly at night. 

We learned to observe first before acting.

Several of the people who became friends had observed me for a few days before approaching. Some weren't sure I was "all there" because of my severely bad haircut at the time, constantly talking to myself, and the odd habit (to them) of carrying Ivy instead of using a leash (not to mention constantly talking to her also). There were reasonable explanations for the above, of course, but they couldn't know that. 

Being constantly short of sleep and good meals, often in fear, sometimes angry, and being dirty created a feral mindset that showed in the early drafts. My prose at some points could have been alternately mistaken for a motorhead rap, a paranoid who saw danger at every turn, and most valuable to my book, a realization that, at least in the present, he was one of them, had to live with them, and that they were just people like him. It's a mood that was worth preserving.

...the Ivy chapter...

For example, I'm glad I wrote the chapter about Ivy's death in the early drafts. Writing about it now as it really happened then would be difficult. The existing chapter captures the physical impact of devastation that fades with time.

One key point that the original account captured was that after Ivy died, an important link to sanity was gone. Admitting that I "lost it" is easy, but keeping in the actual thoughts and behavior of that moment that cycled rapidly through anger, ingratitude, pain, and even blasphemy would be a tempting candidate for self editing. Also, for several hours, I lost all awareness of my surroundings, and disregarded every precaution normally taken in a homeless area at night. 

There was shock, then a raw paralyzing fright that set in once the adrenalin was gone. Even as she died, I could still at least hang on to the notion that superhuman effort or desperate prayer might work, because even long odds sustain hope.

There's an old term, "staring into the abyss," that captures it perfectly. The dreams of the previous four months died that day, yet on that terrible night after it all happened, what actually ran through my mind surprised me even then. It wasn't suicide, getting numb from drugs, striking out in anger, or any of that. I'd have welcomed apathy at that point.

I think that any of us who has such a moment, where a stark truth hits so hard that it renders everything meaningless, and I think it's different for everyone, has to reaffirm something at their core, whether it's faith or a choice, and move into and through that "void."

The term "reaffirm" is a big theme in the second half of the book. There was a decision made four months earlier that turned out to be relevant that sad night, and pulled me out and forward. Like a ship that had been in a terrible storm, found itself well off it's path, but knew it's course and continued the journey. Though it's not always obvious, there's a path that starts in the first chapter all the way to the last.

The first draft ended in February just after the one year anniversary of becoming homeless. In fact, the ending had already been written. I considered leaving it that way, but decided that Ivy was too important to the story and kept writing, something another writer would understand.

She projected so much personality and helped galvanize so much help. If my writing ability is up to the level of ambition in this book, then perhaps you'll be rooting for me to succeed for at least pity's sake, but will most certainly admire Ivy's great big spirit. She started off homeless as a pup, but only got more indomitable no matter what life offered. Make no mistake, she knew we were homeless.

In the larger sense, everything I want to say in the book is there, and it's time to finish it. If all goes well, I'll be able to tell everyone that the final draft is completed on December 31st.

"Nothing, including alcohol, ranked as high as coffee for the Civil War soldier. Men drank it before, during, after, and in lieu of meals. Many wrote of it in letters home, praising the soothing qualities of a pistol-hot cup of grind."

- Thomas R. Flagel (The History Buff's Guide To The Civil War)

Coffee is one of mankind's great loves. It's regarded both as a necessity and a luxury worth paying extra for drinks that have less coffee in it. Most of the world actually prefers tea but like soccer as opposed to NFL football, it'll never replace coffee in the Western Hemisphere.

It only took me a few weeks of living in a car to regard coffee as just an occasional indulgence.

One problem with coffee is that makes you go to the bathroom too much. Going to the bathroom out there was often a real hassle. The other problem is that it's pricey by the cup. Even at a place like MacDonald's where it costs a buck, that was a day's worth of decent meals for my dog.

I eventually started buying a six pack of eight ounce generic cola for a dollar fifty for any needed caffeine boost, and most mornings that did just fine. Part of the reason that worked was because I was primarily a tea drinker for most of my life, so while I liked coffee, it wasn't irreplaceable.

Also, caffeine wasn't a useful drug out there. It could be tense enough, particularly at night, and if I could relax enough to sleep for a few hours, then that was more important. If sleep didn't come that night, I needed to be able to nap during the day.

I missed a lot of things but coffee wasn't high on the list, and have to admit, that was a surprise.

"And honey is the holiest thing ever was, hive, comb and earwax, the food for glory..."

- James Joyce (Finnegan's Wake)

Now honey, that was a different thing altogether. I wasn't a big fan of the stuff in regular life, but out there it was invaluable.

Bread is a cornerstone in any cheap diet, and a good loaf in a variety of flavors can be had for a dollar. Honey is perfect because it's affordable, makes bread taste great, and can be kept in a car as it doesn't spoil.

Honey has a different aura than other cheap foods. For example, beans and bread are quite filling and nutritious, but let's face it, it's still beans and bread. Now, bread with honey on it, well, that's like a snack at home with all it's comforts.

A nice cheap sweet snack was no small thing. Other amazingly cheap goodies, like oatmeal cream sandwiches, could turn white sugar into a punishing experience. I finished a box by scraping out the filling and just eating the cookies, but the joy was less than transcendent.

I don't consume much honey now, but like my dearly departed Birkenstocks, it was a friend when I needed it.

"How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! How short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be."

- Charles Darwin (On The Origin Of Species)

Alpha types tend to interpret "survival of the fittest" as a validation of aggression or masculinity, which is really more Nitchzie (or Ayn Rand) superman stuff. It is a part of natural selection, but the concept is more nuanced.

Being the biggest baddest dude may help get the women interested, but that only meant that he could win a head butting contest with other males. Assuming they fight fair.

Mankind didn't survive because of physical prowess. If we had depended purely on alphas, we'd have been on the desert menu for saber tooth tigers after their main course of he-men. The list of animals that can kick a human butt in a fair fight is long and beyond the scope of this blog entry. Though making such a list might be fun...maybe in a future blog.

What enabled us to evolve into beings that can create thousand dollar hamburgers and shoes was the ability to form groups that could forget political differences long enough to use their intelligence to manufacture weapons and gang up on the savage beasts (most of whom are heading quickly towards extinction, particularly if their body parts are thought to increase male verility).

Looking at the world now, it's obvious that man's main enemy and competitor on the food chain is man. Darwin noted that the competition within a species is more intense.

An invasion by martians might give mankind a reason to unite, but with our superior intelligence and egos that verge on God complexes, any resistance would be crippled by large numbers of people who'd prefer to collaborate and profit by treachery.

Idealists who believe in our innate niceness might scoff at that, but given the large number of people who wish they could become vampires or believe E.T.s built the pyramids, it's clear that the seeds of treason will always be present.

Well, maybe that is Darwinism after all. Like I said, the subject is full of nuance.

Anyway...the reason I discuss capitalism so much is that it is, in the Western World, more than God, the true state religion. Out there in the streets, it was a word that had a lot of relevance.

Like any philosophy or doctrine, capitalism often becomes what people say it is. Much of my early anxiety and fear of the streets was due to Hollywood and literary depictions of it being a tough place ruled by apex predators. Which, as I've said in the past, was found to be only partly true.

Capitalism is really about money. Nothing else.

Sure, there's things like power and status but none of that happens without money. Where that money goes and who gets it is only part of the doctrine. The comparisons to Darwin and survival of the fittest just tends to be one of many platitudes to keep the other 99% quiet and respectful.

The various species on this planet actually survive because of a multitude of successful strategies, but the main one is intelligence. "Street smarts" isn't just about being amoral or a supreme BS'er to survive. Most of the survivor types in my book were smart enough not to play the usual games.

"But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience."

- George Orwell (Essay: Why I Write)

I generally write out of sequence, as for whatever reason, the parts and passages tend to spill out of the consciousness in seemingly random order. That might be due to playing music, which may seem linear but isn't always so in the composition stage.

I wrote out the first draft knowing that the book wasn't opening in a satisfactory way, but kept writing, figuring to address it on the next run through. It was on the fourth pass where the first chapter really came together.

The second draft mainly added all of my thoughts and opinions, which would have resulted in an annoyingly subjective stream of consciousness book...but it was important in that the passages did delineate what I wanted the book to "say" and by the fourth draft was taking those mini essays out and putting in actual story, dialogue, and character actions to not only show what formed those opinions, but doing it a way that lets the reader decide what it means.

There were incidents that turned out to be connected to other passages and it was surprising to realize that there were things going on that weren't comprehended at the time.

For example, I saw things at the county social assistance office that seemed like simple friendly interaction between the homeless and gangs and totally missed the well oiled operation where dealers not only obtained ebt cards for sale but literally harvested homeless druggies for their monthly checks like sheep for their wool.

Also, as I constructed the story of one young woman, the various passages when combined showed her being groomed to become a truck stop hooker and that she was in fact being guarded and not just partying with the same group of guys. The final night she was in the area ended up in a scene that took on a much darker aspect than planned.

Part of the process was becoming more aware of what really happened so as a result, the decision was made to leave in descriptions as seen then, but tied together with better hindsight, with no later judgements or attempts at pathos. The reader can make their own judgement and conclusions, and even better, get a glimpse into their own feelings and attitudes by their reaction to the stories.

I'm still working that part out, how to describe the story as I saw it, and not as I see it now.

"Civilization has increased man's producing power a hundred-fold, and through mismanagement the men of civilization live worse than the beasts." 

- Jack London (The People Of The Abyss)

George Orwell saw Jack London as a person who truly understood fascism because of his atavistic Darwinian sensibilities. He also understood London because like him, he was also an "unreliable" socialist who saw the real world as opposed to trying to fit it into a doctrinal lens.

Both actually went in and lived in poor slum areas, and at times were among the homeless (though both had a different experience with it) and wrote about it. Homeless literature, particularly the first hand experience type, isn't a new phenomenon.

London did it when he was a successful, well off writer, and took the precaution to create a safe house during the early homeless phase of the book writing. There were points where he used it rather than tough it out on the streets, though one couldn't fault that as the intent was to create a first hand account rather than a memoir.

He wanted to understand slum life in London, who was living it, and portray the actual people and what they were like. What he saw deeply affected him. This was clear later in the book, when his feelings about the economic system and attitudes that made such a poor class even possible in a rich society came out. 

The focus was on people and their stories for the most part, and the understanding that poverty created a lifestyle that literally trapped people in it. Even more importantly, he was perceptive enough to realize that the poor wasn't one big group but several subcultures.

Orwell, who was inspired by London, engaged in similar forays into poverty zones and developed a similar take. Like his predecessor, the descriptions were detailed and remarkably free of judgement or preaching and more powerful because of that.

Orwell wrote two books, "Down and Out In London and Paris," and "The Road To Wigan Pier," both still worthwhile reading. The first part of the Wigan Pier book, which describes his experiences working among the Welsh Coal miners is a masterful, a true classic.

The second half of the Wigan Pier book, is a bit off topic, but worth describing. It assumes a devil's advocate role and discusses the faults of English socialism, and succeeded so well that the publisher of the book, a Socialist, felt it necessary to add a disclaimer that Orwell's essay in the second half didn't reflect the mainstream socialist view.

One of the offending passages said that socialists were perceived as sandal wearing "bearded fruit juice drinkers trying to eek out a few more years" of life, which also shows that the health food craze isn't a new phenomena.

As I said earlier, both he and London were considered "unreliable" socialists.  

The thing that affected me the most wasn't their descriptions of privation. A typical lunch before homelessness was often just beans, or cheese and bread. I didn't necessarily see having to eat a can of pork and beans in a car as a hardship.

What hit me was how important the mental aspect was, and the crippling effect of hopelessness and apathy. My own scariest moment wasn't due to any of the crime that was around or any physical threat.

It was when it hit me that the situation could be my life and future. It stemmed from a single incident that, in a manner of speaking, triggered an avalanche. A loss that any normal person might shrug off but felt cataclysmic at the time. That didn't happen to London, who could leave anytime. However, he did see that hopelessness was crippling, and that it was accentuated by the lifestyle. 

...the night life...

In one instance, he tried to stay out that night and sleep, then try to find a job in the morning. Instead, he had to join the multitude who were constantly chased out of doorways and parks, and finding that the police finally let them sleep when the parks opened during the day. Exhausted, and hungry, and with rain coming, he gave up and went back to the safe house. 

Seeing the homeless asleep on park benches during the day in America is generally dismissed as booze or drug fueled stupors, and certainly, that can be the case. Just as often, though, it's because they had to stay moving during the night, but for different reasons than London described. 

I devote a couple of chapters to that. I've stressed the importance of having a car in past blogs, that keeping it in running condition was the priority. The reason was that without it, I could end up on foot, carrying as much of my belongings as possible along with Ivy and in constant danger of being mugged at night.

In those chapters I reconstructed the night routines of various people that I saw. I know about it because during that six week period when my car was dead in the water, I had to think about what would happen if it was towed. There was at least one store manager who was trying his best to get the police to do that even though it was parked out on the street.

So, I watched the night people, where they went, their routines, where the safe areas were, etc. I didn't really think that if it came to being a back packer that it would stay that way for long. There were a couple of RV and car homeless that would have taken me in if that happened.

The problem was, that was an option only if they were still around.

For example, a couple and a woman who was part of an enclave, would dog sit Ivy so I could try to get a job, but the couple was chased out of town by the sheriffs department, the other by some store management and police. 

So suddenly within a two day period, no dog sitters. That's how unpredictable life was out there. I had to assume that if the car went away, we could be on our own for some period of time, and that it was dangerous to simply wander about without any plan or knowledge of the night scene.

The basic rule of survival on foot at night was either have a safe place (not to sleep, that would be stupid to do out in the open), or keep moving (at least until the "safe time"). 

The transient sleeping in a park archetype was described in London's book, and is still seen today. His comment is still relevant. He asked those who might assume it was just a lazy or dissolute person to realize that it might actually be the exhausted sleep of someone who'd been harried and moved along all night by the police. Once he experienced the night they had, they became real people and faces.

I can add, you would sleep out in public because bedding down in a private place is potentially very dangerous. Sleeping in an isolated hiding place is the equivalent of walking through dark alleys at night.

What I want to do is present the reader with faces and lives. Instead of an image of an unfortunate herd suitable for framing in a 90 second news spot or web article that mainly quotes business and property owners, it'll have stories like that of a young homeless woman escaping abuse and probably headed for a life of prostitution, drugs, or criminality. Put there by people who aren't homeless, and as a prostitute, serving members of respectable society not interested in helping her. 

Her story and others like it should say all what needs to be said. I think good decent people, like the ones who helped me so much won't need to be told what they're seeing.

I hope the book does a good job of letting you all see what I saw.

- Al Handa

  Dec. 13, 2018

...cover reveal for Hide In Plain Sight...

This is the cover for the upcoming book, Hide In Plain Sight, hopefully out sometime in 2018.

-Al Handa

djboogieunderground@gmail.com

The Al & Ivy Homeless Literary Journal Archive:

There are earlier blog entries on the Delta Snake Review section of this site that aren't on the On The Road page:
http://deltasnake.blogspot.com

On The Road With Al & Ivy: A Literary Homeless Chronicle - Oct. 19, 2018

"Though frightening, your dream is a significant portent. You must know the Gods have decreed that the lot of the living is to grieve. Your dream ordains mourning for the one who survives."

- The Gilgamesh (Gerald J. Davis 2014 translation)

"I have heard it said that there are men who read in books to convince themselves there is a God."

- James Fenimore Cooper (Last Of The Mohicans)

"...I was playing the guitar but heard an orchestra in my head."

- John Fahey

As of this writing (of this opening section), this blog has reached a wonderful milestone; a half million visits, virtually all of it for the "On The Road With Al & Ivy" homeless literary journal that began on the Delta Snake page and was later split off into it's own blog. The half million figure is the total for the two blog pages.

The earlier blog was called the Delta Snake Review, which was intended to be a continuation of my 80s blues and jazz newsletter (and later website), and to continue writing the music instrument reviews that I had been doing for the ePinions site (before it closed down the review sections).

I've been writing since the 80s, back then for my newsletter and as a freelance who was able to get work in regional weekly papers and later on the Internet. I've always identified as a writer, among other things, but found that freelance work tended to make the end game all about money and the prestige level of the customer, and not writing as art. A process that moves art into the realm of sales, which creates the age old artistic dichotomy of expression and craft.

The circulation of the publication (and it's grand arbiter, the Editor) was seen as the writer's "audience," at least by conventional wisdom according to writer magazines and other experts. 

Any freelance writer with half a brain quickly realizes that the real "audience" is that one person who has the power to buy the piece. A person has a better chance of making a sale working at a jewelry counter.

That didn't make me cynical. I'd been a musician, I already knew the entertainment business was brutal, and had my own reasons for playing music in spite of that, and that went for writing too. Freelance did teach me some valuable skills that I'll cover in a future blog.

I self-published to be able to write about music without anyone's approval, and found my audience. Sometimes that was a relatively small number of paid subscribers like with the Delta Snake Blues Review, or a larger number like with my ePinions instrument reviews with 370,000 visits.

...what's really important...

My priority was always audience, or to have actual people reading my writing. If it was profitable, great, if not, fine. 

The thing is, although writing for one's satisfaction and growth is important, public expression is about reaching people. If not, I would just tap all this out on my iPad, enjoy the inner rewards and be done with it.

If I had been like that, perhaps I'd now still be out there in a car, struggling alone without my good pal Ivy and thinking it was all fate (or punishment, more on that later in this blog).

Instead, because I was a writer, i kept writing, I called out for help and was saved by that very audience that read my blog.

I called out for help in spite of every shame instinct because, among other things, writing had taught me that real art was expression and that included possibly looking bad. 

...Good writing is about truth...

Truth isn't some corny Hollywood movie line. It's the difference between a work that connects with people and one that's forgotten quickly.

The subject of truth in art is, of course, much larger than what can be covered in this blog entry, but in my case, it was all about how art is a connection to the real self.

The musical equivalent is being able to play the sound that's in your head, and not having it filtered by concerns like money or approval, or limited by technical ability. Which is why "practice" in any art is important. You're not training to be play lessons or sound like some legend. It's to develop the technique to be able to play what you want to play.

Another way to say it is if you can master music scales on your instrument, you can possibly master yourself. Those scales and etudes are nowhere near as difficult as the music in the mind that wants to come out. 

Technical skill is a tool or path. Some stay stuck in it, some can move on. Neither is better or worse actually, but if you want to become a Van Gogh, the path is beyond the technical.

In terms of writing, what I'm talking about is being able to honestly write what's in your head. "Being honest" is a common writing axiom, but way too many writers interpret that as simply being blunt about other things and people, or listing things that are really designed to titillate.

There's things that are comfortable to say, and others that aren't. Society has made it easier to come out and say that drug's caused one's fall, for example, but it's not so easy to admit to the deeds done because of that habit.

If I had tried to finish the book out there in the car, I'd have probably not mentioned pimps and drug dealers, even in my blog. For my safety if nothing else. Fear is an effective censor.

The homeless scene was a sprawling collection of people, some of whom caused trouble, could get you in trouble, couldn't help but get into trouble, or avoided trouble. It might seem tempting to treat them as a purely sympathetic huddled mass, and it'd be OK to do that if I saw it that way.

But it would be artistically dishonest in my case if I saw it differently. There was no Godfather movie type glamor out there, no tough guy mean streets, or anything that would fit in a Hollywood film.

...life on the streets...

The "streets" are all too often portrayed as a tough Darwinian world where "street smarts" and toughness are a virtue, and the enemy is straight society and the cops.

As I've said in past blog entries, it's true if it is and isn't when it isn't.

One of the things that hit me out there was how different the reality of street life was out there, as opposed to what it seemed to be in books, TV and movies. It was supposed to be a world full of bad cops, criminals who were really rebels with loyalty and heart, and a poor noble multitude who had been forsaken by a materialistic society.

The real "street" is very Darwinan (and very capitalist), and it's as repressive as any police state (and not from the cops). All the elements are there; from leaders who look out for number one, brown shirt type thugs, and most importantly for any police state to exist, a vast system of informants and commissar types who keep the faith.

Fascism has become a stereotype with Nazi images as the default portrait, but it is, and always has been really a modern ideology, an outlook concerned about power. It's about control and the use of force and can develop anywhere. George Orwell wrote that it was a development that came after the 19th century colonial/imperialistic period (in a nutshell anyway, it's explained a more complex way in his essays).

Put more plainly, it was a world with sharks and little fish.

You had to be selfish out there. My goal was to get Ivy and me out, to survive, and without committing any crimes if at all possible. I did manage to not commit crimes, and survive, but in all honesty, it was because I was rescued by a lot of good people, and not due to any heroic acts on my part.

I didn't rob anyone, but in the later drafts of the book, as my life began to return to "normal," it became apparent that for whatever reason, good or not, I had to not act on or report on a good many crimes out there.

There was a woman, for example, out there that everyone could see was getting too deep into drugs in the worst possible place, and was being cultivated by a dealer/pimp whom no one dared cross. Another young woman was cultivated by a man from respectable society who showered her with gifts then disappeared after using her. Another guy was almost certainly a sociopath who preyed on men, and the list could go on, other than the usual (and true) disclaimer that most of the people out there were good and decent.

Sure, I didn't see the actual crimes...no one can ignore that sort of thing unless absolutely heartless. I'd have had to take the risk of telling the police. But that possible male predator, for example, actually targeted me before another homeless guy. I sensed a trap and avoided any contact, but the next guy didn't and only then I realized what was happening and how lucky I was.

I also kept my mouth shut.

It happened in that awful period when my car was immobile for two months on a street, and there was good reason to not say say anything; the most obvious being that there was no way to leave and avoid reprisal. 

...the early drafts...

The early drafts projected a sense of abject fear, covered by a mask of bravado and street smarts. It was tempting to edit out the fearful ruminations and portray myself as a brave soul with a faithful dog that formed an indomitable team.

The reality was that the homeless life took a real toll, and I reacted in a variety of ways that showed strength, but also weakness and frailty. There was apathy around, as described in past blog entries, but the underlying element was always fear.

It even affected Ivy. She certainly grew into an indispensable hero, but also came to realize that I was the main link to safety in a life centered around a car seat, and experienced moments of fear and anxiety.

It wasn't doggie paranoia or separation anxiety. There was at least one attempt to break into the car to get her that was broken up by a homeless friend who intervened. It was by this seemingly well off couple that had been shadowing me for  couple of days. The attempt to grab her through a partially open window was traumatic.

It's part of a bigger story in the book, but in a nutshell, there were more than a few people who tried to get dogs taken away from the homeless for various reasons.

One reason that honesty is difficult in art is we all like to avoid criticism. We prefer to create work that people will like, to enjoy, and let's face it, to perhaps buy. No one buys things that makes them feel bad.

The fear described in the book wasn't cowardice. It was close to some things experienced as a child, but nothing I could say was experienced before, but in writing honestly about it, the chance has to be taken that people would consider it cowardice or not caring about those around me.

No one will learn anything new if I just get into a Grapes of Wrath trip (the movie version) and write about a glorious struggle in broad terms and beloved archetypes.

So the book has to be honest, and part of that means I have to risk readers seeing all that I did out there to survive, and being critical of me. A true writer can't be thin skinned.

...get out of town stranger...

Ivy and I did have to do many things to survive. Things I never imagined we were capable of, both good and bad. We were scared and at times frightened out of our wits, but pulled together and managed to create a life out there that sustained us until I was able to leave that car.

As we all know, Ivy didn't make it out, though I took her ashes out with me. I'll only bury her when we get home, and we'll know when that is. Like said in an earlier entry, we found out what home was out there, and I'll know it when I see it again.

Back to honesty; one thing that made me leery of leaving certain parts of the first drafts intact was how much I obviously depended on Ivy. The first thought was that it was projecting an awful lot onto her, but as the drafts were refined, it became obvious that she changed a lot and grew. 

That little shih tzu was indeed a sentient being that could comprehend things and learn. She was transcendent at times, but also did things that in one instance forced me to flee a city and never go back. No one was hurt, and in the great scheme of things in homeless life, forgivable, and if truth be told, ultimately my fault.

Plus in retrospect, it was pretty funny. Not so at the time, but now, it's funny to picture me and Ivy having to get out of town before the sheriff deputies, called in by a bunch of old ladies, arrived to arrest us.

My past analogy about having formed a pack, and its implications will become clearer to the reader after reading many of the chapters. It's not about friendship in the usual human ways, but how life itself responds to adversity.

By being honest about how I lived out there, and in expressing my often less than heroic thoughts, I think the book will be less about cardboard heroes and villains and more about things that people will recognize as real life. Life didn't end when I found myself living in a car.

Like I said earlier, the reality was that I was rescued, and the real heroes are those blog readers and friends that decided I was worth saving. The reason they knew about my plight was that I was a writer and that skill too saved me.

...getting back to the Delta Snake...

The blog started off as the Delta Snake, which by 2016 had drawn about 5000 visits. It was intended to be a "sequential magazine" that had features to be added as each was written and not in groups presented on publication dates.

The early "On The Road With Al & Ivy" entries started off under the Delta Snake banner but had to be split off into it's own blog after Twitter flagged tweets from the Google site, blogspot.com. By that time, traffic had grown to over 100,000 visits and I figured that growth would stop once the blog had to be moved.

Instead it kept growing, and it was a real source of pride and comfort out there.

Art, in this case writing, and the people it reached saved my life. That's as rich as an artist can get. This morning the blog reached a half million visits, Friday October 19, 2018.

I feel profound gratitude, and thank you all for the greatest gift a writer could get, an audience that reads his work.

...on the eve of a music gig...

I'm writing this section on the eve of my first live musical performance since the late 70s. Back then, I had played with the a punk band (first in my area) and later founded a blues band, The Delta Snake, that went nowhere but gave my newsletter (and now a music blog) it's name.

It'll be at the Central Illinois Pagan Pride Festival, and I was asked by one of it's organizers, author Melodie Ramone to play a couple of sets. I agreed as long as I didn't have to follow the Goth Metal Belly Dancers. No solo acoustic guitarist on this planet can follow that act.

I'll be performing a set of American and World "Primitive" music, a term that John Fahey used to describe his solo acoustic guitar music that influenced and inspired a generation of musicians that included Leo Kottke, George Winston, Robbie Basho and many others.

The first time I heard him play was in the early 70s at this place that eventually became the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California. He was the opening act on a bill the included Robbie Basho and folk legend Dave Van Ronk. He played first because he had to be at a later gig up north, and needed to get off early.

I was a teenager then, and hadn't even picked up a guitar yet. My musical background was as a violin player playing classical and show tunes in school events.

Fahey came on, and seemed to go into a trance, then started to play a medium tempo fingerpicking piece and from there the set flowed from song to song, only stopping at times to change the tuning on his guitar or switch to slide.

It was a mesmerizing performance, covering a lot of folk and blues styles but in a way I hadn't been heard before. Even my classically trained (and maybe a bit rigid) mind could tell that much of the music was as improvised as a jazz piece.

By the early 70s, folk and folk blues had become pretty much set in how it sounded, almost on the level of an oldies show, though perhaps hipper. The tonalities were familiar and crowd pleasing.

Fahey's music was similar in ways; it was essentially a concert version of folk and country blues instrumentals with one major difference, it freely moved in and out of dissonance, which was as different to my ears as avant-garde classical was to Mozart.

What he did during the  break was interesting, and I never saw any other performer do it. Fahey put his guitar down, lit up a cigarette and just sat there, calmly looking at the audience. 

The ending was even more unusual. After the set, he stood up, waved to acknowledge the applause, then jumped off the stage and ran up the hill towards the parking lot and gradually disappeared from view. We watched him run all the way to the parking lot, and I later learned he was eccentric like that.

After that concert, I bought my first Fahey album, "The Dance Of Death And Other Plantation Favorites," which is probably still one of my favorite recordings.

The key thing that influenced the purchase of a guitar afterwards wasn't the music per se, but that Fahey showed me that a person could create and live in a universe with just one instrument. You didn't need a band or orchestra, you could say it all with a guitar.

I think anyone who writes, or loves books knows this already.

...music is life...

In the earlier drafts of my book, music didn't seem very important. In fact, one of the earlier conclusions was that my love for music had degenerated into instrument collecting for it's own sake and was just one of the layers of the material world that was shed during a time of painful rediscovery.

It took some time and distance to realize that the conclusion was actually fueled by a deep sense of loss. A little part of me went away as each instrument in my collection was sold off to survive.

My blog entries, which first started in the Delta Snake section, originally show a person who thought that music (and the original conception of the book, the epic poem) would be a key element in surviving homelessness. 

I still had my instruments then, which were in storage, and there was still optimism that homelessness was just a temporary bump in the road. As things got worse, the carefree entries continued and masked a growing realization that it was all no longer a simple road trip.

As said in an earlier blog entry, it wasn't losing the valuable pieces that was depressing. There was still plenty of stuff left in the collection early on. It was when the last instruments, the cheap ones, were sold for just a few more days of survival that it hit home that things weren't going to get better.

My narrative in the first drafts expressed disillusionment about music as a lifestyle, about it being part of a past that had to be let go. That it all went away.

But that wasn't true. 

For one thing, I did come out of it with some instruments; a charango that no one would buy, and two harmonicas. All of which I shipped to the Midwest ahead of my arrival. The charango was both a survivor and now a treasured instrument.

Plus I did play music out there. 

It had to be done discreetly, as it wasn't smart to let the druggies out there know that my car had instruments that were easy to covert into quick cash (and more importantly, that Ivy might be in the car at the time it was broken into). 

Which was ironic as the charango was, at least according to legend, an instrument built to be easily hidden from the Spanish colonialists who ran Peru and Bolivia and made it illegal for natives to own a guitar. Whether that's true, I don't know, but it gave the charango mojo, so I chose to believe it.

I also avidly collected music for Spotify playlists, thanks to their customer service who gave me free time after finding out I was homeless. Though oddly enough, I rarely listened to the music afterwards.

It became too melancholy to play and after a while to even listen to music. I thought it was disillusionment about living a life that revolved around music, but it really was a profound sense of loss over a love that went back as early as I could remember.

...arrival...

I arrived in the Midwest in 2017, shell shocked, and even now, still have moments that feel like flashbacks. There was so much lost out there, and as parts come back, like music, it feels like I'm recovering pieces that were left out there.

One of the key parts of the book, and this is perhaps a small spoiler, is this recurring vision or dream of me sitting playing a guitar. How that vision changes and develops is one of the threads that run through the book. 

I constantly saw it in dreams and was puzzled at how it changed, but it was consistent in one respect; it was me, sitting, playing guitar and seen from the back.

When author Melodie Ramone asked to play at the Festival, I agreed quickly without much thought. Normally I'd have said no, as my main interest is in recording music for my YouTube channel, but she asked on a day that was a milestone; I had bought this beat up old acoustic guitar from a pawn shop, and was going to play a guitar for the first time in a few years.

That was a couple of months ago, and on this day, whether I'm truly ready or not, or even intend to play live again isn't the point.

When I go on Saturday morning at 11:00 am, I'll have another piece of my soul back, and maybe that vision that kept coming to me out there will become clearer. If John Fahey was right, that music comes out of the unconscious, then all will be revealed then.

If not, I'll keep playing till it is. 

...give me that old time religion...

One of the elements of the book that took the longest to integrate into the narrative was spirituality.

There was plenty of the old time religion out there. There was at least one Christian cult trying to recruit followers and another church with well heeled parishioners who were heartless with the homeless when no one was looking.

That's an important point, what goes on when people aren't looking. In mainstream Islam, for example, it's said that God looks more kindly on those who do good works out of the sight of others. 

This can run counter to Western practice, where doing charitable work is a popular PR exercise, and donors walk around with T shirts or other merchandise to commemorate their support.

That's not bad per se, but like all human endeavors, engaging in symbolism often leads to a gap between belief and practice. People can maintain appearances and treat it as practice. What they do when no one is looking is revealing.

...there are no atheists in a foxhole...

There is that old saying that there are no atheists in a foxhole (during a battle), and plenty of people out there looked to God to rescue them. I think it's a more nuanced concept, in that when things seem hopeless, it's natural to look for someone or something to rescue you, to hope or wish for a miracle. 

God tends to be the default option because so many people over the centuries have said that a miracle will come if you have faith.

Other popular saviors include angels, drill sergeant or alpha hero types who'll kick your butt and make you man up, Uncle Sam, fairy godmothers, true love, Lady Luck, and the one that was often more popular than God out there, the handsome Prince or hero who comes to save you.

I can list all those out with a wry (and slightly sad) grin now, but all those symbols or psychologies were out there, and often used by some pretty tough characters who understood those as basic human psychologies that could be manipulated.

People reacted differently to the homeless life. There were the barely hanging in there survivor types, some who seemed to thrive, but most had to deal with a variety of demons that made some easy prey for predators.

One common denominator was pain, and the way out on any narrow path not only took patience and faith, but physical and emotional endurance. That last element, endurance, was the real test. At first there's optimism, then hope, and then as things drag on, wishing and asking for rescue, and finally any end to the pain. At that point, looking for a hero can be dangerous.

...faith is all you need, maybe...

A key element of faith isn't that it gives one physical strength or triggers endorphins, but that it's rooted in the concept that the mind can make a decision that's not based on physical symptoms or the apparent reality surrounding you.

In other words, if you believe that the pain is temporary or something that can be overcome, then a decision can be made to endure. Religion can add the possibility of reward for keeping the faith.

That's not just a religious concept; if there was no ability to view the mind and body as separate, then torture would be a sure fire way to make people talk or confess. People would quit at the first obstacle, etc.

Still, enduring is easier said than done.

 I once related in a past blog that many of the homeless have a neutral attitude towards the drug use of others. It wasn't that it was viewed it as an activity that should be legal or something like that, but a recognition that the druggies were self medicating.

I eventually saw it that way too, once I had one too many crappy desperate days. I'd look at a stoned person and not see some loser or sick person but someone who had probably reached the limit of their endurance and just wanted the pain to stop. 

...back to God...

My concept of God and spirituality went through many phases, as with many of the other common ideas that people believe in.

Whether my life in a car was God's will, punishment, karma, dark night of the soul, a temporal phase, necessary failure in a winner/loser system of capitalism, laziness, failure to get up and go, subconscious fear of success, or whatever, I explored every one of those notions.

I had to find myself. I did come out of it with a belief in God intact, but a lot of notions surrounding that central faith had to be examined and discarded. 

Holding on to a main concept, and examining the surrounding clutter isn't something that just relates to questions about God. It applies to any idea that mankind has taken and added the inevitable politics and frailties.

It would have been easy to dismiss God, for example, when I ran into that cult mentioned earlier. That church was certainly not about God, but about power and money.

But I didn't judge Christianity by that church any more than I'd dismiss democracy by the actions of corrupt politicians. The fact is that any concept that mankind touches moves away from principle and into politics and manipulation.

I should add, it isn't always good to judge a belief system by the behavior of it's followers either.

...reading the label...

Much of any group or belief system described in the media will be defined by outsiders. 

Examples include atheists who say that Christianity causes all wars are atheists, Christians who believe all Muslims are terrorists, Liberals who assume Conservatives are money grubbing fascists, and the latter thinking that the former are nanny state Socialists intent on destroying democracy, those are all definitions and labels imposed from outside of a group.

One can argue that groups or subcultures can't always be trusted to honestly define themselves, and that's true. However, that's why hearing both sides is such an important axiom in truth seeking. A lot of so-called truth is really opinion and riddled with self interest.

Most of what people think the homeless are is defined through the media in the same way, through viewpoints filtered by various biases.

There's a tendency to view the homeless as a herd, defined in this or that story as drug users or whatever. It creates a mentality that judges the group by the actions of an individual or individuals. Make no mistake, the homeless are a collection of subcultures, not a uniform mass.

...So, getting back to saviors...

As I said, people out there reacted to life out there in different ways, but all had to confront the various ideas we grow up with, from God to Darwin. As those "faiths," as you will, proved to work or not, people began their rise or fall.

One character in my book is a young woman that lived with a group of homeless, whose life has a tragic trajectory that affected me very deeply. Several people went at her with this or that faith or system, and she tried out most. There were a couple of Princes, who turned out to be just be horny males willing to take advantage of desperation, dealers who promised escape but really were in the business of drugs and prostitution, the drill sergeant leader who projected strength but was just another run of the mill alpha jerk, and respectable society that applied tough love to her and then dumped her back out onto the street.

The final one drove her mad, yet even then, she had a safety net that society doesn't, and can't provide. She had friends. It only saved her biological life, but as a young person with strong survival instincts, time is on her side and the spirit can still win, but I doubt she'll thank any savior. She's been there, done that.

...the biggest God of all...

One other element that can become a faith out there is luck. 

I once discussed a book by Phillip K. Dick called "Solar Lottery," which described a society that was convinced that luck was an ability or in spiritual terms, having a blessed life or a special connection to God that others didn't have.

I describe luck differently in the book, because it isn't an ability or gift. It's part of what goes on randomly in the universe, and it's called fate, luck or fortune.

That is to say, we try to understand an infinite concept by describing it with words and end up with only a snapshot that captures a section, which then makes it seem comprehensible. It's sort of a way of trying to control it, to reduce fears, like reducing the world to God and Satan.

Knowing that it's a flawed idea to use words to create a snapshot of an infinite concept isn't new.

The early Catholic intellectuals, called Mystics back then, wrote that trying to use words to describe God limited the understanding of his infinite power. They weren't talking about shooting off thunderbolts or destroying a city full of sinners. Super powers are a finite concept. The point was that a person couldn't describe infinity with words, that attempts to define it in words limited it.

Or, a cynic may say, control it,

One thing that did became apparent out there, is that as long as there's a God, there'll be men who will put words in his mouth. That's not a problem that only plagues the religious.

...be lucky...

So...I talk about the infinite nature of the universe, using limiting words for chrissake, but mainly I'm talking about one thing described in quantum terms, which is "chaos," or the seemingly random movement of the universe that actually has patterns.

The various patterns, or universes do collide among other things, and that collision is luck in a nutshell...when you think about it, it makes sense...or at least as much as any explanation of luck can be.

That's why one should keep trying even if the odds seem stacked against success. The odds that good things will happen is zero if you don't. That's the underlying principle that powers all faith, keep going and give life a chance to change for the better.

I say all this here in this blog because it won't be described that literally in the book. One by one I've been replacing (as intended) the various philosophical points and essays and putting in stories, conversations and vignettes that illustrate the points. 

Frankly, if you're not philosophically inclined, and that's perfectly OK, it won't be obvious in the book that there is any underlying heavy duty truths. My intention is to write a book that will reveal different things the more times it's read, but will be rewarding on any level you care to take it.

There is a practical reason; to avoid having people think the book is about this or that because of a chapter or passage taken out of context. 

Yes, the book is about the homeless life, but also about the larger issue of displacement, a phenomena that has occurred constantly throughout history. It isn't about gentrification, drug users, runaways, hobos, parasites, crusaders, or whatever per se, even if all show up in the book.

I'm avoiding easy answers. When you read that young woman's story as it threads it's way throughout the book, many emotions and thoughts will come to mind, from pity to admiration. Same with others in the book, none were one dimensional personalities, and after reading about them, you'll recognize that they are very much like the people around you now who were more fortunate than my characters.

It's written that way because that's what I saw. It's also written that way because I recognize that you may see the same thing (as described in the book) and think different. 

That's fine with me, because I know that's how the universe works.

- Al Handa

  Oct. 19, 2018

...cover reveal for Hide In Plain Sight...

This is the cover for the upcoming book, Hide In Plain Sight, hopefully out sometime in the summer of 2018.

-Al Handa

djboogieunderground@gmail.com

The Al & Ivy Homeless Literary Journal Archive:

There are earlier blog entries on the Delta Snake Review section of this site that aren't on the On The Road page:
http://deltasnake.blogspot.com

On The Road With Al and Ivy: A Literary Homeless Chronicle - July 1, 2018

"Then, here in Argos, we’d have often met in love and gladness, two as friends and guests, with nothing that could ever part our paths till, wrapped in blackest clouds, we met our death. A god must have been envious of that, for he has destined him—a fate not known by any other—never to come home.”

- Homer (The Odyssey Of Homer, Allen Mandelbaum 1990 translation) 

No one, be it remembered, seeks the desert for a pleasure-ground. Life and business traverse it by paths along which the bones of things dead are strewn as so many blazons.

- LewWallace (Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ)

One of the concepts that's made it into the Pop Psychology/Philosophy canon is that life is about the journey, and not the destination, and like most truths, it's true if it is, and isn't if it isn't.

In the Middle Ages the Christians in the lower economic classes were taught to endure the present or at least enjoy the little things in life for the greater reward of Heaven after death. That was the ultimate goal oriented life, and perfect for a culture where spirituality (I'll trade you one lamb for good fortune) was materialistic and the powerful didn't want the peasants looking too closely at their earthly lives. 

In all fairness, that was hardly just a Western world thing.

People might think that the average homeless person is just out there laying around stoned as a rock, boosting bike parts, pestering people for change, or living the herd life in a tent city, but that is just a narrow surface view as reported by the media. You'd be surprised to know that many out there think about life as much as any celebrity New Age guru or movie star, and that they might know more about which life philosophy, goal or journey works in the real world and what doesn't.

...what works, what people will actually do, and excess baggage...

One of the first things a Civil War soldier learned was to throw away that two pound bayonet, any pistol or sword (maybe four or more pounds), body armor (popular in the early part of the war if he had means), helmets, or anything that wasn't essential or not subject to court martial (even so, officers had to watch for solders sticking bayonets into the ground).

That included swords, contrary to the stirring images in movies. Union cavalry found that they weren't good at the Confederate game of charging with swords, so they revived the old dragoon, or mounted infantry tactics, so when the Rebels came charging with swords drawn, they were met by a line of Yankees firing carbines. A hasty change in Confederate cavalry tactics followed. It was said that when Stonewall Jackson's sword was examined, it had rusted in it's scabbard due to lack of use.

Most of war back then was marching back and forth in thick uniforms, heavy packs and equipment, in rain or shine, and maybe a battle, albeit an awesomely bloody one, every few months. When you have to trudge 20 miles a day in summer weather, every pound gets scrutinized and discarded if not necessary.

It's the same with life. In a comfortable situation, there's the luxury of which Netflix plan to buy, which phone plan is best, and if you can get thin in time for summer. It's a life with goals and often very pleasant journeys with high aspirations. When the daily food budget is five dollars for man and dog, then four bucks for coffee is out if the question, and safely waking up the next morning can become the future.

None of that disappears out there...at least at first.

I went out on the road with the goal of simply waiting out the bad luck, believing that it was all just a hiccup in the Silicon Valley lifestyle, and like a person not watching where he was going, fell into a hole that had been there for a while. That was goal oriented thinking, that my life would soon get back on a good track, but that thinking was flawed as it made me just wait around, and that was a good way to sink even faster in the streets.

The thing is, an outlook on life, whether material or spiritual, needs to be simpler than even a self help book message (which perhaps is a misnomer, as a simple principle shouldn't need an entire tome) but the idea of a simple principle is time tested, as is the inevitability of decay and inefficiency that comes with elaboration and detail (which is generally group think that marginalizes the individual).

Jesus, for example, preached a very simple message and never created a bible or a church. It was a simple vision that probably made Christianity in that period as workable as any religion could have been before money and power came into the picture.

The Internet is another good example. In the early days it was all about freedom and being a responsible member, and even hackers followed a code of independence from the powerful and a love for programming for the art. It's still a force that benefits, but it's mainstream now, with mainstream vices and controlled by money.

That's basically the fate of groups or systems, and it's not due to the elitist theory of the able being pulled down by mediocrity. The able, which in modern society generally translates to the privileged, really have nothing to fear from the so called rabble. The lower classes rarely have a say in such things, but things tend to go south when the betters of society muck things up for profit or power.

...the wild Wild West...

A good example is the popular media arts image of a wild and woolly western town taken over by respectable society, who bring in the usual hang ups, but it's just a variation of the leveling thing versus freedom. It's supposedly about people hating freedom or trying to control the free spirits or whatever. The "free" bunch is almost always depicted as a bunch of unwashed rootin' tooting Cowboys, gamblers, drunks, saloon women and pimps, and that's no accident. People who are outside the system will looked at as black sheep, even by those who claim to support them.

Sure, put in a large group of people anywhere that's untamed, and they'll seek to protect their investments and weed out sinners. That looks like the fight, but that's foot soldier stuff, down in the trenches and late on the chain of events. Any reasonably deep study of history books makes it clear that the story starts much earlier.

It's too detailed to examine in a blog entry, but in a nutshell, in the Wild West, a bunch of commercial interests saw a lot of wealth potential in land being wasted on a bunch of Native Americans, so the media did their part by publicizing various crowd pleasering stories like go west young man, gold rushes, free farm land, and massacres of white people. The railroad people stood ready to move the masses out there (for a fee), and the massacre stories brought out calls to send out the Army, which created the image of civilization advancing westward and justice being served on the bewildered Native Americans who couldn't wrap their minds around the concept that people could now buy and sell land that was there before people existed, and being portrayed as bloodthirsty savages.

...back to the wild Wild West...

All that movement west solved another big problem...big enough that if it hadn't have been solved, it would have threatened the fabric of society in that era. Dangerous enough to cause revolution.

It was that the economy of the era couldn't support the rapidly growing population (by birth and immigration) exacerbated by the discharge of huge Civil War armies that threatened to create a layer of poor as large as Europe (who used immigration to lower that percentage). If there had been no Western expansion, the United States would have had to deal with the question of social services, homelessness, unemployment and massive unrest.

Getting back to journeys, goals, and such...

There was a lot homelessness back then. A countless amount of Irish and Chinese lived in camps building the railroads, wagon trains were all over the land heading west, tent cities of prospectors, bandits, wanderers, missionaries dotted the landscape...all of the sinews of an evolving nation. 

But they weren't seen as a social problem, lazy asses, or boozers, and that was because there was a journey or goal concept at work. It was the 1800's version of giving them a bus ticket out of town, but with a purpose.

...meanwhile, back at the Native American villages...

On the Native American side, they were seen as a bunch of uncivilized savages, yet had a saner view of life...so much so that in modern times there's a lot of public sympathy toward their side of the story (not enough to rectify it all of course, that would cost money). They lived in tent cities, and weren't transient in the sense that it's defined now, but in many ways were viewed the same way as modern homeless.

One reason was that they didn't have a goal that the so called modern people of the era could relate to, as their life was about the journey, being in harmony with nature. That view perhaps has a little bit of New Age revisionism in it, but it's essentially true. They didn't engage in the then modern types of wealth building, and that was seen as lazy, dissolute, wicked and so on.

Americans from top to bottom had a goal to become economically better off in material terms, and if that involved screwing over the natives, so be it. In this country, seeking wealth is considered a virtue (and maybe it is) and thus can justify a lot of means, some of it shady.

There's that old saying that behind every fortune is a crime. When a rich family can become revered now even if the original fortune was obtained illegally, the message is clear; Goal orientation works.

...a new simple message...

All this activity was guided by a principle called "manifest destiny" and was simple like any idea that worked. That idea could be understood on any level, and allowed people to interpret it subjectively with any good or bigoted idea as achieving the basic goal didn't require Saints...just take over every bit of land to the west and if necessary, kill any Native American who got into the way. Participate, and you got land, possible wealth and a chance to enter the exhalted ranks of the fabulously wealthy. An idea that sold itself.

As I've written in earlier blog entries, this method of solving the homeless problem is no longer workable. There's no more untamed land to ship people off to, and any open space space is now owned by somebody, and none of the owners (even the taxpayers) want transients there. More than a little of that hostility is due to modern liability law, otherwise most people wouldn't really care if a tent city pops up in a remote area.

The issue has never been about whether the homeless should have shelter. Most people with any heart believe that. It's always been about where. Setting up a homeless camp out in some open public land will rarely work because like warfare, it's not about strategy but logistics.

When I was out there in a car, my location was always based on where I could get the cheapest food and where services were available. Early on, I did try to hang out in the foothills of Marin County, where it was open and no one cared if I was there, but food and bathrooms were down in the cities. You might be able to make water behind a tree, but to be seen squatting and doing more brought in an immediate police response. Farming and foraging were not options, so drug zones or not, home was in the cities.

...home sweet home...

The book will have many "themes" as I've related, but a central one of people searching for a "home" is very simple. It's not simply a roof over one's head, it's a concept that's a goal, and that's why simply putting the homeless into housing won't work for many of them. Almost all were in a house or apartment before that life...it's important to understand why that roof went away as it is to put another over them.

There was one meth head out there who ended up living in a car and sold it off to maintain the habit. He was given an RV by a charity, and that was gone in three months and he was back on foot with his dog, and sometime later, even the dog was gone.

Incidentally, that dog has a story, and it's in the book. He was there when I arrived in Gilroy in the summer of 2016, and he was there when I left for Salinas in 2017.

Any assistance has to start with humanizing that apparent mass of homeless, and then you'll know who needs deeper help than a new roof, and who would have taken that RV and built a better life with it. That's why I keep saying that the goal of the book is to make that mass into a group of faces. Some that a person will not want to help, some that you'd sympathize with and want to help.

Those tent cities that are a central media image aren't an accident or a random event. Although I avoided living in those for various reasons, I understood why those were there. The reasons appear complicated, and it took a full chapter to fully describe the surface reasons, but those gatherings are part of a basic human instinct to find a home. I wrote in the story of a woman who became homeless and entered a camp as a way to cover that subject, and to highlight one that wasn't there because of drugs. There's plenty there who won't use even when offered free stuff, and their stories will relate to many women who aren't homeless.

That concept of home took a couple of drafts to express clearly, or simply, to be exact. It's not an instinct that can be easily explained in an essay, and by this final draft, I realized that it was better to simply tell the stories and trust that the reader would find the meaning in the word in those characters and themselves.

Ivy and I became homeless, and we found a "home" that survived even her death out there. If I still think of her now and then it's because I still live in that home we built. It was just a word back in 2016, but now I know what home is.

- Al Handa 

  

...cover reveal for Hide In Plain Sight...

This is the cover for the upcoming book, Hide In Plain Sight, hopefully out sometime in the summer of 2018.

-Al Handa

djboogieunderground@gmail.com

The Al & Ivy Homeless Literary Journal Archive:

There are earlier blog entries on the Delta Snake Review section of this site that aren't on the On The Road page:
http://deltasnake.blogspot.com