"After you have stepped the mast and spread your white sail, you can sit: the breath of Bórëas will guide your ship. But when you’ve crossed the Ocean, you will see the shore and forests of Perséphonë—the towering poplars and the willow trees whose fruits fall prematurely. Beach your ship on that flat shore which lies on the abyss of Ocean. Make your way on foot to Hades."
- Homer (The Odyssey - Alan Mandelbaum translation)
I once read that James Joyce decided to write a book about what went through a man's mind over a 24 hour period, and then spent the next few years writing it all down. If dictation software had existed back then, maybe it'd have been a faster process, but probably not. The reason is that Joyce spent those years writing a book, that happened to depict a day's worth of thoughts, but somewhere along the way, it became a "work," and not simple transcription.
One of the most famous attempts to capture a stream of conscious was Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which was typed out on a roll of butcher paper to capture a continuous narrative. Jack took it to the point of not correcting mistakes or grammar and not separating the text into chapters. Another example is Thomas Wolfe, who sort of did the same thing, creating a huge work that editor's later broke up into separate books.
This isn't unusual in other genres. Many of Miles Davis' late 60s and 70s rock-fusion albums were in fact long jams that producer Ted Macero went through and edited into separate albums.
However, this isn't an entry about editing and editors, but about the process of trying to capture what is in the writer's mind, and like musicians trying to find that perfect note, it's often more about trying to understand the self. There are many reasons that inspiration comes out imperfectly, and I'm sure those are detailed out in countless books about writing.
One of my good friends, writer Melodie Ramone, is coaching me on my book. It's been an interesting process, and though I've written professionally before, I've never taken on something of such length as my book in progress. She hasn't given me many technical points, but has focused on making me break through to that real tome inside my head.
There's many reasons that an author can filter their work, but in my case, it was all about honesty and fear. We were going over some of the 4th draft a couple of months ago and she pointed out that the work needed to be honest.
The first accounts of my homeless life came out in this blog. It was by necessity not 100% honest. It became known to others that I was writing a blog about that life, so I had to be careful to not be too detailed in descriptions about people out there.
There were dealers, pimps, meth heads and all the various subcultures that were part of that scene, and that's where I had to sleep every night. If I said something that got someone busted, I was easy to find if somebody wanted to kick my ass over it or worse.
I was able to keep a lid on all that by not discussing the blog, and moving around a lot, but it was starting to catch up with me in Salinas by the time the move to the midwest had come. People were watching me, walking up and greeting me by name with threatening looks, actively trying to get me to smoke dope with them and more.
It was understandable. In Salinas there had recently been some busts in the area I was in, and everyone was paranoid, and there was only one guy they knew who was writing about the homeless scene. I imagine if I had taken a few social hits of weed or meth then it would have reassured the ones that were nervous about me, but taking any drugs out there was out of the question. It wasn't a case of thinking I was better, but that most of the trouble a person can get into out there could be linked to drugs.
Most of those offers occurred in parking lots, where there's security cameras and undercover cops watching. My book won't have a lot about the in's and out's of the drug scene there, as I chose, like many of the street-wise homeless out there, to stay away from those scenes. In many ways, my depiction of the life out there will differ from what you see in the media.
The press doesn't have a great rep out there. Sure, they can always find someone who'll talk to a reporter (who may overstate how much good will come of the interview), but most homeless enclaves that get press coverage get broken up by the police shortly after the story runs. Anyone who read my blog would know that I was being very careful, but bringing in any press awareness generally brings in the cops.
If you look through my blog entries, there's rarely any reference to specific times and places...especially those areas that tacitly allow the homeless to sleep if they don't make any trouble. I didn't do that just from a sense of descretion...safe places to sleep are scarce, I wasn't interested in taking any such sanctuary away from my fellow transients, most of whom were quite peaceable, and often kind.
Any people I described were vague in appearance because though I wanted to tell their story, I didn't want them to become easy to recognize. The smartest homeless out there avoid any spotlight. They may sleep in a place at night, but will be gone by dawn.
Some will stick around and hang out until kicked out, but that wasn't the crowd I hung out with.
That's why many of my book passages are observations, and not interviews. For one thing, most interviews are not enlightening, as it's generally a case of "captive behavior" or like how a person talks when looking or a job or promoting a product.
Sure, you occasionally get the idiot who'll brag about doing drugs or something, and who can't spot that the reporter still gave enough information to clearly identify him or her on the street, but anyone who asked me questions got small talk or outright lies. Someone who was too curious about where I slept at night would get a location that was in another city.
It's like those old westerns where cowboys didn't ask each other's business. Being too curious was treated as suspicious behavior.
My goal was to get out alive, healthy and with a clean record. If it made for a less exciting book then so be it. Besides, when you think about it, how interesting would yet another book with a drug dealer in it be?
...listen to the music...
A famous musician, who I can't recall just right now, said in an interview, that art has a high rate of failure, and if that's the case, then it's just as easy to crash and burn doing an honest work as it is to spend a lot of energy trying to create what might sell. So if there is a clear vision of what my book was supposed to be, there's no point in changing it. If it's what I want to put out, then I can live with no one reading it.
After all, I've played music all my life...I know what it's like to put a ton of effort into something and only earn a steady fifty cents a week in streaming income from it. What makes it worthwhile, though, is that I eventually learned to create what I liked, and sure enough, if people like it, that's great, but if not, it's still a life spent creating from the soul and if you're creating art for the right reasons, the money is secondary.
That also goes back to my opening paragraphs, about capturing that inner self, stream of consciousness, or honesty. What's running through a person's head isn't necessarily art. In my case, it would be raw material. It'll be shaped as it goes on paper, so to speak, and I'm sure that's what James Joyce did as the events of a 24 hour period came spilling out of his head.
...books, books, and quotes...
I was a book worm type who in the second grade got in trouble because I loved this dinosaur book that was in the upper grades library and would go read it during recess. One day I miscounted the number of doors from the corner of the building and walked into a classroom, and that ended my visits to the library.
Even in high school, lunch time meant book time in the library, and in the present day, I read like some people watch TV. Those quotes at the beginning of each blog aren't found by googling or perusing quote compilations.
Each comes from a book in my Kindle library. Before I write each blog entry, I go through a book that is on my mind at the time, and I pull a quote from it. It's always one that sort of relates to the things discussed, or in some cases, is the opening that I riff on for the entry. It tends to be about what was swirling about in my mind, so maybe it's like old style Bible divination where a phrase is found at random, and maybe not so random after all.
...the quote from Homer...
The opening quote is from the Alan Mandelbaum translation of Homer's Oddyssy, a book I've read countless times in many translations. I began to read it again as Odyseus' trip to Hades came to mind during a rewrite of a chapter that describes the coming of Autumn.
One of the themes that runs through my book is the seasons. The passage of time is a different thing when your life isn't being run by the clock. Days and weeks tend to blend into a single time period, night becomes as detailed as any work day, and seasons give the feeling that time is passing.
One of the aspects of Odysseus' journey was that he was moved this way and that by a seemingly endless procession of outside controls and wills, the most powerful being Poseiden who really screwed with him after his son, Cyclops got his eye poked out by the Greek wanderers.
That in itself would describe homeless life, but would make for a dull book. Besides, it's been done a lot of times, like with the movie O'Brother, Where Art Thou, and other such tales.
What was interesting, and made me come back to it was where our hero has to go to Hades to talk to a soul who'll give him the key to the next part of the journey. The description of Hades (not Hell) and the events that transpired there were surprisingly close to what I had written out as a chapter. Not in the sense of who and what, but the atmosphere, which was a combination of timelessness, and souls in various stages of regret, sadness, and acceptance.
Autumn is viewed as a beautiful time, where there's bright colors and a change in the weather. It's also the coming of winter, so it's very much like the proverbial light bulb that burns extra bright before extinguishing.
The first part of the book centers on the summer of 2016, and many of it's characters are very much alive, and perhaps a bit oblivious of the coming decay and harshness of winter. People see the bright colors and falling leaves of Fall, but my chapter will bring to view other details, like the young homeless enclaves that made the summer seem so carefree, but with the coming cold weather, break up into smaller groups or grim individual survivors, fodder for predators, become meth heads that move along as if there were no seasons, or if lucky, get sucked into the system.
Writing that chapter was a sad experience but after consulting with Homer, I hope I'm a good enough writer to find the underlying affirmation of life in the next draft. Homer wasn't writing a tragedy, and neither am I.
...dog consciousness...
One of the layers I'm exploring in the book is my relationship with Ivy. I still miss her terribly, and it's in her absence that her importance becomes more apparent.
In our early years, Ivy was a very normal dog and we just had fun. I had an idea of how her friendship could make hardship bearable in the 2008 recession, but it was in the last year of her life that really brought it home.
In the early drafts of the book, my description of life together was rather standard, the old Yeller faithful dog thing. I didn't understand how deep the connection was because it took a while to understand that life out in the car.
Ivy changed her behavior during that time. We'd always spent a lot of time together, as my later jobs were telecommutes and I was home all the time.
But it wasn't a time like 2016, where she was literally the main personality I interacted with the most. Before, there was always friends or family around, music to create and record, work to get done, and a busy life going on. She was busy too, with a routine that often took her away into other rooms and adventures with other dogs. etc.
By the summer of 2016, we were it.
Day and night, our routine was mainly each other. If I felt like crap, she was the one who cheered me. If she was unhappy, I knew it right away and did something about it (mainly extra food and attention).
The connection became very much in the moment, and older games like ignoring this or that habit, like begging for food became part of an ongoing conversation with responses between us. If she begged for food, she got it. We didn't get into "training" her to not beg or whatever out there. Once food came just for the asking, she waited till her meal times, and never took treats from strangers.
If I ate in front of her, all bets were off, she wanted a piece of the action...the the local gas station, there was a two hot dog for two dollar special, and I for into the habit of only putting condiments on 2/3rds of those, leaving plain sections to be pulled off for her. When a dog sees it's eating the same food as you, it reinforces the bond.
We became more and more a pack and not master and pet.
I quit giving her commands all the time. I would ask her, tell her, inform her, etc, and she began to develop a range of sounds that I began to recognize as a vocabulary. Instead of scratching at the door, she spoke a sound, and had a second sound if nagging was necessary to get me off my butt to get the leash out.
She also learned manners...if it was raining outside, she wait for a lull to request a bathroom break...conversely, if it was urgent, then she had a sound, or word if you will, and I never ignored it.
There was manipulation... Ivy had a routine where she'd putz around looking for the perfect place to pee to extend the break, which I saw through, but allowed as I wanted her to learn civilized strategy.
Most people who love animals know that their pets aren't just some animated stuffed toys, but sentient life.
One of the things that pets do is that they study you. You're the key to their survival, and are of intense interest to them. Early on, it was easy for Ivy and I to wander off and do our separate things. In the car, everything I did was of great interest, as we were both involved now in a life that required that I be very alert all of the time, and often had to react suddenly to situations. Ivy wanted to be kept in the loop.
At first it was a case of her having to be in tune with what I was doing. Later, it became obvious that she had instincts and abilities that were helpful to pack survival, and I needed to be in tune with her.
For example, we often arrived at a new place at night. That was often the safest time, when all the homeless life there was set in place. That also meant a lot of things were hidden by the dark, and I learned to watch Ivy and see how she reacted. If she was uneasy or nervous, I'd park away from the groups and watch, and sure enough, there would be trouble or a disturbance flaring up a short while later.
It wasn't some mystical ability...a dog can hear an argument starting up in some distant RV or car that's escalating, and more than once Ivy's keen hearing and distaste for loud arguments kept me from parking in a area where a disturbance would break out. I'd see the police lights flashing from a safe distance away, and make a mental note to add a little extra to Ivy's next meal as a thank you.
...lights, camera, action...
I eventually made us into partners in various projects like the social media promo venture, where she would be the star and me the manager. Our daily hikes became a time for video experiments and scouting for photo locations.
It wasn't real, but it was a reality. A game, so to speak, but designed to give us a purpose and keep energy from dissolving into despair, etc, and clearly had levels.
For example, the promo business involved using her as a dog model in ads. She may not have understood that, but would begin to get ready when I pulled out the iphone and set up the front seat with props for photos. Once the phone started clicking (I made sure the camera made a sound so she'd know something was happening), Ivy would begin to pose and would stay still till the pictures were all taken. She never did that before our homelessness life.
It wasn't until the third draft of the book that her personality came out in real detail. Again, the reason was that I had to understand what was going on in my head at the time. The tendency is to push it all away and just see the bland routine of living in a Cadillac, but it's still real life and it's all still there percolating in the brain.
So on one level, Ivy and I are having a long photo session, something that didn't happen years before. Back then, she would only sit still for a few seconds and then try to take off. Something changed in her and it involved how I had changed, what vibe was being put out.
The sessions were for paid ads, which made me very happy. It was money earned, and not donated, and that meant a great deal. Perhaps Ivy picked up on that, and the photo sessions became a shared joy, a time where we both felt engaged. The sessions involved an ending ritual of sharing a cheap 5.00 chicken from Walmart, and again, it seemed just like a happy time, but in retrospect, Ivy saw it as sharing the same meal as a pack, which is a sacred time for a pet.
Necessity put us together, and as the drafts evolved, one of the things that came out was that our increased activities became a time where the dreariness of that life was pushed aside and the mood became joyous. Life often becomes a waiting game for good things to happen, and good fortune judged in material terms like money or things.
I thought early on that it was just me having us do things to pass the time and keep apathy at bay. It was really about how Ivy and I responded to the life we found ourselves in, and it was really a team effort. We spent a lot of time waiting around for good things to happen, and then we quit doing that.
...and we may not have had any deep discussions about life out there, but we definitely talked.
- Al Handa 12/29/17
One of the most famous attempts to capture a stream of conscious was Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which was typed out on a roll of butcher paper to capture a continuous narrative. Jack took it to the point of not correcting mistakes or grammar and not separating the text into chapters. Another example is Thomas Wolfe, who sort of did the same thing, creating a huge work that editor's later broke up into separate books.
This isn't unusual in other genres. Many of Miles Davis' late 60s and 70s rock-fusion albums were in fact long jams that producer Ted Macero went through and edited into separate albums.
However, this isn't an entry about editing and editors, but about the process of trying to capture what is in the writer's mind, and like musicians trying to find that perfect note, it's often more about trying to understand the self. There are many reasons that inspiration comes out imperfectly, and I'm sure those are detailed out in countless books about writing.
One of my good friends, writer Melodie Ramone, is coaching me on my book. It's been an interesting process, and though I've written professionally before, I've never taken on something of such length as my book in progress. She hasn't given me many technical points, but has focused on making me break through to that real tome inside my head.
There's many reasons that an author can filter their work, but in my case, it was all about honesty and fear. We were going over some of the 4th draft a couple of months ago and she pointed out that the work needed to be honest.
The first accounts of my homeless life came out in this blog. It was by necessity not 100% honest. It became known to others that I was writing a blog about that life, so I had to be careful to not be too detailed in descriptions about people out there.
There were dealers, pimps, meth heads and all the various subcultures that were part of that scene, and that's where I had to sleep every night. If I said something that got someone busted, I was easy to find if somebody wanted to kick my ass over it or worse.
I was able to keep a lid on all that by not discussing the blog, and moving around a lot, but it was starting to catch up with me in Salinas by the time the move to the midwest had come. People were watching me, walking up and greeting me by name with threatening looks, actively trying to get me to smoke dope with them and more.
It was understandable. In Salinas there had recently been some busts in the area I was in, and everyone was paranoid, and there was only one guy they knew who was writing about the homeless scene. I imagine if I had taken a few social hits of weed or meth then it would have reassured the ones that were nervous about me, but taking any drugs out there was out of the question. It wasn't a case of thinking I was better, but that most of the trouble a person can get into out there could be linked to drugs.
Most of those offers occurred in parking lots, where there's security cameras and undercover cops watching. My book won't have a lot about the in's and out's of the drug scene there, as I chose, like many of the street-wise homeless out there, to stay away from those scenes. In many ways, my depiction of the life out there will differ from what you see in the media.
The press doesn't have a great rep out there. Sure, they can always find someone who'll talk to a reporter (who may overstate how much good will come of the interview), but most homeless enclaves that get press coverage get broken up by the police shortly after the story runs. Anyone who read my blog would know that I was being very careful, but bringing in any press awareness generally brings in the cops.
If you look through my blog entries, there's rarely any reference to specific times and places...especially those areas that tacitly allow the homeless to sleep if they don't make any trouble. I didn't do that just from a sense of descretion...safe places to sleep are scarce, I wasn't interested in taking any such sanctuary away from my fellow transients, most of whom were quite peaceable, and often kind.
Any people I described were vague in appearance because though I wanted to tell their story, I didn't want them to become easy to recognize. The smartest homeless out there avoid any spotlight. They may sleep in a place at night, but will be gone by dawn.
Some will stick around and hang out until kicked out, but that wasn't the crowd I hung out with.
That's why many of my book passages are observations, and not interviews. For one thing, most interviews are not enlightening, as it's generally a case of "captive behavior" or like how a person talks when looking or a job or promoting a product.
Sure, you occasionally get the idiot who'll brag about doing drugs or something, and who can't spot that the reporter still gave enough information to clearly identify him or her on the street, but anyone who asked me questions got small talk or outright lies. Someone who was too curious about where I slept at night would get a location that was in another city.
It's like those old westerns where cowboys didn't ask each other's business. Being too curious was treated as suspicious behavior.
My goal was to get out alive, healthy and with a clean record. If it made for a less exciting book then so be it. Besides, when you think about it, how interesting would yet another book with a drug dealer in it be?
...listen to the music...
A famous musician, who I can't recall just right now, said in an interview, that art has a high rate of failure, and if that's the case, then it's just as easy to crash and burn doing an honest work as it is to spend a lot of energy trying to create what might sell. So if there is a clear vision of what my book was supposed to be, there's no point in changing it. If it's what I want to put out, then I can live with no one reading it.
After all, I've played music all my life...I know what it's like to put a ton of effort into something and only earn a steady fifty cents a week in streaming income from it. What makes it worthwhile, though, is that I eventually learned to create what I liked, and sure enough, if people like it, that's great, but if not, it's still a life spent creating from the soul and if you're creating art for the right reasons, the money is secondary.
That also goes back to my opening paragraphs, about capturing that inner self, stream of consciousness, or honesty. What's running through a person's head isn't necessarily art. In my case, it would be raw material. It'll be shaped as it goes on paper, so to speak, and I'm sure that's what James Joyce did as the events of a 24 hour period came spilling out of his head.
...books, books, and quotes...
I was a book worm type who in the second grade got in trouble because I loved this dinosaur book that was in the upper grades library and would go read it during recess. One day I miscounted the number of doors from the corner of the building and walked into a classroom, and that ended my visits to the library.
Even in high school, lunch time meant book time in the library, and in the present day, I read like some people watch TV. Those quotes at the beginning of each blog aren't found by googling or perusing quote compilations.
Each comes from a book in my Kindle library. Before I write each blog entry, I go through a book that is on my mind at the time, and I pull a quote from it. It's always one that sort of relates to the things discussed, or in some cases, is the opening that I riff on for the entry. It tends to be about what was swirling about in my mind, so maybe it's like old style Bible divination where a phrase is found at random, and maybe not so random after all.
...the quote from Homer...
The opening quote is from the Alan Mandelbaum translation of Homer's Oddyssy, a book I've read countless times in many translations. I began to read it again as Odyseus' trip to Hades came to mind during a rewrite of a chapter that describes the coming of Autumn.
One of the themes that runs through my book is the seasons. The passage of time is a different thing when your life isn't being run by the clock. Days and weeks tend to blend into a single time period, night becomes as detailed as any work day, and seasons give the feeling that time is passing.
One of the aspects of Odysseus' journey was that he was moved this way and that by a seemingly endless procession of outside controls and wills, the most powerful being Poseiden who really screwed with him after his son, Cyclops got his eye poked out by the Greek wanderers.
That in itself would describe homeless life, but would make for a dull book. Besides, it's been done a lot of times, like with the movie O'Brother, Where Art Thou, and other such tales.
What was interesting, and made me come back to it was where our hero has to go to Hades to talk to a soul who'll give him the key to the next part of the journey. The description of Hades (not Hell) and the events that transpired there were surprisingly close to what I had written out as a chapter. Not in the sense of who and what, but the atmosphere, which was a combination of timelessness, and souls in various stages of regret, sadness, and acceptance.
Autumn is viewed as a beautiful time, where there's bright colors and a change in the weather. It's also the coming of winter, so it's very much like the proverbial light bulb that burns extra bright before extinguishing.
The first part of the book centers on the summer of 2016, and many of it's characters are very much alive, and perhaps a bit oblivious of the coming decay and harshness of winter. People see the bright colors and falling leaves of Fall, but my chapter will bring to view other details, like the young homeless enclaves that made the summer seem so carefree, but with the coming cold weather, break up into smaller groups or grim individual survivors, fodder for predators, become meth heads that move along as if there were no seasons, or if lucky, get sucked into the system.
Writing that chapter was a sad experience but after consulting with Homer, I hope I'm a good enough writer to find the underlying affirmation of life in the next draft. Homer wasn't writing a tragedy, and neither am I.
...dog consciousness...
One of the layers I'm exploring in the book is my relationship with Ivy. I still miss her terribly, and it's in her absence that her importance becomes more apparent.
In our early years, Ivy was a very normal dog and we just had fun. I had an idea of how her friendship could make hardship bearable in the 2008 recession, but it was in the last year of her life that really brought it home.
In the early drafts of the book, my description of life together was rather standard, the old Yeller faithful dog thing. I didn't understand how deep the connection was because it took a while to understand that life out in the car.
Ivy changed her behavior during that time. We'd always spent a lot of time together, as my later jobs were telecommutes and I was home all the time.
But it wasn't a time like 2016, where she was literally the main personality I interacted with the most. Before, there was always friends or family around, music to create and record, work to get done, and a busy life going on. She was busy too, with a routine that often took her away into other rooms and adventures with other dogs. etc.
By the summer of 2016, we were it.
Day and night, our routine was mainly each other. If I felt like crap, she was the one who cheered me. If she was unhappy, I knew it right away and did something about it (mainly extra food and attention).
The connection became very much in the moment, and older games like ignoring this or that habit, like begging for food became part of an ongoing conversation with responses between us. If she begged for food, she got it. We didn't get into "training" her to not beg or whatever out there. Once food came just for the asking, she waited till her meal times, and never took treats from strangers.
If I ate in front of her, all bets were off, she wanted a piece of the action...the the local gas station, there was a two hot dog for two dollar special, and I for into the habit of only putting condiments on 2/3rds of those, leaving plain sections to be pulled off for her. When a dog sees it's eating the same food as you, it reinforces the bond.
We became more and more a pack and not master and pet.
I quit giving her commands all the time. I would ask her, tell her, inform her, etc, and she began to develop a range of sounds that I began to recognize as a vocabulary. Instead of scratching at the door, she spoke a sound, and had a second sound if nagging was necessary to get me off my butt to get the leash out.
She also learned manners...if it was raining outside, she wait for a lull to request a bathroom break...conversely, if it was urgent, then she had a sound, or word if you will, and I never ignored it.
There was manipulation... Ivy had a routine where she'd putz around looking for the perfect place to pee to extend the break, which I saw through, but allowed as I wanted her to learn civilized strategy.
Most people who love animals know that their pets aren't just some animated stuffed toys, but sentient life.
One of the things that pets do is that they study you. You're the key to their survival, and are of intense interest to them. Early on, it was easy for Ivy and I to wander off and do our separate things. In the car, everything I did was of great interest, as we were both involved now in a life that required that I be very alert all of the time, and often had to react suddenly to situations. Ivy wanted to be kept in the loop.
At first it was a case of her having to be in tune with what I was doing. Later, it became obvious that she had instincts and abilities that were helpful to pack survival, and I needed to be in tune with her.
For example, we often arrived at a new place at night. That was often the safest time, when all the homeless life there was set in place. That also meant a lot of things were hidden by the dark, and I learned to watch Ivy and see how she reacted. If she was uneasy or nervous, I'd park away from the groups and watch, and sure enough, there would be trouble or a disturbance flaring up a short while later.
It wasn't some mystical ability...a dog can hear an argument starting up in some distant RV or car that's escalating, and more than once Ivy's keen hearing and distaste for loud arguments kept me from parking in a area where a disturbance would break out. I'd see the police lights flashing from a safe distance away, and make a mental note to add a little extra to Ivy's next meal as a thank you.
...lights, camera, action...
I eventually made us into partners in various projects like the social media promo venture, where she would be the star and me the manager. Our daily hikes became a time for video experiments and scouting for photo locations.
It wasn't real, but it was a reality. A game, so to speak, but designed to give us a purpose and keep energy from dissolving into despair, etc, and clearly had levels.
For example, the promo business involved using her as a dog model in ads. She may not have understood that, but would begin to get ready when I pulled out the iphone and set up the front seat with props for photos. Once the phone started clicking (I made sure the camera made a sound so she'd know something was happening), Ivy would begin to pose and would stay still till the pictures were all taken. She never did that before our homelessness life.
It wasn't until the third draft of the book that her personality came out in real detail. Again, the reason was that I had to understand what was going on in my head at the time. The tendency is to push it all away and just see the bland routine of living in a Cadillac, but it's still real life and it's all still there percolating in the brain.
So on one level, Ivy and I are having a long photo session, something that didn't happen years before. Back then, she would only sit still for a few seconds and then try to take off. Something changed in her and it involved how I had changed, what vibe was being put out.
The sessions were for paid ads, which made me very happy. It was money earned, and not donated, and that meant a great deal. Perhaps Ivy picked up on that, and the photo sessions became a shared joy, a time where we both felt engaged. The sessions involved an ending ritual of sharing a cheap 5.00 chicken from Walmart, and again, it seemed just like a happy time, but in retrospect, Ivy saw it as sharing the same meal as a pack, which is a sacred time for a pet.
Necessity put us together, and as the drafts evolved, one of the things that came out was that our increased activities became a time where the dreariness of that life was pushed aside and the mood became joyous. Life often becomes a waiting game for good things to happen, and good fortune judged in material terms like money or things.
I thought early on that it was just me having us do things to pass the time and keep apathy at bay. It was really about how Ivy and I responded to the life we found ourselves in, and it was really a team effort. We spent a lot of time waiting around for good things to happen, and then we quit doing that.
...and we may not have had any deep discussions about life out there, but we definitely talked.
- Al Handa 12/29/17
...cover reveal for Hide In Plain Sight...
This is the cover for the upcoming book, Hide In Plain Sight, designed by Jenna Brooks, supervised and edited by Mutiny Rising Media.
-Al Handa
The Al & Ivy Homeless Literary Journal Archive:
The earliest entries were on the Delta Snake Review section of this blog site.
http://deltasnake.blogspot.com
http://deltasnake.blogspot.com
