I was thinking about this guy this morning, who is probably going to lose his house.
His mom died a couple years ago and neither he or his siblings did anything about her estate. She owned this house outright. None of his brothers or sisters wanted the house, but he needed the house.
So he has been living there ever since.
Soon after she died, the city turned off the water. In Akron, when you turn off the water, you also lose trash service. He wanted to get the water turned on in his name, but the city would not allow him to do that until he presented legal documents saying that he was legally allowed to turn on the water.
So it has been in the stalemate for two years.
The problem he is facing now is that his trash has been piling up in the garage. It’s bagged and pretty neat. But it’s clearly a garage full of trash.
The neighbors filed a complaint with the city. And now the city is focused on him. They gave him a time limit to clean up the trash. That has come and gone. They have come and removed everything out of his yard. So it’s just a matter of time before he is on the street.
A few weeks ago I got him his birth certificate. He needs that in order to get an identification so that he can then contact a lawyer and move through the probate process of getting that house.
The last I heard he still hadn’t gotten his identification.
Why? They are free. He just has to go down to the BMV and get it.
We so often look outside of ourselves, and shake our heads in dismay as we look at other people’s lives and think “why are they so obviously screwing up their lives?”
I watch women repeatedly get beaten mercilessly by their boyfriends. And they go back. I watch people throw all their money away at the casino and do it again next payday. I watch people lose their spouses, children and homes to alcohol and they keep drinking.
We all just keep digging our own hole.
Why?
I recently read that it was probably because we are all more comfortable in our little slice of hell than having to face the abyss of a new existence.
“I’m going to drink less from now on.”
“I’ve had bad luck at the casino recently, but my luck is gonna turn.”
“He can be so nice sometimes.”
“I’m gonna go get my ID tomorrow.”
There is real truth in those statements. In western culture, we are taught to ignore our dark side. We live in a dualistic mindset that says this is good and that is bad.
The trap however, of that dualistic thinking is that we keep doing “bad.“ We keep screwing up. And then we end up being told by others and by ourselves that we are not measuring up. We are failures and we are weak.
I’m trying really hard to move out of dualistic thinking. It’s just not the full picture.
Do you know how much incredible art and writing has come out of the minds of “failures?”
I heard recently that Ernest Hemingway wanted to kill himself so badly at the end of his life that he tried walking into the propeller of an airplane. It is well-known that Hemingway suffered greatly from alcoholism. He likely had serious mental health issues.
I’m not suggesting that Ernest Hemingway was one of the greatest writers of all time because he drank. What I am suggesting actually is that Ernest Hemingway likely was one of the greatest writers of all time because he was a brilliant writer and he suffered so brutally at the hands of life.
Suffering, whether self-imposed or being dealt a bad hand of cards, shapes you in profound ways.
I have a friend who escaped the streets in the last year. He moved in with his family, they supported him and loved him, and he was doing really well. He had bought a motorcycle and was on the path of sobriety and “living right.“
Well, last week he started showing up at my place again. He’s sleeping in a chair and someone stole his motorcycle.
Honestly, I think he just got bored with “living right. “ He missed his friends. He missed the life.
He certainly doesn’t seem unhappy right now. He is super bummed out that someone stole his motorcycle. But to me, that just looks like the universe freeing him from an obligation that he didn’t need.
“But Sage, these people aren’t writing the great American novel.”
How do you know?
Most of these people will not write their story or even make a video about it. But what if that’s not what matters?
Epigenetics is a field of scientific study that is showing that things like stress, diet, trauma, and a variety of other environmental factors can be passed down to future generations. Science doesn’t currently believe that all of our experiences are being recorded in our DNA. But I won’t be surprised at all when some scientist makes that declaration in the future.
What if our entire existence is a novel that is recorded for all of eternity in the universe?
What story would you rather tell the universe? That you followed all the rules and did everything you were told until the day you died? Or that you burned as bright and as passionately as you possibly could and you left nothing on the field?
That sounds like I’m leaning towards one life or the other. I am most certainly not. A person who follows the rules and does as they were told also experiences some beautiful and wonderful and also tragic stories. Everyone suffers. That makes everyone’s life a great drama. Everyone’s life is an interesting read.
I believe that the key is not to live the “right“ life. The key is to live YOUR life. We teach kids not to succumb to peer pressure and then we spend our entire adult life trying to be just like some fantasy Instagram family.
The average 24 hours of a typical Houseless person has more excitement than some people will ever experience in their entire life. I simply don’t see it as a tragic existence.
The great tragedy of it all really is that they feel bad about it. They feel a tremendous amount of shame and regret. I try to alleviate that as much as possible.
Society tells us that we are meant to toe the line and be good boys and girls so that we can be as productive as possible for the American capitalist machine. That’s why they chastise these people and make them feel bad. The machine is not happy with their existence.
I have seen no evidence that morality is absolute. Everything is relative. There is no right or wrong way to live life. You can’t live it wrong. It’s impossible.
Turn on Fox News at 6 AM and turn it off right before you go to bed at 11. Every single day. Inundate yourself with fear and hatred and stress. That’s fine. You are creating your own horror story that is more terrifying than any Friday the 13th movie I’ve ever seen. Of course, you hate it and you hate the world. But you can’t turn it off. Welcome to life. None of us are able to turn off our own television set. We just watch in horror and keep doing stupid things over and over again. Welcome to the club.
I quit drinking in 2003. It was the best decision I have probably made in my life. But the reason it was such a good decision was because drinking was taking me nowhere interesting. I was just going to the same stupid bars having the same stupid conversations night after night after night. It was boring. And the hangovers were getting super painful.
Could I have been a Bukowski level writer if I had kept drinking? It’s quite possible. I enjoy writing and I do it a lot, as you can see. But it lacks any real smolder and grit. It’s mildly thoughtful, but overly wordy and rambly. I have bills to pay and jobs to go to every day. I don’t have time to try to be the great American writer. Nor do I have any interest in doing it. That’s probably because I gave up drinking to live a more traditional life. It’s not better or worse. It’s just different. And I’m happy with my choices. I probably would not be working with the Houseless community if I was still drinking. But in reality, I think part of me hangs out with the Houseless community to just live vicariously through their fiery, passionate existence.
I’ve tried to jam people through the system to go to rehab or get their identification or get a job. I can’t recall a time that it ever actually worked. But what I can recall is people often coming back to me after leaving the street on their own terms, and saying how thankful they were that I helped them. That always is confusing to me because I feel like I didn’t do anything. I just hung out with them and maybe brought some food, cigarettes and marijuana.
I’ll usually buy somebody a birth certificate if I have the money and I’m not overly lazy. But that’s not really my thing. And it really doesn’t feel like the thing that people are so thankful for. The thing that seems to make the biggest difference is just hanging around and spending time with them.
I think they appreciate that I don’t give up. That’s probably part of it. But how can I give up on them? They are just like the rest of us. We are all messed up and stuck in a rut that we can’t get out of. And maybe we even shouldn’t. Maybe it’s the rut that we are meant to be in and to work through.