TheEditor

The Month From Hell

After being bounced through all three shelters in London through the month I have finally landed on my feet, sort of, although only the struggles have changed. It was a challenge to find anywhere to live in this town, especially with no money for rent.

By pure chance I had met a guy at the lunch at St. Pauls. He was telling me about his place and I ended up going over to see it. Again, by pure chance, the landlord's fix-it guy happened to be there installing a deadbolt. He mentioned that they had just bought the building and they had a couple of studio and bachelor apartments. He showed me one that had just been completely renovated. Although it was nice, my first reaction wasn't great because it had no windows. It did have three skylights so it was plenty bright in there, but the thought of living in a place where you couldn't open a window was unusual to say the least.

It's a long story, but between a new caseworker at Ontario Works and a most compassionate and understanding landlord I managed to move in just before the end of the month and left the Unity Project shelter at the end of August, ending a month that can best be described as one of the most difficult of my life. There were times I thought of giving up completely. It all seemed so hopeless. The worst moment was probably lying in the stifling heat in the filthy dorm at the Mission, wondering how things had ever got this bad? Eight guys ended up in the hospital that horrible night from heat exhaustion. It was deplorable!

My first night in the new place was spent sleeping on the hard floor because I have no bed or furniture of any kind. I had applied for a discretionary benefit through OW to get some basic furniture, but they lost it in the system and I've heard nothing yet. I did manage to find some very cheap items at one of the furniture stores that accepts vouchers from OW, but it will no doubt be gone by the time OW gets their act together. I bought a hunk of foam that I'm sleeping on so my back isn't broken. Also, a friend from when I worked the Bluesfest is moving out West at the end of this month and he is giving me stuff he can't take, so that will make things a little better, but it will be a tough month until he leaves.

The only way I managed to survive was to sell my $800 ring for $80; my $300 cue and case for $70 and my bike carrier for $30. Except for my bike, which I really enjoy, I have little left to sell. I'm down to my office chair, which is the only furniture I have and my computer, which I could not live without.

The job is going okay, although I am not getting enough hours to be able to pay my rent. OW will take what I make off my allowance, so I will not be any further ahead. My rent is steep and, of course, I am now feeding myself, although I continue to go to the churches for meals. Thank God for them or I would starve to death. When you line up with the hundreds of people who eat at the churches you have to wonder how these people would survive without the generosity of the church community. It says a lot about the state of our economy when so many people need these soup kitchens to survive.

It is a very lonely time for me. My friends out West have given up on me and I don't have any friends here in London. My biggest regret of my life is losing contact with my kids. Even with how bad my life is right now I'd still love to talk to my kids and see how they are doing. I have four grandchildren, only one of which I've ever seen and that was when she was just a baby. I search for them everyday but haven't had any luck finding them. My son, Chris, was in Brampton back in 2007 and my daughter, Heather, was in Burlington, but there's no sign of them on any website anywhere. I've tried everything.

For anyone who might still care this is just letting you know what's up with me.

Take care.

by TheEditor

From the streets

The welfare system seems to be designed not to help you in your time of need, but rather to punish you for the mistakes you may have made.

My analogy is that I was quite a few rungs up that proverbial ladder, with a promising job and a place to live and food in my belly. Through various circumstances I slipped off and fell down a few rungs on the ladder, eventually falling off the ladder onto the ground, laying in my filthy bed at the Mission in oppressive heat and I knew I had hit rock bottom.

But I was wrong. OW called them last thing Friday night and told them I could not stay there either. It’s as though I’m on the ground, trying to get to my feet, and OW is there, cowering over me, punching me back down every time I try to get up.

If there is one lesson you learn from being homeless it is to never take what you have for granted. After being denied a bed at both the Centre of Hope and the Mission; sleeping on a friend’s office floor because I was too terrified to sleep in a park, I landed at the Unity Project. The wonderful, caring people there made a phone call and managed to speak to someone with compassion at OW, a rarity, and they agreed to let me stay, at least until the end of the month. Throughout all this horrible ordeal I was also going through a series of job interviews with a local retailer. It was incredibly hard to buck up and put on my game face with them through the interviews, but I managed to get the job, albeit temporary part-time for now. If OW wasn’t just going to deduct whatever I make it would help me to get back on my feet, but at least it’s something. I had no choice but to go out and buy safety shoes with my last dollar for my first shift on Sunday, but OW has me on suspension and hasn’t reimbursed me for them.

I have registered for emergency housing, but have heard nothing. Apparently, even if you are homeless, it can take up to a month at the minimum. Without a permanent address OW will not help you. How do you find a place in this very expensive town when you have no money for a deposit or to pay rent? The fact that you are working and doing your very best to get off the system doesn’t seem to register with anyone. It should be a requirement to work for OW that you surrender everything you have and spend a week on the streets, fending for yourself. If you make it through the ordeal, then and only then do you get the government job. At least you would understand what we are dealing with every day and maybe show some compassion.

And thank God, literally, for the fact that the churches in London feed the homeless and the hungry. Without them you would be stepping over the dead bodies of people who have starved to death. These soup kitchens are staffed by very caring people who understand our plight and do more than their fair share to keep us alive.

Then there’s the guy who sets up his barbeque every night downtown and cooks up hotdogs for anyone who lines up. No inquisition. No judgment. Just food for the soul. Thank you, kind sir!

by TheEditor

How much can one man take?

When you fall down that ladder, one rung at a time, and finally slip off the bottom rung and fall on the ground, you believe, bad as it is, that you have finally hit rock bottom. There’s nowhere left to go, right?

My journey to the bottom has been full of challenges, some admittedly of my own doing, and others just plain bad luck. When I offered safe haven to the Panamanian family who were going to be out on the street for two weeks, how did I know it would end up taking me two weeks to get them out after calling the police, or that they would rip me off for everything I owned, leaving me virtually penniless in a foreign country? They never even paid me a cent of the eight hundred or so dollars I spent to feed their huge family. They left me with no choice but to return to Canada and, had it not been for the kind offer of a roof over my head from my cousin in Toronto, I have no idea what I could have done.

Life is what happens while you are making other plans, they say. By pure chance I met a woman on the internet who lived in London. We fell hopelessly in love, at least I thought so, and I ended up moving to London to be with her. Circumstances prevented us from living together, which I guess turned out to be the right thing. A few months into what I felt was the best relationship I had ever had in my life, and she spent the weekend with another man, who has now moved in with her, and I’m toast.

Thankfully a colleague had got me a job working for a call centre and this kept me alive for a few months at least. There were plans for another show in Calgary and, for a time, I was on my way to Calgary, which suited me just fine, as it got me out of here, but it all fell through and I was out of work. I spent all day, every day, doing my best to find a job, any job. Tim Horton’s, factory work, any kind of sales job, you name it. I was lucky enough to be selected from over three hundred candidates to get the job as Regional Manager for a wireless security company. They told me they had all kinds of “hot leads” for London and all I had to do was follow them up and close them. It was straight commission, but I was confident in the product and my abilities to close and I seized the opportunity like a pit-bull. Despite my efforts, The truth was they had no leads, no clients who had systems and no prospects of any kind.

I soon discovered that the market in London is like no other. Business here has no morals of any kind and no respect for your time and effort. Among many, many prospects was a recycling company who had four locations around London. I spent two full days visiting each location, taking pictures, drafting drawings, meeting with each location manager and preparing the detailed quote. I presented the quote and answered all of their questions. The final statement from the VP was they didn’t know if they would start with two locations, or go for all four. Needless to say, as someone who had spent his whole life in sales, I know a closing statement when I hear one. Keep in mind that this represented about a seven thousand dollar commission, which would change my whole life.

I gave it a few days for them to discuss it and then started following up with emails and phone calls. Nothing. No response. Days went by, then weeks and I could not figure out what I had done wrong, for the life of me. Finally I had our Head Office call and they told them the decision would be delayed for a month or two. Why they couldn’t tell me I will never know.

It was the same story with other prospects. I cold called. I emailed. I phoned. Our Marketing Department sent out a five hundred piece mailer to targeted accounts, a piece that had gotten a good response in other areas and closed some deals. London? Not one response. Our telemarketing department, in two months of calling, got one appointment, which turned out to be a total waste of time. After driving way out of town and spending an hour with the guy, he said he was “just curious” and had no need for a system right now. It was all becoming more and more hopeless.

At the same time I knew I was just about out of money. I hadn’t paid the rent, so I volunteered to do a bunch of work my landlady needed done. I was hoping to work off the rent I owed and, although I freely admit I should have got a firm agreement in place before starting all the work, I assumed she would offer, given that I did about fifty hours of work, completely reorganizing her disaster of a garage, repairing the railings around her above ground pool, building a bookcase unit and some small stuff. When the work was done she didn’t offer me a dollar, in fact, I had spent some money on supplies and she calculated the rent right to the dollar.

Over the next couple of weeks she made my life a living hell. I was afraid to even run into her because she took every opportunity to yell at me and treat me like you know what. She shut the air-conditioning off on me, at a time when we have been suffering through a horrible heat wave. My place was the loft of the house, poorly insulated and not vented properly, so it was about forty degrees up there. I couldn’t work or sleep, which took its toll on me, this on top of not having my diabetic medications for six weeks. She impounded my bike and carrier, so I lost my only form of recreation and she became more threatening about what she would do if I didn't come up with the rent for August as well. I was a mess.

When she told me she was going out of town for a couple of days I realized it was an opportunity to escape. I had nowhere to go, but I just prayed I would find somewhere. I knew I would crack if I didn’t get out of there fast. I took most of my stuff to my friend’s business and started running all over town looking for something. With all the students for Fanshawe college and the University, this is a crazy place to find anything decent. If I were a young female student, no problem, but there is nothing for an older man. The places I looked at were disgusting and too expensive anyway.

With nowhere to go I ended up at the Salvation Army Centre of Hope. Having never been in a place like this before, I had no idea what to expect. After a lengthy check-in process, they showed me to my dorm room, shared with three other guys. Everything is pretty sparse, like one shower for about fifty guys on the floor and the blanket they give you is paper thin and the bed is like sleeping on cardboard, but it’s a roof over your head. Also, thankfully, cool, in fact, sometimes downright cold. There’s a TV room, but you can only watch what the first person in the room watches. No fun for a channel flicker like me.

Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Well, when they checked me in they asked me if I was on Ontario Works, which I was. They asked for my Health card, which they told me covered two nights. I had no idea what happened after that, but my brain couldn’t handle anything more right then, so I figured someone would tell me later. They kick you out of the place during the day, which is challenging enough now. No idea what you do in the winter. When I came back to my dorm there was a note on my bed to speak to the office “immediately”. They informed me that I had to pay $15 a night and I could pay in the morning. The first thing you have to do each morning is sign the bed sheet indicating you will be there for another night. If you don’t they give up your bed, cut your lock off if you have one and donate your “stuff” to charity. Nice. In the morning my name was not on the list and panic set in.

I went down and paid, then brought the receipt back to the floor office. When I handed the receipt to him he immediately told me I could not stay. I carefully explained what I had been told and, after writing a novel on their computer, he told me he would “do me a favor” and let me stay until Tuesday, but then I had to be out. We left it that I would speak to my Ontario Works case worker on Tuesday and take it from there. I have no idea what else to do. I looked at another place, but now I don’t have enough money to pay the rent he wants anyway. It’s all more than one man can take. I have never been so low in all my life or felt so helpless.

They kicked me out of the shelter today. Can’t win.

by TheEditor

The Walls are Closing in on Me

No idea why I keep blogging about all this. No one cares. That's obvious. I guess it some perverse idea that I don't want to just keel over from not having my meds and no one knows why. If it happens, I am reminded of that wise old saying about how much you'll be missed. It reads "put your hand in a bucket of water and then remove it and see how much you have affected it." Yes, a brief ripple and then no one knows you were ever there. Fitting.

My world is crashing in on me. I had applied for welfare to at least get me my meds before it's too late, but they are jerking me around. I had hoped that I would hear something today because they knew how critical it was, but, when I finally managed to contact my worker, she said she had sent me a letter! A letter? How urgent is that? Typical government worker. Not a clue about the real world.

Tonight is my last meal, literally, as that is all the food I have left. I can't go to the food bank because I don't have my authorization from welfare. The food bank only gives you a pathetic three days of lousy food anyway, so I have no idea how you are expected to live on that. My landlady, for whom I did about forty hours of tough work on her house for with little thanks and certainly no break on the rent, now wants me to go and stay at the mens Mission. I've missed two payments on my car, so I guess it might be a good idea to sleep in it somewhere else so they can't grab it from me, knowing my address.

Thanks to the disasters of the last few years I have nothing much left to sell. I've put my blades and my pool cue on Kijiji. I've been holding off putting my bike on because I might need it, but now my landlady might scoop it for rent. Other than clothes nobody wants, all I have is my computer and printer and they're not worth a whole lot. I see selling them as completely giving up, which I'm close to today. I have about fifteen dollars to my name and, without welfare, I won't survive. No meds is suicidal enough. Not eating on top of that for a diabetic is completely insane. At this point I would welcome the end of all this stress though.

There is so much I wanted to accomplish still. I hoped to one day be reunited with my kids, who I miss desperately each and every day. If they somehow find out that I am gone I wonder if it will mean anything to them after all these years? I was so hopeful when my son and I reconnected in 2007, but he just as quickly disappeared and I haven't spoken to him since. I can't even find Danielle, his daughter, who chatted with me often, but who has now also disappeared.

I have been compiling a list of the joyous moments of my life. Not sure why. I guess maybe to believe that my life has not been a waste. No matter what the memory or who was part of it, I found that all it did was make me angry that those people are not in my life, or helping me now when I helped them so much in the past. Even thinking about the kids gets me upset because I know I did nothing wrong. My kids knew I was stuck in a horrible marriage and they were the ones who encouraged me to move out West to start over. There was never any talk of them then abandoning me or my entire side of the family. I tried for years to connect with them, even driving down from BC to Ontario in the depths of the winter to see my daughter, who they hid away from me. It was all so cruel. Why do people do that to others? I figured that when my kids were adults they would come to their senses and contact us again, but that never happened. Both my father and mother passed away without ever hearing from their grand-kids again. Unbelievably sad and so undeserved.

No idea what will happen if I don't get my drug card tomorrow. I guess without food it will all be academic anyway.

by TheEditor

Diary of a Diabetic

Had to happen. After a sleepless night Thursday because my feet were cramping up so bad, I knew I had to see my doctor. He phoned the pharmacy to order emergency meds for me, then gave me money out of his own pocket to pay for them. He's such a great guy! When he tested my sugar, which came back at a whopping 24.5, he said I needed to go straight to emergency, which I did. Took hours, but they watched me while my sugars came down slowly and they gave me enough Metphormin to make it through the weekend. Going without my meds has been stupid, but I've had no choice. God, how I wish I could find a job, any job!

by TheEditor

Desperation sets in

Not much left to say. I am on hold on the phone right now to Welfare, to beg them to give me some meds before I collapse. It's been six weeks now and that is taking its toll on me. Add this deplorable heat to being without meds and the days and nights are not pleasant. My landlady, although surprisingly understanding about not paying the rent last week, refuses to leave the air on to cool down my sweltering loft, so I just sit and sweat and can't sleep. I have no money for food, so my diet has tanked. I am so dehydrated all I do is drink water and pee, and it keeps me up all night. I have filled out an unbelievable number of job applications, at least a hundred over the last few days, with not one response. It's so discouraging! I would kill to be back out West. I have so many wonderful memories of great friends there. I have no one to care here. I wish I could close my eyes, click my heels and wake up in the Okanagan.

by TheEditor