Robo Hobo Homo #103

From Friday 'til about Monday night, I ate a lot of bread and raisins. There's always bread here. Loads of it. Not sure why. I guess we get donated food that goes bad, and bread goes bad relatively quickly.

There's always bread out in the galley for folks to wander in and eat. Enough that despite the incredible varieties, I'm getting a bit sick of bread.

We also have raisins. Cases of raisins. I can only assume that someone donated a lot of raisins. So we have those hanging out the kitchen too. Now, I don't like raisins, really. They're not that sweet and they're kind of dry. They're even kind of ugly. They're talented musicians though.

I have come to love raisins. I can pack a little box to help me stay alert through a night shift. They have 120 calories in those little boxes, but they're still not a bad light snack or a rough meal replacement.

Raisins: They're a food that's not more bread.

Robo Hobo Homo #100

I did make the most of it though. As I had left, I saw some candy machines in the not-a-mall. They only took quarters and my change collection was almost exclusively nickels and dimes. Just to show I did learn something in college, I availed myself of a nearby vending machine. Because vending machines dispense change and returned money in the most efficient denominations, you can turn small change into quarters. Twenty seconds later my dollar of loose change wealth had been redistributed into four quarters.

Larry had asked me expectantly about candy at some point during the past. I hadn't had any at the time, but things were good and I wanted to share with one of my closest friends at the shelter. Two quarters got me enough Mike & Ikes to satisfyingly fill one of my smaller zip-loc bags.

I don't remember much of the walk to the shelter. It's not quite a ninety-minute blank spot in my memory, but it's close. According to my calculations, once I started doing 10 hour shifts I'd be spending 13 hours on each work day working. Assuming—ha!—eight hours of sleep, that would be three hours for every other bodily function and personal need I might attend to.

Reflecting on it later Saturday morning, it didn't feel like a good match. I thought about continuing working on it while looking for something else. 

“If nothing else,” I thought humorously, “I could become a blogger.”

Robo Hobo Homo #090

When I used to drive from Houma to San Antonio, I'd love to stop by Wal-Marts to buy Magic cards, diet coke, and turkey sandwiches. I don't have much nice to say about Wal-Marts, but their turkey-sandwiches are indelibly linked with those nine-hour drives.

When I was a kid, the four-hour drive we took between parents for every other holiday were linked with fried chicken gizzards. The drive from the Lafayette McDonald's to my dad's house in Houma is nothing but a straight drive through cane fields. I'm not sure what it was like to drive a car full of kids across it for two hours, but the chicken gizzards probably helped.

Whenever I drove a friend from his place in Houston to my dad's place in Houma for Christmas in 2012, we stopped by a little place in Lafayette for fried chicken gizzards.

He hated them.

Robo Hobo Homo #087

It wasn't even a place that gave out hygiene products. It was a free shower place.

Of course. I got him to take First Street in a straight shot back to downtown and hung a left to get to the Safeway. We talked about a few things, nothing in particular. He misses his grandkids and can't wait to get his Social Security money.

I hope he gets it. I talk a lot of shit about Larry, but given that he's an ex-con over fifty who doesn't want to work, I'd rather he get some money to take care of himself than end up living in shelters for the rest of his life.

Deep down, I'm afraid that there is no money coming. He tells a great story about pretending to be insane to get the money and how he's always just waiting on it, but sometimes I don't know if he's pretending for us, telling us that things will be okay when he's going to be spending the rest of his life in one shelter like this or another.

Larry is kind of my closest friend right now and I want to help him so much but I can't.

But on that Friday we talked, I bought him a sandwich and gatorade with my EBT card, and wished him good luck.

Robo Hobo Homo #086

Oh, right. Larry.

He caught me just before the eleven o'clock buses pulled in. I walked over and he offered to show me where the hygiene dispensing place was. Finally happy to have him show me this mythical valhalla of deodorant and shaving cream, I accepted.

Because we'd be missing lunch at the shelter in order to go on our adventure, I offered to break open my EBT card and buy us both sandwiches at the Safeway. He showed me how to call and check the balance on my card.

Larry has a habit of hitting someone in the arm to begin a sentence. It's like the upside down exclamation point of his personal punctuation scheme. In the first five minutes of our trip, my left arm was already aching.

We had a a nice trip up First Street. A few blocks west of downtown proper, he turned up a dirt and gravel road that pulled up a hill between an abandoned shop and an auto parts store. His path cut to the left and he began pointing out familiar buildings with me as we continued on a side-street further west.

Eventually, my curiosity gave way to frustration and my frustration gave way to the sort of pure amusement that only life's inevitable, blithe stupidity can evoke.

The twisting path we'd followed and Larry's incoherent directions both led me to a small building just next door to the Thrift Store.

Robo Hobo Homo #084

After I was done with my email, I followed-up with Mr. McCoy. He was super-enthused that I'd gotten the job and even though the hours were still uncertain, he was ready to get me with Scotty from the local housing assistance program to get me into an apartment Saturday morning.

I am only slightly exaggerating about his enthusiasm.

After that, I updated my information with the Food Stamps office (that typo in my address line carried over from my healthcare application) and headed to the bus stop to hurry back home and complete the mountain of paperwork I needed to finish for my night shift.

As I was waiting, Larry called out to me from across the bus center.

Robo Hobo Homo #063

The walk home Wednesday from the library wasn't any better or worse than before. It might have contributed to my computer's accelerated decline, but I can't be sure anymore. It seems to be doing okay in this exact moment. It spent all day in the computer room with me so maybe it's just following the example of good computers.

Anyway, because the city is an unreliable grid, there are only three major routes home. I went the route I like to call 8th and I, because it hinges on the intersection of 8th Street and I Street and because it's an in-joke from my time at The Academy.

Robo Hobo Homo #015

Now they don't have “plenty” of food here, but there's enough. The helpings are big because meals are cooked never knowing who's going to show up. Enough is made for everyone, and there are leftovers, but never enough to reuse for a whole meal the next day. In the five days I've been here, two people have dropped off perishable foods here for us to enjoy. There's usually bread, peanut butter, and some fruit available in the dining area.

So there's a lot of food around and without wi-fi, a cheap means of getting around, or anything nearby to do, it's easy to just sit around and eat. The temptation is the worst after kitchen duty. The other thing about working late is that when I'm done, I'm in pain, I'm tired, and I'm mentally drained (yes, focusing on doing dishes so I can do them as quickly as I can is draining).

About that time, it's snack time. There's an actual snack time. It's an unhealthy meal served late at night and it's always really tempting.

Luckily, it's the only time that all of my roommates are out of the room, so I can do some light workouts. Because it's so hard to do laundry and because I don't have any decent clothes for it, it's still kinda hard to get workouts in.

I have walked a lot. I manage to stay busy when there's something to do. When there's nothing to do, I try to find something to do. Especially on the weekends though, when no one is hiring for anything, the hours stretch on. It's a very conscious effort to watch what I'm eating.

Whether it's fair or not, I have three advantages when it comes to interviews. They're not things that make me better than anyone I'm competing with; they're things that employers generally count as a virtue because people are shit. I'm a dude, I'm white, and I'm not bad looking.

As shitty as it is, I'm hanging onto that last one as much as I can here.