Robo Hobo Homo #101

When I got in, Mike asked me to pick up a lobby shift that morning in exchange for the one he'd taken care of.

I crashed for a bit, then got back up for my shift. It was my first lobby, and after all of the action on the previous day it was a relief to get on with it. It went pretty well.

The Mumblr I talked about earlier was discharged. Everyone was on edge. It turns out he's certifiably crazy. While I was hanging out with Larry the previous day, he talked to me about his lobby watches. Larry, like many people's grandparents, pretends to get up really early, but cheats by taking naps. Larry prefers staying up at night so he takes night shifts in the lobby.

During one of those shifts, he caught The Mumblr pissing in the bushes outside. At every meeting I've attended here, Dave mentions how there's no urinating in the bushes in the front of the shelter. I assumed that it was guys who were smoking and lazy, but it turns out it was The Mumblr, deliberately pissing in the bushes at night.

His story was that he took tobacco out of the garbage on the back patio to put in his pipe. He's pretty broke, so that's how he gets his tobacco. Apparently he accidentally put marijuana from that garbage into his pipe and then...somehow he's peeing in the bushes?

He was certifiable and despite all of my sturm and drag over the fates of other guys around here, I didn't feel bad about that. I mean, there are other shelters and he can get health care.

I guess I'll talk about how wrong I was when I get to Thursday though.

Robo Hobo Homo #058

The courthouse was on the way to my most important stop, the Mental Health Office. I already went over it before, but I do want to impress upon you how nice everyone there was. A lady noticed that I used the word “y’all” and I confessed to being from Texas. I can’t overstate how much it meant to me, feeling broke and vulnerable, to have someone notice me as a person. It wasn’t just her. The folks at the local helping people find employment office, the Food Stamp Place, and even the DMV were really nice.
 

That the Thrift Store people and my case worker are a bit more abrupt doesn’t seem so bad.

I also saw a fellow resident at the Mental Health Office. I won’t even give him a made-up name. We shared a few words, had some small talk, and that was it. None the less, he’s a good guy and I’m glad he’s getting help too.
 

I wouldn’t have pegged him as someone who really needed counseling, but then you can never tell these things about folks just by looking at them.

Robo Hobo Homo #057

On Wednesday after I left the local helping people find employment place, I was headed for the mental health office. On the way I wanted to swing by the courthouse to see what I had to do to get another social security card.

I forgot that courthouses have guards and metal detectors at them. If I had a dime for every time I had to walk into a courthouse, then suspiciously walk back out as I put my boxcutter down on a nearby hand rail then walk back in, I’d have twenty cents.

But hey, I could use the money right now.

Luckily, this town is small enough that that was not the case. In fact, they had a relatively large display focused solely on helping folks get new social security cards. Go fig. I read it over, noted the documents, grabbed an application, and got out.

I turns out that I only need a valid driver’s license and my birth certificate to get the new social security card. Whenever I got to the library later, I managed—through my euphoric haze—to look up data on getting my birth certificate from Texas. $22 paid through a debt or credit card.

Outstanding.

At least I was on the right track.

Robo Hobo Homo #047

So I made an appointment. The folks were nice. Very nice. I’ve never been a really big “insurance” guy. I understand the operating principles, but I never quite know how to make sure everything works.

I once had to pay over $1,000 for an STI test just because I went to the doctor’s office a day fucking early. It was a complete hassle that saw me getting billed by three or so different organizations I’d never heard of and my overall experience was unsatisfactory.

With the public healthcare plan I signed up for as a poor person, I was able to fill out my form and then the folks behind the counter determined my insurance information.

They could do that because the system was all linked together. They had to do that because I hadn’t gotten my card yet. Getting a mental health screening was at the top of my list of things to do and I imagined there would be a line so I didn't want to wait for my card to come in the mail before I got into the queue.

Luckily, I was correct. My appointment ended up being on “Walk-In Wednesday,” which is a little depressing, but for essentially free mental health that might be able to help me hold down the next job I get, I think it’s worth it.

I know it’s worth it.

Robo Hobo Homo #046

That was something else I’d done on Wednesday. I had received assurances that I had insurance coverage, so I decided I’d take some time to actually get evaluated.

I want to start by saying that I don’t consider my suicidal tendencies to be an error or the result of something wrong with my brain. If anything, the fact that I haven’t done so in the face of the overwhelming evidence of the futility of my building a future is proof of some processing flaw.

None the less, I do get emotional flashes where I do want to die as a result of stress. Having someone just slide up and blow my brains out would be a preferable experience to some of the social situations I encounter. It’s just cleaner and easier.

It’s not my lack of zeal for life that I find troublesome. It’s the aggressiveness of these moods that concerns me. It’s that I can be so down for so long. It’s that I can be so euphoric at something which is rationally a very small thing.

I don’t think that having “nominal” brain chemistry is the cure for anything. I do think that maybe if I didn’t brood over things, I’d be a little more capable of engaging in the social give-and-take that’s required to stay at a job for longer than a year.