Robo Hobo Homo #105

I blazed through the dishes, despite it being a chili night and everything I said earlier about tomato-based dishes.

If I thought the gas here was bad before, Chili Night must be the most ill omen in The Great Book of Ill Omens. He who reaps the chili will reap the chili winds.

Part of why the dishes went so well is because I had Future Octavio come in to help. Future Octavio looks like the forty-year-old version of my friend Octavio.

When I mentioned earlier that Wagner had a lot of radio components, I wasn't kidding. As it turns out, he and Tosh are kind of close friends. I saw them carting some stuff in while I was in the lobby after doing the dishes. It turns out that Wagner had scored “a few” radio parts from a dealer somewhere in town and they were unloading them from his car.

I like both of those guys and it sounded like an opportunity to do something cool, so I volunteered to help. There were radio parts two boxes deep in every surface of Wagner's car except for the driver's seat. Then he opened the trunk. It was a dazzling amount of old radios, resistors, circuits, transformers, and a couple of things I couldn't identify.

I talked with Wagner a bit about it while striking up a conversation with Tosh about Star Trek. Tosh likes Voyager, but if it's one good thing I can say about Star Trek (2009) it's that it makes liking Voyager more endearing than grating.

Wagner's hard for me to get a handle on. I know I use words like “good guy” and “nice” to describe people fairly often, but Wagner is a good guy. Like me, he's a bit weird, but he's just a slightly different type of weird.

Oh, and everyone made a joke about how we're building a time machine.

Robo Hobo Homo #102

I got the mail, which included the phone I ordered on eBay. I really liked the lobby shift. It was basically barge work plus standing a watch. I managed to take some phone calls, remind guys when they had mail and laundry, and otherwise just do stuff for two hours straight. I really liked it.

I also finally got around to doing my laundry. I had forgotten on Thursday do it, and in all of the confusion had to put it off Friday and I finally got a heap o' stuff washed. Bono called in and he said he was going to be working late with his disabled brother and wanted me to pass that on to Yesbert, who—as I'd suspected—told me that a phone call about that shit wasn't enough.

A lot of folks here are recovering from drug problems so it's important that they not be able to vanish for a night and simply come back in the morning. Purgatory House doesn't want to help folks that are just going to crash here between getting high, so suddenly going on an unauthorized absence with no notice is a red flag.

I rebuilt the personnel list and discovered that I didn't have a card on file. You know what they say, the misfile you find may be your own. I kind of miss me being on lobby because everyone since then has misspelled my name.

Lunch rolled around, and I guess Dennis is adamant that folks on lobby can't duck out to get food. I'd like to stay on his good side, so I was resigned to not having any, but Wheelchair Guy offered to get me some. Heart of gold, that guy.

Between being on watch and having to shake people down for watches, I've been learning a lot of people's names.

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 #098

There is a game store here. I may have mentioned it before. They were playing Friday Night Magic. I wandered in and asked about Journey into Nyx. It's out. It was so weird not knowing, after being plugged into the Magic news machine while I was plugged in.

Troy from the shelter flagged me down. He spotted me from a block away. It's my curse that my taste in jackets is so distinctive. It was thirty minutes until the Purgatory Shelter curfew and he thought that I might have a ride back. He was disappointed that I didn't, but he either found a way back or didn't get caught.

While I was walking, I thought about my schedule, what I'd need money to pay for. If I could get an apartment of my own. If I even wanted to live alone. What would the appointment at the Mental Health Center be like on Wednesday? It was all a bit scary, to be honest.

I would eventually gave up wandering and sat inside of the not-a-mall building that my work is in. Then it occurred to me that I was thinking weeks in advance instead of just days. I took it as a good sign and headed into work.