Train to town, no one checked for fare, lunch at Blanchet House, checking out other places to get food. Walked up to a church that allegedly gives out bags of groceries once a week but didn't get a bag because I didn't want to have to carry it around all day & keep track of it. I guess I could have done what a lot of homeless people do, which is stash it somewhere & retrieve it later, but even that seemed like a chore I didn't want or need right now. I guess I'm not hungry enough. After scoping out the place, I walked all over town exploring. The downtown area is nice here, I wish I had the dough to take advantage of some of the amenities. Walked to the waterfront (western side) & fell asleep on a bench next to some chattering Mexicans. Then went to the library, looked at a book of photos of Charles Bukowski plus some things I would never otherwise look at. Read three or four Jean Rhys short stories & looked at the exhibit of cartoon-illustration art by some clown the library is touting. Had a bad reaction to the exhibit, maybe it's just residual undercurrent because I'm out on the street(?). My immediate reaction was something like this: Why is it that ‘artists’ who make illustrations for "kids’ books" always want to make them look like goofy cartoons? How come there’s never any realistic representation or genuinely magical art? Do these people think they actually have to expand the imaginations of kids by keeping all the lines & shapes so simple & the colors all boring & nondescript & common? And this is how to do it? Kids have the biggest imaginations of any of us, from birth. That all goes away when they see this ineffectual pap & ridiculous crap. You’d do better showing them Zap Comix.
Dinner at Blanchet House at 5, then at Portland Rescue Mission at 6. Many of the street people eat two or even three dinners each night. The times are staggered so you can do that. Train back to the car, staring into the darkness listening to the radio. Then bundle up for sleep.
My left hip gives me fits just about every night. No matter how I turn in the car I’m still in a contorted position, & this ain’t yoga, it’s just cramped bullshit conditions & it gives my 54-year-old body aches & pains. Some nights not as bad as others, maybe the cold has something to do with it, too. It’s also a little bit that I have to keep my head down below the window line, or feel like I do so nobody will spot me & make me move my car & interrupt my rest. When I sleep at rest areas on interstates, where I can put my head against the window (with a pillow, I have 3 pillows in the car) & stretch out my legs, then it’s not so bad, except for having to sleep sitting up like in a recliner & without a TV on in front of me. (TV has become a treat I miss.) Sometimes a man just needs to lie stretched out flat on his stomach in a proper bed, or so one would think. I guess it’s what you’re used to. I read once that in the Middle Ages beds weren’t 6 feet long, they were short & they had high backs that people piled pillows against & people slept sitting up. I forget where I read that, it was a long time ago. I don’t know if it’s even true.
You've got to be careful about who sees you shaking out & folding your blankets each morning. The wrong person saw me doing that a few days ago & now a game of cat & mouse has developed that spells the end of this perfectly peaceful street as a base for nightly sleep-outs. One might ask: Why fold my blankets each morning anyway? It gives a sense of order to an otherwise chaotic & formless situation. And maybe also a feeling of control over circumstances that seem temporarily out of control.
Walked around the neighborhood in the NE 102nd Street area prospecting for places to sleep at night. It's funny what camping out does to your thinking: When I've been downtown lately I catch myself all the time looking between buildings and scoping out places where I might sleep without being bothered should I lose my car. It's an altogether different thing to look for places where you can put a car at night and live out of it (that is, eat & sleep in it, & in my case, as an artist, draw and make collage books in & around it). The car becomes both a blessing (shelter at least) and an albatross. It takes money to put gas in it so it can be moved around because you can't leave it parked in one place indefinitely because if you do people hassle you, neighborhood watch committees, cops, residents who feel possessive of their streets, crack head passers-by, etc, just about anyone will hassle a man sleeping in a car at one time or another for whatever reason. People sleeping in cars are threats to the status quo even though they're just SLEEPING & are dealt with as threats.
