Homeless: No Future

Without home or future

I’ve technically been aware that I am in the social class of homeless. Sleeping in your car is functionally homeless with more resources than someone without a car. Every time you lay down to sleep within the borders of a town you probably break the law. To cops and the middle class living in your car is just for the recently homeless.

It occurred to me however that I haven’t thought of that as being without home. Yet now I’ve been reflecting as I consider what is worthy action for my life. Then recognizing, I have no home. There is no home for me in California, no home in Arizona, no base in Virginia, no abode in Massachusetts, no shelter in Colorado. Finally I have become without home and the only sense of ownership that remains is that which is forced upon me by the state: citizenship. My only context of home is the borders of the US. My car is not my home, it is the box I sleep in to stay out of wind and rain, not a home, not a house. A van is not a home without a place to build over it. A camp is not a home when you plan to leave it so shortly.

Thus have I become transient. There exists no ownership in the places I visit. There is no string nor rope or chain that says that any place I park I must root into. In any case, everywhere I have parked would turn the ire of the truncheon on me if I were to bring hammer and nails. Save Slabs, yet that’s going to shit with gentrification and police occupation. There is no future. No future! Freedom in the abandonment of hope and home leads one to reconcile directly with the only chains remaining: ties of citizenship to state.

What does one do when there is no future? No place to call home, nothing to root into, only poisoned soil that rejects my steps. When the state is bearing down on me and those like me, what am I to do? Where can I find joy in resistance to an entity so large it can crush me with a laugh?

I think often of the Holocaust and the trains and how people being taken to death camps would attack their captors when they realized. Every time, they were all killed. And people kept doing it. I think, if I am to die at the end of a noose or needle, I’d like to spit in the face of my killer before I take that final bow.