Living the Homeless Life, Part 1

For those who don't know...

On November 15, 2013 the police pulled me out of the apartment I was living in to protect my life from the numb-nut criminals in the complex.(Had I been informed that the landlord is associated with gangsters I would not have moved into the place in the first place.  Because I know me and me always calls the police upon witnessing a crime, and living in a den of thieves is not conducive to my well being.)

Since then I have been in the homeless state of sharing a transition house run by the Salvation Army.  I have no say on who my roommates will be, and army life is not something I have ever needed. For more than 50 years I have learned self-discipline by engaging in the arts. Artists are masters, and masters create something from nothing. Simple as that. Do these Army folk understand this? No.

The majority of the people who work and live within the Salvation Army are people who need to be told what to do and how to do it. A case in point:

This morning I had a discussion with one of my roommates about the effects of drugs and alcohol on the human mind. She has not used crack cocaine for the last eight months after 15 years of using. She was saying the addiction is a disease, and I said it is a lifestyle choice. I backed my statement up with the fact that drugs and alcohol suppress the mind's inhibitors, allowing for the user to express whatever emotion they feel or think about in the moment; and, that it takes a great deal of practice to control one's emotions. She ended the conversation with stating she needed to get ready to go to church. 

She needs the structure of basic rules because she has spent a great deal of her adult life in the state of being out of control. For her, the daily church attendance is an absolute need, because it is the comfort zone where she does not have to take responsibility for controlling herself. Someone else is in control, she's obedient to her faith instead of a substance.

What I know...

In more than 50 years of engaging in one art form or another I have discovered self control. Each art form is a skill, and those skills require practice to achieve proficiency, and the practice demands self control.