Am I a Blogger Now?

A Dispatch from Planet Whatever

(image shamelessly stolen without proper attribution from the pure evil local television news vultures)

I finally did street outreach in my hometown as a volunteer this morning. It was everything I wanted it to be. This org popped up several years ago, started somehow by some ex-tunnel dwellers under the Las Vegas Strip. I won’t name it b/c idk we don’t know each other like that.

If you don’t know what street outreach is, it’s when you give out waters and food and soap and socks and Narcan and shit to people on the street. I rode around in dude’s truck for a few hours going to different spots and chatting with other volunteers, homeless people, a 7-11 cashier, whatever.

But fuck, this morning was nice. It was nice to shoot the shit with some dudes in recovery and not have to worry about the cold pregnant disgusting weird skin-crawling awkward silence that accompanies the Pacific Northwest. A fellow volunteer, an ex-con, clocked me as a fag over a pink lighter. I don’t even give a shit! I’ll fucking take that homophobic shit over whatever weird creepy PNW judgment/anxiety/whatever I dealt with in the queer spaces there.

Everyone down here is a piece of shit, and fuck is it nice to be a piece of shit too.

That’s the good.

The bad? Part of the org I went out with today offers a path to treatment, right now, to recover. This model is in conflict with much of the country’s push for Housing First (including Vegas). In order to get housing, you have to get treatment. Housing First is like the name implies: housing comes first, then sobriety.

Does this other model work? I can’t tell. I want to hear from more people out there, and yes, I’ve heard from plenty already. But I’m putting on a new hat, trying new things, opening up to new perspectives. The Recovery First model seems outdated, Republican, and regressive in nature, but it has plenty of supporters in recovery spaces. I generally hear it to be bad, bad, bad, especially from the harm reductionists and homeless services sector at large in Seattle. BTW, I get into harm reduction and my deep ambivalence toward it in a previous post.

Another volunteer, a volunteer lead actually, is coping in his recovery over “choices” people make to stay in the washes and the tunnels and the camps to continue to get high. There’s more to say about why a dude that’s in recovery from meth addiction kept rattling on about choosing to continue to get high and live in the washes, but I don’t have the refined, academic, peer-reviewed words for it at the moment. I know it contradicts the enlightened perspective of SUD being a medical disease and not an active choice people make. He’s not a social worker, though; he’s a mechanic with thirteen years in the military. Everyone’s got opinions. However, his experience and opinion might, ironically, give someone else hope and dignity that they do actually really do actually really have a choice. A real choice. Imagine that.

The ugly? Homegirl in one of the washes was crying because her neighbor OD’ed, and the dude’s lady was with his body for like four hours before calling someone. I think they were close. Also, the police come to sweep every day. Homegirl’s spot, a really nice, shaded spot by a water source, will have to be abandoned. If the police arrive, they’ll take her straight to jail. Homegirl had two puppies, and if it’s jail for homegirl, it’s the kill shelter for the puppies. Standard story, sure, and also worth witnessing.

Worth telling you? I don’t know. Maybe I do another one of these next week.