Write a manual on how to live with and rise out of poverty.

I have begun to experience what is life like staying on the streets of Savannah, Atlanta, Chicago, and Galesburg.

In Savannah I started a camp under an underpass. Living homeless there is very harsh, what with the hot humid climate and the West Nile bearing mosquitoes.

Chicago’s crime is intimidating. In one instance, three men beat a homeless man so severely he lost an eye. What “did he do wrong?” He bumped in to one on the sidewalk. Just that.

Whenever possible, use grocery carts to push things across shopping areas. But don’t steal carts off of store lots, please. Or you do so at your own risk. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

1. What to do when you don’t want to depend on anyone’s charity, or you are unsure as to the locals’ reaction or response to your asking for help.

A. Scrounge for food at fast food parking lots and large department store lots.

1/ Checking out ground for lost coins & paper money.

2. Looking into bags to see if there is any uneaten food.

3. Living off the bounty of nature.

a. Plants.
b. Insects.
c. Small game.
d. Larger game.

2. Having overcome scruples or fears, asking another human being.

A. Begging.
B. Accepting unasked for help.

1. When not to beg.
2. How to beg.

In cold climate or weather, go to a public place, find a bathroom where you can remove the socks. Substitue with newspaper or dry grass if you don’t have a dry pair.

Put the dry pair some place where they can dry. This may be tricky. I did find that I could dry them “secretly” in the space under the radiator cover at the bathroom by a deli within one of these super markets. After a dinner there, paid for by a generous relative, I returned to the bathroom to find nice dry wool socks.

This would be on the scale of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, and would include my own testimonry and memoirs of living homeless in Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, New York, and Anchorage, Alaska.

If you’re spending too much time trying to pick up tin while you’re ignoring a nearby and very feasible gold-mining opportunity, you may need to reassess your priorities.

Now, if I can rise out of OCD and practice what I preach.

Focus.

Talk to your friends, get a “community cell phone.”
Save up your money and get a cell phone. Develop a plan, a program to share the cell phone.

This means you or someone you trust holds the phone, and the rest pay by the minute, as well as put in a deposit to join “community cell phone club.”

They can pay a base fee which you decide upon, based on the number of people in the “inner circle.” Then you all agree to abide by a set of rules, which includes showing the cell phone without pressing any further buttons, so the exact time can be logged (otherwise, let them use it for privacy in a room, and clock the time they use it).

You can actually make a nice profit by this if you do it right. There are villages in India, where the people are very poor, but they pass the cell phone around so everyone gets a chance to use it. We can do this too!

Jul 30, 03:15PM