Another Day of Homeless Mental Wanderings

Good day dear readers.  Well, it is my last full day in Toronto.  Yesterday I went around taking pictures and these three men were kind enough to let me take their picture.  I wanted people to see the real face of homelessness.  I don’t know what brought these men out on the streets like this but there are a thousand valid reasons.  For starters they either have no family or are estranged from their family.  This is something that touches me heart because my family is so important to me.  I like to focus on my niece a lot but I also have a sister and a Dad and a few cousins and an Aunt and Uncle that I really like having in my life.  I guess the easiest way for me to think about these men is to put myself in their shoes.  I can recall being in California and not being able to work (due to no work permit) and not wanting to get in trouble with the Law in case I ever wanted to go back there (which I eventually did when I went to Hawaii).  The first day I was in California the guy I traveled with took off on me and I spent the night sleeping in a ditch.  This was not the first time or the last I had to resort to outside sleeping and it isn’t very pleasant.  I knew a guy who once slept under a bridge and his whole day was about getting enough booze so that he could drink himself to sleep.  He was mentally ill and this cycle of booze and not sleeping is so easy to get caught up in.  Before I was able to hitch rides out of California there were times when I had literally gone 5 days without food or sleep.  It was so bad that if I sat down somewhere I would sleep almost instantly and have extremely vivid and frightening dreams.  I was able to get back to Canada, to get the sleep I needed to get myself functioning again and then I was able to find work but if I hadn’t gotten out of there I don’t know where I would be right now.

One of the sad things about homelessness is that it seems that no matter how well (and things are NOT going well with the economy right now) the economy may be going, there will be people who are poor.  I think this means it is quite obvious that these people are unable to work, and I feel strongly that anyone in that situation should be given benefits enough to have a place to live and means to get food to eat.  I will never forget the words of a Danish friend when he had seen Vancouver, he said the place was very depressing, that it was like there was almost no social welfare.  I see a lot of news about Denmark, how they make 140% of their power needs through wind, how their people are among the happiest.  At one time I could have become a Danish citizen but I have a deep love for this country I live in.  I am very pleased now to see that Alberta for the very first time in its history has a Socialist Government.  There won’t be a lot of drastic changes, I am actually finding that often even Conservatives in Canada are more Socialist than many would think.  They do some things to provide universal health care and one of the best disability programs in the country.  Like Denmark, Alberta is able to afford these things by virtue of having oil in their jurisdiction.  I think one of the ways a person can judge how well the government helps the homeless is how many of them one sees, and in Toronto there is a lot of them.  They sleep right on sidewalk corners, they have sleeping bags and ‘campsites’ staked out under bridges.  I really wish I knew the best thing to do for them.  I often try to give a little change, and people say that if you give them change they will spend their money on booze or drugs but I think a lot about that.  You are almost required to tip waiters and waitresses, but you don’t tell them how they have to spend their money.  I also watched a video recently of a gifted native piano player who had been homeless for a very long time until he got into a supportive housing situation where they would allow him to drink a couple of drinks every few hours just to keep his nerves calm and allow him to function.  I challenge you, dear readers to think of what you can do to help even just one homeless person.  Can you give them an old sleeping bag now that winter is coming?  Can you buy coffee shop gift cards to give for Christmas?  It’s up to you.  I hope you will stick around to read today’s poem, it is another one about a homeless person and I hope you will enjoy it.

 

Please Help Get Me Through The Day
Shuffled off from each and every place
Nowhere I can call my very own space
All the horrid memories I can’t erase
Staring down the devil in the face

Way back when life seemed to be going fine
Then I lost every single little thing I could call mine
My father used to beat me every day
Drove me insane and then they put me away

With any justice in this world he would have been the one
To have had to live through those god-awful years of being on the run
First they decided I was crazy and put me away
Then no one listened to anything I had to say

I was the patient now I could just sit and rot
They listened less and less and then forgot
Forgot I was a human being first
Knowing they felt that way was perhaps the worst

All my childhood days were lived in fear
I was never safe as long as he was near
At fourteen they let me out for a visit and I ran away
There was no hope or future in that place anyway

Soon after that I found solace in booze and drugs
And for a time they replaced my loving mother’s hugs
It felt so good to do it the first few times
But then I needed it so bad I committed crimes

I’m not proud that I ripped so many people off
I’m not happy to sit in the street and hack and cough
Gone are the days of football glory and being cool
No more chances to go back and finish school

I sleep under a bridge and beg for change
Even my old friends from childhood think I’m deranged
Don’t look into my eyes you will see a world of pain
You’ll feel the lonely hurting and learn why I’m insane

I can only dream of the life you live
And it does help a little when you give
But in truth I long for someone just like you
To help me, take me in, let me start anew

I know I could have a life if I just got clean
You have no idea what a chance like that would mean
But sadly none of you could trust me in that way
So if you please, a few coins to get me through the day?

Leif Gregersen
August 25, 2015

A Blog and a Poem For Brian and the Work He Does

This is basically the busiest place in North Western Canada.  Calgary to the South and Vancouver to the South-West may rival it, but this is the Alpha and the Omega of what happens in the North.

     Good morning dear readers.  Just to let you know early, for those of you who like my poems, I have written one today and will be posting just under the last photo in today’s blog.  Kind of a funny thing, I thought I did a pretty good job of writing a blog yesterday, but I didn’t get too many views.  I don’t know if I am getting boring or if I am just not using the most optimal tags.  There is also the fact that the weather has been gorgeous and sunny over a lot of the places I get hits.

So today is going to be a bit of a lukewarm blog.  It is just past 4:00am and I can’t sleep so I decided this might be a good time to foster up some creativity.  Oh, before I forget, anyone who likes is totally free to email me about this blog or anything else at: viking3082000@yahoo.com I hope you do whenever you get the chance.

So yesterday I was involved in a music festival right in my neighborhood at a small park in what we call little Italy.  Some of the music was really amazing and I was given the opportunity to go up on stage and read my poetry.  I often wonder where poetry will take me, I love to write it but I seem to lapse into the same kind of style a lot.  I will leave you my dear readers to judge and let you know that I would appreciate any honest feedback I can get.

The outdoor festival was amazing, I had a table set up with books and though I didn’t sell too many, I was interviewed by a TV station and I ran into the candidate I am supporting for the next Federal election in Canada which happens in October.  She is an incredible, energetic, community minded, hard working and very nice young woman.  She is with a party called “The New Democratic Party” or NDP which is a left-leaning party that swept the Alberta elections just a few short weeks ago and has left a lot of people very excited at the direction things are going to go for Albertans.  It is my personal hope that more will be done for the mentally ill in the way of funding for hospital facilities and possibly even disability pensions, though I have to admit that I already get kind of a generous one.

So what does a person do when they can’t sleep?  I hear the dyslexic insomniac stays up all night wondering if there really is a dog.  Okay, that was pretty sick, but you snickered a bit didn’t you?  I heard another pretty good one from my good friend James Derksen.  He has this book that publishes contest winners who are asked to write in with their absolute worst novel beginnings.  In one of them there was a paragraph:  “Mr. Van Gogh, I suggest you consider painting as a career because you clearly have no ear for music!”  Okay, I will stop there.

Saturday night I decided to do some more serious reading and I picked up a book I had received in the mail from amazon a few days ago.  It is called “The Depression Workbook” and it is giving me a lot of interesting ideas.  It is written by the woman who founded the course that I am taking which is called WRAP, or Wellness Recovery Action Plan.  I have been reading about a lot of interesting new ideas, some that I support, some I have a hard time swallowing.  One of them is a statement that I would have been very reluctant to accept ten years ago which states that only you can be an expert on your condition.  Doctors can help, but they don’t know which medication really makes you feel better or worse, you have to do your part.  Another thing that I already know but really want to look into is having tests to see if my moods go up and down as a result of hormone deficiencies.  I seriously doubt my Doctor has been wrong about me having Bipolar all these years but I think it might be a good idea.

It is funny to think back to some of my first days in the mental hospital when I was still a teenager.  They doped me up like crazy and my mind was all over the place.  It didn’t help that I hated everything about Psychiatry including the Psychiatrists even though a lot of these people were doing everything they could to help me.  One of the reasons I think I felt this way had to do with how the initial staff that I encountered in going to the hospital treated me.  The people on the lock-down ward I went to first were brutal.  There was this one male nurse who once slammed my face into a hard floor and put me into a wrestling hold while someone arbitrarily decided I could use a shot of some evil tranquilizer that made my muscles lock up.  By the time I got to see the Psychiatrist, I had very little faith in anything he had to say.  The funny thing is that my Doctor in that locked ward right on the first time I went into the mental hospital is my Doctor to this day, now 25 years later.

I am learning a lot from this Wellness Recovery Action Plan.  Little things like making sure people know which Doctors you don’t want to deal with and which hospital you want to go to.  I had kind of thought that I would never need to go back in the hospital, but a lot of circumstances could put me in there.  Having a plan, and possibly even having a bag packed could help a lot.  Last time I was in the hospital I had to wear the same clothes for months and had nothing from home.  I went through the humiliation of swapping blue jeans with a guy because they wouldn’t give me a belt and my pants were literally falling off me (I wasn’t eating much either).  It seemed the cruelty and inhuman treatment was constant.  I have to say though that the mental hospital I was in was really a beautiful place.  No matter where I went, no matter how sick I got, no matter what happened to me, somehow I would end up back there and I would end up better.  Sometimes it felt really awful in there, but it had more to do with me being very mentally ill.

It’s a weird thing but it almost seemed like the staff and others could see right in my eyes whether I was delusional or not.  What bugs me the most is that while I was there the people on the staff made me out to be some kind of monster.  Quite often other patients had picked fights with me and I did the bare minimum I had to do to defend myself and then I heard later that the nurses were trying to convince those people to have me charged.  There were a lot of stories like that, one of them had to do with this female nurse who said she would pick me up a cassette walkman for me and she kept coming back to me and asking for more money for it.  They would seize my property and give it to others, and one time they actually tried to force an end to a friendship I had made in the hospital.  And this didn’t come from the top, this was a decision made by some random nurse, not even the head nurse.  “I have already told her to stay away from you.” she told me.  Then others would get angry when I joked around with people and act appalled that I wasn’t making friends with other people.  It really is something I wish on no one and sometimes I think I would like to blow that place up and build a proper place for people who have illnesses to be treated like human beings.

Anyhow, that is how it goes, I have been trying so hard to redirect my thoughts when I get into rants or dredge up old memories.  I have been using a relaxation video from YouTube, one I posted a few days ago and it seems to be helping.  I think what I really need to do is to take a proper meditation class and learn how to be more mindful of my surroundings and less mindful of things in the past that I can’t change and only make me upset.  Enjoy the poem Dear Readers, write soon!

Leif Gregersen

Construction has always fascinated me, the very idea of building something that will mean so much to the inhabitants or employees in it, the idea of creating something solid and permanent.  The other day I worked building a local hockey rink and I am hoping the puck boards I set up will last through many a fun game played by local kids.

 

Hope Mission

 

Today I saw a sight that broke my heart

So many downtrodden men with lives all torn apart

As I saw them around me tears welled up in my eyes

For once I didn’t want to wear my tough guy disguise

 

These homeless men were lining up to sleep upon a floor

A guard was checking for weapons or booze right at the door

One poor soul had neither socks or shoes

Someone was saying Jesus dying was good news

 

I how I wish I knew a way to really help these men

Without putting myself in their very situation once again

Yes, a few years ago I had no place to call home

Sick and lost and wandering the streets alone

 

By love and luck and friendship I somehow overcame

Oh my sweet God in heaven let these men somehow do the same

And let me be your instrument to help them in some way

I don’t want to think I couldn’t even stop to pray

 

So many came here when we put out the call

That there was money here and plenty of jobs for all

For a time here things did look pretty good

But things never seem to change in this neighborhood

 

Though now a sweeping change is bringing hope

Of giving those who have nothing enough to cope

I wish with all my spirit one day these men have much much more

Than getting just a little bit of money and then being shown the door

 

As well as stomachs, these men need to fill their souls hearts and mind

With the hope of dignity and self-reliance they themselves find

Some of the wisest words I know of would be a perfect start

“Every one of us has a God-shaped hole inside our heart.”

 

Leif Gregersen

June 8, 2015