Hugh's Blog

Where I’m From

Last weekend I was at a retreat, and one of the exercises was to first read the poem Where I’m From, by George Ella Lyon, and then to write our own version, in a similar style, in 15 minutes.

I love poetry, but writing it is hard for me – having a pattern and a time limit made it somehow easier, much like the using haiku or Shakespearean sonnet as a form. (That doesn’t mean it makes it easy to write, or even produces a good poem. It just removes a barrier, by adding a constraint.)

Anyway, I liked it, and am putting it here. I encourage you to spend 15 minutes writing one of your own. If you do, I would love to see it.

I’m from rolling hills, covered in cedar trees, oaks, and broken dreams.

I’m from hog killings, Kmart blue jeans, and gift wrap saved and folded from last year’s gifts, kept in the drawer with the saved ribbon and string.

I’m from folk who knew my daddy and his momma, who had no doubt I had been raised right, and to whom I will always be Little Hugh.

I’m from a brick church my grandaddy — who I did not know – built. It was here that I learned about potluck dinners, Jesus, and to distrust authority.

I’m from a volunteer fire department that was all that kept my community safe. Tragedy might strike at any minute, but our neighbors would save us.

I’m from heretics and preachers,

Enslavers and abolitionists,

Trad wives and closeted lesbians,

Rebel flags and the Stars and Stripes.

They haunt me, and they hold me

And every day, I get to choose.

Security

For years I worked on the frontlines of homelessness in the urban South. It was good work, and one of the honors of my life that I got to do it. It was also exhausting and led to burnout and PTSD. I’m finally writing about that time, after years of silence on the subject, as a way of processing it all. You can read more of these stories here. – HH

In my early years of ministry on the streets, I had no money. To say I had no money does not adequately convey just how little money I had. I mean, I had negative money.

I would pick up writing jobs of the meanest sort – $5 a page blah blah blah website copy for content farms promoting saunas, cell phones, and nude beaches. I would work at a hot dog stand a friend owned on the sidewalk in front of a leather bar, across the street from a hardcore porn video shop. I worked the overnight shift at a 24-hour gym, where my job was to hand people towels and say, “Have a good workout!” in a cheerful voice. I wrote website copy when nobody was there, in the lonely hours between 1 and 4 AM.

A friend referred to this work as being in service of my ministry habit.

Raleigh had a decent public transit system for the South, and I lived and worked downtown, and so I didn’t own a car for years. That was less an environmental stance as much as it was that I could not afford a car. I could barely afford groceries. Rent for the tiny room I rented in someone else’s house was a struggle each month.

But a church that knew and respected my work bought me a $1000 Chinese knock-off scooter, and for nearly five years, I rode that thing everywhere at 30 mph. It was bright red, and it was well known on those streets. I was terrified of it getting stolen – the thing probably only weighed 500 pounds, and two strong people could have easily put it in the back of a pickup in seconds. I had a cable as thick as a hoe handle that I chained it down with every chance I got.

In those early days, everything was very fragile. Security was in short supply, and one miscalculation could mean buying groceries or not.

I was dating Renee (whom I later married), and she was on disability because of the heart disease that would eventually lead to her receiving a heart transplant. She lived in a tiny efficiency loft apartment that took more than half her income. She got food stamps because her income was so low, and many weeks we would go on a date to the neighborhood grocery store and buy a sub sandwich from the deli and a Diet Coke from the cold drink box and split it. An unhoused friend had clued us into that – if you bought the cold sub, you could use food stamps, but if you had them toast it, you could not.

To this day, untoasted bread tastes like poverty to me.

We would sit at the café tables outside the Starbucks beside that grocery store, eating our (untoasted) sub sandwich and Diet Coke, courtesy of the taxpayers, and watch the sun go down and see the birds grabbing scraps in the parking lot and then, when it was over, we would climb on my scooter and we would put-put back to her tiny loft.

I reminded her recently of how tight things were in those days, and she said, “I never felt like we were struggling.” It made me happy that she said that, because I was intimately aware of how much we were struggling. One of us freaking out was enough, I assure you.

It was a Tuesday morning, and someone I knew had a court date that morning for one of the petty crimes that only poor people are charged with – trespass, most likely – and so I drove my scooter to the park downtown and parked it next to the light pole I always chained it to and began walking toward the courthouse.

I always did it that way; arrive early, park at the park and walk the several blocks to the courthouse because I would see folks I wanted to check in on along the way. In those days, I could not walk a block downtown without seeing someone I knew, catching up on who got housing, who got arrested, who moved away, who died.

People were always dying.

So on this crisp Tuesday morning (you notice the weather more when riding a scooter), I had parked by that light pole early in the morning and trekked the three blocks and had many conversations, then sat in a courtroom waiting for hours for my person’s case to come up, and then when I testified and it got dismissed, we walked together to the soup kitchen and ate a celebratory lunch put on by the Episcopalians, who didn’t always get it right, but their food was good and their heart was in the right place.

Around 2 PM, I drifted back to the park, spent and talked out. I had heard heavy stories, been emotionally “on” for hours, and had expenses piling up I had no idea how to deal with. I was already dreaming of going home, taking a hot shower, and taking a short nap.

It was then I saw the small crowd of people around my scooter. As I got closer, I recognized individual faces, and realized they were all people I knew, and that they were waiting for me. Inwardly, I sunk a bit. I just wanted to go home. I just wanted to rest. I just wanted to be warm again.

As I approach the small crowd, folks turn and great me, smiling.

“What’s up?” I ask.

Ramon fills me in.

“You left your keys in your scooter when you parked it. Stevie here saw that, recognized it was your bike, and told the rest of us. We all been taking turns guarding it until you go back.”

I must have gone pale when I realized how close I had come to losing that scooter.

“Oh my God”, I croaked.

The guy we called Pops came over and put his hand on my shoulder.

“It’s OK, man. We got you. Nothing happened, and nothing is gonna happen, because we got you. You got us, and we got you. That’s how it works out here.”

I hugged some folks, slapped palms with others, and thanked everybody. They gave me a good-natured hard time, calling me rookie for making such a dumb mistake, and making plans to catch up at the soup kitchen that evening or tomorrow. Then they shambled off to their lives, and I got on the cold seat of my cheap scooter and put-putted toward my cheap rented room, aware that my life had just changed, and that I would never measure security the same way, ever again.

Help us do what?

After more than a decade of running a Christian ministry that was a destination for young people on mission trips, I came to dread young people on mission trips.

Don’t get me wrong – I love young people. I love how curious they are, and how motivated and open they are, and it is an awesome time to shape and mold their opinions. I could name a dozen folks whose lives were forever changed because of mission trips. I know people who now run nonprofits and do good work because their eyes were opened on mission trips. If I’m honest, it was really the mission trips themselves I came to hate.

I know all the arguments for them: They inspire young people to see Christianity as something you do, not just believe. It provides an influx of labor for understaffed nonprofits and ministries. It provides employment security for youth ministers (we don’t say that part out loud). No doubt the lovers of mission trips will fill the comments with justifications for them.

But I also know all the ways they are broken, especially if you are running the receiving agency. Because you suddenly have an influx of 25 teens, your staff of 5 is now overwhelmed creating work for them to do. And it must be work that is not dangerous, and that they can do unsupervised, and it can’t make them uncomfortable or push their boundaries too much. It also cannot require skill, or at least not much.

It has to have a teaching component, but not be controversial, and meanwhile, your staff of five still has their work to do that they would be doing if they were not here. And you will get money because they are here, and you need that money, and if you make them happy, they will come back and give you more money. So, you must spend a lot of energy catering to their feelings, instead of, you know, actually serving the people your org exists to serve.

It was not at all uncommon for a church group that would come to work with us from out of town for a week to have a trip budget of $20,000 (and this was pre-pandemic dollars). We might, after a week of intense effort, get a donation of $1500 on the back end, along with whatever work got done along the way that was not just stuff we made up to keep them happy.

I know a guy who ran a school in Mexico, and most of their funding came from young people on mission trips. But while their capacity really called for 3-4 groups a year, their funding requirements called for more like 14 or 15. So in the spring, groups painted the outside of the school one color. In the summer, they painted the inside a different color.

The next year, they reversed the colors. Rinse, lather, repeat. The school did not need painting, but the bills needed paying, and while it would have been a much better use of funds to just cut a check for the cost of the mission trip to the school, instead, the school got painted every year – sometimes twice a year.

Meanwhile, you must make sure that you are not confused with someone who is running a zoo. At their worst, mission trips can be voyeuristic – as if these teens came from Akron to see poor people in their natural environment. The easiest thing in the world to do is to create a “mission experience” for folks from out of town that posits all the ways the economically poor are “objects of mission” rather than human beings made in the image of God. But just because it’s easy does not mean it should be done. It should, in fact, never be done.

Say it with me: The poor are not extras in a movie about you.

You also have no real idea what these people coming into town to “love on” (ick!) your people are really like. Do you trust them with the people you care about and serve? What if they are transphobic? What if their theology is misogynistic? What if they try to start “sharing the gospel” with your Muslim participants?

You must let them have access to vulnerable people you care deeply about, and who see you as safe, but you are not sure if these people are trustworthy. Especially after you caught that one group trying to cast the demon of queerness out of a guy. They were not happy when they went home early.

But the thing I hated most about them was the way they infantilized the people they came to help. In their desire to help (as defined by them) they tended to strip away the agency and choice and dignity of the very people they came to serve.

One day I was in my office on the phone with a youth pastor from another state, discussing their plans around an upcoming mission trip that included a few days of working with us. The youth pastor kept saying his kids really wanted to “help the homeless”. He said it so much it grated on my last damned nerve.

It must have shown in my voice, because one of the guests at our day shelter, an unhoused man everyone called Cowboy, had been walking by my open office doorway and stuck his head in the doorway as I let out a loud sigh of frustration after hanging up the phone.

“You OK, Pastor Hugh?

I assured him I was. “Just frustrated at church people.”

“Oh.” he said. “What happened?”

“It’s not a big deal. Just some well meaning folks who want to ‘help the homeless’ “ I said, making air quotes as I said it.

“They do?” he asked. “That’s cool, I guess.”

He paused for a second, staring off into space.

It was my turn.

“You OK, Cowboy?” I asked.

He chuckled.

“Oh yeah, man. I’m fine. I was just wondering – that church that wants to help the homeless – well, help us do what, exactly?

Harsh and Dreadful Love

NB: I am writing about the days I did street engagement work among the unhoused population as a way of dealing with the trauma I experienced there. – HH

A few years into my work among the unhoused, I was making maybe $1200 a month doing this work, and it took all of my time. I was making ends meet (barely) by selling hotdogs on weekend nights on the corner between a porn shop and the leather bar.

When I talked about my work in churches (which was my major source of funding at this point), I was either revered or ridiculed – there was little middle ground. I was dispirited and exhausted.

So when I was invited to contribute a chapter to a book about love by a Christian publishing house, I got really excited. At that point, I was just desperate to be taken seriously.

If you are a creative person, there is no end of people who will want to exploit you for their benefit. For example, this particular project offered no pay for my work (other than the exposure and 1 free author copy). I assume the other 40 some odd contributors also were unpaid, but some of them were big names at the time, so maybe the headliners got paid and I didn’t. I have no idea. I just know I didn’t.

The publishing company would later go out of business, and while the book is still available on Amazon, I won’t link to it here, because when my author copy came in the mail (there is no feeling like holding a book in your hand that holds your words) the first thing I noticed is that it looked and felt cheap. The second thing was that it was full of typos. And then I saw that they had changed my story.

I don’t just mean it was edited – I expect and welcome edits, especially copy edits. No, the editor of this book literally changed the story I submitted, literally giving me interior dialog that suited their narrative, and that made it more “Christian”.

It might have been different if I had made the story up, but this was a real thing I had experienced. The struggles I felt were real. The whole point of my story was that love was hard, and the edits changed that narrative. They changed what I thought, what I believed.

I felt betrayed. I was already sick of a church industrial complex more interested in making things suit their narrative than reality. It was neither the first or the last time the world of professional Christianity would make me feel like I was being used.

Here is the story as I wrote it.

A Harsh and Dreadful Love

I’m not a huge fan of modern country music – but I love Johnny Cash.

I know, I know, everybody loves Johnny Cash. Now. But not many people were showing him any love back in the early 1990’s. He was washed up. Forgotten. Out of date. Just plain…old.

But I was a true believer. I have always loved Johnny Cash, even when it looked like his career was over. I have digital copies of his entire discography.

Every. Single. Album.

I know the words to all of the songs, even the bad ones (If there were bad ones – a point I am not entirely willing to concede).

I love Johnny Cash.

And I also love my wife. But while my wife and I, like any married couple, have our ups and downs, Johnny and I have never had a bad day. It’s always been smooth sailing between Johnny and me. Johnny has never been upset when I forgot the milk. I have never snapped at Johnny because I couldn’t find my shoes.

But that is because Johnny and I don’t have a real relationship. I never met Johnny Cash. He never knew my name. All I have is his music and the meaning I place on that music and the feelings and emotion I put on him. It turns out, Johnny and I hate the same people.

But that’s because I really just love the idea of Johnny Cash.

Meanwhile, my wife and I have a real relationship. On some days it is a lot like heaven, and other days it reminds me of the other place. Sometimes, it’s an act of sheer will to reach the end of the day. But that is because it is a real relationship, involving real people and real pain and real feelings.

In the Gospels, Jesus says the entirety of scripture can be summed up in just two statements:

Love God with all you have in you. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Love God, and love your neighbor. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? I mean, who can be against loving your neighbor? Hearing this over and over in our liturgies and our devotions for over two thousand years, we have lost sight of the radical nature of what Jesus is proposing.

Because it’s not just “Love your neighbor”. It’s “Love your neighbor as yourself”.

What does our loving our neighbor have to do with my love for Johnny Cash?

Simply this: I don’t love Johnny Cash – just the idea of Johnny Cash. And we’re much better at loving the idea of our neighbor than we are at actually loving our neighbor.

In The Brothers Karamazov, a young widow is speaking to the wise old priest. She confesses her dream of serving the poor, of tending the wounds of the sick, of feeding the hungry. But she is concerned: What if the poor are unappreciative? What if they are rude? What if they are petty and demanding?

The priest tells her that “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams”.

It is into this harsh and dreadful reality that Jesus calls us.

* * *

Erica is a pain in my ass.

No matter what spin I put on it, she just isn’t a very nice person.

Erica is one of the many at-risk people I work with every day. She is constantly on the brink of homelessness and several times a year ends up in a physical relationship where she gets physically abused. To protect herself, she has learned to be the abuser, not the abused. She is rude and angry and, often, very drunk.

On Saturdays and Sundays, we have ‘Breakfast in the Park’, our little meal sharing initiative where we bring coffee and sausage and biscuits to the park and share with whoever comes. No agenda, other than sharing from our abundance.

When she shows up, however, Erica always has an agenda. She breaks in line. She pesters folks for money. She bitches about the color of the free jacket we gave her or that Stephanie got a nicer one than she did. If you don’t watch her, she will get back in line, ostensibly to get another jacket or pair of shoes for her ‘cousin’, which will actually end up on Martin Street, traded for her drug of choice.

If that was not enough, Erica is a first class bigot, too. She yells at the Latino men she imagines are trying to cut in front of her. Since Erica is Black, this adds a delightful bit of racial tension to our little gathering.

I often wish she would just go away.

Just before Christmas, it hit a new level. Samir is a delightful Indian man who always lives in that gray area between housed and homeless. He is always smiling and happy, and I have seen him take shoes we have given him and give them to someone who needed them more. He is not just a guest of ours – he is also a volunteer, helping us set up the tables and unpack the vehicles. I wish I had 100 volunteers just like Samir.

Erica was at the head of the line. Samir was wrestling the coffee urn from the car when Erica shouts “I don’t want that A-rab touching my food. He looks like a terrorist or something”.

I blew my top. “Shut up! Just shut the hell up!” I shout at Erica. “Samir is my friend and our guest – just like you are. If you don’t want food Samir has touched, you can leave.”

She mumbled something under her breath – I am not sure what it was, but I am pretty sure it was not “I love you”. She took her food and coffee and marched away, quietly, for which I was thankful.

The next week, I saw Erica coming down the sidewalk toward where we were setting up. Samir, who was unloading the coffee, saw her first and pointed her out to me. I thought, “Oh boy! Here we go again…” I had this bad feeling in my gut – like when you see the train wreck coming, but really can’t do anything about it. But she surprised me.

She comes up to me.

“Hugh,” she said. “I owe you an apology. I am sorry for the way I acted last week. I was wrong, and you were right to chew me out. Are we still friends?”

You can look at this one way and believe that nothing has changed. Erica is still a liar and a thief, and her presence still brings tension to the group when she shows up. On another level, she at least owns up to her end of the relationship, and that is not a small thing at all. And I have come to realize I had not loved Erica as I did myself – I only loved Erica as I wished she was. I loved my idea of Erica. No wonder she kept disappointing me.

Several weeks into this new aspect of our relationship, Erica and I are not yet pals, but we are civil to each other when we run into each other, which is often. Last time I gave her a biscuit, she said thank you and I didn’t want to punch her, so maybe she has traveled a bit farther than I have. But we are working on it.

John the evangelist tells us that God is love, and that God loved the world. If the world has any hope of redemption, that redemption is only going to come about because of love. But it won’t be the love of dreams, but the harsh and dreadful love that only comes from real relationships with real people.

Long before we can ever learn to love one another, we are going to have to get to know each other.

Even when it is hard. Maybe especially when it is hard.

Frustration

NB: As I wrote about here, I am writing about the days I did street engagement work among the unhoused population as a way of dealing with the trauma I experienced there. – HH

I was frustrated.

I had been working on the streets of Raleigh for about a year, with no budget, no money, and damned little encouragement. How I had gotten there is another story for another day, but it was out of conviction and an honest attempt to reconcile my faith with what I saw happening around me.

When church folk wanted to talk about homelessness with me at all, they wanted to either pray for folks or get them to heaven.

There was a “street ministry” I encountered early on in my time out there that would take pictures of unhoused people they were praying with, and then post them on their blog to fundraise. No attempt to recognize their humanity, no realization that they had their own stories and pasts and preferences and agency – no, they would post a photo of someone crying with a caption like. “Another of God’s lambs is saved from hellfire!”

The big steeples were more the praying kind. A huge downtown church had announced they were spending 1.8 million dollars on a pipe organ for their sanctuary. I knew several unhoused folks who lived on their property, and so when I met the pastor of that church, I asked if he could help me get some resources so I could provide relational help and pastoral care to those people. He told me the best thing we could do for those folks was to pray for them, and trust God to provide it.

So I was frustrated. I knew people who were dying because they lived outside, ignored, in a wealthy city, in the shadow of huge steeples. Churches with multi-million-dollar budgets were content to ignore them, and hoped they returned the favor. Street ministries used them as pawns and fundraising tokens, their rich inner lives reduced to being extras in a movie about street preachers. And I was convinced they were made in the very image of God, and that Jesus meant all those things he said when he identified with the poor, saying that when we feed someone who is hungry, we are feeding Jesus himself.

Jesus is fucking hungry and these people with all their fucking Jesus talk are content to let him starve. Goddammit.

Have I mentioned how frustrated I was?

So, I did what I always do when I don’t know what else to do; I wrote.

Ashe, who is now my friend but then was not, ran a popular blog (now defunct) called Jesus Manifesto, which sought to be “a clearinghouse for propaganda meant to frustrate and disrupt quaint notions of Jesus”.

I dashed off a piece and asked Ashe if they would accept it as a guest submission. And they did.

I recently came across it as I began cleaning up my archives. I had been writing for a while about what I was doing on my own blog, but this was the first time I wrote about my work for a wider audience.

As I read it now, even though I would write it differently now, I’m proud of me for being bold, for turning my frustration into action, and for doing both storytelling and preaching in the same piece. The foundations of my personal theology – that it is not we who wait for God to act, but God who waits for us – is there, even in those early days. Later I would learn and then embrace the words of Miroslav Volf, who said that it is deeply hypocritical to pray for a problem you are unwilling to resolve. I did not know those words then, but I already knew the thought.

Anyway, here it is, warts and all. This guy was very, very angry. And it would get worse.

Evelyn and the failure of the church

Content warning – mentions of death and sexual assault, but nothing graphic.

A heavy girl, perhaps 250 pounds, Evelyn’s greasy, stringy hair only served to accentuate her poor skin. Her weight made her shuffle rather than walk and her head was always bowed, seeking not to offend, avoiding eye contact. At 23, most people her age are very conscious of their appearance, but Evelyn’s wardrobe consisted of thrift store finds and cast offs, leaning heavily toward stretch pants and sweatshirts that advertised events she had never seen and places she would never visit.

It was my second month in Raleigh. I was volunteering with a group that fed the homeless in the park on Sunday when I met her for the first time. She shuffled through the line, mumbling thanks for the watery mashed potatoes and chili-mac, eyes on the ground. Several times I tried to engage her, but between my maleness and her demons, it just was not happening. Like a dog that had been struck once too often, she flinched at contact, muttering secrets only she knew to people only she saw.

When there was an open bed, Evelyn would stay at the woman’s shelter, but more often then not she had to make other arrangements. On cold nights, she would trade sexual favors in exchange for a warm bed. To pick up spending money, she would give men oral sex for $5. Because of her weight and mental issues, often the promise of a warm bed was revoked, or the money not paid after the oral sex had been given. Several people later told me Evelyn was often sexually assaulted and raped, unable to resist her attackers.

The last time I saw her was on a Thursday in early November. I remember it was inordinately cold that day, with a sharp, piercing wind.. Evelyn shuffled down the sidewalk, huddled down into her jacket, oblivious to my wave, ignoring me when I called.

That night Evelyn made it into the women’s shelter. In here she could sleep, secure in the knowledge she was safe. In the night Evelyn died of complications from sleep apnea. At age 23, she was another statistic of life, and death, on the streets.

* * * *

I told Evelyn’s story in a church once, and when I was finished they prayed fervent prayers that Evelyn would be at peace in the loving arms of Jesus. They prayed that those who would injure and molest women like Evelyn would be caught and punished. They prayed for God’s kingdom to come and for shalom to rest on our city.

At the end of the talk, a lady came up to me, obviously moved by my story and asked me the question I dread most: “How could God have allowed this to happen to Evelyn? Was this all part of God’s plan?”

If you spend much time working in the inner-city, you try not to ask yourself those kind of questions–not because you don’t know what the answer is, but because you do. Because if you think about it too much you get mad and because if you tell people the answer, you will not be invited back.

What I wanted to tell that lady, but did not, was God did have a plan to take care of Evelyn; God’s plan was us. God’s plan was to put us here to be his hands and feet. We are to show mercy, to love justice. We are to show mercy, as he is merciful. We are to feed those who are hungry, with the assurance that when we do, we are doing it to, and not just for, Jesus himself.

I wanted to tell that lady God did have a plan and we screwed it up. I wanted to tell her that it is not we who are waiting on God, but rather God who is waiting on us and that what Evelyn really had needed was not this lady’s prayers but a safe place to sleep at night. What I wanted to tell that lady, but didn’t, is that it is very obvious that we have the resources to help invisible people just like Evelyn but we simply lack the will to do so.

I did not tell that church lady any of that. But often I wish I had.

Reclaiming my stories

Six years ago, in an effort to stay alive, I walked away from a decade and a half of work on the streets among the unhoused population.

It was good work, and I was good at it, if not good at being as loving to myself as I was to the people I encountered. It was, to use a buzzword, unsustainable.

I have a lot of trauma from that time. It took years to regulate my blood pressure, to sleep all night, to not have panic attacks every winter. My relationship to money will probably never be right.

Because my storytelling during that time was our primary fundraising technique, I have resisted writing about that time since I left. It began to feel exploitative of me – as if putting my wounds on display was the only way I was worthy of earning a living wage.

I imagined myself a barker, shouting, “Come see the street pastor have a mental health crisis! In exchange for donating 1 dollar a day, you too can enable his slow nervous breakdown!”

It was a wild time. I married a lot of people who spent their honeymoon at the homeless shelter. I buried a lot of people. I spent far more time in a soup kitchen and at AA meetings then I did in church. Because of my work, some folks who probably would have died did not die. Some laws got changed, and some folks in other states began to do similar work, and some folks I trusted tried to take me out, and along the way I almost died. It was a wild time.

After some discussions with my therapist, I have decided that over the next few months I will write some stories from that time – not to raise awareness of the plight of the unhoused, and not to get you to donate money to my cause and not to show you how spiritual I am – but to take ownership of my stories back.

I have essays I write each week for people who give me money – but none of those essays will come from this series. These are not stories I’m trading for money. These are the stories that shaped me, taught me, saved me, and almost killed me. These stories are mine.

It’s not a perfect world.

Content Warning: Mentions of trafficking and sexual assault, but no descriptive content.

It was Maria who made it clear to me that my middle-class sensibilities would not survive working on the streets among the unhoused community.

Maria was a natural leader, attracting the respect of the other folks who were in her circle, and eventually I would learn that when I needed support in that community for something that would be unpopular, winning Maria over would be an essential, early step.

She was attractive, vibrant, and intelligent. Her partner Jake beat her often during the more than three years they had been together. He accompanied her everywhere, constantly referred to her as “his woman”, and I knew of several occasions where he had beaten men who were a little too attentive to her.

I was one of very few men he allowed her to be alone with for any length of time. I think it was that I was a pastor – even people who are unbelievers often grant unearned respect to clergy folks. But maybe he just saw me – someone who taught nonviolence – as no threat to someone as overtly masculine as he was.

One day I ran into her in the park. She was sitting on the bench, alone, scrolling her phone, her bags beside her. I was walking toward the soup kitchen, and she saw me, and flagged me down. I sat next to her.

After some initial pleasantries, we sat there for a few minutes in silence as she worked up her nerve to tell me what was on her mind. Then I notice she has a bruise on the side of her face.

“Are you OK?” I ask, pointing at the bruise.

She sighs. “Yeah. I just got too mouthy with Jake when he was high. I should have known better.”

“Oh, Maria. You should get away from him.”

She looked at me with sad brown eyes – eyes not filled with sadness for herself, but at my naivete.

“You really don’t understand, do you? The first month I was homeless, I got raped twice. Got groped dozens of times. It was hell. Then Jake told me that if I was his woman, nobody else would ever touch me again. And they don’t. Everyone is scared of Jake.”

I was beginning, unhappily, to understand.

“So Jake protects you?” I ask with a bit of snark in my voice.

“Dammit, Hugh. My choice was get fucked by random men who would always hurt me or get fucked by one guy who is mostly nice, and who protects me from everyone but him. And sometimes, it’s really nice. He will bring me flowers he picked in the park, or we will go for a walk in the Azalea garden over by the TV station. And he always smiles when he sees me.”

Sounding meaner than I meant to, I said, “And sometimes he beats your ass.”

She touches her face distractedly and says, “Yeah. But it’s not a perfect world.”

She looked at the time on her phone, and said, “I got to get to the soup kitchen if I’m gonna eat. You coming?”

I told her to go ahead without me, and I walked the other way, head down, lost in my thoughts. Because I still wasn’t sure why she had flagged me down in the first place – what it was she had intended to tell me.

But one thing was clear: I had a lot to learn.

Proverbs

My father was self-educated and a voracious reader, and was attracted to proverbs. I do not mean the book in the Bible found after the Psalms, purportedly written by King Solomon, but rather short pithy wisdom statements of the sort made famous by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanac. And he used them as a teaching tool all the time – almost as a form of punctuation, or as the moral of the story after something happened to illustrate the proverb.

For example, he hated to argue. Once, I watched him and another man talk about something they disagreed on. It was rather embarrassing, because I knew Dad was right, and yet Dad didn’t even really try to convince the guy that he was wrong. The teenage me was all about winning and dominating your opponent, and here my father was, literally refusing to argue. Later, I asked him why he didn’t try to convince the guy.

“It would have been a waste of time,” he said. “He wasn’t ready to hear it. You can’t convince a man to change his mind if he has made up his mind not to change it. It’s like wrestling a pig – you both get dirty, but the pig’s having fun.”

I laughed at the pig comment.

“Mark Twain said that.” Dad said. He loved to attribute the quotes he knew, probably as a compensation for his lack of formal education, and as an appeal to authority. As if to say that these are not just the thoughts of a working class man from rural Mississippi, but those of one of the great writers of our culture. Sometimes, his attributions were wrong, but always enthusiastic nonetheless. I joked once that all of his quotes were from either Benjamin Franklin or the Bible.

Like the time he told me, “Son, remember, like it says in the Bible, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

“Dad, Franklin Roosevelt said that.”

He said, “Sure, but he was quoting the Bible when he said it.”

I didn’t argue with him. He wasn’t ready to hear it. After all, like Benjamin Franklin said, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

New Membership Perks

Trying to make any money as an independent writer is tough these days. Especially if you have scruples. And I do.

I don’t want people who read my stuff to be baraged by pop-up ads, videos that start playing automatically, privacy scraping cookies, or sponsored posts. I don’t want anything to come between me and my readers – not just graphically, but ethically. If I am holding a Yeti mug in a picture, I want you to know that it is because I chose that picture, not because I have a sponsorship deal with Yeti.

And I paid my bills for a few years in the early days of the web by writing marketing copy – I never want to have to do that again. I don’t want to write “teaser copy” to get people to click things they would not normally want to click. I don’t want to chase clicks, be sensational, or make you angry in order to increase my traffic or to curry favor with advertisers.

So, I have a Membership Program. It’s ~ 200 folks who give somewhere between $5 and $25 a month to support my various writing projects, such as this blog and my weekly newsletter.

What do they get out of it? Well, it’s sort of like NPR – there are perks, of course, but the major benefit is that they get to make sure there is more of my writing in the world.

But there are perks – and today, I’m adding a big one.

Beginning this weekend, Saturday the 17th of August, people who support my writing as part of my membership team will receive an original, unpublished essay in their inbox every Saturday morning. It will be around 800 to 1,000 words, give or take, and while the subject matter is flexible, there won’t be surprises – if you like my writing, you will enjoy this. I’m not going to suddenly take up writing romance or erotica or anything. Not that there’s anything wrong with romance or erotica. It’s just not what I want to write about.

It does not matter what membership tier you are, either, Whether you are a $5 a month member or a $25 a month member, you get the same perks, including the weekly essay in your inbox. I am a big believer in the idea that we support the things that matter to us based on our capacity, so I’m intentionally not going to differentiate access because of the amount of money you send me. No matter your membership tier you get access to this.

You can learn more about becoming as member, what perks there are, and so on by going to this page.

Writing against the clock

It’s 5:30 AM, and the sky is still dark outside, but not as dark as it was 15 minutes ago when I woke up. As I write this, it’s Friday, but it really doesn’t matter, as most days, the same thing happens. The birds are singing the song of their people, letting their friends know they made it through the night. The kettle is almost ready, and the coffee grinder just finished. My kingdom for a quiet coffee grinder.

After making a cup of coffee in my Melitta (best $6 purchase, ever), in my Fiesta bistro mug (this one is Poppy colored, but the Meadow Green one is my favorite), I walk, cup in hand, to the room at the end of the hall that once was the bedroom of six different foster children, but is now my office.

I have a hard time writing in silence – my ADHD won’t let me – but I also have a hard time writing when the music has strong lyrics – my ADHD won’t let me – so I end up mostly writing to instrumental jazz, classical or, rarely, techno. My audio setup is a bit of a hybrid of an old school stereo tuner (a cheap bookcase-sized Sharp) paired with my phone on bluetooth, via which today I am streaming this playlist from Amazon music.

Now it’s 5:45, I’ve been up for 30 minutes. Daylight is breaking through, and the birds are much louder, and the music is playing and the chair is adjusted. I shut the door to the office (we have cats who will want to get on my keyboard otherwise), open Google Docs, open a new doc, and begin to write for the next hour.

Hopefully.

I don’t mean that I write hopefully, although I generally do. I mean that hopefully, something to write about will occur to me. Some days, it’s like a firehose, just pouring out of you, the words are. On those days, it’s hard to keep up with the flow, especially if you are a three finger and a thumb typist, like I am.

On other days, nothing goes right. Nothing is interesting to you. You have nothing you want to say. You are bored with the world, and with the people in it, and have nothing to say to them, and wish you had not committed to yourself that you would hold this time sacred, this first hour of work each day. On those days, the words do not come.

There are a variety of ways writers deal with this. Some people have word-count commitments. They apply their ass to the chair and stay there until they have 500 words, or 2,000 words, or whatever their daily goal is. I think this makes sense, assuming you have control over your time and are working on a specific project.

I’m more of a time-based writer. This is the amount of time I have to write, and so I write, or try to, during this time, and how many words I get is just how many words I get that day. Some days, I might get 1200 words during that hour. Most days it’s 700 or thereabouts. Some days, when it’s particularly bad, it’s 50 words.

There are times I wish I was a word – count writer, with the ability to just sit there, ass in the chair, staring at an empty page until the words come. But alas, the writing I do only supplies a portion of my income, and the mortgage must be paid, and the cat kibble purchased, and the living earned, so if I am to have words on the page today, they must show up before 7AM, or else they will just have to wait until tomorrow morning, unless time gets stolen from other obligations. It’s like having homework you are behind on, everyday, for the rest of your life.

Because the time available to write is limited, and the words must show up then if they are to show up at all, you take pains to be careful with your words – or at least, it does for me. Sometimes, my limited writing time is spent staring at the screen, not because I do not have the words, but because I am forming the next sentence in my head, repeating it over and over, listening to the rhythm and the meter, because writing is for me just transcribing the words I already hear in my head. On the better days, it’s much faster, like transcribing the words you hear as they are being said.

But it also means the words seem more valuable, more scarce, more precious than they would otherwise. It makes revision particularly offensive – striking out a paragraph that you spent 30 of your precious sixty minutes on is viscerally painful.

I turned 52 this year. Every time I mention this, folks older than 52 love to tell me how young I am. I realize 52 is not old, per se. Although, I was reading an Agatha Christie novel not long ago and a character described someone as an elderly man in his early sixties, and I put the book down, as I was not ready for that sort of violence.

However, I turned 52 this year. Somewhere around my mid-forties, something shifted. Instead of the future seeming wide open, my dreams began to be accompanied with a Use-By date. Instead of thinking, “I would like to go hiking in the Alps one day,” it became, “I would like to go hiking in the Alps while I am still healthy enough to do it.” Instead of enjoying the first day of Summer, it became, “I might, if I am lucky, get to do this thirty more times.”

Time began to move quicker. I notice this especially in my writing, where words are already valuable because of the lack of writing time. If I get an hour a day to write, and I live to be 82, that’s only about 10,000 hours of writing left.

The words are precious, and time is scarce.

And tomorrow, I will do it again.