Walking away from the world of money

One day you loose your job and your last hundred dollar bill breaks into two 20’s and a 10. Then your money crumbles into the last dimes that send you off the cliff.

Watching myself slip into poverty feels like following the lethal injection as it disappears into the skin. Poverty is its own society and system and if you don’t know the system as you leave the world of money, you’re so lost, you suffocate.

Everything is complicated and uphill now. If I get work today, how would I afford the gas to get there? How would I survive for two weeks or a month as I waited for my pay?

What amazes me is how much money, change, how many extra rooms, couches, cars and jobs people have. But so few help and even fewer do anything of substance.

Even when someone does help, there is an amount of guilt mixed with resentment within me. I need a job so that I can create free will for myself.

Even my relative who is letting me sleep here wants me to move already. It has been a month and she wants to get her second bedroom back and maybe turn it into an office for her pyramid scheme business.

So, do I look for a job or a place to live?

I have no place or rights at the restaurants or the movie theaters either. I have no reason to go into almost every populated place I find. Tomorrow, for just one day, imagine a world like that.

The world sees the beating heart of a poor man as an unfortunate continuation. If things get worse and my clothes get dirty, finding even a bathroom will become a moment of guilt that I will have to pursue.

You sometimes feel that you have slipped into a place somewhere between a dog and a man. And so you wait patiently for a world that is so bothered by your existence that it finally calls you to your bowl. But you will eat knowing it is only because you barked, whimpered and gave the world your guiltiest eyes.

I have heard people say that the homeless or the poor deserve these circumstances, are lazy or want them. But I am here because someone hired me and then did not pay. Then another job was starting but it did not. I would bet most of us are here because of something similar.

It is believed that 1 out of 10 people in this country, very soon, will be unemployed.

Of the nearly 10 percent unemployed now, many will slip forever away from their productive lives. Many will silently slip through the cracks of the richest country in the world.

The goal is to not be one of them.