Emerging from the mines at last

Today is a red-letter day. That's because it’s done.

By 'it', I mean my month-long project.

So, it's done and I'm done -- as in very fatigued and still waiting for life to return to normal. I’m still waiting. I’m still waiting. C’mon life – return to normal!

For the entirety of February, I lived, breathed and thought about what ultimately turned out to be a 68 page treatise on homelessness in my community. I think it looks swell. It covers the ground, reads well (I’ve been told by those scrutinizing it – i.e., the folk who hired me) and I hope it can make an effective handbook for those carrying out the task of bringing about a notable change in the plight of the disadvantaged in the area.

I won’t go into the details of the philosophy, but it essentially follows the same pattern Victoria is planning to undertake, and Victoria is taking its model from Calgary, and Calgary took its model from Portland OR. And in that, it all goes back to a guy named Phillip Mangano who was hired by George W. Bush to find a scheme to address the plight of the homeless in US cities.

His model is a truly simple (and very effective) one. It’s called ‘Housing First’, and all it calls for is to get people into safe and warm digs, and then begin to address all the other problems in their lives once they are securely ensconced in a tolerable domestic setting. When they are no longer sleeping under bridges, in alleyways, or in cockroach-infested shit hotel rooms, then you can look at such things as mental illness and drug addiction (the dual scourges that affect and disable about 80% of our homeless. When somebody can tuck in under clean sheets after having had a nutritious meal, then that same person might be able to take an honest look at the other scourges of his or her life.

I mention ‘her’, because the most revelatory finding in this community was that more than half of our homeless are female. Victims often of domestic abuse, as well as mental illness, and addictions to drugs and/or alcohol, women are truly left with little recourse other than hooking to improve their lives. How wretched. Even more wretched is that many of them have children in tow and are desperately afraid of having the kids seized.

Anyway, enough about the report per se.

What I have found is that doing the job was so labor-intensive that, while I longed for the day of completion, I am finding it difficult to come down and revel in my new freedom. It’s the adrenalin rush that keeps it going, and the adrenalin sometimes continues to pump for a while after the task is completed. At the extreme end of that scale, it is the soldier returning from a combat tour and trying to settle into normal domestic life, at a more domestic level it is the moment after sex when the bliss is over and the thought is, “now what do we do?”

Anticlimax has a host of meanings.

So, I think I’ll just take the day to putter in the garden, since it’s bright and sunny, and maybe look to painting a picture sometime this weekend.

Oh, and there is one more thing about the project that I have vowed. One, I’ll never gain take on something of such magnitude with such a limited window of time given. I want to be involved from the beginning to be fully up to speed so people don’t immediately assume I know what in the fuck they’re talking about. And, two, I won’t take on a project in which I have to answer to more than one person. Multitudes of players with divergent opinions do not make the task easier.

Now, show me the money!