Sent this text to a student/friend of mine whose mother might be into witchcraft. Thought it might make an interesting blog post, out of context.
Okay. I’m paranoid because I identify as a Christian which in this neck of the woods is regarded with enmity by people who practice witchcraft and therefore maybe even your mom.
I learned after a hard experience with a Pagan lady that the Pagans and witches in this area are quite adversarial toward professed Christians. This was not my experience in the Bay Area, where i was often advised I could be a Pagan and a Christian simultaneously.
On rational reflection, since your mom has always appeared to be favorable, I tend to doubt she’s about to go cast a spell against me. Therefore the paranoia is probably unfounded (except in the case of some previous Pagans, such as that other lady.)
Oddly enough, the Christian thing didn’t really become a public statement till I moved up to Idaho. Down in Berkeley, I was regarded as a Pagan–pentacles, circles, the whole shebang. The Christian thing there was a function of churches often needing piano players, though it is true that I have embraced an inner spiritual reality. But I have also always enjoyed digesting the teachings of all the many conflicting denominations and cults.
A position as a church pianist was a perfect way to learn of these denominational differences, since I wound up losing jobs with every major denomination. But here I am up in Idaho and writing for a religious news site, somehow having had the effect of dredging up personal beliefs from out of my inner heart of privacy, and making my weird notions known to the masses (albeit largely misunderstood, as stated earlier.)
In my experience, psychologically speaking, paranoia is a product of guilt. As a guilt-ridden individual, it’s often challenging for me to determine whether I’ve actually done something wrong, or am merely feeling guilt out of a guilty nature.
A religious upbringing during a very staid and repressive decade no doubt contributed to the guilty excess. However I do feel there is a transcendent spirituality that can be sought and found, and I don’t feel that Christianity, despite its many problems, should be excluded from that realm.
Christ is real. This is a real Spirit with whom people interact and who assists them in their decision making. How that relates to the Christian religion is another story, and would be the substance of an extended conversation.
Odd I would even become paranoid at all, actually. I very often felt paranoia down in California, but very seldom since I’ve moved to Idaho. Last time I was paranoid, I was concerned that a biker might have been out to get me. But that was over a year ago. Now he and I are cool too, thus demonstrating that it was only a paranoid fiction.
So that’s all really. I’m not paranoid anymore but just kind of annoyed with life, which usually happens at around this time every month before I get paid, three of four days from now. However, I may need to explore what is making me feel guilty. This seems the most critical matter in terms of psychoanalysis.
Please donate at this particular time.
(It’s needed.)
When I found the kids in my 11th grade class making fun of me, I myself did not know that classism was the culprit. My dad was a Navy man — an enlisted man who had just been stationed in a new town after a tour overseas. Because my parents wanted to assure their children of a “high quality education,” they bought a modest house in the richest of four unified school districts in that city. I remember that we barely made the border between that district and the next one down.
In the twelve years when I lived outside, this word had a way of making me feel that I was in some way distinctly set apart from the rest of the human race. At times, the word suggested that possibly I was not even fully human. I quickly learned that in this over-generalization, the “H-Word” carries with it so much stigma that its usage actually had the power to actively work against me in a number of different ways.
This is because it is easier for most people to live with the perception that a person became homeless because they were a “crackhead” (or drug addict, alcoholic, etc.), than it is with the sense that a homeless person may have become homeless for reasons that were completely beyond their control, and that cannot possibly be attributed to any kind of behavioral flaw or defect of that person’s character. The homeless person needs to somehow be blamed for having gotten themselves as far low as they’ve gotten themselves. This is so that the focus can become on what they ostensibly did wrongin order to result in their homelessness; and not on the homelessness itself.
A better question would have been: “Why didn’t they react with normal human sympathy for a person who had just been so violated and traumatized?
While these comments may seem to many to be fairly sensible at face value, I would have to say — from the perspective of a person who spent several years swimming the quicksand of homelessness in the S.F.Bay Area — that the mayor’s insights are rather shallow. While I personally never had to take a shit on the sidewalk, can you imagine the difficulty I would have had in “clean-up” if I had? For one thing, what would I have used to clean up the feces? Certainly not toilet paper. If I’d had access to toilet paper, I’d have had access to one of the many locked bathrooms I wasn’t able to get into. And that’s the very situation that would have driven me to have to take a dump outdoors in the first place.
unsuccessfully to sleep.
A. Revelation. Revelation of my own hypocrisy. You might say, my hypocrisy has been revealed to me.
Then one day I had a revelation. I realized that I needed to embrace homelessness completely and learn how to deal with it on its own terms. Those terms included a silent hustle for day-to-day survival that easily consumed more than forty hours each week — in other words, the time consumption of a full time job. So I gave myself to the homeless experience, and I prided myself on how well I was handling it. 
The first time was roughly nine years into my homeless experience, in December of 2013. When my friend on the East Coast (3000 miles away from me) found out I was ailing, she immediately sent me $700 off of her credit card, asking me to pay it all back at the beginning of the month, when I got my government check. The idea was to put me in a hotel room for 7–10 days so I could recover in full.
At that, a strange mix of fear and anger ripped through my body. The man had not only lied to me about Pete’s schedule, but he blatantly refused to even consider that I might have been telling the truth. Moreover, I had recognized him; I knew exactly who he was, and I could not possibly have changed my appearance so hugely in the past seven years, that he would think I was anyone other than who I said I was.
In such instances, there is a widespread feeling that the person can “pull himself up by his own bootstraps” and that this will “teach him” to manage money better, become more responsible, and so forth. This translates to less sympathy for the homeless on the part of the privileged classes, which are predominantly White.
The second time was a bit different, and actually was more of an inconvenience than anything else. I had been in a halfway house, and I left before the two week term was up. I left because I couldn’t stand being around all the strangers, and I wanted to be alone, and sleep alone outside. (This was always my preference, during the years when I was homeless.)
Q. And on the other hand?
I asked my sister if I could stay at her house. She said no. She, however, gave me a reason. She had a very small house, was aging with health concerns, in a wheelchair, and with live-in care. My presence in the house would not have helped her health, and I can understand that. (She is since deceased.)
This says nothing about the “idle rich” — people who are rich by inheritance and may never have done a lick of work in their lives. They have so much time on their hands, and so much money, that many of them become addicted to heroin and cocaine — and they buy top grade.
You will be kicked out of your beauty sleep by cops, security guards, property owners, business owners, and worst of all, other homeless people. You might as well divest yourself of all remnant of worldly possessions — cell phones and laptops included — because they are all going to be stolen anyway. At food services and “feeds” you will be herded around like cattle, and orders will be barked at you as though you were a criminal in a jailhouse. Your 1st and 4th Amendment rights will routinely be violated by rookie cops who wake you up in the middle of the night and immediately search your backpack for drugs. During these violations, the cops will also run your “criminal record,” since it is also assumed that you are a criminal.
But the rain continued, more-or-less treacherously, more-or-less cynically — as though my frivolous complaint meant nothing in the face of such cosmic inevitability. 
Maybe he’d just been around. Or perhaps he was smart. If you stop to think about it, it won’t take long to figure out how difficult it can be for a homeless person to come up with a clean pair of socks on a regular basis. Socks were like gold down there. But people usually didn’t stop to think farther than the basics, if they even bothered to think about us at all. 
I really need a shower. I’m not used to this neck of the woods, and I can’t just go hang out at the Multi-Agency Service Center like I could in Berkeley, where I could usually be assured of a shower in the morning, though I often had to wait for over three hours with about fifty other people, and sometimes would have my things ripped off during the brief period of time I was allotted for my shower.
Consider also these very famous Scriptures: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 19:24) “The love of money is the root of all evil.” (1 Timothy 6:10). And without bothering to quote every word, passages such as James 5:1-11 and Luke 16:19-31 hurl severe warnings in the direction of the wealthy. But where in the Bible are such warnings thrown in the direction of the poor? Nowhere.
“No,” she said, possibly lying. 
Eden in Babylon 