“EUGENE, Ore. — The City of Eugene is seeking proposals to utilize $1,056,545 from the 2024 Affordable Housing Trust Fund to support housing developments that cater to the housing needs of low and moderate-income Eugene residents.”
LOL – the check is in the mail. A million bucks wouldn’t cover the bar tab at the 2023 National Conference on Ending Homelessness and Capitol Hill Day at the Washington Hilton in DC. But it’s still amusing to dream. What would I do with a million bucks to help people?
Never mind. My notes from Eugene contain the usual spread ranging from mundane to murder. Mangled pedestrians, a new Old Spaghetti Factory. The top headlines pale in comparison to the homeless guy in our laundry room. His name is Fred and he’s another citizen of Methopotamia. All he wants is a dry place to rest and recover. RoseMarie had a couple of freakouts, and then decided to ignore him. Fred seems relatively harmless and now he’s become another fixture in our cast of crazy Mill Street players.
I tap on the window at first light, a sack of laundry over my shoulder. “Morning, Fred.” Fred isn’t much for conversation. He knows the rules and so do I. We ignore each other. Fred has a warm place to sleep for the night and I don’t get hit up for money I don’t have to give. Small comforts mean a great deal when the temperature drops and the rain turns to snow.
Learn to Ignore It
Ignoring the horror seems the only sane option. When bleeding pedestrians lay across wet asphalt with a ‘Advertise Here’ billboard looming in the distance. High school kids building tiny houses for wildfire survivors. Homeless and the ‘housing insecure’ populations are going up, not down. I’m powerless to stop it – like most of Eugene. They used to say about surviving the Vietnam War that one of the most important things to learn was what to ignore. That seems to be a valid survival tactic in the Year of Our Lord 2024.
What happens when you don’t ignore it? Well, you end up like this rapscallion who threatened to kill everyone when he couldn’t pay for his order at Burrito Boy. You can appreciate the subtlety of his scam, but now he’ll be eating three squares a day courtesy the ODOC.
Never mind the pedestrians slaughtered like chickens on Highway 99. Ignore the mounting bills and the failure to launch of my writing career. Pay no attention to the man sleeping in your laundry room. You might be fighting him for space next week, if the dice fall the wrong way.
A winter storm watch starts tomorrow afternoon and I’m sure Fred will need a place to sleep until the clouds lift again. Meanwhile, if a hot cup of coffee and a sandwich should magically appear on his window sill, I’m sure Fred wouldn’t mind.
