It’s time I told you all what is going on with me.<\/p>\n
I no longer have the apartment I had for the past 21 years. I fell too far behind on my rent. On November 1 the management company took me to court.<\/p>\n
My bank balance fell negative for so long that First Tennessee closed my account in June. I’d had that account since 1987. No bank account means I can’t receive money transfers via Venmo, Cashapp, Zelle, etc. It also means I can’t work for a remote company and receive payment via bank transfer.<\/p>\n
AT&T cut my cellular service off around September 10. That brought an end to the tour guide job I held this summer. The customer-service aspects of the job required that I had a phone. I still have my Phone and am able to jump on public Wi-Fi and use Apple iMessage to text many of my friends.<\/p>\n
I’ve been out of my apartment since December 18. Since then I have mostly been couchsurfing thanks to incredibly generous friends. Two of them even paid for me a ticket to Bardog’s $150\/person anniversary party. I greatly appreciated that, even though it wasn’t at the top of my “needs” list. It helped me feel like a whole person again, not “less-than” if that makes any sense.<\/p>\n
Friends aware of my situation have bought me meals. I haven’t had to stand in any soup kitchen lines yet. Not that there’s a thing wrong with doing so.<\/p>\n
Two nights I stayed out all night. On one of those nights I walked all the way from the Downtown core to Madison and Cooper. This was about 3 in the morning. The streets were deserted. No particular reason for going out there. I just needed to pass the time. I’m finding that boredom is my biggest enemy.<\/p>\n
I have an outer jacket, two hoodies (one of them my famous PBR hoodie), a t-shirt, jeans, underwear, socks, and shoes in a backpack. Clothes to survive, but probably not appropriate work attire for many occupations.<\/p>\n
I do have my driver’s license and Social Security card, and before I left the apartment for the last time I grabbed a copy of my birth certificate. So I’m good to go there.<\/p>\n
I also grabbed my computer, its charger, and my iPhone and Apple Watch chargers before I left. So I’m connected. Through free public Wi-Fi I have a signal most of the time.<\/p>\n
Five years ago, St. Peter Catholic Church commissioned me to create for them a pamphlet listing available resources for the homeless in the Downtown Memphis area. Through that research I became familiar with the Hospitality Hub<\/a>, a tremendous clearinghouse of resources to help those experiencing homelessness get to a better place in life.<\/p>\n Today I plan to go to the Hub and see if they can help me with<\/p>\n The Hub offers a lot of other services I don’t need personally, but which I want to mention just because I think the Hub is awesome!<\/p>\n Y’all, I plan to keep going with this blog and remaining your Downtown news source. Informing and entertaining all of you gives me purpose and true joy in my life. I hope this is not the end of our relationship.<\/p>\n Feel free to send me love, prayers, (gently worded) advice, and whatever else you’ve got for me. Best ways to do that, other than in-person:<\/p>\n To those who have known about my situation the past three weeks and have helped me, I cannot say THANK YOU or I LOVE YOU enough to express the depth of gratitude I feel in my heart. I know some of you are frustrated with me for moving so slowly to reach out for help on my own. I apologize and will try to go faster – but please understand, accepting the reality of my current situation is a difficult mental exercise.<\/p>\n Thank you for reading. As I said, there is nothing which gives me joy as much as writing for all of you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s time I told you all what is going on with me. I no longer have the apartment I had for the past 21 years. I fell too far behind on my rent. On November 1 the management company took me to court. My bank balance fell negative for so long that First Tennessee closed … Continue reading “Homeless”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27451"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27451"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27453,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27451\/revisions\/27453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulryburn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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