This is where I stop being nice.<br /><br />

Look here, you knuckle-dragging half-wit:  nowhere have I suggested or believed that anything is 'beneath' me.  You have NO clue what living on the streets looks like.  How effective do you think it is to fill out job applications with an address of 'General Delivery?'  How badly do you think McDonalds wants to hire someone who has to have their work schedule set up around the availability of public showers?  I applied at every fast-food joint, manual labor agency, temp service, and convenience store in Woodland.  Would YOU hire someone who can't wash their clothes, can't rely on getting a shower, and might well be seen by one of your customers sleeping in a Wal-Mart parking lot? <br /><br />

This is exactly the kind of obnoxious and utterly fantastical attitude that has been driving me apeshit lately.  People who have never really needed anything, never really been hungry, never really been stuck or hopeless, looking down their nose and preaching 'excuses' and 'this and that isn't beneath you.'  I'd have happily shovelled shit for minimum wage:  nobody is hiring shit-shovelers.  I'm not above cleaning bathrooms or making fries or anything else; I'm more than happy to do what I need to survive, so long as it's at least plausible to suggest I *believed* it was legal. <br /><br />

I'm not too proud, and nothing is 'beneath' me.  I've never suggested such a thing, nor have I conducted myself in such a manner.<br /><br />

I would respectfully suggest that you haven't the slightest notion what being well and truly BROKE looks like, nor what kinds of obstacles to employment present themselves when you have no home and no income.  I find it ridiculous that you should sit there looking down your nose at me like I'm some crackhead or tweaker just trying to avoid working for a living.  I bust my ass, and I'm good at what I do, but hell, *I* wouldn't hire someone who was living in their car.<br /><br />

With all due respect, Mr. Logan, when you have *been* in the situation I was in, hovering on the edge of utter hopelessness, perhaps your perspective will be a little more informed.  Until then, while I certainly appreciate the time and effort you've spent in writing, I have to say that your 'advice' is rather useless, based on a series of erroneous assumptions about my attitude and approach, and is not rooted in objective reality.<br /><br />

It would be silly to suggest that everyone on the street is pious and flawless, merely the victim of circumstance.  There are dozens of mistakes I could point to over the course of my life that impacted my ability to find work in that situation.<br /><br />

However, thinking I was 'above' anything is not one of them, and I'm far from the only person who has been on the streets through no direct fault of their own.<br /><br />

Life is not a TV show, and the pat answers of the terminally comfortable are generally no solution at all to the problems one faces when one has little or nothing to work with.

*shrug*  lord knows RSPW isn't the only place I've pissed people off.  Who knows what motivates folks like that?  Some people appreciate what I have to say, others would call me a liar if I said the sun rose in the east.

I don't lose sleep over it.