BAD NEWS Harpo Corleone throws a seven
I finally wander into the COH offices around half past noon Saturday, June 3rd. People who call me a workaholic are closer to the truth than I'll ever let on: Money jingles in my pocket, and teeming along sidewalks linking all the many liquor stores of the Tenderloin are the typical legions of dealers and hustlers and runners and lookouts and all the whatever elses I don't care to contemplate and am trying to avoid - all of them choking back the despair of poverty and illness for a few moments at a time… sealing their fates in the bargain.
To Terry, From Jack
Your inspiration, encouragement and ethics will be with me forever. I will miss you. AND I promise to spell better in the future; perhaps.
To Trent, From Terry
I mourn his loss tremendously. Not only because he was a good, decent, and committed activist, but also because he was the single most exceptional and talented writer I've ever seen come out of the homeless movement. His writing had enormous potential to create social change. He was able to write every kind of story on every subject and make it compelling, vivid, and inspiring.
To Trent, From Joe
Last night on Friday, a man was found dead on San Francisco's hard streets. I saw him once in a staff meeting; the name he went by was Trent. He was part of Media Alliance and participated in Community Newsroom at POOR. He had addiction problems; I don't know the drugs used: it's a non-issue. But Homelessness is ultimately what killed him.
To be homeless, focusing your mind on more than immediate food, shelter, and clothing is difficult enough to many, for some nearly impossible.
To Trent...From Tiny
It was a small tree in the corner of a piece of partial nature only allowed to be there because it was the landscaped frame for a PGE processing plant ,,proving that poor people like us are not important unless we are sponsored by a corporation....
#2.......
Ode to Trent
To Trent
Bent to that
demon wind
blowing from within
and without.
Without a home
curled tight to the needle,
cops slide you in to the
bag like you weren't.
KA$H FOR KART$
The Coalition on Homelessness and four kick- ass local bands linked claws on a Saturday night in August at the Hotel Utah in a joint effort to buy shopping carts for homeless folks.
If you have never had the pleasure of seeing the sun gleaming off the black, chitinoid armor of a Free Kart rolling down past the tourists in U.N. Plaza, you have not yet truly lived. If you can for a moment imagine a cross between the Stealth bomber, an angry dung-beetle and the Batmobile, you'd be getting close.
Hate McMuffin
On Friday, July 30 at around 7:45 am a long-time homeless resident of the Haight St. area was beaten by a private security guard at the McDonald's restaurant at Haight and Stanyan. His crime was asking for a receipt for a breakfast he purchased, in order to comply with the company's beverage refill policy.
Blood on the Clownsuit
He is a big man. He kills for a living. The more he kills, it seems, the bigger he get - and he has killed in over 40 states. He is Doug Ferrari, stand-up comic.
At six foot five, Ferrari is an imposing monolith of mirth with a track record in the volatile comedy industry that reads like the guestbook at Spago. He has performed with the best - from Robin Williams and Rodney Dangerfield to Elvis Costello and Sun Ra.