No place like homeless

28 Blogs Later...



It's a bi-product of my nomadic lifestyle over the last couple of years, that I seem to be in a constant state of unpacked half and half. The things that I own, the books that I've read, the CDs I've borrowed and never returned (and put in box labelled "Mwahhhahhahhhaaa, it's MINE now") they all live in stasis. Little nuggets of my personality packed away in the attics of friends and family waiting to eventually be reanimated into my world. It feels like I'm trapped in a cautionary satire of my own life, written by a disturbed John Lennon obsessive, riffing on the idea of removing all my possessions and warbling a tedious, patronising song about it.

The stinging and painful sensation of homelessness comes into focus during more depressed moments, like when I stub a toenail, drop a plate or stand, weeping, in front of a mirror. Being without a base causes a worrisome split within me and gives me a feeling of something being out of joint. Although I've had some great times renting in flat shares, it's inevitable to be haunted by an impotent feeling of not being able to influence your surroundings and the acceptance that you must at all times be seen to be grateful and get your bloody feet off the sofa.

I've never actually owned my own house, mainly on account of the fact that I don't possess a magic duck that shits golden eggs, so find myself somewhere short of the 47 billion lifetimes I would need to be working for in order to afford a deposit. Instead, I've been wandering from short term lease to short term lease and sharing with live in landlords. Although I've never been anything other than welcome (in no small part on account of the pennies coughed up monthly) there will always be a sense of being the second rooster in the hen house. Especially when I was discovered burying turds and crowing outside the back door at six in the morning.

Perhaps my dislocation from my location is caused by the split from my possessions as much as the lack of the traditional notion of a home. This is a personal Hell, not because I live in a manner that is even approaching "mildly inconvenient", but because I am absent from my heaven. Everything I own is absent from me, locked away in storage and bundled into boxes. It's a continuously weird situation to be so transient and it's a situation that makes me wonder constantly about what my future holds.

When you lose something important; your wallet, an old letter, the key to a secret basement dungeon, the frustration is driven by the function or emotional significance of the item and how desperate you are to use it. Eventually it dissipates and you give up searching, so the anger, the looking down the children's throats, the threats to perform an emergency c section on the kitten, they give way to a constant migrane of irritation. This feels like a yearning, caused by the knowledge that it's out there. Somewhere. Mocking you. Entering your dreams and whispering quietly; "I'm here... why can't you find me....? I'm so aloneeeeeeeeee..... BURN THINGS"

All the things I've owned in the past and at some point given away, outgrown or sold for crack, they're all out there, somewhere. My history is in those artifacts. My old sofa is being guffed on by a flatulent, bum picking sloth in somebody else's front room. My old washing machine is being cacked on by a seagull on a rancid landfill. My first toothbrush was probably pushed inside a broken oil pipe in a dismally futile 'Top Kill' exercise.

Thinking about these things can lead to either a sad nostalgia, where your missing object is romanced, mourned or even personified, which is exactly what I was telling my hairbrush this morning. I know it's silly to attach painful emotions to mere items, but it's hard not to want to pin your experiences to things that remind you of certain times in your life. It has to be better to think of the objects you shed as discarding a past, rooting you in inactivity. I'm glad I can move on and create a vacuum which is ready to be filled with experiences rather than commodities.

I do miss a home and a solid base. It makes life more comforting to know you can always return to your own sanctuary, but for now, life is constantly about emptying baggage and doing as much as I can to refill it. Perhaps next time, I'll pitch up somewhere I'll be able to stay.

At least my old toothbrush is doing its bit to stop the apocalypse. Not a surprise really. It did have Mighty Mouse on it and there ain't nothing he can't do. Apart from blocking pipes vomiting oil into the sea, it appears, but then I might have missed that episode.



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