This is a reprint of a post from a year and a half ago, with some minor changes. The issue of aggressive efforts to fix stalled lives has been coming up a lot lately, in the haunts I frequent, in HWS.Yep. We people stuck in the Big Muddy Muddy of Homeless World Sacramento need the Wolf. That is, we need someone like Pulp Fiction's Winston Wolfe who is a Fixer of any – and I do mean any – problem.
You might recall the character The Wolf in Pulp Fiction, played by Harvey Keitel, who was called in to fix the fix that Jules and Vincent found themselves in. Seems the movie's principle characters had a bloody corpse in the backseat of their Dodge.
The Wolf had been called to the scene by Marsellus Wallace, boss of our sociopathic protagonist heros, to clean up the incriminating mess, which he did lickitysplit – and in impressive fashion, otherwise.
We need someone like The Wolf in Homeless World Sac. Not to clean up incriminating messes, but to straighten up to make fly right fallen lives.
Damn it, the most frustrating thing about the world I'm in has to do with all the impressive men who have so much to offer the world and no means out of their mudhole to offer it.
What's rather weird – and unknown to the world outside the world of the outside – is that homelessness is a wonderful training exercise in humility (though many would attest it hasn't taken with me). And since so many people in Housed World Sacramento are such vainglorious pistols, a bit of humble splendor would be exactly the right pat of butter for their bread.
Whether you live hidden away out in back of the outback, or trundle you body back and forth between Sanctuary* and Loaves**, there's no egress from Miseryville. Now, that's not to say there's ABSOLUTELY NO egress from Miseryville, but effectively that's the case for beat-up folks who don't know their virtues and are unaware of their shadow aspects.
Shadow aspects? Yep. "Everyone carries a shadow," Carl Jung wrote, "and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."
Quoting wikidpedia,
According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to project: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these projections are unrecognized "The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object – if it has one – or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power." These projections insulate and cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion between the ego and the real world. Jung also believed that "in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness – or perhaps because of this – the shadow is the seat of creativity."So, am I envisioning a psychologist for this Fixer position? Hmm, well, maybe. But it needs to be an all-purpose fixer who knows a great deal and has terrific instincts. Someone who can quickly get people jobs and housing and get their lives unstalled.
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* Sanctuary: This winter's Overflow, Winter Sanctuary. It's the best of what the county is doing to try to meet the over-abundance of need in the way of shelter for homeless folk this cold season. It provides a floor at an area church for just 100 homeless people to sleep on in their own blankets/sleeping bags, or ones WS provides. Our county's supervisors meet first the needs of the best connected, rather than the more-dire needs of the poorest of the poor. That is damnable at a time when the economy is collapsed.
**Loaves: the daytime facility known formally as Loaves ampersand Fishes, or totally informally as Libby's Playground.
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