Homelessness in San Francisco

I seem to be hooked on this at the moment.  Extracts below.

4.45 am here in fog town and sleep aint an option.  Terrific couple of days trekking the hills of San Francisco, Alcatraz, Union Square rich shopping and joining in a protest at city hall in support of the tribes of homeless people who inhabit the streets.  Amazing what happens when you walk out without a strict itinerary and go with the flow.  A mixture of free and liberal California as you expect but ruled it seems by a system that discards its sick and poor to fend for themselves.

Homelessness in SF is compounded by the city hall 'homelessness tsar' lack of systems thinking - why analyse the problem in any depth when you can quote the amount of money its costing you to run a 'pony' system!

We are visiting SF for the first time and are shocked at the tribes of people living on the streets.  It does not appear on the surface as though SF has a health and social care system that works to care for its citizens.  When I questioned the "homelessness Tsar" at City Hall he turned petulantly to me and quoted the amount of cash spent on the programme, saying that I needed to do my homework!  Obviously he equates cash with success rather than using his eyes and looking at the waste of money he is overseeing on a system that does not work.  I would have liked to have had a chance to debate with him but he stormed off. I suppose he had just come away from our visitation of the mayors office to demonstrate against  the relay system of people being handed from one office to the next all over town, often finding 'no room at the inn'.  I guess he had enough of the polite pretence of listening.  Good luck with the campaign.

Because the world is round

Morning Pages

I got the title from a book I tried to use once about learning to be creative, The Artists Way by Julia Cameron. The idea is to write every morning for a set time, as I recall from memory and then just keep them to one side. [Learn more here] Its the sort of thing I did a lot of as a teeneager and student and up to my mid thirties and then got out of the habit of doing. I guess that is why I broght a book to learn how to write again. I found it far to formal a way of living though and abandoned the idea quite soon after I read the first few chapters of the book. The sort of writing I used to do was very abstract, sometimes under the influence and sometimes angry. It would come at anytime and be a great source of poetry and ideas for me.
I recently started a course called "Re-Write Your Life". It is a corny title but the woman running it is absolutely wonderful and it has been another way in which I have been able to re examine the writing that I do and that I can do. It has been quite surprising how it has replenished my sense of creativity.

First Blog Entry

The intention is to start a blog as an alternative to the 'childish ways' of Facebook - although a few friends are linked and talk using that medium so I would not want to loose that altogether.
This is an experiment.
Let us see what happens!