Home. Less. Home.

     There was a film the other night, The Golden Voice, which starred a weathered 84-year old Nick Nolte.  He convincingly played a homeless veteran, riddled with different shades of guilt that had churned into not anger or despair, but acceptance and wisdom.  It was simply done, and left a good message that no matter what we may think of a person, we should remember that we actually know next to nothing about them.  As Arrested Development sang: No one ever knew his name cause he's a no-one.  Never thought twice about spending on a ol' bum until I had the chance to really get to know one.  So it puzzled me to read a comment by Esquire's editor that said: A recent study showed that two-thirds of men aged eighteen to twenty-three say they feel that nobody really knows them well.  Two thirds!  The co-creator of Adolescence, (mentioned in an earlier post) Jack Thorne, told Business Week: I think it’s really central, this idea of 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men.  That idea is such a powerful idea.  And it gets inside of what I felt like as a teenager, which is, "No one likes me.  No one finds me attractive.  No one wants to talk to me.  How can I fit in this world?"  And if I heard that there is a reason why you feel this way, there is a reason why you feel all these emotions, and that is because the world is female dominated.  Aesthetically you don't belong in it until you learn how to make yourself stronger, make yourself better, make yourself more attractive.  Another piece in the same magazine added: Where does this aesthetic go from here?  --the mythic strength of Sandow, the beachside bravado of the Venice bodybuilders, the greed-soaked tailoring of 1980s finance and the tight-fitting clothes once labeled metrosexual.  When the cultural winds shift --as they always do-- the alpha will update accordingly.  The look will change.  The slogans will too.  But the performance will remain: a man offering a caricature as comfort, selling certainty to those unsettled by change.

     Little of that would have mattered had I not read the startling statistic that 20% of the homeless population are seniors.  Some studies even place the figure as high as 50%, wrote PBS: ...in New York City, Los Angeles County and Boston, the population of homeless people older than 65 will likely triple by 2030...[many] typically had worked their whole lives, she said, hovering around the poverty level but always with housing.  But a combination of a few life changes forced them from their homes.  These events included losing a job, getting sick, a spouse or partner getting sick, separation from a partner, or the death of a partner or parent...And for those who first become homeless after 50, life expectancies can be even worse than the already early death rate for the general elderly homeless population...In her research of unhoused people older than 50 in Oakland, California, Kushel [Dr. Margot Kushel, director of UCSF’s Center for Vulnerable Populations] found that their median age of death was 64.  "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64" sang the Beatles.  It seemed so lively and happy back then, but maybe not so much now...

     For many, the dream of getting a "home" as in a house one owns, is slowly fading into the sunset.  Mortgage rates seem as if they'll not be returning to those ultra-low rates of the just a few years ago, pay for workers seems stuck, and consumers now hang tight to their "emergency" cash.  Those who do own homes seem to be staying put for the most part (and here I'm talking about the everyday person and not the thriving market of homes priced in the millions; a recent advertisement showed a Miami condo building with wraparound balconies with the tagline "starting at $15 million"...it's being built over the Surfside condos which collapsed 4 years ago).  Rents are little better.  Take this example of living in Paris as reviewed in the New York Review: The average Paris rent is €1,200 per month, low compared with New York or London, but the average Paris apartment is fifty square meters [less than 540 sq. ft.] and the average net monthly income €2,000.  According to a 2022 UBS report, a “skilled service worker” here would need fifteen years to save enough money to buy a sixty-square-meter apartment, placing Paris among the most expensive cities in the world.  Paris—that is, its central twenty arrondissements—is also one of the densest cities in Europe, with 2.16 million inhabitants in an area one twelfth the size of the five boroughs of New York.  In the multiethnic eighteenth arrondissement there are 32,000 inhabitants per square kilometer, on par with Mumbai and Karachi.  A further 10 million live in the surrounding banlieues, the French urbanist Justinien Tribillon writes in The Zone.  

     So what does the average person do?  Rent for years or decades?  Buy a starter home?  Upgrade to a larger home?  Run out of options and wonder what can you do?  Two surveys, one from the National Association of Realtors, and the other from Opendoor, showed that decisions and perhaps regrets about owning a home are shifting, the buyers younger and having to settle for smaller homes or condos.  Or moving back in with parents in an effort to save a bit more.  "Too many people going underground," wrote Paul McCartney: Too many reaching for a piece of cake.  Too many people pulled and pushed around, too many waiting for that lucky break.  It can feel like that at times, the crowded streets of Vegas or perhaps the even larger field of sports betting which now approaches nearly $45 billion in the US alone (sports betting is legal in 38 states). Wrote ESPN: "Last year saw brick-and-mortar revenue growth slow, while online gaming and sports betting continued to grow," AGA vice president of research David Forman said during the call.  "These past few years have reshaped the industry, and the revenue pie, while it's much bigger, looks very different than it used to.  That's increasingly driven by new online gaming options available to more people than ever before."  Forman said 30% of all commercial gaming revenue came from digital sources in 2024, compared to 25% in 2023 and 13% in 2021.  Throw in gambling in general, from lotteries to horse racing to roulette tables, and the amount spent in 2025 is anticipated  to top $417 billion (the city of Macau is the world leader in gambling revenue), wrote Statistica.  Too many waiting for that lucky break...

     But there are many more not only waiting for a "break" but just trying to survive, coming home tired and unable to sleep well because of the worry of paying bills or even just a bill.  For many, just having to face another day is daunting because there's no apparent end in sight.  Car loan defaults are now at the 60-days late mark, and will likely move to 90 days; repossessions and evictions have soared.  Many people are now paying only the minimum on their credit cards (said a report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank on May 16, 2025: The share of credit card balances at least three months delinquent rose to its highest level in 14 years, approaching its level during the Great Recession).  History may take awhile, but it does seem to revolve in a circular pattern.  And it's not just consumers -- bankruptcy filings for retail stores doubled last year, according to The Street.  And yet, one need only drive by the outside of restaurants and find them packed.  Menu prices for the most part aren't low (here in my area, the average dinner runs about $40 pp before tip); a party of 4 can easily tally a bill of $200.  And yet (again), there are often lines waiting to get in.  So what's the deal here?  Is everyone maxing out their credit, or have inheritances begun to arrive, or are people making more than enough to flash their bucks?...likely yes, yes, and yes.  

Famed reporter, now homeless, Patrick Fealey

     Little wonder then that a medical issue or a major repair or a disruption of income (the planned budget cuts to Medicaid and possibly Medicare) can leave seniors few options.  For Patrick Fealey, something hit his brain and turned ordinary life --war veteran, star reporter for a major newspaper, settled life-- into a world he would depend on for sanity, a world that would give him the meds he needed to control that which he couldn't control, a world he once knew and reported on so well but was now a world whose lifeline was getting a bit frayed.  In a piece he wrote in Esquire, he gave us a sample of a life few of us know, that of living on the street: I began parking at Walmart in November.  The masses flood the lot to shop for the holidays.  People drive fast in the lot, as aggressively as they do on the roads, whipping in and out of empty spaces while pedestrians walk in the low florescent glow.  They make me nervous.  People are economically squeezed, the stress of everyday survival and the fear of uncertain future turning into hostility.  Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and many have no emergency savings -- they are one crisis from homelessness.  A job loss or an unexpected illness and they are where I am.  They are on edge, driving bigger and faster and louder cars -- a society speeding along as it disintegrates...Many of you could be where we are --on the street-- but for some simple and not uncommon twist of fate.  This is part of your rejection, this fear that it could be you.  You deny that reality because it is too horrific to contemplate, therefore you must deny us.  And the moneyed reject us because they know they create us, that we are a consequence of their impulse to accumulate more than they need, rooted in a fear of life and the death that comes with it.  Nothing good comes of fear, only destruction, and America has become a society of fear, much of that fear cultivated to divide and control. 

     For many of us, his words ring true.  We deny that our life will change, that we will grow older and no longer be able to climb those stairs, that something will fail in our job or our marriage, that our car will make it through one more month without an oil change, that our country will head to war once again.  Wrote a piece in The New Yorker on this seemingly engrained denial: The tremors can be so muffled and distant that people continually adapt, explaining away the anomalies.  You can live through the big one, it turns out, and still go on acting as if --still go on feeling as if-- the big one is not yet here.  And then we are suddenly on the edge, as the author of Cellar Rat wrote: The casual chain lurched beyond those few minutes of intensity, the week prior, choices not made the prior semester, or even to a rainy night the year before when I had refused to act and lived with frustration inherent.  More likely the chain of my stagnant self-hatred included all of them, a culmination of nights, days, and moments when I stood frozen, unable to make myself do the difficult thing that needed to be done, whether it had been missing a girl or calling someone about a job...I began to fathom the necessity of taking the difficult and uncomfortable actions demanded by this life that if left undone might leave you staring 13 stories down on the streetscape, wishing you were part of the glass cascade. 

      Now that you've made it to through to the end of this maze of manlihood, and big houses, and an older homeless population, try adding on this from another piece in The New Yorker: Israeli forces have now dropped more explosives in Gaza than fell on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined during the Second World War...the World Health Organization reported that more that a thousand health-care workers had been killed, and that it had verified six hundred and fifty-four strikes on Gaza’s medical facilities.  So having just read that, or that the White House decided it could bomb an unprovoked nation without Congressional approval (and apparently in violation of the War Powers Act), or that there are so many "nameless" homeless, or that the younger crowd also feels unseen, or that the heat dome hit your area, or that the ice sheets are melting up north, or that we may once again be facing boots-on-the-ground in the Middle East.  Now, which of those did you remember?  Which of those, if any, gnawed at your conscience?  The answer is likely none of them.  It certainly doesn't seem to bother Congress, or the Supreme Court justices, or most of us who are still driving around and shopping and mowing lawns.  Apathy has hit hard once again as the solution seems to be to simply  "tune out" and laugh at it all with Jimmy Kimmel.  Is it because the "bad" news is just becoming too much and too common that it's easier to become numb to what would once be considered shocking.  As my wife keeps asking, why isn't anyone saying, no yelling, "this is not right?"

    So another piece in The New Yorker began this way: Out of guilt or amnesia, we tend to treat wars, in retrospect, as natural disasters: terrible but somehow inevitable, beyond anyone's control.  Shaking your fist at the fools who started the First World War and condemned millions to a meaningless death seems jejune; historians teach us to say that the generals did their best under impossible conditions.  Mournful fatalism is the requisite emotion, even when mad fury would be more apt.  Efforts at de-escalation are cast as weakness or cowardice, while those who lead nations into catastrophe are praised for their "strength of character," or for stoically accepting what was supposedly unavoidable.  We rarely honor those who turn back at the brink... The truth is that we accept mass dying with enormous aplomb.  [It] barely fazes us -- until, that is, it becomes personal and particular... Remaining alive to other people's pain, in the face of heroic rhetoric, retrospective rationalization, and two-sided tribal terror, is perhaps the hardest moral task we face -- and one at which we almost always fail.  Sometimes the only people who can see the sky are the soldiers who die beneath it. 

     If the US and Israel can "plant" missiles and bombs, there is the probability that other countries have done so as well here in our country.  Perhaps not missiles or bombs but many other possible "weapons."  The scare of radioactive emission devices or REDs (possible) or "dirty" bombs (unlikely) already residing among sleeper cells here in the US have been speculated for years and even decades by some.  Slow leaks of radiation emerging from office buildings or $15 million condos, or small objects left on multiple passenger jets, or lunch bags left in parks and schools, or boxes sent through the mail, or a few parcels dropped off boats into water reservoirs...until discovered, the radioactivity would continue until just as with the homeless, you'd begin to feel sick, then shunned, then shut out, unseen, unrecognized, and wishing there was a way to undo what was happening to you.  It can't happen here, we cry.  As Freddie Mercury of Queen sang: There are plenty of ways that you can hurt a man and bring him to the ground.  You can beat him, you can cheat him, you can treat him bad and leave him when he's down...another one bites the dust.

    In the issue of Esquire mentioned earlier, Denzel Washington said that there was a slap he has never forgotten: As I got older I started carrying my little switchblade, walking down to the club by myself, all swagger.  I had a mentor there, Billy Thomas.  He’s still in my life.  He slapped me in the face one time.  And I’ll tell you what—that was a lesson.  Billy’s not tall, but I was so little.  He was on one knee, and I was standing, and he’s telling me something important.  And I wasn’t listening.  I’m looking around, like, Mm-hmm, okay, yeah, okay.  Because I want to get back out and play with the other kids.  And then Pow!  Pay attention!  I never forgot it.  In today's world we could all use a slap like that.  Pay attention!  Allow women and children to be shot and killed when they're just waiting for food?  Allow a foreign country to drop bombs on it for possibly specious reasons (Israel still refuses to openly admit that it may have a many as 300 nuclear warheads, wrote Current Affairs).  Allow nearly a million immigrants to be sent to a country which is not their home country, and where they may be tortured, all without any legal recourse, said the Supreme Court?  Maybe we need that slap now to wake us up, and to pay attention.  At least before we are the ones looking up at the sky for the wrong reason.  Take me home, Country Joe...