This Website is for All of Us
Us humanoids withhold both our wants and our needs. Our wants are the subjective wishes and desires of our emotional monkey mind. Our needs are the objective and non-negotiable necessities that keep us alive and full of purpose. The number one need in my life is to help others. Let me explain…
Most of us are used to seeing our parents’ faces up close…
As children we see them up close in the kitchen or nearby in the living room, or up in our face when they kiss us good night. When older and we come back to visit the parental units, we gather close to chat, laugh, and tell stories over a sandwich or the Thanksgiving Day turkey.
As a young man I was skilled picking my mom out in a crowd. It was not her face I would recognize first, no, but her shape. In my home town of Baltimore, either riding my bike or later driving my car I would see her. She sauntered painfully down the sidewalk, doing her best organic homeless bag lady shuffle. A full two blocks away during the chaotic Baltimore lunch rush, and my radar would pick her up almost immediately.
Amid her disheveledness she pushed around her stupid little vertical wire shopping basket on wheels, her entire life’s belongings shoved into that damn poverty cart, and her big brown pleather purse tucked securely under her arm. Severely hunched over, her face aimed towards the pavement…she shuffled forward in her slow but determined way, barely glancing up or around as she went. I never saw anyone interact with her, except to agressively speed around when she became nothing but an obstacle in their way on the sidewalk. She seemed to bother no one — except me that is, as I came rolling by and tried to avoid the monstrosity of a mother bird.
I bird-bothered…unable to help my mother in any genuine manner, despite my best intentions and efforts. She struggled horribly with her poor mental health, she was less than poor, all alone, and homeless.
Running into my mother-type bag lady person on the street never turned out positively. Always I tried to avoid it.
Good as I was identifying my mother in a crowd, she was even better knowing when I was in the vicinity. Somehow she sensed my presence as I attempted to slip past undetected, but she would summon me over every time. I guess she was utilizing her natural mom super radar.
I don’t remember much when my mom lived at home with my three sisters and me, before she got sick and got locked up in a state mental hospital. She never returned to our family life after that, except to terrorize us. But…but she was still my mom, and I turned around to see what the hell she wanted when calling out to me on the street.
The scene always went down the same: she would demand money, talk trash about my dad, then jabber on and on and on about people places and events I had zero knowledge of. Later, her diagnosis was sold to me as paranoid schizophrenic, then lived the remainder of her years struggling to make sense of her own thoughts.
I am here to help.
My founded two nonprofits serve our most precious citizens: our at-risk kiddos experiencing trauma, homelessness, the oppressive cycle of poverty, and the cyclical widespread lack of opportunity. Such these my efforts are not enough for me, no way. Many of us young adults wrangle with the fears and pains blocking us from the better life we could have, and would like to have.
I've been ‘round the block a time or three.
I want to help, I try to help. I want to try and help you my sisters and bropthers, or someone close to you.
As my father Big Bird the pastoral Father once told me: We should try to help each other and when we do, it helps us too.