I’m wrecked. Flat out spun! Most of the day I have been on a high thinking about my crazy adventure going up north to make new homeless friends. This afternoon I received two calls from different people who want me to visit. Both calls made it feel like the right thing to do. I mean, for some time I’ve been thinking about visiting the tent cities in Sacramento. It’s a powerful story that needs to be told by the people themselves – not reporters. But making this journey right now is a huge risk because I don’t have an income and I am also trying to survive this economic crisis. What’s life without a few risks so around noon today I decided I’m going!

After hours of excitement and thinking about the risk I sat down to write this post. There has been lots of press on the tent cities including, New York Times, NPR, and a few great posts from my much loved editor and amazingly cool blogger Shannon Moriarty. (read Tag, You’re Homeless) But my all time favorite has been Schwarzenegger Opens ‘Obamaville’ for Homeless!

Then I saw this page full of powerful pictures and I started to feel their pain. All of a sudden I was slammed with the seriousness of the issue. I wanted to write a happy post about a happy adventure but homelessness is not happy. Yes, I will have some fun and meet some amazing people but I need to stay conscious as to why I am taking this risk and why I’m making this journey. I need to remind myself that the sole purpose of this trip is to give real people a medium to tell their real stories uncontaminated by anyone. Raw, unedited and very real! Their story told in their own words!

I’m speaking at a Hollywood business luncheon this Wednesday and the plan right now is to leave that afternoon. First stop will be The Prado Day Center in San Luis Obispo. They started to follow me on twitter and asked me to visit. San Luis Obispo is a relatively affluent city and it may make a great story showing homelessness is everywhere. Then on Friday Justin McRoberts asked me to speak at the Justice League located near East San Francisco Bay Area. Hopefully I will be able to get a little tour of San Francisco and yes of course meet some homeless peeps.

I tried to get up north last week for San Francisco’s Homeless Connect Day but my New York Dream Center trip was delayed. I’ve made friends with the program manager and I’ll try to connect for at least coffee. Speaking of connecting for coffee have you seen the movie Lord Save Us From Your Followers? Too me, Timmy Ryan (aka Sister Mary Timothy Simplicity) is a rock star. He made that movie for me and I have lots of respect for him. Through Facebook we’ve connected and if schedules permit we are hooking up for coffee. He’s also offered to help me meet some homeless peeps. Woohoo that part of this trip is going to be AWESOME! I’ve written about this before. Too me, the church can learn so much from different lifestyles. Mostly how to genuinely accept and love those different from ourselves! I know as a homeless person there are not very many churches that I would have walked into and felt welcomed. We need to wake up.

After that I am headed over to Sacramento. Dave Ingland has been kind enough to connect me with a reporter who gave me some information. But most of that stage of the journey has yet to be planned. My one and only goal is to make some new homeless friends. When that is done I am headed back to Hollywood!

I hope you all ride along with me on this journey. Primarily I will be updating on twitter @hardlynormal. Twitpic is unreliable so I started to post photos on posterous hardlynormal.com/view. I have been using BrightKite when I want to share my location. For this trip I am going to give Whrrl a test drive. It looks like a great storytelling tool but I’m not sure if it works for sharing linear stories in real-time. The company does have great customer service that is beyond impressive and they honestly listen. I believe I can edit the stories after I return so I am not sure if I’ll broadcast, oops, a dinosaur word just popped out. What I meant to say is I don’t know if I’ll share along the way or wait until it’s polished. We’ll see what fits.

If you would like to help contribute to this tour I’ve set up a PayPal donation page. The places I’m visiting have been gracious enough to offer food and maybe a little help with gas. The rest I have to pull out of savings that I’m guarding to pay next month’s rent. Yes, to a normal person taking this risk right now is insane but we weren’t born to be normal. I honestly feel this short tour around Southern California capturing real stories from real people is something I must do. Besides, I continue to look for work and every day I continue to have a mailbox/inbox filled with rejection letters. Point is I could just sit here and still be in the same crisis. Too me not taking action is always the dumb move!

As more details get finalized I’ll do my best to update this post. For real-time updates catch me on twitter!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 11:27 pm and is filed under My Big Mouth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.