Paul's Comments

On June 28, the mortgage company got an "order of posession" (the equivalent of a court-ordered eviction) for the property I was living at and was paying rent until the landlord got foreclosed upon, whereupon I was then paying utilities and repairs on the place which essentially ran more than I had been paying in rent. The morgage company never told me or anyone here anything; they never even sent me a postcard. I'm not going to ignore or disregard a court order; they could have had the place clean and without the extra expense of a dispossession, but obviously they don't care. I was paying a guy a monthly fee to warn me about such things. He also failed me.

On August 4, 2009 at about 11:30 in the morning, deputies from the Prince George's County Sheriff's department came out and evicted me and everyone else in the building. I salvaged a few things over the next few days but essentially I lost everything. This wasn't supposed to happen; my expectation was that I would have notice of this happening and had time to act, to have my posessions put into storage, to find another place, etc.

What a mess.

One "advantage" to being handicapped is that the Sheriff can't just dump me on the street; they had to find me a place and can't just leave me, they had to wait until Metro Access - surprisingly on only two hours notice, not a day in advance as is usual - came and got me to take me to a homeless shelter that had space and could accomodate a wheelchair client.

A deputy sheriff - Paula Henderson - called Prince George's County Social Services. The people on the phone didn't particularly like having to get off their ass and do something for a change, and basically kept trying to dump the problem on someone else, because apparently they have considerable trouble understanding "plain ol' Galveston English" when I kept explaining that I did not have any one who could help me, until finally I gave them my sister's phone number and they put her on three-way conference call with me and she confirmed that it was not possible for her to help me.

Which ended up getting me to Prince George's House on Addison Road South, a few blocks from the Addison Road Metro station. It's not a bad place. A little heavy on the religious aspects of trying to use God as a means to solve the problems of the clients - like myself - who end up stuck there for a time.

If the Sheriff's office hadn't hit the place just after I had paid a number of bills that left me with very little money, there are a number of things I could have done to salvage the situation.

Well, anyway, so Metro Access comes gets me and takes me over to the shelter. In the mean time the vultures in the neighborhood came and feasted on whatever I had that they could cart off and steal. Actually, that's incorrect; vultures only feed on the dead. So, in the mean time the hyenas in the neighborhood came and feasted on whatever I had that they could cart off and steal.

I salvaged a working laptop, which is what I'm using to write this, and I would like to acknowledge the very generous availability of free wireless Internet access from the Martin Luther King (main) branch of the District of Columbia Public Library.

There will be more news later as I tell about some of the things that have happened over the last (almost) three weeks, including two unsuccessful trips to MVA to convert my license over from Virginia to Maryland; a trip to Baltimore where I got chewed out by the train crew for trying to take the elevator from the station to the train; how I almost converted from agnostic to atheist until I gave the universe an ultimatum; and handling various paperwork to try to find substitute housing which someone in a wheelchair can use.