Day 33 – Thursday, 13 Dec

The trip to the house for clothes went off without a hitch two days ago. Maria was out with Silas, and the kids were gone to school, so it was just me and the deputy in the house.

I filled a gym bag with shirts, socks and underwear. Picked up a book called Stop the Anger Now from my office, along with files for Generation E - a project I had been working on before all this happened.

The volunteers at PADS have been good about welcoming me to the program, and making sure I know how things work at each location. Last night was interesting because Wednesday is the night for the church that's way south of town. The transportation they arrange is in the Sheriff's van.

It pulls up to the courthouse at 5:30, and everyone piles in. If you miss it, you're on your own for getting out to the church. It's a fairly short ride, but I never did enjoy being inside a vehicle where I can't open the door.

A big development today was being officially declared a Poor Person.

Tomorrow is the deadline for responding to Maria's petition for a divorce, and there's a two hundred dollar fee for filing a reply. Since I didn't have that amount of money to spend, I had to apply for permission to file a reply as a Poor Person. That means they waive the fee.

Fortunately, the process was swift. A lady in the clerk's office gave me the form, I filled it in, and she passed it off to the court clerk right away. The answer came back the same day, and I even got a piece of paper with the court's seal on it saying they recognise me as a Poor Person. Not exactly a keeper for framing.

It reminds me of having to file for bankruptcy in my early twenties (my first divorce and second time being homeless). There is a class you’re required to attend that’s supposed to help you better understand money and how to handle it. The only thing I remember about that class is the fellow in charge being particularly mean about stressing how most of the people in the room were just irresponsible, and that they’d be back in the same class a few years later. He even said that most people who file for bankruptcy once become people with chronic debt and repeated bankruptcies.

Why is it that people who are supposed to be helping you make your life better so often take great pleasure in telling you how screwed up you are? I’ve met a lot of people throughout my life who claimed to want to help, who then focused on how big or terrible the problem is and all the reasons why I can’t solve it.

Fortunately, it isn't often that I've met someone like the fellow running the bankruptcy class. It's true that you don't really matter to most of the people you meet when you're having a hard time, but you don't not matter to them either. Most folks want to be helpful, to ease your burden where they can, but nobody would ever have enough energy to get personally involved in every client's life, right?