The Night of the Super Bowl

 I feel life is a lot like being in a hard-core team death match on Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Anyone who has ever played that mode will understand what I mean by that.  Where if we mess up one time, we have to start all over. 

It was just yesterday that I started my first day of work.  I remember dreading the process till my first paycheck.  It was all rinse and repeat, really.  The only obstacle I face throughout my workdays (and my days off) is what to eat.  Eating out is so expensive and I really wish I could cook a meal sometimes.  Even if I wanted to eat the food at the shelter, I don't make it back to the shelter in time.  I don't even like the food they serve at the shelter. It’s a hit or miss sometimes and I can't stand the nights where I sleep on an empty stomach.  

Which is why I go buy food outside.  

Food is the main motivation to having money.  It used to be weed, but thats the wrong motivator.  Me, I like to eat well and I had spent a significant amount of my 20s worrying about how to build up my weight but now I am managing how to cut down on that weight. 

There's only so much a budget on foodstamps could get you.  I believe foodstamps are to supplement what we already make.  We're not really meant to live off of food stamps-- it's just not possible. 

Eventually, it would make sense to transition from the Department of Human Services to a more private form of welfare.  That means paying for my own health insurance, my own food, and my own apartment.  For the time being, though, I am going to enjoy what they have to offer because they've really helped me get off the streets.  They have continued to give me hope into building a better life for myself and I know I am going up from here.   

The motivation lays within those nights where I wake up out of my sleep because of the asshole drunk who mutters to himself all night; it resides in my imagining me cooking my own food some day; the thought of being in my own bathroom one day, where I won't have to clean somebody else's piss off the toilet seat before I use it.  

I am getting so close to my goal, man, and it's been a long slow process. 

I don't even know how I don't get drunk or high all the time.  I keep my mind clean because that's the only way to maintain stability...through sobriety. 

A little weed and a beer here and there... but nothing more. 

I drink to dullness, not temptation.