8:00 a.m. I woke up in my tent. There’s a Christmas dinner at the shelter I plan on going to.
10:30 a.m. I walk over to the Megacamp. I check on the camp and find that some of the winds have ripped the eyelets of the tarp. I’m going to have to figure out ways to secure it better. I fixed the minimal damage that happened by cutting into the tarp and restringing it.
11:30 a.m. I walked out of the forest and I drive over to the Salem shelter. The meal starts at 12:30 p.m. so I hang around with some of the other homeless people that are waiting.
12:15 p.m. We received our meals. It’s chicken cordon bleus with green beans and rice pilaf with some chocolate chip cookies. I sat at a picnic table outside with three other people. We sit, talk, and eat.
1:00 p.m. I walked over to my car and I drove to my girlfriend’s apartment. Her and I drive out to the park and play pickleball. She’s way better than me and beats me. On the third game she seems to be getting moody and has a headache.
2:30 p.m. My girlfriend and I drove back to her apartment. We relax for a little while and then we watch a show called carnival row. Like always she falls asleep. I get so bored by the show that eventually I wake her up and we try maybe a more action-packed movie called Rebel Moon. She falls asleep during this movie as well but I watch the whole movie. It’s really cool.
9:30 p.m. When the movie’s finished I wake up my girlfriend and we go to bed.
HINDSIGHT: 10/15/2025
This was a depressing Christmas for me. The issues in my personal life were impacting my ability to document and record this work. I was also suffering from internal struggles with the meaning of this work. People had been criticizing me harshly for living homeless for a year and documenting the experience. I will not go into detail about the things people said on social media, or the things some of my friends told me other people were saying. I think the lion share of my dissatisfaction was the sustainability of my relationship with my girlfriend. I cared about her a lot, and she had been really nice to me since we started spending time together again, but it wasn’t a solid relationship, and I was waiting for her to go berserk on me. She was also in dyer straits with her bills, she was losing her apartment because she couldn’t afford it, which left me with the responsibility to help her or not.