THE CONGRESSMAN WILL NOT SEE YOU NOW.

I was having trouble with a landlord recently. The landlord knew I had recently qualified for SSDI, and took it upon themselves to mandate that I get a representative payee. A payee is someone who manages your SSDI benefits because, in the opinion of the judge who decides your case, you are unable to manage your own affairs.

The administrative law judge who decided my case did not require me to have a payee. I suspected that no third party --- creditors, landlords, etc. --- could mandate a disability recipient to have a payee if the judge or SSA did not. So I visited the ODAR Hearing Office, the Legal Aid Society offices, chatted up Ohio Legal Services, and visited both the SSA website and an actual human being at SSA's 500 Main Street regional office.

The consensus was clear: my interpretation of the law was accurate. My landlord was holding no cards. The landlord reminded me that I had signed an "agreement" to obtain a payee "if and when" I received SSDI benefits. I asserted that I signed the agreement under the pretense that I had the legal standing to assign the landlord the authority to require me to have a payee. I do not. Also, they claimed that I would lose my housing if I didn't sign. Since I had no income, that meant homelessness. Again. My take on this: that a threat to put me out constituted coercion.

During this time I also emailed and left phone messages at the office of Representative Driehaus. I would like to say that Rep. Driehaus' office was part of the aforementioned consensus, but alas, he was not. As of this writing, I still have not heard from his staff.

There was a meeting at the landlord's office. Fortunately, the agency recently hired a new COO. He was well aquainted with SSA regs, having formerly worked as an advocate for disabled people trying to navigate the vast SSA bureacracy. The new COO posed the rhetorical question: "Actually this gentleman is correct. We cannot mandate that he have a payee. So--- what's the problem?"

His subordinates deflated like speared pufferfish. It is not in my nature to gloat, and my feeling at the end of the meeting was mostly relief.

I grew accustomed to former Rep. Chabot failing to respond to letters, emails, etc. His view of the world is fundementally different from mine. But Driehaus, over a question about SSDI regulations, remained unresponsive to my request for help and information. It was not-for-profit organizations, and SSA itself, that responded with accurate, helpful answers to my questions. My landlord now accepts my rent checks with my signature, not a payees. And the email below from Rep. Driehaus' office is sadly self-explanatory.

OH01-WYR (Service Account)

show details Nov 5

Thank you for contacting Congressman Driehaus' office. We look forward to responding to you as soon as possible.

If your request requires immediate attention please call us in Washington, DC at (202) 225-2216 or in Cincinnati at (513) 684-2723.

Please do not reply to this message. It was sent from an unattended mailbox.

JOE SAVES THE UNIVERSE

Ladies from Immanuel Methodist are serving the volunteer meal tonight: spaghetti and homemade meatballs, vegetables and chocolate chip cookies. Joe has finished eating, probably the only thing he's eaten all day, and prattles on about his latest favorite subject. He's trying to find a way to reverse the cosmic protocol that causes the End Of Time on December 31st.

He has no source for his date on this End of Time thing. Joe never sites sources, because ideas pop into his consciousness, he becomes fascinated by them, then he can't let them go for hours or days. For example, in the basement laundry room there is an old bricked up doorway, an old coal shoot, or possibly a former connection to Underground Railroad tunnels. Joe will hear none of this. He believes, he knows, that the bricked up aperture is a portal to another universe.

"If I can adjust my clock so that it has 90 hours," Joe explains. "Then I think I can prevent the end of time. If all the clocks had 90 hours ---." Joe then launches into a recital of the seemingly random names he has assigned to each of the new hours. "Hollowell, Lumina, Dregnots, Edwardia..." Someone gently taps their spoon on the table, and this seems to distract Joe from his litany. He pauses, trying to mentally regroup.

"But, ah...so what I'm saying is, uh..."

We tell him that probably not all the clocks in the world need to be changed to a 90 hour day. As long as one person can successfully alter the configuration of his clock, then the End of Time will be averted. Joe seizes upon this.

"Yeah, that's what I'm saying! That's me! Or it could be me! I'm going to keep working on it."

He shakes hands with everybody at the table. His hands are stained brown and yellow from endless smoking. He steps out onto the patio to smoke again and listen to the chaos in his head. He has no ability to think abstractly. He tries to mimic what people sound like when they are speaking abstractly, but what he actually says is nonsense. He can't understand why people don't take his ideas seriously. Last week he told me that he made up a new joke: Why are church steeples green? Because they have VD! He doesn't laugh after he tells this joke. He does not experience irony or farce. Yet he is deeply puzzled as to why I don't laugh.

The more Joe tries to convince you that he's like everybody else, the more incoherent and disconnected he sounds. He is so thin inside his billowy t-shirt that you wonder if he's anorexic. His major food groups are nicotine, caffeine, and whatever is served by volunteers that evening. If there is no volunteer meal that night, he has a dinner of Faygo and a microwave burger.

Joe is doing his best. He is optimistic about Time not ending.

TWO OLD LADIES

When you ask around the neighborhood, or talk to staff or homeless people at the Drop, most will tell you that Nan came from Korea. There are other more obscure stories about her originating in Cambodia, Japan and a few other places. Nan has lived at the Drop Inn shelter for over a decade. She believes that she owns the Drop Inn Center, or at least has lots of equity built up. She speaks little or no English, and there is rarely anybody around who speaks Korean, or whatever Nan's native language might be.

While she is not a dwarf, Nan can't be more than 4'11". Often you can see her in Washington Park searching one of the smaller trees for a branch that is just right for back scratching. She will slide that branch down the back of her blouse and scratch herself slowly, thoughtfully, and with great satisfaction. On days when no branches are within her reach, she will flag down a passerby to help her. She will communicate with hand gestures, alternately scowling or smiling, until the poor bemused volunteer figures out that she actually wants him to break off a branch from a tree that is ostensibly city property.

Nan believes there is some sort of trust fund back in Korea, or possibly a rich relative, who has been making payments on the Drop Inn Center. She is convinced that she actually has equity in the place. How she rationalizes the presence of hundreds of homeless people passing through each week is not clear.

LA Mary also resides at the Drop, usually. She will spend the occasional night on the street. Her cinder grey hair is long and unkempt. Her hygiene is erratic. Her voice sounds like an Evinrude outboard, or Anne Ramsey in Throw Mama From The Train.

Hardly anybody knows her real name. Mary is not from Los Angeles; LA stands for "LoudAss." Mary is a paranoid schizophrenic who, for reasons she usually does not wish to share, refuses to take medication. Her strategy with her auditory hallucinations, aka the voices in her head, is to shout them down. You can tell when LA Mary is hearing voices: you will see her plodding down the street cussing a blue streak at the top of her cigarette-ravaged lungs. (She prefers unfiltered Camels, but they are getting pricey. She settles for whatever she can afford or scrounge.)

These ladies are what you might call resource resistant. Over many years doctors, psych RN's, LSW's, and sometimes total strangers with no social work experience have tried to place these women in better shelters, rooms or apartments. Inevitably such placement is contingent upon an agreement to take medication. Inevitably, Nan and LA Mary fail to qualify for housing.

Perhaps "qualify" should be in quotes. If delusional thinking and auditory hallucinations are not qualifying factors for subsidized housing, then what is? But most people would have NIMBY issues with living next door to a woman who tears their trees apart and believes that she owns their building. Or a woman who turns any environment she occupies into an enormous ashtray, and disturbs her neighbors dinner hour by yelling at her voices: "A--hole! Shut the f--- up! I'll kick your f------ teeth in you piece of ----."

After many years, these two old ladies prowl OTR and downtown, looking for peace they will never find as long as they live at the Drop and on the street. They have a right to decline to be treated. But can their decision possibly be based on informed consent? What should we do with them that we are not doing now, which is almost nothing. And how do you help them without coercion that would violate their rights?

A Death In Custody

One of the many problems with alcoholism is that intoxication can disguise underlying medical issues. Is that homeless person sprawled under the hickory tree in Washington Park sleeping,
passed out from drink, or felled by a heart attack? Sometimes even people with clinical training have difficulty making these distinctions. Police in St.Clair County, IL faced this dilemna recently with one of their regular customers, a homeless woman who passed out while in jail for trespassing. See the link below.

http://www.bnd.com/breaking_news/story/972395.html

SO, WHAT ARE WE SAYING HERE?

Dutifully, I reported my change of address to the Social Security Administration. By way of response, SSA sent me a letter which contained, in the text, the new address. The letter further explained that my updated address would be entered into "the system" by October 6.

Wait a minute. October 6 also happens to be the date of the SSA letter itself. And the letter itself had to be forwarded to me from my old address. SSA acknowledges and correctly prints out my new address, then sends this information to me at my old address.

SSA catches up!

This will link you to SSA.gov's page about the long process of clearing the backlog in ALJ hearings. Funds and personnel were reduced during the 43rd president's administration, leaving thousands of physically or mentally disabled people in poverty, and sometimes homelessness.

For example, yours truly has recently received a "fully favorable" decision from the local hearing office, after over 3 years of applying, appealing, waiting.

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/pressoffice/pr/hearings-backlog-pr.htm

Dots for Nora, Nots for Ray

Nora, who is schizophrenic, is puzzled about why Ray's SSDI application took so long. Ray applied in 2006, and only this month received notice from an administrative law judge that the previous SSA rulings had been overturned. Ray should start receiving his benefits next month.

"Why the hell did it take so long?," Nora inquires.

"Lots of reasons. Vague or conflicting information from different doctors. When I appealed for reconsideration, the worker reviewing my case ignored SSA's own descriptions of my disorder and turned my down flat. I guess Major Depressive Disorder is a fairly recent addition to their disabling mental illnesses list.

"Then the ALJ hearing didn't get scheduled for 23 months. There was a shortage of judges, then one of those judges died. When Obama took office, they assigned more judges to this area to get the SSDI appeals cases caught up. When I finally go into to see the judge, he tells me that Cincy Psych has not updated my records for over two years. I almost gave up several times along the way."

"Wow. I didn't go through any of that. I just showed up, and the lady looked at some stuff the doctor sent her. She asked me if I still saw dots, and I said yeah, afraid so. Then she said okay, you're approved."

"Sounds like your doctors were really motivated," Ray says ruefully.

"Hell no. They were psychiatrists."