Upper Room saturdays!

For those who don't know, I'd like to introduce you to the Upper Room at the Toronto Alliance Church.

It's at 602 Queen Street West, on the north side of Queen, just west of Bathurst. It's not the most obvious doorway ever, so here's a Google Street View link and embedded picture for it:

It's right there under "mac fab" ...the barred up one to the left of that seated guy.


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So the deal is, every saturday evening at 5:30pm.

NOTE: It was every second saturday for awhile, now it's back to weekly. Yay!

AND they have a no-questions-asked food bank AND clothing bank. This is definitely one of the better clothing banks around! There will often be a nurse in there to do foot washing and stuff too!

After about an hour of dinner, they break out the instruments and start singing Christian music, with the lyrics on an overhead projector. And there's always a sermon as well. They're gracious enough to allow you plenty of time to ram your gullet full of - honestly - some of the best soup kitchen fare in town, before they start the service, so if you're averse to religious stuff, show up early.

Gotta get the jump on breakfast & lunch!

On these beautiful summer days, it's so easy to forget that after about 4pm, it's damn hard to find free food! That's why an early-morning tupperware run is always in order.

Here's a good morning schedule (for weekdays):

1. Good Shepherd breakfast & coffee, 9am (show up as early as possible, it gets bad quick).
2. St. Steven's breakfast & coffee, 10am - 10:30am.
3. Scott Mission breakfast, 10:30am.
4. St. Felix lunch, 11am.
5. Scott Mission lunch, 11:30am.
6. Good Shepherd dinner, 2pm - 4pm.

Of course, you'll end up with much much more food than one person could possibly consume in a 24-hour period, but if you're picking up for a whole family, or a group of friends, who are out getting other things done, then it's perfect! It's easy to pick up enough food to feed about eight people with this schedule.

Substitute the United Church on Wright and Roncesvalles, at 1pm and 5:30pm, and you've got a pretty solid weekly schedule for "bringing home the bacon." Even if home is Trinity Bellwoods and your family is a bunch of hungry-ass weirdos with shitloads of vodka and weed.

Too broke for food again thank god.

After a whole weekend of hot dogs, sushi, subway sandwiches and terrible indigestion, sweet sweet poverty comes to the rescue once again. Just look at this beautiful afternoon:

Scot Mission's great, but it's such a lifesaver all week, it's nice to give it a rest and check out the Christie/Ossington place. It might be fun to do Christie/Ossington, United Church and Good Shepherd... with a bike it's just barely possible!

Awww YEAH United Church on Wright time!

Sunday afternoon is a great time because of the united church on Wright Ave... one of the few places on the west side! What a pleasure not to have to bomb all the way east to the Good Shepherd (which admittedly probably has a bigger meal waiting for us) and having a great chance to check out Ronces village and stuff.

Plus the church meal's good! They won't let you touch anything and that means you get served coffee like at a coffee bar, except without waiting. Plus there's only like fifteen people there having food and they'll chat and start bands with you.

See y'all theresies!!!

Working Guy Food Switchover

Working and having money for your own food and other needs is great, but not when it means a dramatic drop in food quality. Even making reasonably healthy eating-out choices (falafel instead of burgers, bacon & eggs instead of pizza) only mitigates the problem. The issue is that soup kitchens serve homestyle food, cooked with nutrition in mind, whereas restaurants serve dirty restaurant food, with taste and profit in mind.

The result is, right away when we're working and not having time for meal programs, we end up feeling like shit physically, even if we feel more socially accepted!

Just can't wait to be broke again, and have time for it. Seems like in Toronto it's hard to find part-time work, so you're either too busy to even cook at home, or you can't even afford it.

Am I broke enough to eat?

It's a paradox: some people don't feel that they are sufficiently disadvantaged that they have the right to use Toronto's incredible social resources. It's a gap between completely-fucked and sort-of-fucked, and that's the most important gap in the downward spiral that leads to rock-bottom. Where exactly rock-bottom is depends on your point of view. Typically things can get worse. The only actual, absolute rock-bottom is right after doing whatever it takes to commit suicide, waiting for death to come, and not wanting to abort the plan and stay alive. That is bottom. Anywhere "above" that point is a theoretical space that's subject mostly to intellectualization.

So obviously, everybody has a threshold that must be crossed before they are willing to do certain things, like rely on emergency food security resources.

The role of these services is also a matter of disagreement among the public. Probably the most popular view is that they are for people who aren't expected to bounce back into productive participation in paying for their food, accommodation, and other needs. But these programs have an open-ended criteria for use - they are there to feed whoever is willing to be fed. The most important goal of these services is, in fact, to support people in bouncing back from whatever crisis they're in, so that they don't become a "lifer."

There are several very popular "bouncing back" cases that come into play here:

• A person has to choose between food money and medication money or funding for more immediate health needs, such as surgery, dental care, etc. If they choose to spend their medication money on food, they risk the health consequences of interrupting their treatment, and the results can put them in a position where they'll need to rely on emergency services indefinitely.
• Because of the time constraints of a full-time job, or educational study, a person has to choose between purchasing unhealthy food out of convenience, jeopardizing their work or home life to obtain healthy food, going outside their budget for convenient healthy food, or getting it conveniently and for free at a soup kitchen, despite the fact that they can afford it. Once a person can work out a system that works with both their schedule and their health needs, they can be self-sufficient in this area. But the adverse health affects associated with convenient, unhealthy food can jeopardize or limit one's productivity at their work.
• Being temporarily stuck without a kitchen, for most people, means a diet of restaurant or junk food, which can lead to mental and physical health problems for most people, which can lead to a loss of employment, relationships and social equity.

The incredible number of young people who don't feel poor enough to take advantage of free emergency meal programs run the risk of disadvantaging themselves permanently.

So it's important for people to look at their health situation and make choices that will improve their lives, instead of trying to "tough it out" because they misinterpret the mandate of social programs designed to help people in all states of crisis.

Food security never tasted so good!

It's funny that, in all of Canada's major cities, Toronto has the worst restaurants and the best soup kitchens.

Any other place, you run out of cash, it's time to steal. Just go into grocery stores and stuff shit under your jacket, buy one thing, ask some staff fucker where something else is, and just STEAL. Because that's it. That's your option. In Vancouver if you run out of money, it's peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for life... or grocery theft. Of course as soon as you have a few bucks, you can get wicked pizza or some dirt-cheap amazing Sushi, or in Montreal a nice vegan burger for $1.50, but in Toronto, somehow, $5 gets you more indian smokes than bites of food, but when you're broke, all of a sudden you're eating like a king.

Nobody eats better than Toronto's homeless. Not the Bay St. Boys, not the New Media douches in Liberty Village, not the hairdressers in Yorkville, and not the burnouts in the East side, it's the crusty, crazy homeless weirdos (and a few young hosers that got caught in the crossfire and are too ballsy to sit around and get skinny) who eat well.

It makes little to no sense, but somehow it works well with the rest of Toronto's ethos - a figure-it-out-for-your-fuckin-self, supposed-to-be-hard, safe-as-the-womb, big, gritty and griddy, omg-it's-gonna-be-so-tough (oh-wait-a-sec-this-is-easy) type of place.

And it's not even because of the government. It's because of the Christians. Isn't that incredible? After all the bullshit they have to deal with, not being hip and all that, they actually come out and get charitable. The Christians and... the lawyers? What's the score with them lawyers feeding the hungry? I guess it'll become obvious this Wednesday.

And apparently some free meals for the students around the edu districts. But fuck them. They blew their OSAP on booze. We might have blown our welfare moneys on booze, but they blew their OSAP. That's your education. Welfare is like, no matter what happens you're not affording rent and food on that shit, and they know an alkie when they see one. Half of us aren't even on anything: no welfare, no wages, no OSAP, no loans from parents, no sugar mamas, no sugar daddies, just skimming close to zero for months and fucking months, WTF do we do, how do we get the occasional dollar? Welfare office pieces of shit think we're hiding some stacks of cash because we can't produce proper banking information, acting like PC Financial will just give us a printout - hello, stupid fucks: they close that shit down if you don't deposit money. They charge $15 to take two weeks to send you a fucking receipt saying you deposited. They will not print you shit. Online Banking produces what you'd get if you did it up in Word yourself - no useful confirmation numbers, no unforgeable graphics...

If I have zero dollars and I get a cheque for two hundred for some bullshit work I did two weeks ago, and my rent is a week and a half late, yeah sure I'm gonna deposit it so the bank can take $20 of it for a late fee, make me wait a week, and then make me spend $2.50 and chance my stolen bank card not working so that I can have a paper trail, instead of taking it to money mart and getting my rent payed right away.

Yeah fuckin' right. If we wanted to hide money, the evidence wouldn't be a sketchy banking situation. Or no banking situation. Or not being able to get the proper printouts for stuff. There has to be an easier way to prove poverty. Maybe just trust us and then audit a person every once in awhile just by following them out of the fuckin' welfare office and watch to see if they start picking up cigarette butts and rolling a smoke out of the extra tobacco in them. Then you can fuck off and trail somebody else because you know - that's a fuckin' poor person. That's us. You don't even sit around in a welfare office for hours, track all over town for paperwork, and then do it all over again, unless that is the only possible way of getting the five hundred bucks that is going to save your ass - if you also go to soup kitchens for every single meal.

Fuckin' piece of shit Canadian government doesn't give a shit, we spit on them together. Thanks for the useless PDFs ya cunts, rot in hell, the Christians care about us and slowly we're starting to see the grace that surrounds us and it's healing our hearts. With our bellies full we can start to think about love and kindness and mysticism, instead of just groaning about how this really is the bottom and there's nothing at the bottom but more blackness.

How come the Christians have to work like dentists pulling teeth all day and night, trying to get donations from a kind-but-also-impoverished public, when the government spends billions every day on marketing campaigns about how great the North American Energy Exchange (Tar Sands Cunts) really is, Billions on gas subsidies to keep our carbon cheap, our plastic cheap, our everything-that-is-evil super duper cheap??? New bus shelters that you have to back out of, go around, and then somehow squeeze in front of - to get onto that shit? To pay $3 to get hassled about not having a transfer five blocks away? Fuck the TTC, the local Gov't... omg, hands up in surrender, thank god for St. Steven's, Scot Mission, Good Shepherd, I mean fuck the Salvation Army for being homophobic cunts and trying to charge $2.50 for a hot meal - who do you think you are, I can get a Burger King burger any day of the week if I felt like spending $2 on food - at this point, that $2 is 1/4th of a bottle of sherry... hateful homophobic bastards... but hey the folks at St. Felix, oh my gosh those nuns are wonderful! Gangsters over on Jarvis, just south of Queen there, maybe that's a Sally-Anne, I don't think so, forget about Metro United, douches at #211 won't stop talking about it, dudes it's NO LONGER HAPPENING... but oh no, you can't give the gods at #211 updates, they just pretend you weren't asking about that place two minutes ago... but really, they're a useful source for the beginnings of this calendar and map.

But really, the deal is, you have to get a list of these places, and then go to them, and talk with other broke-ass people, and talk with the staff, and talk with the crazies on the corner, and the random dudes in wheelchairs, and the fucked-up guys sitting outside, because they'll tell you what else is going on and where else. You have to get a pad and a piece of paper and big ears and not stare at too much shit.

Why do the endlessly charitable Christians have to take up the slack that the Government, on all levels, just keeps making sure gets even looser?

We need to help the Christians do what they do, and make sure the Government knows that they owe the Church like the vagina owes the clit, like the penis owes the balls, like a child owes its parents.

"Oh just check the internet, it's all on the internet!"

So what's the score with being broke in Toronto?

What is it with the 211 information service? Like a quarter of the info they give you is out of date. They keep directing people to dinners at Metropolitan United, sending a bunch of homeless dudes wandering around the church and pestering whoever answers the buzzer. Or what about the place on Queen and Jarvis that charges $2.50 and the folks at 211 don't know about it? Do they update their listings when we call them back with helpful information? No, they don't. But they'll bug us to answer surveys on the content - those of us who have a landline, that is. Thanks.

How many times have we bussed or biked or walked miles based on bad info?

Then there's the terrible government-supplied PDF, totally disorganized, terrible maps, ok it's a nice effort, but come on, a PDF? Why would we be interested in checking out a PDF? We're poor and hungry. We use cellphones and old computers at drop-ins. And why would the 211 folks not just publish their sources on the 'net? Oh, that's right, they do, on their own terribly-organized and confusing list.

Is it so terribly hard to just make a google map and calendar? No, so here it is on this website.

Also, how come none of the websites of these individual organizations seem to have information for their actual clients? There's no meal schedules on the Scott Mission site, the St. Stevens site... and why not? Are the sites just for people who might be donating, or other organizations, or what? Who are these sites geared towards? Other government people? Concerned citizens? Do they want to carefully control the information, or is there some advantage to employing a bunch of people at 211, most of whom are not great communicators, let alone "information retrieval specialists," to research and regurgitate outdated information over the phone?

It's absolutely silly that some loser with a blogger account could do a better job than three different organizations of presenting this very simple information, but when it comes to building websites... pretty much anybody can do it better than the Canadian government, and the web agencies who end up doing their work for them.

Of course, it's wonderful of them to have collected the information from which this site draws its beginnings. But this site is about the information that we, the broke, homeless, destitute, fucked-up residents of the not-so-mean streets of Toronto, share with each-other. And it's about the amazing people, mostly Christian volunteers, bless their hearts, who help us get by when nobody else knows how to. It's the charity of the people at places like St. Felix, the Augusta House, the Good Shepherd, PARC, etc, who make it possible to eat safely and healthily on no cash in this city. It's a rarity - the drop-ins in Vancouver totally suck, for example!

So here it is, this is a good beginning, and I hope to see comments and tips showing up in here from other broke-ass, fucked-up-in-one-way-or-another people who use these awesome places to get by. Let's help each-other out and take the pressure off 211 and these other services that obviously are not going the distance. It's easy enough to share information, that's what the internet's for.