Everything costs in Ocean Beach. If you want a cup of coffee you can buy a cup for $3 at OB Beans Coffee Roasters where they don’t usually play music too loud unless the drug addicts show up. (It’s $3.23 if you dine in and $3 in a to-go cup, but we’ll get into that) Or you can pay $2.75 at New Break Coffee roasters where they play “Illegal Woman” at volume on the stereo (the owner is a Latino) and one of the waitresses will stare you in the face with wide open eyes and painted eyelashes asking “HOW ARE YOU?” Or you can pay $1.50 and grab a cup of coffee at Template where the owner is named Sunshine, and the decor looks like Salvador Dali flunked out of pre-school. They used to have their location above Run For Cover bookstore before the bookstore owner decided they couldn’t make rent and closed down the shop.

Bread at Krisp, the grocery store on Newport, costs $4.78. The cheapest meat you can buy is at a little bodega off of Voltaire where an off brand stick of cured meat costs $1.49, unless they charge tax, in which case it’s $1.99.

Why am I telling you this and why should you care? Because Ocean Beach is a homelessness training center. It’s bootcamp for putting people on the street and keeping them there. Intentionally. You’d think I was kidding. I am not.

Here’s how it works. First what happens is that the community decides there’s someone that they want to become homeless. They have some resources, in my case, I have an education and a laptop computer. But they’re sleeping on the beach. What the community wants to do is keep them there by putting them in a situation they cannot climb out of. There are several methods to do this, the first is de-banking, the other is psychological conditioning that causes severe emotionally traumatic scars. In most people, anyway; it just makes me angry. Here are some of the ways that I’ve seen people in Ocean Beach attempt to condition the homeless.

Food training.

One of the most pernicious is what I call “food training”. What will happen here is that no one will give the homeless money. It’s not about drugs — drugs are plentiful in Ocean Beach and don’t cost anything. Were it my desire I could have access to marijuana, alcohol, mushrooms, and psychedelic cactus at no cost to me whatsoever. No. What people don’t want is the homeless able to take the money and shop for their own groceries in stores that they themselves frequent. Or sit across from them in coffee shops.

If you consider this from their perspective, this is a tough problem. Three dollars for a cup of coffee is cheap and they want to keep prices down! So if any one person gives a homeless man $3 they’d have to sit next to them while they check their email and sip a latte. The worst! So what do they do? No one will give a homeless person money but rather they will offer food.

I’ve seen this in action myself. I’ll ask for money on a street corner and have people pass and give nothing. When I was a child I was always told that if you gave the homeless money they’d just turn around and use it for drugs, but I wonder what just-so stories they are using today.

Then what will happen is that more and more people will walk by carrying food containers. Someone will offer you a sandwich. Or someone will walk by loudly talking about how some store or another is giving away free food.

It’s a form of control. It means that a person who is on the street doesn’t get to choose what they eat and when, or has the ability to eat nutritious food or not. If a homeless person isn’t “nice” all of a sudden the food that’s offered comes from people with communicable illnesses, the only food that’s offered is pizza or candy. If the person doesn’t say “god bless” or “thank you” (not “thanks” or “cool” but “thank you”) the food dries up and disappears. It’s a way of creating slaves.

Here’s an example of what I’ve had to go through to eat. Last night I sat at the intersection of Newport and Sunset and asked people for “$5 for a loaf of bread” over and over again. People would hurry by or say they had no money. Make dramatic gestures of patting their pockets. Finally a woman with two 6 year olds in tiedye shirts says “Oh I don’t have any money! Oops I was lying. Here.” And gives me $2. This was funny to her. And she treated me this way in front of her little children.

So I went and bought an apple at Krisp for $0.55. The clerk says, “Ooooh is it Apple Time then?” as if he’s talking to a toddler. I’ve had to watch them while they weigh the food or they’ll sell it to me for the wrong price. I’ve been repeatedly charged $0.27 for a single banana (sometimes the only food I’ve had to eat all day) and then had the clerk only take a quarter. Until I informed the owner and he went into the store with me and watched them weigh the food after laughing at me and calling me a liar on the street. They give me a free piece of pizza which I can’t turn down because I don’t have enough money to survive otherwise. I end up with $1.55 after leaving the store, which means the clerk gave me the wrong change. So I walk to the bodega with the $1.49 Slim Jim knockoffs where he says he’ll have to charge me $1.99 and offers me 3 Slim Jims instead. I remind him that the last time he sold me the food he charged me $1.49 until he relents.

As I was walking to the store I had 16 year old high school girls walk behind me making piggy noises. Because I left the area that the residents of Ocean Beach want to keep the homeless in and I’ve decided to shop at more than one store. Because I need the calories in order to survive.

Homelessness tracking

One of the most pernicious and awful ways in which people have started to abuse the homeless is through cell phone tracking. By telling other community members where a homeless person is they are able to track the homeless either through a city wide “Get It Done” app (yes, this exists for San Diego — you can inform the police that there’s homeless people by geolocation) or via Instagram.

What will happen is that if you’re in an area where people don’t want the homeless to exist, they’ll walk behind you and loudly make conversation designed to be hurtful. It also helps to increase the paranoia of people who are living on the street. For example, on my way to buy the Slim Jim, college students walked behind me making loud conversation about an expensive trip they were planning. They stand approximately a meter or two behind you, one on your left and one on your right and speak past you at volume. Were this an isolated incident, I could write this off, but I’ve had this happen in multiple locations with the conversation seemingly tailored to make one as miserable as possible. For example while walking along the beach walk in Pacific Beach a couple stood on either side of me and loudly proclaimed the cost and various merits of beach homes, until I had to ask them to stop.

Dog Training

Perhaps you’ve heard on the news about homeless people shitting in Safeway bags or urinating on the sidewalks. All of this is meant to demonstrate, despite the available public toilets, that homelessness is due to mental illness. What I’ve seen is what I call “dog training.” What people will do is follow them around with their dogs. When the homeless person does something that they like, they’ll praise their dog and give it pets or a treat. When the homeless person does something that they do not like, they will lead their dog to others that cause fights. Or they’ll throw their dog shit on the sidewalk where the homeless person will step on it.

All of this is an attempt at psychological training in which the homeless person identifies with a dog. Other methods of making public toilets dangerous are also used, for example by refusing to clean them or having dangerous people (or dangerous looking people) hang out around them. The purpose of this is to make a person become a public urinator/defecator so that their personal hygiene suffers and that they are witnessed by other community members as acting like an animal. In this way shops are more likely to find excuses to forbid them entry in the first place.

Garbage Training

One of the worst things I’ve seen people in Ocean Beach do is garbage train the homeless. What they’ll do is they will walk by a garbage can around people who are hungry and place complete sacks of food delicately in the bottom of the can. When someone breaks down enough that they’re willing to eat that, they start placing food on top of garbage cans and leaving it. The food becomes closer and closer to pure garbage until starving people, who no one will pay the $4.78 it costs to buy a loaf of bread, are digging through the trash and eating other people’s trash.

Wacky Wednesdays

Every Wednesday down here they have a market with food stalls. A “farmer’s market.” I’ve gone around handing out slips of paper asking for a job without luck, but I could beg for food if I wanted to be “trained”. Wednesday around here people really let their hair down. There’s a drum circle on the grass by the beach where people get high and dance in a circle. My favorite part is the children. I was sitting on the grass this Wednesday and some guy lights up a joint next to a five year old little girl until I start to feel sick. Physically and emotionally. The police don’t care. Why would they? The fucked up hippies are just messing up their own children.

It’s not like they have any interest in being homeless trained.

Last night I went to Stuff 2 Puff and they asked me, high, how many pushups I could do at once, laughing. I told them I was just there looking for a job. “Oh we don’t have that, but have a nice night!” I’d write more, but I haven’t eaten today. I refuse to eat garbage and I’m slowly starving to death.

Does this all sound paranoid? Yes, of course it does. And it’s possible for people to do because it’s so hard to prove that people are being abused. Garbage training? Well jeez officer I just happened to be done with these 3 hamburgers and fries and large drink I’ve delicately placed at the bottom of a garbage can. Dog training? Well jeez officer how could I possibly know where other dogs in the neighborhood are (hides cell phone)? Getting children high on drugs? Second hand pot smoke isn’t a crime and until it is police officers can’t be “smoked out” just as easily as a four year old.

But I’ll write the truth if it kills me.

Peter Weyand