On Aug. 27 of this year I learned I’d been left homeless.  Did I hear that day that my house had burned down?  No.  The economic downturn cost me my job resulting in my receiving an eviction notice for not paying my rent?  No.

That day the Post and Courier callously informed me of my homelessness in an article on homeless children.  Staffer Bill Henley wrote, “Homeless children are counted... as those who qualify for assistance as either homeless, displaced or in substandard housing.”

Well, I live in substandard housing.  And I have to think an adult living in such housing is just as homeless as a child living in such a dwelling. I had to face up to the fact that I count as homeless.

So, yes, I’m homeless, categorically homeless.  And I have been so for quite some time.

Now, I must confess, I’ve always been reluctant to admit I have anything in common with the homeless.  The ones I knew (and worked with while working for temp services to pay my way through college) were all contemptuous of formal education.  They prided themselves on their street smarts and put little worth on what they called “book learning.” Attending college full-time for over 10 years, I obviously have a different attitude.

Also, the homeless I knew were always in party mode.  “Ready to raise Hell,” they liked to say.  They were either anticipating a night of partying or coming off a hard night of revel and having deal with needing to do a little work if they wanted to keep the party going.  Me, I’d long since become disillusioned with the party life and was seeking to alter my consciousness through education, not with alcohol or any mind-expanding drugs.

The lifestyle they worked to keep up required little discipline, and they had very little.  What I wanted required a great deal of discipline, and more and more I’d become a tyrant in managing myself.

Then, too, many I knew spoke as if the ability to deceive people was the measure of a high IQ.  I valued the truth, and resorting to lies I saw as the ready tool of fools.

So the more I got to know these people, the less sympathy I had for them and their condition.  If there was anything I had in common with them, I hesitated to admit it.

But counting now as one of them I may as well admit what we homeless folk have in common.  And it’s something very basic: we haven’t bought into the American dream, particularly the part about the nice comfortable home with the white picket fence.

Living in comfort and having a lot of nice things is not a high priority for us.  As for housing, a roof over our heads is just that, nothing more.  Substandard housing is quite sufficient. If that’s not in the cards for the night, a cardboard box or highway overpass will do.

Also, we tend to be a bit contemptuous of those who assume everyone wants the same things in life that they do, people who can only think we homeless live as we do through no choice of our own.  We homeless see such people as easy marks, folks gullible enough to believe almost any sob story told them.

And there’s so many of these easy marks, with more money than they know what to do with.  That’s why, I contend, so many of us turn to panhandling.

Of course, none of us are willing to work for what we don’t want.  Like many others who find themselves homeless, I’ve always been averse to working a full 40-hour-a-week job and have never kept one for any length of time.  What I want doesn’t require that much work.  So I’ve ended up working temp jobs and taking only part-time work.  That’s allowed me to do what I want: to follow my various intellectual pursuits.  Such jobs have kept me in the most substandard housing available, my head and books dry.

Of course, such jobs allow other homeless people to do what they want to do as well, which is, for many, provide them with just enough money to go out raising a little Hell.

Speaking of which, authorities in California recently arrested a homeless man for arson in connection with the big conflagration out there that destroyed 89 homes and where two firefighters lost their lives.

What can a homeless man like me say?  People are just different, with differences in what they value.