Smashed is a project that I started something like eight years ago when I toyed with the idea of writing a book about the experience of being homeless, but as I wrote I begun to understand that this this was a far bigger thing, it wasn't just about me. There are characters, people who you can recognise in the work as a whole, but it does not have the kind of time line that goes for A to Z because when you have nowhere to live nothing goes from A to Z.
Also as I tentatively begun to write the first chapter I also realised that ending up without a home is a journey that begins long before you lose a residence. It starts when your life messes up at the age of four, or six, or twelve when your carted off to a children's home, or your parent's uproot you on a yearly basis.
That is the essence of the story, it's not just my story, it's an amalgam of all the people I met and lost while out on the streets, and though some of them I still have fond memories of, it is dedicated to my little brother Philip Michael Robinson, who was murdered by a drug dealer a week before his twenty first birthday.
If you happen to be that person then I feel sorry for you because you will never be anything more than a pathetic creep, you can never undo what you have done, and you will have to answer for it, and maybe when that is over you might feel peace again.....
