11:11
make a wish
I've been wishing for the same thing just about every day now. I'm old enough to know either a) you're not supposed to tell your wish and/or b) this is about as useful as praying, but I still do it. Call it pseudoscientific goal setting. I don't care.
I'm trying to save everything I possibly can. Important emails, blog posts, old videos, documents - archiving my days as if it's going to matter. It matters to me. I have to keep telling myself that's good enough.
I've been worried about losing my housing every single day for a year-and-a-half now. I was worried about ending up on the street long before that, but quarantined in my room (some halfway point between trapped and safe) --- sorry I got distracted by someone blasting my apartment with their goddamn bass again.
Been wearing active noise cancelling headphones nearly 24 hours a day. If I play a binural beats track with the volume all the way up, most of all the traffic and screaming is drowned out. Impressively sucked into the ambient music like some kind of vibrational sponge. Some sounds still get through though. Figure that's when you know it's way too fucking loud - I'm not just getting overly upset over the regular sound of regular traffic. This is some kind of assault on the ears and mind.
Last year I swear if you could have done a physical scan on me, you'd have seen a bruised brain. Like I'd been beaten up by noise.
Now the trade off is that my ears hurt from the pressure of the headphones, and sometimes, honestly, smell a little funny. Like that gauged ears smell people sometimes have.
A motorcycle rips by. It would have hurt if I didn't have the headphones. Luckily, the headphones turn their bullshit down from abusive to just obnoxious. I have it all recorded. I record the audio of my life 24 hours a day. I don't really expect anyone to ever listen to it. Just makes me feel better.
Besides a small sense of security, I can keep myself company and think my own thoughts, and it's not even close to "crazy" because I'm working on this project that is my life. The line between writing and speaking is pretty thin. Still the same stream-of-consciousness. I'd argue speaking makes that even easier, actually.
So it's a work/education/therapy/art project - not just someone talking to themselves. You know?
I've come up with a number of legit stories this year. I pick at them, but never seem to get down to the gritty work of putting them all together. I just keep getting either distracted or too sad. Even though I haven't left my building in a year, I seem to be exhausted pretty much all the time.
I'll cycle between pragmatic things like diet or self-esteem or some other topic that feels oddly selfish and oversimplified and then big world issues like justice, human rights, and what the hell is up with COVID. Sometimes I don't know what brings me to a certain topic on a certain day, like I'm being pulled along by an invisible force of sorts that helps me see the information I need to see - eventually. Just a coincidence. Don't know why I'm writing today, for example. It was the first day of summer and I thought that was good enough reason as any to update this blog, I guess.
I wear myself out emotionally and I don't have a lot in my life that brings the good feeling energy back up to full battery. I haven't had money for cannabis, although I use it medicinally, and I quit smoking. I've survived mostly thanks to food assistance, and a program that did cover my rent and electric for last year. I am lucky to still have some connection to the internet, though it's not fast enough for a lot of remote jobs, and I don't have the tech I need either. I've been trying to apply for rental and electric assistance and remote work - mainly writing - but haven't heard back and don't trust or don't qualify for 80% of the postings I find. It's been extremely frustrating. Although I'm still housed, I don't know when that luck might run out.
I know I'm not the only one who feels this way, and that's all the more reason why it doesn't make any sense to me that our leaders didn't look ahead and put legislation in place that would help people in a more solid block kind of way. Make it so no one was sitting there worried for months on end, or lost their business, or needed to find remote work but didn't have the computer. No one should be hungry. Everyone needs a safe place to sleep and somewhere to shower and use the bathroom. I don't understand how so many people seemed to have spent the whole pandemic - even the dead of winter - outside. I can understand reasons someone might not have wanted help - they've been hurt from getting "help" before - but there must have been some compromise beyond just leaving people not only to get sick but possibly get other people sick.
Just last night there was a woman wondering around who tucked herself behind a corner and openly coughed as people walked by who had just simply come out to enjoy life again - those people are probably vaccinated or just plain desperate to feel alive - can't blame them really - or even wanting to support their favorite forms of nightlife so they don't end up gone by the time the world really opens up again. But from my window it all just seems like chaos.
It's been going right up to the deadline and then relief extended for just a few more months over and over. If I was supposed to write a book or something - which has been everything my life has personally lead up to - it would have been better to know I could go ahead and focus on that and dig myself out of poverty that way instead of squirming with fear that I really need to forgo those dreams and find a different income solution if I'm going to survive. Find a way to buy a hazmat suit or something.
Even typing this now, my hand is starting to hurt and my arm is getting tired. This is not good.
If I could just get some really accurate speech-to-text program, I could play out all my recordings for the past year and surely would have seven books out of those "speeches".
I feel like I've done nothing but work but I have no income to show for it.
People have still been going out and doing things all around all year. I keep trying to get inside their minds. What justifications could they possibly have that I just can't subscribe to myself?
Maybe they've never been sick, never even known or been close to someone who was sick - is that possible?
Maybe they put their life in "god's hands" and just think if it's their time, it'll be their time (which just isn't how I feel).
Maybe they just don't care? Or even want their life to end to some degree? Or think they do anyway.
On the sci-fi side, maybe they know something I don't?
Of course there are plenty of people who felt like they needed to keep going to work - not just to survive but because their jobs helped everyone else survive. I've been frustrated by parades of garbage trucks in the middle of the night, but at the same time, we'd all be so fucked if they had stopped going to work. And blessed be delivery drivers - how else would I be able to get food? (Even when they've literally sat my bag of groceries down in a pile of shit that was in front of the door).
Again, why couldn't there be special arrangements? And then you realize some of them wouldn't have wanted to wear hazmat suits - the face masks pissed them off as it was. I see that as an indication that people felt they were being controlled SOMEHOW but misjudged just what their "enemy" was. Too bad, because while I too have been out of breath just carrying groceries up the stairs with my double masks on - it does seem like a simple gesture to say you cared. Better than nothing.
Which brings me to the thought: how could anyone NOT feel like this whole situation was a little too fucking weird, at the very least? How could our standards to keep each other safe really be the same as what was said back in 1918? I've watched people line up for food every day throughout the pandemic. Even with face masks on, what sense does it make to have people wait two minutes or more in one spot, only to move up in line to where someone else had just been standing?
Meanwhile, just to add to my confusion (though it is a good thing) there have been no reported outbreaks due to any of the protests despite the large numbers of people gathered. Should that prove the simple power of face masks or what? Will I regret not going to any protests this past year - trying to work in solidarity in my own artistic/sharing resources kind-of-way from inside my apartment?
I have my own reasons for being extra cautious and feeling extra vulnerable, and I realize no one cares whether I live or die. If I end up in the hospital, I'll be there alone. So I'm the only one who can take care of myself the best I can - even if people are coughing in the hallway right outside my door or constantly on the street below my window. I can't do anything about them - I can only do anything about me. I just don't know how much of my life I'm actually wasting only to end up on the street with my cat in the end anyway while people had been coming and going and working and would think I was a fool for staying in quarantine or if I've done exactly the right thing for me. I'm honestly scared to find out I was wrong, but sometimes I want to be.
