About 3:30am last night (Jan 2nd) someone set off three enormous bangs on the street where I live.
The first sounded like a firework and was loud enough. The last was a massive boom.
There was a smell of camp/firewood that came and went for a couple hours after as I tried to go back to sleep.
I've learned to not bother looking outside.
I was petrified, but also pissed - this was far from the first round of bullshit that's happened here in the last two years.
I woke up this morning looking through the news for a story of an explosion - there was one, but it was from way earlier in the day and located somewhere else in the city.
I usually get angry about what's happening to me, and then once I calm down, I see the bigger social issue it all represents. Might just be a coping mechanism, but it has kept me feeling like I could get in touch with a larger truth even while it seems I'm being abused - and maybe a new vision of a better future for everyone could come out of that.
This incident could launch me into a thought process about being unhoused in the cold, the cruelty of not having warm spaces open 24 hours a day regardless of temperature, the danger that can cause to everyone - not just those outside...ultimately the need for free, quality, safe housing or official outdoor sites to anyone willing to take them.
Or COVID confusion and people still going out - whether we should be using a kind of "rhythm method" to know when it's safer to congregate in crowds. Avoid everything two weeks before peak and two weeks after? Wondering why people want to get drunk in public at all costs to their own - or anyone else's - safety. Why we can't have "fun" places that don't hurt anyone. How people might not realize they're essentially being harmed in the long run by the places they spend money to enjoy. Why was housing even built here if the noise is so loud as to vibrate the building? That sound and energy can change people's moods - there have been multiple deaths just in the area alone since I've lived here. Imagine how it could be done so that all didn't happen (keeping volumes at a certain level, having people wait an hour in a warm, comfortable setting before driving home, maybe making the area a gun free zone during club nights? A car free zone in general?)
Or authority corruption and the potential for people with any kind of power to get away with doing horrendous things. Or the potential for a conspiracy among people who have been in any one place the longest - they all grew up together and are all friends - everyone else is an outsider to them.
Why does it feel like the city was built for people like me, advertised for people like me, but I didn't make enough money, so no one really gives a fuck if I live or die?
What do I do as someone who literally does not have a home to "go back" to?
If I knew exactly who was behind this crap, it would be easier to make a case.
Everything has been done in such a way to make that very difficult to explain.
So today I just wrapped myself up in bed. I am momentarily out of profound things to say.
Just fuck whoever the fuck is fucking with me.
I've been recording myself nearly 24 hours a day for the last two years, so I got the sound on file.
The eeriest part was the absolute lack of sirens afterwards.
No one coming to investigate.
You'd think people must have heard it across the river.
I swear I heard the rumble of what I know to be a fire truck and a small honk just after the first firework woke me up, but I didn't hear it on the recording. Might need some different software or something.
There should be cameras everywhere pointed at the street - so that would be easy enough to prove if anyone cared.
I've gotten used to the idea that no one cares, though.
I have nowhere else to go.
I don't want to leave my home.
I've been in this apartment, in this area of the city, longer than I've lived in any one place my entire life.
I don't care who hates me.
You don't get to just do this to people.
I have no clue what I'm going to do
I've written to city officials, state agencies, national organizations
from noise control to the ACLU
about a variety of issues that have made an already stressful pandemic downright torture.
Most recently, I begged for more security in housing.
I have been on the edge of eviction for far too long
and whatever I'm facing inside will only be worse out on my ass.
I'd get a remote job but I lack the technology.
My only recourse is writing and it has taken me years to put together a genuine work of art, much less get it published.
I have no idea when help or luck will run out
and frankly it makes one feel insane to hold on so tightly when the chaos keeps unfolding.
Trying to use my experience to make a case for why people deserve help, but it all feels like a sick joke - having everything that matters thrown back in the faces of anyone who cared.
If I could go back in time, I would have simply tried to find a different apartment in downtown.
If I had been on almost any other street, I wonder how much better my life would have been
not only during the pandemic, but the four years before that.
I had one shot at landing somewhere and I landed here
and this became my home.
I realize why no one would care
but that's the way it is.
This is already low income housing, too.
If I go anywhere else, even another low income building, it would be more expensive.
I want to bring it all together - make the pain I've experienced and witnessed worth something - make it matter - make it make the world better by advocating for what needed to be different
but I can't shake the thought that those in power already know
they have access to experts, access to resources, access to ideas I haven't even imagined
and they simply don't implement them.
If anyone wants me to do anything, it would just be as a way to make money somehow
off my work or whatever
no one cares what the fuck I do or say.
I'm angry.
Hopefully I'm just not focusing on the bright side at the moment, but if it's real, then it will still be there when I do.
I do still want this all to amount to something more important
but that's just how I feel right now.
This shit is fucking bogus.
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