Coronavirus Shit List

It's been almost eight months since the governor declared the pandemic a state of emergency, and since then the failed-state governmental response to the crisis and the antics of a culturally balkanized morass of plague-impassioned buffoons have inspired in me the urge to compile a nice little shit list:

Bike Farm & Bike Shops
Bike Farm is a volunteer run DIY bike menchaic shop, where those who didn't know could learn how to build or maintain and repair their bikes and those who did know could utilize a vast array of tools; five dollars gave you an hour of stand time and tool use, and often there was also cheap used replacement parts available. It was a pillar resource for low-income Portland cyclists, but I'm saying "was" because it closed shop in response to the pandemic. It's not completely closed: during summer they were letting Community Cycling Center volunteers do free repairs for essential workers one day a week, but summer is over and now all they're doing is selling stuff one day a week. I base my beef on this simple fact: Bike Farm is a warehouse! It's got to be the easiest possible indoor environment to keep people socially distanced; in fact, I don't think I ever stood within six feet of anyone whenever I used the place before the coronavirus struck us.

As a result of this major disappointment, the much more forgivable and understandable disappointments of other low-income cyclist resources closing down or reducing access, and bike stores becoming absurdly back-logged in mechanic availability, I've decided I'm going to be my own bicycle mechanic shop. It'll take a while, but I refuse to financially support traitorous cowards who abandon the poor.

Yuppie Jogger Plague Rats
I never liked joggers to begin with: there's just something contemptible about people who so proudly parade before the world their superficial vanity, unresolved insecurities, and craven age-denial and death-avoidance. (I'm reminded of Jesus' disdain for the sanctimonious Pharisees and their self-righteous exhibitionism — except at least those guys faked being godly and wise, rather than merely faking being eternally youthful and virile.) But, now these asymptomatic asswipes are huffing and puffing aerosolized moisture droplets all around as they breeze past you in their athletic pursuit of conspicuous self-obsession. Who are these people, anyway? None of them were around when I grew up out in Powelhurst in East Portland, because back then we only had a handful of Californians who moved up here — and those guys actually moved here to be here instead of moving here to terraform Portland into another chichi strip mall for yoga-mat elitist corporate drones. I suppose this complaint is just an extension of my objection to the invasion of what I consider to be a materialistic and elitist culture that's incompatible with the lack of pretension I always admired about the Pacific Northwest. But, it's worthy of mention because I and others can catch seriously ill (or dead) because some ex-pat Bay Area techyuppie's a vapid self-absorbed social-contract imbecile.

I'm starting to seriously want to blast these privileged punks in the face with pepper spray and then smash their ankles into pulp with my bike lock!

Multnomah County Library
Now this here is an ancient hate; only it was the coronavirus response of theirs that teetered me over into sufficient contempt to boycot the system and vote against it every time it comes up in a ballot measure. First off: it's gone all techyuppie, and has favored DRM digital media over hard copies of material — which I view as a class warfare sally against the poor (I've been wanting to copy tracks from CDs of bossa nova and bebop jazz, especially because I dislike enough songs on individual albums to balk at making any purchases). Secondly: the work culture and my interactions with staff there have always been heavily redolent of that left-fascist new-age social engineering ideology I'm vehemently oppsoed to on a fundamental, almost reptilan-brain basis. Thirdly: who are all these people making good money and garnering exceptional county employee perqs, who just putter around all day not even looking busy, and often aren't even that good at assisting patrons? And finally: they lay off a third of their workforce and require people to make appointments to pick up books placed on hold … that they waited months for, in response to the pandemic? I'm not some anti-literate redneck; in fact, by not checking out books I'm going to end up reading a lot of classics, something I've always whimsically meant to get around to. As for my criticisms pertaining to its cost and effectiveness; I've worked in a college library, so I'm not an ignorant outsider.

Fortunately for me, I got a chance to put my money where my mouth is this election; I voted against increasing their funding. (A pity the BLM rioters never got around to burning down the central library building downtown.)

Central City Concern Etc
Central City Concern is one of the three social services megacomplexes here in Portland, that helps damaged and distressed people with housing, mental health, and adictions issues. I never cared much for these guys because I always felt they were — as a former friend named Kif aptly put it — poverty pimps. Their housing buildings are some of the most unsafe and unsanitary living conditions you can find outside of landfills and the more squalid of freeway homeless camps, their addictions treatment is typically ineffectual and quasi-religious and pseudo-scientific, and their mental health treatment is less science and more cultural indoctrination. They talk up transparency and accountability, yet are themselves opaque and unbridled; and they love to medicate those they can and control whatever welfare money they receive. Nobody who works there has a real degree, or if they do engages in what could be considered a real practice — it's bottom-of-the-barrel psychology and therapy, that inculcates passive-aggressiveness and acquiescence to elite capitalism and corrupt jurisprudence, dependency on social welfare, and preaches mainstream New Age "spiritual" intellectual retardation.

Now they're all at home working from their phones, and are even less useful than they barely were before the pandemic. In fact, the only thing they're still faithfully doing is handing out meds and holding onto clients' social security checks!

Antifa, BLM, Patriot Prayer Etc
I never thought much of my fellow Americans or of the various mainstream cultures that make up of schismatic and bellicose republic, and in recent years I've grown increasingly alarmed at the emerging polarization and extremism I've seen. But, 2020 has got to be a new high-water mark in the sheer stupidity, goose-stepping groupthink, and explosive violence in our society. On the one side you have anti-intellectual throwback bigots who want turn the clock back on workers and renters rights, racial equality, women's rights, humane and rehabilitative jurisprudence, and tolerance of formerly fringe subcultures like the LGBT scene. On the other hand you have new age social engineers politicizing science and conducting sexual experiments on children, scorning Western culture and promoting anti-white racist shaming, pushing societally destructive permissiveness, and erecting a welfare dependency state. Fascists on the Left, fascists on the Right, as my trans friend so aptly put it.

I consider this mindless, violently angry, and unrelentingly other-seeking and -destroying state of American society to be symptomatic of the informal breakdown of our democracy. Again, I'm reminded of the brak-up of Yugolslavia. You can't have a functioning democracy when its citizenry is ignorant, self-centered, cowardly, and greedy — at least not without a strong government and an enemy or rival most people agree against.

Multnomah County Circuit Court
A perfect example of godawful timing, I was supposed to accept a plea bargain for a harassment charge just a week after the courthouse shut its doors to all jury trials and to courtroom appearances by offenders who aren't enmired in custody battles, aren't currently in the klink, or haven't been charged with serious property or violent crimes. Since March 30 I've been calling in periodically, only to have the judge tell me to call back next month; though thankfully from here on out I don't even have to make any more personal appearances. My attorney says misdemeanor cases like mine probably won't see the light of the courtroom until sometime next spring. That's ONE YEAR! I suppose I could make constructive use of this time to volunteer, so that when I finally go to court I won't have to worry about finding the time for that, especially since by then I'll either be looking for work or again gainfully employed.

All paltry and idiotic counted blessings aside, I'm incredulous: I never imagined I'd personally experience such a drastic formal breakdown in governmental function! I guess I always figured as crappy and absurd as it often gets the only time my local government would be interrupted would be during those occasional weak dustings of snow we Portlanders always freak out over; even those temporary federal shutdowns over congressional budget disputes haven't adversely affected me, though theoretically they can delay my rent assistance and SNAP benefits.

Second Thoughts re. Seeking Employment

Something that's bothered me most about this pandemic is that it struck us just as I was about to return to work. I was going to do a lot more, actually: exercise, try out some kind of meditative practice, engage in social gaming, volunteer somewhere weekly, and other self-development stuff like quitting spitting and taking up origami. After a few months canning I decided last month to resume the job search; the plague situation looked stable here in Oregon, and the summer-to-fall transition is usually the last hiring spree out of the year and in this case likely my last chance to land a potential keeper until next spring. I was going to start some of that self-betterment stuff, too, but so far all I've managed is to cut down drinking (which is actually a big deal). It didn't take me long to reverse my decision, at least regarding seeking employment.

Like that picture? That's a typical outdoor seating arrangement at the sushi place down the street from my apartment; most of the places I've seen in the area that offer outdoor seating are fudging between-party distances. I'm surrounded by highly educated (and class-conscious) Yuppie liberals, and even they're getting tired of the necessary constraints the pandemic imposed on us — before Portland got strangled by toxic wildfire discharge people were starting to uncover their nostrils wile wearing face coverings, more joggers and cyclists eschewed their use entirely, and dinner parties started growing larger and friendlier. And that's not even mentioning the droves of fools out there denying science that's been established since it was discovered flies weren't born from rotting meat, or who decry a rational pandemic response as a brutal assault on the constitution … or whatever other hare-brained buffoonery compels these guys to be so vehemently self-centered and socially irresponsible.

I'm not going to rub elbows with co-workers and get breathed all over and handle the cash and/or food of customers, probably indoors in poor air circulation. As much as I loathe scrounging for bottles and cans, and as abysmal as the hourly pay rate averages out, I'm at least one order of magnitude safer doing that. I'll just have to bite the bullet and cut most of the fun corners out of my budget. Which I've already started doing, now that I only drink a six-pack a week and have given up cigarettes. I can financially tread water through fall and winter, and maybe even spring; I'm supremely confident the coronavirus will kick us in the teeth as soon as we start spending more time indoors (as our colleges and universities are already foreshadowing). We'll also be shopping and traveling for the holidays. The flu season is right around the corner, too. And many of us on the West Coast have had our immune systems likely weakened by exposure to wildfire smoke.

A lot of people getting sick + a lot of people being fools + increasing favorability of environmental conditions = a lot more people getting sick, maybe to the point where our robber-baron feudal healthcare system seriously buckles under the strain and towns and counties get shut back down. I'm not taking any chances. I've smoked for almost thirty years; if I catch this I'll probably end up fighting it for a couple months and end up with permanent damage to my cardiovascular and respiratory systems — dodging this bullet could very well mean the difference between whether I die at sixty-two or seventy-two. Come to think of it, I'll probably eventually switch from using a magic scarf with an N95 filter folded inside it over to one of those 3M™ respirators (they're actually easier to breathe through). Besides, in the meantime I can still engage in self-betterment, right? I literally have nothing better to do.

Hippie Hygiene Revolution

COVID-19 and the absurd Bizarro© nightmare shopping for toilet paper became during the first couple months, has finally inspired me to give up TP altogether. This was no decision born out of whimsy, however; I've been entertaining the notion for a few years — I probably would have gotten around to it sometime within a year or two, definitely if I'd have moved out of housing into a van or RV. You see, for years I've grown increasingly interested both in eco-stewardship and the Spartan minimalism that life as a modern mechanized Mongol would necessitate, so it was inevitable that I'd make significant changes in my consumption patterns.

First off, I feel compelled to rebut squeamish people who would whine "Ewwwww!" Fred Flintstone didn't squeeze the Charmin™ back in Bedrock — TP is an historically recent phenomenon, and even today most of the world doesn't use it. Frankly, I think widespread adoption of toilet paper use is an early example of how opportunistic capitalism can artificially manufacture both a consumer need and a culture centered around it. Sounds crazy? If you’re reading this whilst drinking coffee, you’ll be interested to know that the coffee market was also crazy talk back in the seventeenth century, and it didn't gain acceptance until people started attaching bogus medicinal claims to its ingestion.

So, what do I use instead? Not a bidet, though I'm not repulsed by them like many Americans seem to be. I use a terry cloth rag stored in an open jar filled with water and vinegar, which I refresh every morning. Yes, I spend a lot more time looking at and handling my doodie, but I'm not deforesting my beautiful Pacific Northwest — though I'm still wasting water every time I flush, something I may never work around. Additionally, the handling of the rag forces me to wash my hands every time I use the bathroom (except to pee), which is a sort of hygienic lifehack that avoids the modern solution of allowing myself to become further infantilized by reliance on tech that I usually end up ignoring or silencing anyway.

Alas, water is where my conservation performance is weakest. I'm great at minimizing use of electricity, by doing things like eschewing air conditioning, only heating my bedroom during winter, and avoiding using both my computer monitor and my TV at the same time. I recycle rabidly diligently, especially now that it's once again my sole source of income; I refurbish older computers and rebuild older bicycles; I furnish my apartment with stuff I find or cobble together, and I’m not so posh as to insist on California king-sized mattresses and Czech crystal chandeliers. I don't drive, and if I did I'd be riding a motorcycle or living in a van I don't drive much. I'm not bragging, though, because much of why I have a small carbon footprint is because I'm simply too poor to be a consumer who has bleeding-edge smartphones and smart TVs, lives in a smart home, and drives one of those damn SUVs.

One way I've managed to cut down some of my wasteful water use is by switching to a regimen where I take a shallow oatmeal bath twice a week and sponge-bathe with vinegar and water on the other days. I realize aerated shower heads result in pretty efficient water use, but the apartment I live in has low water pressure and I'm not about to bathe AND shower throughout the week — sponge bathing is simply how I make up for the exorbitant use of water all baths ultimately are. No need to thank me, Mother Earth; the best anyone could ever do will never be enough, not compared to the titanic waste production capabaility of megacorporations.

Movin' on Up!

I'm living in the pearl Court Apartments now, another subsidized low-income apartment unit owned by Home Forward in the Pearl District. The Fountain Place Apartments downtown where I used to live is undergoing a seismic upgrade, being one of those ancient unreinforced masonry buildings that like to bury people alive or dead in temblors. The building I'm in now is a modern one and is in some ways better and in some ways worse: the wiring and the flooring and the windows are all better, but the water pressure is crap and the apartment is heated by those grody air vents — plus my bedroom has a brand new carpet that is out-gassing horribly. Also this building is much larger and is dedicated entirely to low-income residents, so it has a different, slightly ghetto institutional feel to it (the Fountain Place was a mixed building, with some market-rate and some subsidized units).

Home sweet home, as is sometimes said; at least for the time being. I'm supposed to return to the Fountain Place Apartments once the renovation of that building is complete, because as a project-based section 8 voucher recipient my rent assistance is tied to the unit I lived in rather than to me as a person. Housing welfare is a mysterious animal compared to food stamps, the only other form of welfare I have experience with. It doesn't help that there's very little transparency or communication offered by those who administer it, and online research has thus far yielded little in the way of comprehensible and useful information. (What most people are familiar with is the housing choice section 8 voucher, which is one where a person can choose where to live — even move out of town or out of state.)

One thing I CAN say for sure is that I'm not looking forward to moving back to the Fountain Place Apartments! Not because of the building itself but because of the process. It took me five weeks to relocate, during which time I was constantly met with arbitrary-seeming bureaucratic demands — and the people who were supposed to be helping me seemed only to render what should have been a straightforward process a muddled anxiety-inducing clusterfuck!

Why was my income eligibility assessed as though I were fresh off the streets instead of being an interim transplant? Because of this, one of my neighbors ended up ineligible to move here because she earned too much, even though her income level was acceptable in the old building (different units and different buildings have different income eligibility caps, usually 40% or 60% or 80% of the area median income; though after you've moved in you're usually allowed to earn 140% of the maximum income you were allowed to earn to be eligible to move in). And why was I initially deemed ineligible to move here because I'm in the midst of legal proceedings, even though I haven't been convicted of anything yet? Is this how insurance companies circumvent presumption of innocence? And then there was the whole headache regarding reporting my income as a delivery courier for Postmates and Uber Eats! To verify my income for the purpose of proving that I'm eligible to move into a tax credit-funded low-income housing unit, I ended up submitting Schedule C from the 1040 tax form and all of my bank statements for the entire year; whereas if I had simply had an hourly-wage job all I would have had to submit would have been my W-2s or pay stubs!

And the question remains: will I even be returning to the Fountain Place Apartments? It's not outside of the realm of possibility, that Home Forward may sell the property. Actually the big question for me, and for everyone else receiving rent assistance, is just what the future has in store for housing welfare in this country? A lot of Americans hate us welfare recipients and want to all but obliterate social safety nets, even though for a single person earning minimum wage to afford the average rent of $1,482 for a one-bedroom apartment in Portland he'd have to work ninety hours a week! (This is based on housing costs being 35% of one's budget.)

It's not the Big One I'm afraid of, nor am I afraid of getting stricken down by the coronavirus. It's not even some sketchy tweaker neighbor setting the building on fire or nutting up on me with a knife ... shit, I'm not even afraid of four more years of Donald Trump! What scares me are the boorish assholes living down the street with ballots in one hand and ignorant hatred for victims of runaway capitalism in the other!

Is My Luck Turning for the Worse?

Well, a drunken incident where I got belligerent with a parking enforcement officer, and accidentally spit on her when I intended to spit on the ground beside in a crude gesture of contempt, just may completely destroy my life. Yeah, it was pretty dumb, but the shitstorm that's falling out of it seems to me to be logarithmically more retarded and exemplifies some of what disgusts me about our diseased and disintegrating society. No, I'm not going to get into it; it was obnoxious and dumb, but nobody got hurt and nothing really happened of any consequence.

I'm charged with harassment, and am due to go to trial over it on March 31 if the district attorney decides to proceed with prosecution on March 17, when the lawyers meet with the judge to make that determination. I suppose I'm lucky; I could have been charged with assault because I did in fact spit on her (on accident, I'll say again — I was so drunk I was having trouble walking my bike down the sidewalk … lol wait, I was walking it down the street?). My attorney hopes to have the charges dismissed if I engage in outpatient drug and alcohol treatment, which I'm going to start sometime this week. I don't really have such hopes, because the plaintiff was understandably outraged by my barbarous behavior, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway ... besides, I suppose it wouldn't hurt for me to dry out and sober up, if only to prolong the lifespan of my pancreas and liver. (I don't see much use in sobriety when your life isn't one that's worth being sober for, but at the same time I realize that I may never attain such a life until I go through the trial-by-fire of recovery.)

The reason I say this may destroy my life is because it's caused me to lose my contract with Über Eats, thanks to a bunch of creepy drivers in California sexually harassing passengers and causing the company to weather scores of lawsuits. So, now the only way I can earn any money is by returning bottles and cans for their deposits, and if I'm lucky maybe work an occasional day labor assignment. I don't even know how this pending court case will affect my ability to get a part-time job, but I'll find out soon enough when I resume looking for work — again, I'm not optimistic. Even worse, however, is that I may lose my housing and return to living on the streets. The subsidized housing building I currently live in is going to be seismically upgraded, and we all have to be out of here by the end of the month. My relocation to other buildings has been hampered by the fact that I'm currently in legal proceedings, and based on what I've read on the Housing Authority of Portland's web site there's a good chance that I'm no longer eligible to receive rent assistance or to live in one of their properties.

Because apparently the charge against me is considered a violent crime, even though in reality nothing violent occurred. Like I said, it was stupid and gross, but no harm was done; I'm not excusing my behavior, but I'm not about to rub shoulders with thugs and serial killers just because of some arbitrary legal definition. This is what happens when Americans get "tough on crime", the result of Americans informing themselves about human nature and how to run a society by watching fear-mongering other-hating propaganda like Fox News and CSI: Miami. As a result, I stand a good chance of being homeless and unemployable — a sure path toward becoming a mentally sound, sober (or at least functionally alcoholic), tax-paying and law-abiding contributor to society!

Of course, it's possible I may end up okay, or at least not living on the streets again. Central City Concern may be able to advocate on my behalf and finagle a way for me not to lose my housing voucher. We'll see. Again, I have to be out of here by the 29th, so I'll need to know soon so I can prepare for the worst. It's still winter, after all, and I suspect it will linger and transition into a colder- and wetter-than-usual spring. And, I figure I'll need about $200 to adequately initially prepare myself; and I'm no longer able to earn the kind of money I was when I was delivering for Über Eats.

It's Gonna Be a Busy Year

This will be a pretty busy year for me. I'm going to be enrolling in outpatient drug and alcohol treatment, I'm going to start looking for part-time mainstream wage-slave employment, I'll be actively seeking to start engaging in side-income projects like freelance writing and DIY crafts, I'll also start seriously learning bike mechanics and begin assembling them for fun and a meager under-the-table supplement to my income, I'll start putting myself out there socially, I'm going to be temporarily moving to a new apartment while this building gets a seismic upgrade … and, of course, it's election year, a time of grim foreboding I'm sure.

That's right, a seismic upgrade. More like a stress-inducing pain in the ass, to me. Because I live in a project-based section eight voucher, I'm at the mercy of how the political winds blow the sails of the federal government – and right now those winds are filling the sails with corruption and disintegration, being blown by a criminal upstart who is destabilizing society and destroying our government as a functional body. And he hates the poor, wants us all in chain gangs or debtors prisons or sleeping on the streets. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this amounts to displacement, that somehow I'll get priced out when I return here. That's why I'm going to be gearing up to be homeless, an if I'm lucky I may even be able to buy a van to live in.

As for all that other stuff, well it's just time for me to actually start moving forward with my life, rather than just spinning around in the same eddy ruminating on dissatisfaction and animosity whilst idly daydreaming about the better life I ignorantly believe I deserve. I got off the streets so I could stop being a victim and a loser, do things like sober up and get back to work, try to figure out how to get along with people and get a handle on the weirdness in my head. I'm probably never going to be truly self-sufficient, but at least I can be some kind of participant in society and enjoy myself a little bit.