#COVID-19 homelessness

[icarusxxrising]

Refusing the mask up while participating in mutual aid means you're mutually giving fatal sicknesses to disabled people, which not only make up a population of activists, but also make up a large population of homeless individuals.

Refusing the mask up means you're killing the people you're helping. You don't know it, because you won't be there when they pass away in their tents unable to seek medical attention, after unknowingly spreading it to the people they're around.

If you really want to help people then Mask. Up. If you refuse to mask up even when being advised too then you're maliciously killing people and you're an anti-revolutionary.

[remembertheplunge]

The 5 things. March 19, 2020. Thursday. 9:31pm

Sculpt work out with the quiet man watching the lady in white question in coming shoppers re: the virus I assume this morning

Mac and Shawn (I think) his friend slept in his car last night.

Josh O. Stopped by briefly

Erin. /military Erin, mental health issues joined me for coffee outside preservation

Raymond, mac’s Denny’s friend called to say hi.

So did Mohan from fit republic

Beautiful schooner cloud sky

I got to say goodbye to the places I love today

Sent from my iPad

Notes re: above. 3/19/2024. Four years later.

As the gathering storm and horror of the Covid virus built up rapidly, I recorded it in my 5 things entry on my I Pad that I do nightly still. The 3/19/2020 "5 things" records my meetings that day with friends, some homeless, some not. Mac, Shawn, Josh O., and Erin were homeless. I had known them for anywhere for years to days. Mohan was a friend I met in the gym who was not homeless. Raymond I am not sure about (homeless or not). I was writing in my journal outside, drinking my cappuccino from a paper cup. We customers of Preservation Coffee in Downtown Modesto, California could no longer sit inside or drink from a porcelain mug due to the swirling virus. Drinking from the porcelain mug was part of the sacred ritual of my Preservation writing sessions. The virus drove the magic from the coffee house experience. it also drove the magic from plays and movies which I had loved to attend. I no longer write in coffee houses and rarely attend plays or movies. These are the things I loved that I got to say goodbye to 4 years ago.. In my journal on the table you can see that I was working with despair work due to the new potentially lethal virus world I found myself in. Quoting from the book Saved Sorrows" p 116, I wrote "...we can come to terms with apocalyptic anxieties in ways that are integrative and liberating..."

[undeadlyclawjob]

Commissions and Donation Drive

I have multiple ways to support me here. I am currently in a bad situation. I have Covid, which prevents me from working a job to raise funds for housing. I went through multiple dangerous situations IRL, which led me to be in an emergency shelter, which recently kicked me out for what was confirmed to be bogus reasons. While DSS is aware of this, they can't do anything about it, and have no emergency housing spots.

They have temporary housing spots, but I can't get an appointment to get into it until the 30th. Therefore, I aim to raise money to extend my hotel room until then.

Thank you for your consideration and any help you may give.

[elskamo]

Dafuq is happening with Ron? The Masterpost!

Hey all, sorry it's taking me a while to update you properly about what's going on IRL. There is... a lot that's been happening and some of it has taken me awhile to wrap my head around and figure out how to explain so please bare with me.

If you just want to know what's happening with my various blogs and accounts (on Tumblr that'd be this blog right here and @official-fresh-tv-blog) then feel free to skip to "My Fandom Situation" at the end of the post (hence the Total Drama tag attached). At some point I'll be updating the abouts on both blogs so if you CBA to read this then you can at least get a vague idea of what's changed when those update. You may also be able to kinda twig one of the main announcements from the tags as well.

I'm gonna put all this shit under the cut because it is LONG. As always if I forget to tag something please let me know so I can add it ASAP. And if you have any questions please don't be afraid to ask me outright.

My Health Situation

As I've mentioned before both my physical and mental health are utter shite that I barely get any help with. I have very little recollection of my childhood, especially before age 8 or so, as an adult when it comes to my dissociation I only lose a couple of days memory at most. Despite this I recently lost two whole months of my memory, hence my disappearance around late April/early May to late June/early July.

A couple of weeks ago I was finally able to speak to a doctor on video call about my mental health and to get a clearer picture on what my dissociation actually is. Given my background and anecdotal evidence from friends (but not family because they notice absolute fuck all) I'm pursuing a more up to date diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder which the doctor agreed is likely (as well as FINALLY getting an official C-PTSD diagnosis). In total honesty I've had my suspicions since around 2018/19 when friends started mentioning suspicious changes in my behaviour and voice as well as my apparent use of a completely different name at one point.

When I finally started interacting with other people who dissociate within the Total Drama fandom during the lockdown in 2020 I realised what might be happening and kept telling myself to reach out to other users but I was far too scared to say anything due to my own lack of knowledge on DID and Dissociation in general and my confusion about how I could possibly not know for so long. If there are any users with DID that are willing to reach out I'd really appreciate it, especially as I'm getting used to the various terminology and figuring out how to interact with the rest of the system, most of which understandably ignore me for the most part given some of my previous shitty and ignorant behaviour and reluctance to get properly diagnosed.

I still haven't told the family I am in touch with simply because they don't particularly give a shit about my mental health, they tend to just assume they know what's going on and run with that. The fact that zero people in my family noticed anything strange when other people around me did also put me off saying anything, right now I'm planning to wait until I have an official diagnosis but I may say something sooner.

I'm waiting on two appointments, one with the same doctor to catch up in September and one with a psychologist who'll have a deeper understanding of trauma and Dissociative issues. I'm also waiting to start new meds as mine have been completely overhauled, this means I'm currently having withdrawal symptoms coming off the old ones and when the new ones are finally ready I'll likely be a bit erratic for the first few weeks due to the side effects. Apologies in advance, I promise several people IRL have been informed and will be keeping an eye on me to make sure I'm okay until the meds kick in properly.

Following my two month memory lapse I also had Covid for the majority of July and am still kinda foggy now, which explains the rest of my absence. I'm not entirely sure what my physical health is like due to having lost my memory but my chronic pain doesn't seem to be flaring up at the moment at least, that being said I was having major problems with my chronic pain prior to my two month dissociative period.

On the plus side of things I finally have an appointment booked with a new NHS gender identity clinic in London so that I can get assessed to start Testosterone therapy! At the moment it's tentatively booked in for September 3rd however I've been told they may be able to move it to a different time slot if they can find one with one of their newer staff given how difficult it'll be for me to travel up there for the early morning (for context it takes about 3 hours to get to London from where I am in Dorset and another 3 hours to get back, most of the appointment slots are at 8 or 9am!)

My Home Situation

Absolute fuck all has changed with my home situation. I'm still stuck at the house where I was previously abused a lot and am not currently in a position where I can find a new place or move in with someone else. A couple of friends have offered to let me sofa surf back and forth between them if needed but I have no immediate long term plans.

I found out a couple days ago that Damien decided to make a post on my behalf venting about my home situation which I will now be deleting. Essentially while everyone in the household caught Covid last month my relationship with my Mum swung back to being quite abusive again and she threatened to kick me out. That being said, I will acknowledge she has genuinely been trying to understand my situation and be a better mother towards me since I became homeless the first time around back in 2018 and no physical abuse has taken place since then.

Right now it appears I'm safe but at the time Damien posted there appeared to be a very high chance that I was going to be kicked out and have nowhere to live. My mum hasn't brought up her threats again since Damien's vent post so hopefully we still have somewhere to stay for the time being.

My Money Situation

Leading on from my home situation, my money situation has worsened drastically. As many of you know I've been fighting a losing battle for years attempting to get my disability benefits back and since being made redundant twice I've been living solely off of the single component of Universal Credit which amounts to less than £400 a month to cover all my living expenses. My housing benefit is gone until I'm able to leave Mum's and I'm still waiting for my appeal to get the unfit for work/sick portion of my Universal Credit back.

My mum refuses to budge on the amount of money that I pay her to stay each month and she has recently been getting me to pay for more frivolous expenses like multiple takeaways because she hasn't been buying enough groceries and being ill has left the three of us unable to cook. Factor in other expenses like transport to get to appointments, the most basic phone bill I can get away with, and unexpected emergencies like my tech breaking and I'm no longer able to cover my living expenses at all and no longer have any savings money left to cushion the blow.

I'm now at a point where I'm in my overdraft every month and resorting to begging friends for loans to keep me afloat so I don't get charged. The situation with my health has not helped with being able to find work, either freelance or a permanent role, so unless I'm able to get money from things like my Ebay, Etsy, or Redbubble stores I don't have anything else coming in that can help me cover my most basic needs.

I'm doing my best to get back on track with job hunting as both the job centre and the local Restart program I've been forced to go onto are insisting I need to be applying for a certain amount of jobs per week and attending regular face to face appointments with them otherwise they'll take away my benefits. I've almost finished updating my CV and website and have a mandatory job fair I've been told to go to on Wednesday so hopefully I can find work again soon, but given my health situation and the fact that I shouldn't actually be working this may still be very difficult.

I know I post about this a lot and many of you have your own financial struggles but please if you're able to, donate to my Ko-Fi page or buy something from one of my stores. Even if you're not able to help me directly just sharing them with your friends/followers can make a huge difference!

My Fandom Situation

You may have noticed by now that my Etsy store has been closed for a few months and I've gone back to posting a lot more infrequently on my Tumblr, DeviantArt, and Archive of our Own accounts. I've also been letting asks pile up in my inbox. I'm attempting to catch up on my fandom stuff as fast as I can but obviously I'll be doing this around all the IRL stuff I'm dealing with.

For some reason a lot of the asks and messages I've been receiving have been straight up disappearing, right now I only have one ask on each blog and one private message to my knowledge, everything else has somehow gone. If when I post answers to both asks you don't see yours answered please feel free to send it again and I'll get to it as soon as I can! If it's something I'm not comfortable answering I'll say so outright so you know that I did receive and view your ask.

I have a massive backlog of fics and art I'm trying to finish off and post, again I'll get to these as and when I can before starting on any new projects. I've been keeping a spreadsheet of all the smaller pieces I want to work on for people to vote on once I've cleared my backlog. My larger projects will take a little (okay, a lot) more time to post.

I'll only be reopening my Etsy store once I'm certain I've got a handle on my health, as usual I'll only be accepting a few orders at a time and keeping the prices fairly cheap so they're more affordable for people that want to buy. As always, Redbubble is always active as is my Ebay account, though there are still a few products I need to update or upload on both platforms that aren't on there yet. If there's any art you'd like me to prioritise adding for you to purchase on Redbubble please feel free to reach out and let me know.

I'm going to be updating the about posts on both my Tumblr blogs soon to better reflect what they're for and who is posting. I'm currently planning on making the Ronnie Rambles tag my personal one instead of using it just to show which posts have been queued up ahead of time. The two alters that I've talked to will definitely have their own tags as well though I have no idea how often they'll be posting.

[entitledrichpeople]

[cw: description/discussion of death, mass illness]

[macksting]

COVID prolly finally caught me

One tries one's best, but my ears are clogged and my nose is running and my head hurts. I still have senses of smell and taste, so either the latest vaccine is doing its job properly or it's actually some other respiratory infection.

It sucks 'cause I had a good track record, but we're unhoused and couchsurfing during one of the biggest spikes in the brief history of the illness.

Just sucks is all. I knew there was no avoiding it this time. Estimates were one in three will get it this time around due to lack of precautions, and I couldn't get anybody to stay six feet away from me masked or otherwise, and due to my circumstances I am unable to avoid using public transit. Unhoused people don't get to avoid COVID. Poor people have to shop for groceries more often than would be otherwise preventable, too, because we can't always afford nor even store buying in bulk, and the unhoused may not even have the entire space of a refrigerator or shelves, even when couchsurfing. And we had to travel during the spike, on New Years', because we were unable to live where we were. The lease ran out and the South is a rotten place to be homeless, trans, with a wife and kid and nearly no support network and no family. We simoly truly were forced by our circumstances to travel at the worst possible time.

Can't afford cars, can't afford to isolate. Turns out I am a member of a very vulnerable population again.

There was simply no avoiding it unless everyone else acted responsibly. Any plan that requires that is a bad plan.

Ultimately the blame is on the wealthy who sabotaged public response categorically.

Crikey, with all the brain fog I experience from anxiety disorders, the last thing I need is new permanent neurological damage. And at my age, permanent damage to my internal organs is gonna be Fun™️.

Wonder what this is gonna do to my immune system. :T

Bonus: We have to vamoose in six days due to the terms of our hostex's lease, and have not lined up anywhere to stay for more than a day or two each location, and getting to all the appointments to talk to people and attend interviews and such is exposing more people but we have to jump through hoops in order to try to obtain food, housing, etc. And of course nobody at my kid's middle school masks up.

[unpopularly-opinionated]

It is asinine how many tiktok videos I’ve seen from locals throwing out any and every excuse under the sun to push the blame for why Portland is in the state it’s in away from the protests or the homeless.

I actually just saw someone’s video where she made all these snarky remarks about “oh no, what will we do if mom and pop stores like Walmart go out of business” AS IF SHE WAS EVEN MAKING A POINT because I KNOW she’s referring to the fact that a couple weeks ago it was on the news about how Walmart was leaving “the city” due to rampant theft, as she’s walking in the heart of Portland. You know where these Walmart stores were? On like the furthest edges of what you could reasonably call Portland. Frankly, they were nowhere near actual Portland, but because Portland encompasses a lot more than just the central city, it’s still considered Portland. She may as well be trying to connect a store closure in Sherwood with Portland for all that’s worth. Actual mom and pop businesses are still shutting down all the time, but here she is pretending like it’s only the big bad businesses that were impacted.

Then she had the gall to say “Let me ask you this, what do you think’s made all the people work from home, the pandemic or the protests?” relating it to the fact that all of the businesses were closed…except this is a blatant false equivalence. The question you should be asking isn’t “what made everyone work from home”, it’s “what made all the businesses close down”, and the answer was quite literally both. She acts like businesses weren’t shutting down in droves immediately prior to the pandemic due to all the riots.

Prior to the pandemic, protests were rampant in the city, and it’s quite frankly a disservice to protest to even be calling them protests. They were riots, and they were terrorizing the city, destroying property left and right, and driving everyone out of the city. Even without the aid of the government fucking over every small business in the country, these riots nearly did in every small business here. The few that survived were graciously rewarded with government overreach that forced most of the survivors to shutter their businesses or massively pivot their entire business strategies (if even possible). Not to mention, the riots only exacerbated the homeless issue because dozens of those rioters decided to have a little camping trip in the middle of the city for weeks on end, which only further trashed the city, drove people away, and encouraged the homeless encampments that Portland is quite literally still battling on a daily basis.

And the saddest thing is that even though the riots and pandemic have since stopped (for now), this isn’t a problem that we simply spring back from. Businesses that are closed are closed for good. Jobs lost are lost forever. The echos of these problems are still being seen on a regular basis as more and more people are struggling to keep afloat. Don’t get me wrong, the astronomical rent prices are also a pretty big fucking reason for why people are fleeing Portland in droves. But to sit here and pretend like the riots and the homeless aren’t equally—if not more damaging to the overall livability of the city is just downright disingenuous and deceitful. Fuck out of here with your false equivalency bullshit. Nobody who is complaining about Portland is doing so for the sake of Walmart, or Starbucks, or REI, or whatever big ass corporation you feel the need to divert people’s attentions to. Fuck off with your bitching about union busting when you’re talking about why the city is in the state it’s in.

[royalteachitchat]

🌊🍁 Niagara Falls recently declared a State of Emergency for mental health, opioid addiction and homelessness.

The Canadian Federal Government continues to send illegal immigrants to Niagara, costing the city $5M in social services and has rented out 2000 hotel rooms to house them. 😫😲😡🤦

[lastcatghost]

Sometimes I get lazy, in the way that, when going in and out of fever delirium, I had thoughts that, if I should die now from covid, would it be the worst way to go out?

Would mean no more work, and I am tired, but I'm glad I pulled through it all leading up to now. We must have revolutionary optimism, and if nothing else, exist outta spite as long as you can

[in-sightjournal]

Ask A Genius 901: Mr. and Mrs. Smith

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: Carole and I started watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the TV series inspired by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, a Doug Liman movie from probably 15 years ago. It’s where Brad and Angelina met and fell in love, perhaps 17 or 18 years ago. In both the film and the series, the main characters work for a mysterious Espionage and assassination agency, of which there are many…

[ourchallengeinlifeworld]

Even at the Darkest Point in Life Faith gives you Hope

The last five years of my life have really been difficult. Things have gotten so rough I got to the point suicide was almost at my fingertips. I got to the point that the ray of hope I had in my life went dark. If I didn’t have my Faith in God I wouldn’t be here today. I am going to tell you my story and it’s 100% true. Five Years Ago I had a job where I went to 7-3 in the morning and actually…

[irreplaceable-spark]

Former Resident: Why San Francisco is on the brink of losing its unique culture? | Jennifer Sey

"The city has always been known for its progressive politics. But I liked that. I lived there until 2021, over 30 years. It's become a place of such aggressive conformity. And if you don't uphold whatever the most far left narrative is, if you dare to ask any questions, you will be smeared and vilified, and pushed out of your job." Siyamak sits down with Jennifer Sey, former brand president of Levi’s and long-time resident in San Francisco. Today she will talk about what caused her to leave California.