Add on to the story…. It seems Housing is unhappy with my stories. They seem to be setting up conditions to evict me again. A guy turned up when I was ill and in bed and demanded entry. About 22nd of Jan. I told him to go away until Housing had arranged an appointment by letter. He said they had sent a letter then left me what was supposed to be a copy and scurried away.
This means the letters supposedly lost by the post office are always the same letter, bearing the same news, despite there being about ten packages a week for the last five years without a single loss. The inference by Housing is I am getting the letters and lying about it. I need a better way to prove if anything comes. This is not good enough. The loss of the letter was reported to post office upsetting my entire local staff who feel I accused them of losing it
Housing’s (Community and Justice’s) idea seems to be to create evidence I have driven away legitimate attempts to inspect the apartment so then they can force entrance and evict me. This is murderous treachery and I am getting sick of every bloody local small government asshole taking offense every time I write about conditions here. I cannot avoid them. That seems to be a fact of life.
They took X away the week before Christmas at about 3AM. Two police cars and an ambulance came to rescue her fellow tenants when she lashed out with a sharp steel bar. She’d had enough. Six rescue workers came and took her off into the night.
C has a story I am sure. It may explain how she became a lost soul who stood on a porch in the middle of the night clutching a weapon and begging the police to save her from us. She had been pounding on her neighbor’s security doors trying to bust through and howling. She was Mighty Mouse in those moments but her terror and helplessness were under the reign of massive neurosis.
The people she imagined crouching in their apartments waiting to leap out and get her if she fell asleep were themselves asleep. They were people in their later years who cherished gentle healing slumber. Maybe they hadn’t always been nice people. I don’t know. I don’t think we ask about our pasts in case someone tells us and we don’t like it. Maybe that was the problem. She needed people who talked of the past so she could grieve
The story I heard was how she lived a comfortable middle class life with her husband and friends. She was an artisan with a life time of work and she was known for it. She visited the craft shows and sold well. Did that happen? It is a story I hear often enough now for it to be likely. It is almost my story
I heard her husband died and she lost her home. She lost her art and her friends and her furniture and to try and save her they put her here. She squeezed into a tiny apartment in one of the socialist gulags the property managing politicians use to hide the people falling through the cracks in the high rent market. I seem to remember the last time she had seemed sane Housing was enforcing some unnecessary anti-clutter order and throwing much of her remaining art and equipment onto the street. Nobody said a word because they were watching the administration direct its ire at someone who had dared complain of their lot and they didn’t want it to happen to them.
I almost said these apartments were ones they didn’t sell but they did sell these and now a corporation profits from our poverty via your taxes and probably pumps money into many politician’s portfolios. Don’t get me wrong. This emergency housing saves many of us from gruesome deaths on the streets and people truly appreciate the gift of a safe harbor. I appreciate it less because I am like her and needed a private rental of the type we could access before the big herd of property parasites grabbed everything and ruined our futures. I resent a ruined future I worked so hard for, even if I appreciate your supply of a safe roof.
It sounds incredibly left wing doesn’t it. The difference is people who are consciously on the left say these things as part of a political civil rights agenda which may even include a hidden desire for anarchy. Often they have not experienced much apart from student outrage. My agenda is to call it as I see it because it hurts and my muse demands it. Her muse will be a part of the pains she was stricken with as her ability to create shrank.
She can thank the media for her absolute terror when she was surrounded by “Housos”. They created the stereotype which now kept her from sleeping most nights and gnawed ever deeper into her broken heart and mind. That tiny woman was terrified and she was coping alone in the dark. In her mind we developed criminal abilities such as being able to slither through her roof spars and steal her wireless broadband or bank details. Most of us can barely walk.
She went from a clean, tidy person to something like a disheveled hobgoblin with wild hair and dark rings under its eyes and brown peg teeth in raw gums. Our own Gollum although this one might have been saved
The tiny apartment made her feel so unsafe she developed deeper and deeper insecurities and the neurosis developed into a raging paranoia. She begged the mental health professionals and the government property managers to get her out of here. This is was becoming another of those abject failures by mental health professionals we see so commonly among the poorer residents of Australian suburban sprawls now. We didn’t used to need them and now they are there but maybe the cure is worse than the condition!
X was in deep trouble. The staff of housing despises people who make their offerings seem less than stellar. They are often like the Beadle in Oliver Twist. “MORE? He wants more!”” They work hard and we love them of course.
The mental health professionals and even the local politicians have good reason to wish for her disappearance. It is a conflict of interest where recognizing her shattered wreck of a personality requires a mia culpa on their investment portfolios. It is something they defend rigorously, their aristocratic right to profit from the population without being held responsible for the carnage they cause.
Four years. She started grieving for her partner and her home and being scared of us and it grew until almost every weekend the neighborhood noises made her so scared she would shriek into the night simultaneously begging for help and telling us to “bring it on!” if we thought we could kill or rob her. It looks as though some of the wags around here managed to tell her many of the police who came to her at night were disguised drug dealers trying to keep her quiet. Poor woman! What a horrid fantasy to be so helpless in.
Most of the people here have their own conflicts and some showed their disdain by openly chanting at her for being crazy. She watched as the few she trusted died around her. The ones she feared the worst were taken off to jail for grooming young girls and various drug charges. Most of us just live here. We have had hard lives and we hurt a lot some of us.
She maybe heard her neighbors discussing her last breakdown. She would spout resentment and venom at any of the residents of her little block caught in her glare as she left her apartment. Others she would simply pass quietly. She hid in her tiny space and she feared us and she begged for help. I heard her so many nights begging the police her neighbor had called. They would come to protect us from her but she would beg them to take her away. In the end she thought we had cameras in her bedroom. The creepy feeling of being in such a tiny space with people gathered so close can do that to you. You feel as though you are never far enough away from someone else to get any privacy. Her mind, with its neurosis and scars blew it up and fed off it.
Maybe she was an empath. Nobody who can sense another person’s pain should live like this. There is no escape. She will sense their resentment long after she has pulled her door shut at night. It will seep into her emotions like an insidious gas. Many artists have the ability to sense emotions and psychies around them. Some of them can be extraordinarily sensitive and often have never been taught to filter the confused strings of other’s emotional baggage, despair, fear or anger. Living in a place as crowded and close as this is an invasion of harsh realities even in your waking dreams.
That was two weeks ago and a week before Christmas. She had told the last police who came for her she was planning a trip over Christmas and was excited and even happy about it. She was going to explore the possibility of being a digital artist and rebuild her self. I have done that. As you watch years of preparation and experience swim around the toilet bowl you don’t give up. The loss is total ruination of all your life’s work but you do something because you are an artist and the muse demands it
She did not get to the bus. A man came from the place they were all due to meet asking if she was here. Whatever the people who had her are doing this is a tragedy. It cost what may be her last attempt to wrest control of her emotions and her creative energy from the depression and neurosis. She may even be in jail. What a cruel treatment it would be. She may in a mental hospital. They will not replace the loss of her self motivated trip with anything much even there.
Someone turned up and took her things away over Christmas so it is likely she is staying at Wyong Hospital in the Mental Health Wing.
Another of the tenants had a bout of neurosis today and was asking to fight someone and threatening to kill someone else. He is much larger and definitely able to do some harm but unless he actually hurt someone no one will call the police. We know people in here are hurting and often light up for a while before simply settling back down. It is dangerous though.
I am losing my sight. To read this I have to move my head back and forth and squint. The new gaming keyboard with the large, lit keys is a wonderful help but the overall comprehension is slowed. I am struggling through chemo for a few more weeks and I was ill every day anyway.
Because I live alone and the onset of the blindness is truly devastating the optometrist sent me to a local eye surgeon who agreed to monitor me with an option to get surgery if it continues. The problem for me is the surgery looks like being done at Wyong Hospital and that facility has been one the big abusers in my life. It was because of that place and the attitude they took to my medical needs I lost my apartment at Chittaway, the first jobs I had in decades and was left too physically destroyed to finish the ten year run in University with a Masters Degree I had planned. They have misdiagnosed many conditions and verbally been abusive and corrosive.The idea of letting them get their hands on my eyes is blood curdling.
Kay and Dave came and drove me to Tiger’s Leagues Club at Bateau Bay for lunch on the 29th. First time I have been out for a proper meal for ages and it was nice
The new community support worker seems to be turning out well. She is doubly precious as my eyes fail and I need her to take me places. I am still not good at getting the best out of the arrangement as I can often be mentally scattered
I have done a few small paintings but I cannot tell if they work any more. There are both some large and small works planned. I may be able to get them worked and beautiful although my problem is like Cheryl’s. For me to work with the processes needed to get the complexity and depth of color and finish there needs to be a big clean, dedicated space and there isnt. I will still try but sometimes I could sob out loud at the possibilities which escape me
As always, despite all the things running through life, I am surrounded by wonderful people like you and lifted beyond myself