Gobsmacked & Godsmacked: How Twitter & Reddit Saved My Life During the Pandemic (Intro)

 Prologue - October 2022

Dear America:

A little over a year ago I sat down to write a Pandemic 

Memoir about everything that I have witnessed first-hand during the Pandemic  A year ago, I wrote a very different book than I have now because as they say…I did not know what I did not yet then know.   

To be quite candid, I had a very DIFFERENT pandemic experience than most of you did. While most of you learned new hobbies and binge-watched Netflix,  I bore witness to a deeply broken America.  A year ago - I would have told you that, based on my observations, America is bewilderingly broken.  I now no longer say that - for I know better.  America and the so-called “social safety net” is broken by design and riddled with corruption and evildoers grifting off those most vulnerable.  I now know this intentional corruption within the American “social safety net” is intentional, broken by design and working exactly as intended, which is to say, not at all for the bottom half of the economic ladder in America.  Should your life fall inexplicably apart due to sudden homelessness, a health catastrophe, disability, unemployment or domestic violence - there is NO “social safety net” in America there to help you.  None whatsoever. 

 What does exist, however, is a giant government grant grift gamed by all the fully corrupt nonprofits and HOAs who have never seen a social ill they didn’t prop themselves up around and claim to be serving vulnerable people; while instead,  lining their own pockets with government cash. 

It took me two long months to realize this much: the system is designed to INTENTIONALLY fail you when catastrophe strikes your life because the very foundation of capitalism relies on your ongoing LABOR contribution through slave wages and your never needing benefits like EBT, Lifeline, Medicaid, unemployment pay etc The day you can no longer contribute to the capitalist machine, is the day that machine via “the social safety net system” attempts to eat you alive - intentionally and by design.     

I edited this Memoir way down in the interest of time and due to the average  person’s attention span.  Perhaps the larger work - if it is ever published as a full length Memoir - will give credit to literally everyone who made me laugh, made me cry, inspired me, saved my sanity and literally saved my life.  You all deserve it.  Each and every one of you.  

I also intentionally wrote this “abbreviated Memoir” as a sort of long letter to my fellow Americans - hoping that such an approach - something written more intimately between us - like a secret correspondence and bond between friends - will jar your attention and cause you to not look away…and to keep reading…For if I had to live it in order to tell it, I would hope the very least you might do is bear witness to it all with me.   For I need you now more than I ever have - to help me save America - and so many of our other American friends still languishing in these broken systems.    

I often say that I did not come this far to only come this far.  I now must GIVE IT ALL TO YOU and beg you to care.  To act. To DO SOMETHING in response.   For America is broken by design, a raging dumpster fire of dysfunction & overt corruption causing unmet basic human needs to be ignored and people are literally dying on the daily as a result.  The whole damn system is guilty as hell.

You are my only hope, folks. You are all I have left.  And that hope largely rests with the people of Reddit and Twitter who lifted me up when I couldn’t reach and who gave me faith because you believed...  For America’s beautifully kind people have always been her greatest strength and her most formidable asset.  Your sense of moral outrage in the face of grave injustice is the only thing that can and will save this Country now.  

I realize that taking up the mantle of “I will help” isn’t for everyone.  In fact, for far too many Americans, it seems some are all too content to watch this slow-motion train wreck Country of ours go full-tilt off the rails - as if it is some form of FICTIONAL entertainment for your amusement. It is not.  THIS IS AS REAL AS IT GETS, America.  We need to become the hero we’ve all been waiting for and step fearlessly into the future demanding change and urgent action. NOW.   

I implore you, America: Please - DO NOT BE LIKE I WAS.  Don’t wait until some horrible tragedy happens TO YOU and you feel the full weight of the impossible trap that keeps you lost in that traumatic dire circumstance before deciding that such a thing should NEVER HAPPEN to anyone else in America ever.  For justice will not be served until those unaffected by injustice in America are as outraged as those who are.  Be affected, America.  Be outraged, friends.  And channel that outrage into something more meaningful than a retweet or an upvote on Reddit.  Join me.  Please: Help me.  You got me this far.  I am begging you to now get in the REAL FIGHT WITH ME and do the hard work of changing America back to a Country that works for ALL OF US - not just the 1% made up of our lying leaders of the kleptocracy that has taken hold in America. today. 

         

PRELUDE:

Heartbreak & Hard Times at a COVID Homeless Hotel

Punching, screaming, crying, sweating, heart pounding, I am pleading for anyone to medically assist my father. I'm screaming for him not to die. I am screaming that I cannot and will not be able to live without him.  I am howling, rabidly and painfully in an effort to get anyone’s attention. I stand alone in a negligently abandoned ICU as no one comes to help. My father has coded and no one, not one medical person in the Hospital responds to my futile cries for help as my father fails to breathe. To live.  Another 47 minutes go by before someone deems it “time” to intervene.  By then I know it is too late and I exit the hospital running, screaming, crying, sobbing, shouting, spitting, stress-vomiting and furious with rage.  These same screams do not leave my lungs for well over a year on a nightly basis as I relive this same horror of what happened to my father the night of his entirely preventable death in that awful ICU ward.  I internally blame myself and wonder why, despite being legally and medically trained, I was so ineffectual in securing help for him when it was most needed.  

Later, months later in 2019, I am  diagnosed with “traumatic grief” - whatever that means.  For what grief of a person who was so well loved is not traumatic? The experts tell me “traumatic grief” is when you have entire blocks of time “missing” from your memories surrounding the event.  And I do.  He died in July 2018. And I have no memory of the Holidays that year.  I have no memories of anything at all until I slowly came up for stagnant air sometime in June of 2019. 

And in July 2019 my medical health & emotional well-being were under attack by a lunatic stalker landlord & the black mold in his slum dump rental I was forced to flee from…

But this nightmare of my father dying and my sobbing, it still recurs at times.  And this night when it happens, I am jolted awake by the sound of my own screams, reverberating off the metal four (4) walls of my car. It is late April 2020. I’m so cold my teeth shattering together in unison with my screams awaken me with a traumatic shock. It’s dank, damp and cramped sleeping in the back seat of my sedan.  But that’s how it is when you’re sleeping rough in your car (and have literally no idea how to do so PROPERLY or SAFELY); you will awaken every day hurting, tired, cold and damp. Moving from semi-consciousness to mostly awake, I realize (again - for the thousandth time) that it isn’t all just a bad dream.  I am actually now living this nightmare: homeless in a car without a dime to my name and without my beloved father by my side.  During a pandemic. During lockdown - when no Agencies are open or helping people like me.  

I struggle to manage to take my first morning pee.  Because that’s a true legitimate and urgent issue in FEMALE car living.  You essentially have to find a public restroom (most are closed right now due to the Pandemic) or you pee sitting on the running board of your car with (or without) a styrofoam cup to catch it.  I then drive to the nearby dumpster and toss away my urine bomb as I begin my day.  

Falling from my former relative affluence of 50 years into sudden destitute dire straits living in a car was legitimately very disorienting.  You are handed this new life you did not ask for and have no idea how to navigate but nevertheless - you must muster the will to survive - somehow. The death of your former life as a person with a safe home filled with love and laughter is a deeply traumatic loss. This is because this profound loss literally changes every single thing in your World going forward. The way you eat changes - if you eat at all.  Your friend circle changes - or disappears entirely. Your financial situation is suddenly frantic and desperate - on the daily.  You spend your days wondering how you can possibly survive the next minute, hour, day or week.  Your family life changes - or disappears entirely. Losing both friends and family at such a critically vulnerable juncture is a function of the abuse and further trauma “the homeless outreach system” heaps onto you. Another indignity you must endure.  Your ability to obtain and sustain any type of inner calm is met with the body’s own “fight or flight” instinct that KNOWS when you are in danger and not safe; so you remain BIOLOGICALLY permanently housed in hypervigilance while homeless. That, too, takes a cumulative toll.  And all of this negatively impacts your self-worth, your sense of self and who you are, your confidence and how you view your place in this World.  Your daily rhythms change. The way you breathe changes - always unconsciously holding your breath waiting for the other shoe to drop - awaiting the impending next new hardship to be heaped upon you or the next threat to your safety to occur.  Your physical body, too, becomes unhealthy as cumulative stress and trauma exact their daily toll.  And any self-care or self-nurturing habits you might have had in your prior past life disappear entirely when all you can focus on is trying to stay alive.  Your sense of security, your sense of humor, your sense of identity and your very sense of self all become necessary casualties in the traumatic seismic shift that being suddenly unhoused causes. 

Every. Single Thing. Changes. 

So please - never ask why some of your unhoused neighbors are mentally unwell or do drugs to try and escape - even momentarily - the brutal, dehumanizing and deeply traumatic reality that being without your former home and family causes.  Never judge a person for their current circumstance in this life for it does not define who they truly are - underneath all the trauma the streets dump upon us. For this thing called life is often hard and it can turn on a dime for any of us at any given moment. So please, truly listen when a struggling person tells you what would be most helpful to them.  Don’t MAKE THAT DECISION FOR THEM - ask them directly what will most help them.  Assuming you know best for them strips them of their agency and their autonomy and their dignity as a human being.  You are under no obligation to help them, obviously.  But if you genuinely want to help - never presume that you know what is best for them as that is infantilizing and condescending, at best.   Because that thing you do for them that they ask of you?  That may be the very thing that prevents them from being swallowed up entirely by the broken homeless system in America. The “system” that only causes the fatal cycle of chronic homelessness, ongoing housing instability and the exploitation by others without your good intentions for that broken person.  The key to a stable future is a stable home and the key to a stable home is help from OUTSIDE the system that is charged by our government with helping the homeless but which, by design, only perpetuates homelessness for profit off of poor people’s lives. So please always be kind and show tender mercies towards those truly struggling in this life.  Because it is we as humans, with our infinite capacity to love, that give meaning to an otherwise indifferent Universe.  And because I can promise you that if the day ever comes when your life hits the bricks and your back hits the wall and the blood hits your tongue, you will hope and pray someone INFORMED ON THE TOPIC is there to help you. 

Allow me to inform you on this topic, my friends….For three years, I have wished I could tell you what I’m about to tell you.  And now I can….