Misplaced optimism

I’ve spent today thinking about what happened a year ago.

A few days earlier you became sluggish and apprehensive about going out. The problem was that that behaviour was pretty normal thanks to fuckwits letting off fireworks unlicensed every five minutes around here.

The first day back to work it was obvious, because you walked like a dog twice your age.

I booked you into the vets ASAP. You got an appointment on Wednesday the 30th.

That’s a year ago today.

I don’t know what went wrong or when. All I know that this is the day when it should have turned around. This is the day I’ll keep going back to and trying to figure out how between now and November 8th I could make you live and enjoy a happy life.

I took you to the vets, expecting some diagnosis involving lupus or something, and after an ultrasound we found a UTI.

The vet said you were on the way out – to the point it was literally pay up or put you down.

You’re my kid. I’m broke. My parents thankfully paid up, because fuck letting you die.

I spent the day in trauma. There was no guarantee you’d survive the operation. I didn’t pick you up until near 7pm (if I get that right).

And that’s the worst.

I picked you up thinking “we won. My baby is ok.”

I did everything when it came to not overexercising you for ten days – you died on day nine.

The moment I left you for surgery I was so worried I’d lose you.

The moment I picked you up I was all about how we beat this shit and everything would be great from now on.

This day – and this week – is all about how shit optimism is.

We should have beaten this, but something went wrong. Ultimately I was responsible for your life, do ultimately I’m responsible for what went wrong.

I don’t know what it was, I just know it was me and that this day is the moment I’ll return to because it’s the point between first finding out what you were dealing with and you dying as a result of it – and whatever it was that took you, I was and always will be responsible.

I love you always. I’ll miss you always.

I’ll always want to relive our lives together, no matter what.

I’ll forever want to be with you ❤️

Celebrating your birthday without you

This is a weird day.

That seems an understatement. It would be a weird day even without living through a pandemic.

For the obvious, this is the first birthday I’m not with you – both as in the first birthday you aren’t here alive next to me, but also the first birthday I’m not physically next to you at all because the pandemic means I’m not allowed to be by your grave.

It’s also your 9th birthday, and you should be around half way through your life if things didn’t go fucking arse up, so it’s a birthday we should be celebrating together. I should be taking you on a walk and buying you presents right now.

But it’s also weird because, well, it’s a mix of emotions.

Your memorial day – which is in 2 weeks, which is fucking weird because we celebrated your last birthday exactly 2 weeks before you died – is inevitably going to involve reliving the moments around watching you die in front of me.

Our anniversary of meeting is inevitably going to involve remembering everything about us spending our life together.

But your birthday…. is weird.

I’m trying to celebrate your life whilst unable to be with you for the first time ever, whilst trying to cope with the fact that you died exactly 2 weeks later.

I don’t know how to deal with that.

I spent today walking the first mountain you did – the mountain you went “I’m all about being a mountain goat”, which led you to you enjoying every walk we ever did afterwards. Seriously, you happily tackled the Arete of Tryfan like it was nothing, because you loved scrambling so much.

I’ve been told that when people think of me they think of you. That’s pure gold. That speaks so much about who you were and how much you defined my life forever and touched the lives of everyone you met.

You had friends I never met, during the summer months when someone would look after you whilst I worked the festival circuit. People I’ve never met before know me because they met and fell in love with you.

You really were the littlest hobo.

If someone asked 5 year old me what I’d want from a relationship with a dog, the answer would have looked exactly like you – and that’s not down to some self-fulfilling prophecy. You just were you from the start – the exact mix of the littlest hobo, Lassie and Doggit. You were that amazing spirit the day you were born.

And here’s the thing:

I enjoyed enjoying things with you.

I can’t think of any better lasting testament to anyone than “I enjoyed enjoying things with you.”

I don’t think there’s a better eulogy or epitaph.

I think it’s the most noble goal of life.

I enjoyed enjoying things with you. I honestly hope that that is what people think of me, because “enjoying enjoying things with someone” is literally all we have.

I enjoyed enjoying things with you. Sharing your enjoyment of life gave life meaning.

Homeless is homeless. No divide, no conquer.

If you’ve never been homeless – whether street homeless or hidden homeless or any other homeless lifestyles – you definitely don’t get the shame.

You don’t get why people who have been homeless in any capacity are disinclined to publicise the fact they were homeless.

Chances are you probably know someone who was at some point homeless, but you don’t know that about them.

Even more insidious, amongst the homeless community, there’s a “survivor’s guilt” thing.

People who have been legitimately homeless wrongly compare their existence against what they are told “real homelessness” looks like by people who honestly don’t care about the distinction – they’re just trying to stop homeless voices from being confident to express themselves.

I’ve been homeless at every level – from street homeless to hidden homeless (for those who don’t know, it’s a scale from literally sleeping on the street to sleeping on a couch).

I know what homelessness looks like at every level, and it looks like Dante’s Inferno.

So fuck everyone who tries to divide homeless voices – who tries to pretend that somebody’s homeless experience isn’t legitimate because you can find someone with a worse homeless experience.

That’s not how homelessness is solved.

It’s how it’s perpetuated.

Homelessness is portrayed as something to be ashamed of.

Even if you make it out, you are made to feel like the main reason you succeeded was because the society you live in is just, despite it making you homeless in the first place.

At no point are you welcome to question the socio-economic and political regime you live in.

If you do, you’re an ingrate.

“You’re doing ok, aren’t you? Why wouldn’t you look at this and agree that others who didn’t make it here are just lazy?”

I’m not kidding.

The entire world around, this is how we deal with homeless issues.

Every

Fucking

Country

It’s no surprise so few of us ever acknowledge our homelessness.

I can’t demand anybody does.

But I know that many of my friends have experienced homelessness in some degree, and I ask…. I’m pleading you to talk openly about it.

Destroy the stigma, destroy the myths.

Don’t let them divide us.

We’re kin.

You’re no less homeless if you slept on a couch.

You’re only less homeless if you pretend your experience can justify homelessness.

That’s literally it.

We’re kin.

Everything you’ve experienced IS trauma – take that from someone who’s experienced every form of homelessness. EVERY POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE OF HOMELESSNESS YOU COULD HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED IS TRAUMA.

No “ifs”, no “buts”.

You’re kin.

You’re a homeless voice.

Don’t be ashamed.

Don’t ever think you’ll be shamed by your kin.

Homeless rights only exist when we fight for them.

They only exist when we fight for them together.

#HomelessIsHomeless

No divide.

No conquer.

You’re my kin.

End of.

#NoOneLeftOut

Turning grief back into love

This ends this weekend.

My alcoholism both corrupted the life with the person I loved and lost, and has defined my existence after that loss. I can’t think of not being an alcoholic and bettering MH existence because the person I love won’t get to enjoy that reality.

Hence my alcoholism has taken on a new layer of self-hatred – how dare I be anything that I couldn’t give the one I love who is no longer here?

But that’s not what we want our legacy to mean – a whole host of people who don’t improve life because they didn’t make utopia a thing when we were alive, and so fuck it let’s all get pissed and watch the world burn.

I cannot bring her back by not being an alcoholic. I can’t make our life together not involve me being an alcoholic. But that doesn’t mean I can’t improve life in her name – which is the legacy we all want.

Well all die someday, but we want our lives to mean that something better gets realised.

I’ve spent so long in grief, and it will be with me forever – but I’ve spent too long in the self-destructive phase of grief.

As I’ve said before, grief isn’t a process. Love is the process of which grief is an inevitable part.

I loved the person I’ve lost when they were alive and after. I owe it to them to be better. That’s a sacrifice I have to make for them.

And that cuts to the heart: being a better person involves sacrifice. It isn’t me being better and reaping some reward that they should have. It’s me sacrificing my life in order to be better. The alternative is me being an even worse person.

So I’ve loved and lost, both imperfectly. And I’m grieving the one I love. And I hate myself for not saving them and for not giving them the utopia they deserve.

But now I have to recognise that fighting for a better world, even after they are gone, involves sacrificing part of myself and taking onboard everything they ever taught me.

Grief is a part of the process of love. At its most difficult points it becomes a method of self-destruction – and everyone who encounters grief (so…. everyone) does this to some extent. But what’s important is turning grief back into love – it’s sacrificing part of you to be a better person and make a better world.

It’s what you did when they were alive, and it’s what you do for them still even after they’re gone.

Grief is a part of love. Remember this above all else. You can’t grieve without first loving, and you’ll always love.

A plan

I wrote something on Facebook last week about an idea that I want to do, but probably won’t because I’m shit at organising, but I REALLY want to do, involving walking the length of the uk and sleeping rough to highlight homeless issues and campaign to end homelessness.

It’s more involved than just that. The idea was to get in touch with local homeless communities and outreach groups, to meet with them and find out from each local community what issues matter to them, to spotlight their voices, to get in touch with both local and national media, and to basically make homeless issues such an endemic part of the national discourse that nobody can watch the news without hearing about it – and more, hearing about it from the voices of homeless people, rather than the voices of non-homeless people (which is basically what happens now).

The walk involves some detours – an important one being the grave of my girl, who lived through some of my homeless experiences with me and without whom I wouldn’t have survived those experiences.

Yeah, it was a throw away post about something I wish I could do.

The post blew up – as did another post decrying the “all lives matter” trolls for dismantling their own argument by ignoring homeless lives and ridiculing them and being guilty of criminal negligence in respect to homeless people (people of colour are WAY over-represented in the homeless community compared to whites people – basically, if you’re a person of colour you’re far more likely to end up homeless than a white-British person).

People started pitching ideas and volunteering to get involved, from walking stretches with me to helping with organising it and sorting out the media and marketing side.

And so an off-hand post about what I’d love to do, but probably won’t because I’m pretty shit, has turned into an actual THING.

By that, I mean, this might actually happen. Which is terrifying.

I now have people offering their help – including holding my feet to the fire. Which means I’m now ACCOUNTABLE. That shit scares me 🤣

So now it looks like this is a THING. It looks like I’m going to have to do something I really want to do to highlight homeless issues and get local groups and communities more interconnected, and deal with everything that entails.

So yeah. It’s a thing now. I don’t know how it will work or happen. I just know that it will because lots of people want me to do it.

I should stop getting drunk and posting fantasies of who I wish I could be on Facebook.

So…. Brexit. Several months on.

So….. Brexit.
The Rick-roll of social media posts 🤣

There’s a load of folk on the left pushing “Lexit”, whilst pretending that the overwhelming vote wasn’t racist and xenophobic, who’ve utterly failed to fulfill their promise to make it the socialist utopian dream they imagined instead of just ending up accidentally pushing through a right wing agenda that they can’t control – but which they assure us that SOME DAY IN THE FUTURE they will.

Then there’s a load of folk on the left pushing against an isolationist policy, but still fighting for a stricter immigration policy and throwing travellers and transients and immigrants and homeless people under the bus because they don’t want to actually fight for the human rights of those communities that the EU continually curtails and denies, because they actually just mean “free movement for rich people, and poor people we can exploit to pick our fruit.”

Am I getting it?
Because it certainly looks like I’m getting it.

I spent months on the streets of Europe only to be denied welfare or access to work.

Nobody on the left – pro- or anti EU – gave a shit.
I’ve heard all sorts of excuses to deny my human right to move somewhere else and live there from people across the “left spectrum”.

At least the right wingers were consistent and explicitly honest in their hatred of me.

I’m a remainer, but I’m just as angry at the rhetoric and beliefs and denial of the humanity of my kin from Remainers as I am when it comes to the lexit brigade.

It’s like watching the US civil war in history class, and realising with great fucking depression that nobody – not even the unionist north – actually cared about African Americans as people. They just cared about the economic impact of slavery. Not the human cost.

History is unfortunately all about that.

The people who are really and truly affected about issues of human rights don’t count.
What counts is whether or not our existence and exploitation is something the ruling elite and the middle class might be adversely affected by.

The answer isn’t to close the borders – which the Lexiteers have idiotically allowed to happen.
Nor is it to pretend this “social mobility determined by wealth and class alone, and let’s keep exploiting poor people to do the jobs we don’t want” mentality should continue – which most Remainers idiotically demand.

I have no sympathy for either side, even though I’m a remainer, because nobody on either side ever expressed any human interest in the plight of travelers/ transient or homeless folk – and whenever I asked BOTH SIDES stonewalled me 🤬

The history of youtube in 4 acts:

Oh great, anybody can upload a video.
Here’s lots of people talking about how their day has been.

Oh wow, lots of people have suddenly realised they can upload videos discussing topics the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover.

Oooh, we need ad revenue. Better push videos that agree with or don’t insult our conservative sponsors.
Let’s happily boost conservative voices who just parrot the now mainstream politics.

Oh, wait, now the entire site is pushing mainstream media content, and anybody who parrots mainstream politics and media, and now they’ve just started to go full-on “pay for premium shit because we’re all about being a single prime cable tv service now.”

What’s that? You’re a new channel just wanting to vlog and have access to an audience to talk about things outside the mainstream like the good old days which we told everyone would last forever on our platform?
FUCK YOU 🖕

Community social media groups and extremism

Community social media groups have outlived their usefulness.

That’s a bold statement to make, but let me clarify.

They are largely run by admins who:
Pretend what they choose is and isn’t “political” isn’t actually a political choice;
Have no knowledge or training in the nuanced ways that extremists use community social media groups, and flat out refuse to get any training;
Refuse to acknowledge the fact that their communities already have certain biases, and that by refusing to allow them to be challenged, they are only contributing to the problem;
And all too often, consistently try to silence people with legitimate concerns about the community whilst allowing bigots to run rings around them.

Just recently we’ve seen how Reddit and the My Little Pony fandom have had to acknowledge extremism in their midsts and deal with it properly, after years of denying it was ever a problem.

But it always was a problem, and thankfully those groups are beginning to think about acknowledging that fact and do something about it.

Community social media groups are a hotbed for hatred masquerading as “just how things are”, or as “apolitical” when they are already very political.

They get to choose what is and isn’t “political” based solely on the way-too subjective (and mostly uninformed) opinions of the admins – who, again are not trained in the nuanced ways extremists use social media bubbles and who refuse to ever be educated in that respect.

I don’t have any solution to this, but I’m calling it out because they thrive on people not recognising or accepting this fact or challenging them on it.

Community social media groups have a MASSIVE problem with bigotry, and their admins don’t want to do anything about it, and the social media companies are happy to keep it that way.

Reforming the economy and society. Why I want it despite the fact I won’t benefit.

Why do I want a more equitable society and economy, that involves the abolition of student loans and thus debt; the forgiveness of debts – including government debts – accrued through mental health issues (yeah, that’s a thing, I’m afraid. I’ll happily give details to anyone interested); the promotion of apprenticeships to those over 20-30; the promotion of undergraduate university courses to those over 20; a more mental health and sociological approach to how debt accrues and finding a way to combat it that doesn’t involve punishing those stuck with it; and WAY more besides?

Is it because I lived – and still live – through those experiences?

Hell yes. I doubt anyone who hasn’t properly understands any of this.

Is it because I want my life to be all rosy now?

No.

Sorry.

Life has already taken from me my best years and everything after last November means little to me personally. You can’t give back what I lost then. What we lost them.

I’m pretty much done.

I’ll keep going, because fuck doing life’s inevitable dirty work for it.

But my point is, I won’t gain anything meaningful. That’s already passed.

I just don’t want others to go through that shit, and I know that restructuring our economy and society and political system is going to make things better for the generations to come and the younger generation who are alive now.

I don’t want anyone else to go through what my friends have experienced and what I’ve experienced.

I’ll still have to pay for what I’ve gone through.

Cool.

You’ve literally taken my heart, I don’t care what else you take.

Just don’t do it to everyone else.

So much wasted potential because you couldn’t be bothered to understand humanity, let alone life as a whole.

We’ve normalised sociopathy to the point that it’s not a disorder we have to work with productively, but a FOUNDATIONAL FEATURE of our existence.

I want these reforms not because I’ll ever get to profit from them – rest assured, I won’t even if they happen tomorrow – but so that our children and future generations don’t have to go through all this shit over and over again.

A Homeless take on “All Lives Matter”

You know what’s ironic about “all lives matter”?

It’s that in the homeless community, we’ve been fighting for that as a sincere mantra.

We see homeless folks who are white, black, asian, gay, trans, disabled, and everything – and to us “ALL THEIR LIVES MATTER”.

We are ALL kin, no matter our background, because we watch you all happily kill us or pretend we don’t matter on a daily basis.

But we REALLY mean “all lives matter”, because we SEE “all lives”, and we see how you treat “all lives” once we fall below some arbitrary economic success line that allows you all to forget about us and pretend we deserve the hell we experience and the police abuse we live through.

Nobody I’ve seen using the slogan “all lives matter” actually cares about homeless lives.

So we know you aren’t on our side.

You just want to undermine human rights activists.

You’re the same people who tell me that homeless people bring homelessness onto themselves, like we’re somehow inbuilt with a “homelessness gene”.

You don’t care about all lives.

You care only about your own.

But we LIVE with all lives.

To us, all lives really do matter.

We are family beyond even the most simplistic terms you can’t even understand. Because all of you hate us – or even worse, pity us.

But more than that, we share an experience that nobody ever should, *AND WE RECOGNISE THE FACT THAT NOBIDY SHOULD EVER EXPERIENCE THIS.*

I can meet a homeless person from any ethnicity, gender, orientation, age and anything else, and we can recognise in each other something that connects us that you never will.

Something that makes us FAMILY.

I don’t frivolously call other homeless people my kin.

We share an experience beyond what you have, and beyond what we want anyone to have.

#BlackLivesMatter

#TransLivesMatter

#TravellerLivesMatter

#DisabledLivesMatter

You get it?

When I say “all lives matter”, I fucking mean it – which is why I don’t say it in response to people trying to get everyone to acknowledge the fact that their lives don’t matter in the eyes of society.

Weirdly, the only people I see responding to “black lives matter” with “all lives matter” don’t ever care about homeless lives – and mostly they spout anti-homeless hatred.

Yeah, I’m SOOOO sure you care about “all lives” – so much that you hate literally all lives that don’t fit your narrow idea of “worthy lives” 🤦‍♂️🖕

We don’t use “all lives matter” as a mantra, though.

We use #NoOneLeftOut, because it perfectly encapsulates what “all lives matter” pretends to, whilst actually defining humanity as one and ensuring we all have the same basic rights that we define perfectly: NO ONE LEFT OUT.

Everyone gets shelter and basic needs. No exceptions.

But there’s a caveat: we won’t ever respond to “black lives matter” with “No one left out”, because we aren’t a white supremacist group trying to undermine a valid human rights cause.

It’s depressing that I have to make that clear:

WE CANNOT HAVE HOMELESS RIGHTS WITHOUT DISMANTLING RACISM.

If anybody does respond to “black lives matter” with “no one left out”, they are 100% trying to co-opt a human rights issue in order to undermine another human rights issue, and they are by definition a worthless shit stain in deserve of a shovel-based facial reconstruction surgery.

All lives matter to us, because we actually see all lives when your society gives up on them.

Our family consists of your rejects.

Our family consists of people you are determined to see die through your ideology.

So don’t pretend to me that you’re an egalitarian by saying “all lives matter”, whilst doing everything you can to ensure people are denied basic humanity 🤬🖕