… Yeah…

Ironically, the last job I had… before becoming homeless…

Was the Co-Lead of the Data Team… for Mary’s Place, the largest non profit network of shelters and other programs … assisting the homeless… in and near Seattle.

About 24hrs after the assault that crippled me, I dragged myself into the main office… for a sandwich.

They handed me my papers on the spot.

I told the HR guy to go fuck himself, as he was crying.

… Fuck Seattle, at this point.

They are almost certainly still using my databases, my online, public facing intake forms, my process flows and documentation…

Anyway, I was literally the expert on exactly how fucked I was, as a single white cis male, in terms of getting housing or shelter assistance in Seattle.

We shared at least shelter capacity and eligibility info with almost every other shelter in or near Seattle… and almost all of them prioritize families, minorities and/or female domestic abuse victims.

Made more sense to head pretty far east to lower CoL areas and stay in roach motels than to drag my crippled ass around trying to find a working path to housing, given how often I was being mugged, assaulted, held hostage by a psychotic fentanyl addict for a week at one point, missed being shot in a drive by by about 100 feet at one point…

Anyway, all our the widely publicized PIT headcounts of homeless people in any given city or nationwide… basically need to be multiplied by about 4 or 5. So that’d be about 3 to 4 million, not the almost 800k of the last nationwide PIT count.

If you compare the demographics of living situations people are in who requested our help… to the demographics of who actually gets counted by those PIT count methodologies…

Yeah, you need to multiply the PIT count by roughly 4 or 5 to make it actually representative of all the people who are requesting help, but are not counted by the PIT.

… And that will easily balloon up to 10, 20+ million … fuck, probably within a year from right now given how utterly fucked the economy is about to become, and how many governement assistsnce programs are getting cut.

…

But uh, back to things I can now just laugh at…

yeah, Boeing is fucked. They were fucked before the tariffs, and now they are turbofucked, and all the right wing anti union asshats that work for them will just retreat further into delusion and a sense of enraged, denied entitlement as they all get exactly what their AM talk show radio hosts have told them they want for 30+ years.

… and of course who can forget about the liberal tinged, smug, self serving, fake ass corpo tech shitheels who all don’t realize they’re basically dressed down Patrick Batemans because they go to Pride marches… yeah, a whole lot of them are fucked as well as they get laid off, their 2nd and 3rd homes can’t generate AirBnB rents anymore…

Oh no, who could have forseen that working for giant tech megacorps that have explicitly stated they want to automate everything for 20 years… are now automating their own jobs, and that they are not actually special?

…

I dunno if I qualify as a rags to riches tale…

I got maybe halfway through that article before I had to stop.

… Too similar to what I went through, too … way too similar. Its not just that basically no one gives a fuck about it, its that almost everyone assumes the absolute worst about you, all the time, unless you ‘perform’ perfectly for them.

I was recently diagnosed with PTSD. I actually cannot handle reliving, or apparently even reading about those experiences.

They fill me with rage and terror.

Make me double check and make sure my knife is in the spot it ‘lives in’ in my motel room.

…

The teeth thing is real. Somehow I have been insanely lucky with baffling infection resitant teeth… I have never had a cavity in my entire life, despite literally being homeless for over a year.

But I’ve seen the immense agony of other homeless people with bad teeth. Seen people bite into a sandwich and 2 1/2 broken teeth come out in bits…

… Seen people with fucking gangrene, massively infected feet and other wounds…

… For a while I was able to trade my rudimentary first aid skills for respect, cigarettes and food, became kind of a defacto medic at some encampments and shelters I ended up at.

Seen people OD and die in front of me, stumbled upon the bodies in the back alleys, either OD’d or beaten or stabbed or shot to death.

… I can’t believe I survived it. I can’t make sense of why I did.

… Just a skinny, out of shape, Autistic tech dork, streets should have eaten me alive.

… At least I was able to eventually get connected to Physical Therapy, and … not a very good one, but at least at newbie Social Worker.

Solid Snake may wanna go over the basics of CQC… I wanna go back over the basics of CBT.

Physical Therapist has me in aquatherapy. Too many torn and otherwise fucked up ligaments in too many places, have to have the bouyancy and water resistsnce to do any useful stretches without extreme pain.

… sorry. rambling. yay trauma.