Under Pressure. We've all been there, at some level. Classic song created when Queen and David Bowie worked together.
Why have I been homeless, in some form, for about 15 of the last 23 years? At first it was a few months, while I was learning to be a taxi driver. I got myself out of it when I had some good weeks in the taxi.
In 2001, about three weeks after the attacks of 9/11, my bank account was shut down, for no apparent reason. I went into the bank to deposit some money, thinkng I was about $4 overdrawn. I'd had the account at that bank for about 12 or 13 years at the time. I walked into the branch at Bolsa and Heil in Huntington Beach, and they wouldn't accept my deposit. Ultimately, the manager came out, and gave me a check for $18, and said I could no longer have an account at that bank. She seemed physically afraid of me, like someone had told her something bad about me. It was right after 9/11, and people were still pretty freaked out, in general. But I'd been in there dozens of times, there were never any issues. No reason for shutting down my account was given. I walked out of the bank confused.
Similar things have been going on, on a regular basis, for 20 1/2 years now. I have been under tremendous pressure, from some still unknown source, for over 20 years. I've been turned down for jobs I should have easily qualified for. When I tried some different small business ideas, I've had a guy in a suit (different guys, 3 or 4 different times) walk up and tell me that I was NOT going to be able to get that business idea going. That's a part of why I kept driving a taxi in 2003-2007, even though the industry was dying, even before Uber and Lyft came along.
I've had hundreds of encounters with uniformed law officers from 2002-2008, but only got one minor traffic ticket. I've had a lot of people, who appeared to be undercover officer or agents o fsome sort, ask me typical law enforcement type questions. That has happened hundreds of times. It was obvious that it wasn't local SoCal law enforcement calling the shots, but a much higher level of power, somewhere else, getting police to apply pressure.
In 2008, while panhandling in and obscure place in south Orange County, CA, an officer with over 20 years experience walked up to me on the off ramp. "Who are you?" he asked. "I've never seen them come down on anyone the way they're coming down on you." My reply was, "So there IS a THEM." He just nodded. We talked for a few minutes. No ticket, he just told me to leave the offramp that day. He walked off, and I grabbed my bags and walked to a bus stop. When I walked by where his patrol car had been parked, there was a$5 bill in the gutter. Police, as a rule, don't give money to panhandlers. Neither of us understood what was going on. But he confirmed something weird was happening in my life.
This type of intense, indirect pressure was used to force me out of Southern California, finally in 2008. My family flew me to North Carolina, where my parents and sister's family were living then. We were from Ohio, and moved west as my sister and I grew up, eventually living in San Jose, California when I moved out on my own. I had no connection to North Carolina, other than my family had moved there after I left their house. I moved into the spare bedroom of my parents' tiny apartment in the small town of Kernersville, NC.
I went into a near suicidal depression as soon as I got there. I couldn't get hired for even a simple cashier or menail job. I started blogging a couple of weeks later, and interacting with my old BMX freestyle friends online really helped me during that time. I worked one year as a taxi driver in Winston-Salem, living in my taxi the whole time. I quit when my dad was dying, after a stroke in 2012.
I was financially stuck in NC for about ten years. I finally escaped, landing in Richmond, Virginia in late 2018. A friend from California helped me get back to California in 2019, hoping I could help his new online business with my blogging and social media skills. That work didn't pan out, and I left and headed back out on the streets of SoCal. I've been scraping by with my Sharpie art, and then getting EBT when Covid hit.
A couple of posible reasons all this happened have come up. But no one has confirmed those to me directly, they're just rumors, as far as I'm concerned. Those don't really matter. The point is, this pressure is still happening, though not to the overt level it once was. But, I have no work history now, since I couldn't find work for so many years. I literally have nothing to put on a resume', to even try to get a job, except taxi driving 10-20 years ago, at companies that are now out of business. There is no job I could get now that would pay enough to simply rent a place to live here (or anywhere). My Sharpie art has kept my alive for six years, but is not enough to make a decent living at this point.
Somebody with some high level of political or social power, or some group, wanted me to live my life in a completely different way than I was living it. I don't know who, or what they really wanted me to do. This power structure, whomever it is, seems to be centered on the East Coast. It appears they thought I'd get to North Carolina, and then think, "Oh, my whole life has been shit, I need ot go to college." Instead, college didn't enter my mind. After not being able to make a decent living from 2001-2008, going into debt for a degree I didn't want in the first place was not even an option. Not going to college, and getting saddled with a ton of debt, is one of the smartest decisions I ever made. College is great for lots of people, but I always wanted to start my own business, and I don't need a degree to hire myself. Nothing I was interested in was degree dependent. Coming out of high school, I was thinking of going to college to become a wildlife biologist, but that was more of a default plan. I didn't have anywhere near enough money to go to college, and when BMX took off for me, college was out the window.
For over 20 years now, simply surviving was the best I could manage. No level of material or financial success was ever going to happen, that became apparent by late 2003 or 2004. We live in a world where things like this happen. A powerful group of people, can target someone for reasons only they know, and use their influence to destroy that person's life, if the person doesn't conform to their wishes. There's a ridiculous amount of douchebaggery going on in this world, particularly back East.
I'm smart, and hard working. But now my only hope of making a decent living again is creating my own job, my own small business, around my writing, artwork, and online skills. So that's what I continue to keep working towards, no matter what happens.
Its a miracle I'm still alive, actually several small miracles. I should not have survived the last 20 years, including a serious suicide attempt in 2015, in North Carolina. Coming back from that, I devited myself to doing my own creative work. At this point, it's all or nothing. Either I make a living doing my own creative work, or a die as a homeless guy doing my own creative work. I've lost way too much of my life dealing with other people's bullshit.
I'll keep trying to live my own life, and create a legitimate business around my art and writing, as long as I live. I'll never know all of my own story, that's how weird things have been. I don't care. I'm just trying to move on now, and forge a good life in today's weird, fast changing world. "Let's go create some shit!" is my personal motto now. That's what I do every day. I wake up on the streets, and then create something. A blog post. A drawing. A funny meme. A collection of photos online. Something. I may be fat and have no bike these days, but I'm still a BMXer at heart. Get knocked down, cuss a little, get back up, and keep trying. That's what BMX taught me.
Onward.
So now you can look at my memes, my Sharpie drawings online, my 1,500+ blog posts, and decide if I'm dellusional, or maybe there is actually some shady stuff going on in this world. Your call.
Blogger's note- 6/21/2022- According to my analytics, only two people have looked at this post. Yet I wound up getting questioned by a psychologist at McDonald's yesterday, for two hours or so. After commenting to people nearby about subjects I might respond to, he eventually walked up and commented on the Sharpie drawing I was working on. Nice enough guy, but just wanted to know all kinds of personal stuff about me. This happened in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles, where I live. Even crazier, he claimed to have gone to the same, not very well known university as my sister, brother-in-law, and niece. A college 2,479 miles away. Wow, now there's an amazing coincidence. It's a weird world. Like I said above, a lot of weird shit happens in my life.
Also, just ot clarify, uniformed police have had almost no verbal contact with me since I left California in November 2008. But hundreds of people have come into my life and asked that types of questions police and other forms of law enforcement, usually ask, from asking about potential criminal activity, to just wanting to know my thoughts on a specific subject. I'm talking about conversations that seem intentionally planned and directed, not just random conversations with people I meet. I probably had 15,000 or so conversations as a taxi driver, a tiny fraction of those, are the ones I'm talking about, as well as many since then. OK, I've said my piece about this, I'll try to move on with my life...
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