Sometimes you just have to suck it up and take what the world will allow you to have

 

I must confess that I don’t really understand why there are so many people on the street, like this woman:

 

                   

Part of me feels sympathy, but another part of me says people have choices, and those can be either good or bad choices. I know what it is like not to have a place to live, but my mindset has never been influenced by what can’t be done, but what can be done. Making enough money to live and to buy things (like my video collection, which fills a 10x10 storage unit) has always been something that is “second nature” to me, and as bad as things can be, there is always a way to move on from one catastrophe to the next.

There is always temp work, and I am not particularly conscious of the fact that I have a university degree, which isn’t the first thing 99.99 percent of people I encounter perceive anyways (I encountered a white woman in Seattle the other day walking down the sidewalk who looked at me and said “Oh what the hell, you can have it.” What was she talking about? The “country”? Some "Great Replacement" bullshit? Hell, she can “keep” it and keep making a mess of it as we see happening in the other Washington; I just “live” here). What is the point of feeling any mortification in taking any job available? Especially ones requiring the minimum of interaction with judgmental people.

Frankly, all you need to get off your fundament is a phone number and a mailing address  (a mail box will do)--and a work "ethic." For some people, laziness is a habit, like a drug. Even if you live on the street like this individual, it is easy to at least get something on your “resume” if you at least have those things. For temp work all you have to do is walk in the door; if you are a female, there are certain jobs that only you are "capable" of doing,  if it requires being more “nimble” with your fingers.

I’m sure people will say that this had a bad childhood, or something; but that didn’t stop me from just moving on with life. There are pages and pages of women-only organizations specifically designed to help people like her if she wanted the help.  There were very few people or organizations designed to help me; I had to help myself, although it “helped” that I more or less had a good work ethic so that I lasted a little longer in jobs than I might have, given my “loner” nature that often makes me frustrated with the trials and tribulations of dealing with the vagaries of other people. Thankfully I’ve “tolerated” other people long enough to be near retirement age.

Still, what is the problem with this individual? I was in the alley long enough to observe her temporarily rouse herself in order for me to ask her if she had any place to go; she mumbled something that I didn’t quite make out, but I assumed it was in the negative. In the part of the building I was working in I could observe her from a window directly overhead. She went back to sleep, then roused herself again to light up what from a distance appeared to look something like a cigarette with some roundish object attached to the end of it…

 

…and what she exhaled was chalky-white smoke. I am not “street-smart,” so I had no clue what she was indulging in. Later I did some Google investigating and finally found this image which appeared to suggest what she was ingesting:

 

According to the accompanying article, what she was smoking was meth. Later I observed an individual stop to talk with her. I took this shaky video of what he was “helping” her with—smoking more meth:

 

I suppose that is what it "takes" to make life "tolerable" for some people; me, maybe a good book will do. Sometime after that she left the alley, taking her belongings save her blanket and pillow, so I assumed she would be back. However it rained the next day and these became soaked and unusable, so I figured she just found another place to sleep. What does she and others like her do during the day? From what I can tell, they just “hang out” on the sidewalks. If they need something to eat, there are 27 food banks in Seattle, and those are “busy.”

I have to admit that things have changed dramatically in Seattle in the last decade or so. I don’t know if it is because of a flood of H-1B visa immigrants with different cultural values and interests (particularly South Asian), or the “Amazon effect,” or the "generational" thing in which the current demographic is less interested in "philosophical" musings or artistic "merit." But one thing for sure is that people quit spending their money downtown, and that is why the city has a shuttered look, at least on the ground level. But while the subsidized low-income apartment behind the office I work in appears to be have been closed (with a lot of old refrigerators and bed frames cluttering up the alley for a few days),  Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times tells us that while homelessness in Seattle is thus rising, everywhere one looks things are at least  rising “skyward”:

Up and down Union, across from Rainier Square, almost every storefront is shuttered, with tents and scattered pockets of drug activity filling some of the doorways. Even inside the Rainier Square complex, which on a recent day felt fancy, fresh and very well-guarded, most of the street front retail spaces are empty. PCC will open another hole when it gives up after two years downtown in January. But up above, it’s another atmosphere. Same city. Same block. Much different story.

On the top floor, three out of the four penthouse suites are rented, while the fourth is currently available. “Starting at $19,999” per month, the ad says. Starting? That’s $239,988 a year in rent — the price to gain entry to a three-bedroom with 12-foot ceilings in the tallest residential tower on the West Coast. If that’s too rarefied, a few floors down on level 55 you can get a two-bedroom for $15,000 a month.

But even if you have that kind of money, there is simply nowhere to go in downtown Seattle anymore. No book, record, video or computer software stores for over 15 years, just the tourist junk shops on the piers, and Starbucks and that ilk. All the theaters that showed second-run and foreign films are gone. There used to be a 24-hour Burger King next to a redeye bus stop; those are a distant memory. There used to be four McDonalds in downtown; now there is just one that only has walk-up service. Hell, there used to be an adult store that did most of its business in the wee hours of the night. 

The once grand Bon Marche is dead to the world; it was rebranded “Macys” and then shuttered for good in 2020, and most of its floors were rented out to Amazon—but only "temporarily" since the company began pulling out of Seattle permanently allegedly due to “crime concerns” but more likely because it is cheaper to "farm out" staff returning from remote working to other locations. 

Crime is frankly a bit overstated because there are few places to "rob" and what does happen is usually between "consenting" adults with problems to "work out"; the highest incidence of the crime actually  occurs elsewhere, mainly in Rainier Valley, population two-thirds black/Asian (principally Filipino, from a country that has its own problems with gang violence). The only "worthwhile" place to go that is “free” is the central library, although when the weather is nice I just like to find a spot to sit on the pier and do my typing.

Of course if you are one of those people who spend their lives “hanging out” as professional vagrants, even at relatively young ages, it is the way of the world. People are who they are; I could be doing what they are doing, but I'm just not "wired" that way. I lost my "shame" about who I imagined myself to be long ago.