Baby, I'd follow you to Oklahoma. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Liminality In our recent moves to relocate for new jobs we have been through some interesting and in a few cases rather desperate circumstances. Whenever you are moving house you are for at least a short while technically homeless. If your financial circumstances are not solid then you are not just technically homeless but are effectively homeless as well. If you do not have a signed lease in your new home city as well as plenty of money to get you there and a job that will wait for you - or a support network that will step in and bail you out - then one or two instances of bad luck can easily land you in a quite desperate situation. For many people moving house is an inconvenient, frustrating upheaval of daily life but for others it turns into a crisis or a negative turning point in their lives - mostly if you are poor or without a support network to fall back on. When we lived in Washington state we heard about an Amazon distribution facility that had many of its employees living in the KOA Campground across the street in trailers and tents. Driving past that Amazon facility and KOA campground one day purely by accident I realized where I was. Looking at the KOA it was pretty obvious the situation was exactly as reported. Due to the truly egregious stupid scarcity of housing in the reality distortion field around Seattle, WA there was a real /booming/ market for old beat-up RVs and campers because there is a vast population of people in that area who simply can't find any other way to have a place to live any more permanent than that. They can afford a twelve-year-old camper that won't pass the state inspection and is barely road-worthy though, at a price that the market will bear. There was a business near us that was just buying up old junk RVs and reselling them, with several old examples lying around half stripped of spare parts to fix others that would still run so they could be sold. There are little Hoovervilles around the corner everywhere: people in little two-person tents, RVs that will never roll anywhere under their own power again. Late-stage capitalism and Darwin Days. Back in the days of Herbert Hoover people at least had the decency to be ashamed of this I think, now people blame the victims and talk about how people want to live like that, that they all did it to themselves. None of this is unique to Seattle or Southern California of course, it's just on the surface and more visible there. There are Hoovervilles and people living in houses they can no longer pay for all over the US. We live in the Detroit area now and it's everywhere - neighborhoods where less than 10% of the houses that were once neatly stacked one after another are still intact and inhabited. You're driving along through a suburb and then pass through an area that but for the occasional inhabited house and disrepaired telephone poles and lines is swiftly returning to prairie. The pavement is coming apart, phone lines drooping or obviously failed and just hanging there. It is very similar to scenes close to Chernobyl or bombed-out Ukrainian cities on the news now: buildings falling apart, homes left to rot or burned-out shells. Darwin Days came to Detroit and stuck around to see how the movie ends - still lingering for sure in many neighborhoods. Despite the narrative that Detroit suddenly lost a lot of people, that they fled when the city government had to file for bankruptcy during the Great Recession you can see in these neighborhoods with their lone inhabited house per block the gradual drawn-out emptying and increasing neglect of infrastructure that happened here. You see the sealed-up small store buildings and storefronts with their roll-doors closed and the padlocks rusting into uselessness waiting inert for a time when someone is able to pay to use them again - resting on someone's books like a third-string running back waiting for a chance to prove something - potential held in place in case it might someday pay off for the investers. Here and there you find factory buildings sitting in this same mothballed inertia waiting for someone to see them as an opportunity and buy or lease them to start up some new prospective business, their paint flaking, sometimes rusting equipment or old parts stacked in the yard outside instead of being recycled for scrap value. But those are merely more visible indicators in a major city that everyone knows. This exists in subtler variants everywhere in the US: houses in rural Indiana towns like Tab and Judyville that hardly even exist, a collection of a dozen houses surrounded by farm fields being inexorably consolidated into larger and larger and larger successful farms with the houses left behind falling into ruin. People living in conditions so desperate nearly everyone wonders why they don't simply leave for somewhere else - except for those who have themselves been too poor to gather the money to move or unwilling to leave behind everything they own to try desperately somewhere else. In Indiana we were offered a house for rent that had one room that still had a dirt floor - in 2012. Overall I was surprised by what counted as a rentable dwelling in Indiana, but that landlady was married to some sort of preacher who was also a lawyer, so... that dirt floor may have been an outlier. The condition of some of the houses I was shown was still shockingly bad. Somewhat wealthy people simply preying upon those less fortunate by birth. If you're moving and the company that has offered you a job out-of-state was in actuality about to go into bankruptcy or to close up shop you could find yourself with no income or even proof of employment to secure a place to live - immediately your circumstances could become vastly more desperate. Your willingness to compromise things to have a place to live and not lose possessions, your pets, things that really matter to you spikes. You begin considering how you would make desperate choices, if it comes to that. You begin working this out in your head so you are prepared if it comes to that. When your only home is a sketchy hotel room and having that place to live relies on not pissing off the potentially unstable family running it you find yourself contemplating what could happen if they decide they don't like you or they could get more for that room if you were gone. Your wife worries about just what the hell she would do if you for some reason didn't come back from your job today - really, what fucking options would she have? No benefits yet, so no company life insurance. What could she possibly do to recover from that situation? That's a terror that most people can just nope on away from and get back to living their daily life of the job they don't like or their ungrateful kids, gossip, shopping. If you're living it there isn't much else to do but stew about it and try not to go raving insane. Once you have been in or near that situation the fear of it never really goes away - that deep-down insecure fear of being in such circumstances, or the imminent fear of such circumstances being only one small serious problem away from you is what drives the engine of capitalism. This is the truth that people do not allow themselves to think about, that the shrinking middle class and the somewhat financially-vulnerable echelon of the upper class are in deep, inky, cavernous denial of. They tell themselves that they could not fall into such circumstances, that they are not subject to such calamities, that the poor are there through lack of talent, work ethic, or decency. If they allowed themselves a moment of honest introspection they would have to face the undeniable fact that their circumstances are separated from those on the verge of homelessness or living homeless by sheer stupid luck, random chance. My truck's drive shaft u-joint failed in Western Wisconsin. After sitting beside the highway in the summer sun for a few hours hoping I wouldn't run out of water, we got it towed to a shop just over the border in eastern North Dakota. My wife went on ahead to find a hotel room and get things set up for a stay. We spent three days while they found a replacement drive shaft (which actually came off of one of their beater shop trucks). They helped us out and charged us very reasonably to help us out of a situation that otherwise would have become a choice of abandoning the truck and most of what was in it for the move and continuing in the car somehow or risk running out of money and falling back on my family for help or... something. They were very decent people helping us out like they did, they didn't have to. We made it to Washington state with a few hundred dollars to our names beyond the prepaid first few weeks' rent for our reserved room at an Extended Stay America and the next stage of our continuing crisis of moving began. After about a week my cashout of the 401k from my previous job arrived and money became somewhat less of an issue with paychecks starting to arrive from the new job as well. We managed to stay at the Extended Stay for a month, putting up with stupid behavior from the staff and seeing occasionally someone who had been staying there long-term thrown out in the middle of the night - ordinary people who minded their business packing their stuff back into their car suddenly and for seemingly no reason. There were rumors that the staff had some illegal goings-on on the side and rumors that the management was throwing out unprofitable long-term guests to get in more profitable short-term stays. My wife later found many reports in forums online of people seeing this at Extended Stay America hotels all over the US - it's a well-established pattern because they're not doing well with their advertised business model. One night a staff member picked a fight with my wife to justify throwing us out, they called the police to 'report' it and make sure that we just quietly packed our things and got out of their way of putting someone else in that room. I called around desperately to find some other hotel with a room and finally found one at a beaten-down Econolodge and we put all of our stuff in her car and my truck and did a late-night shift to the drug-den down-and-out Econolodge. In that situation how do you put forward a mask of normalcy in a salaried job as a department manager in a multi-million dollar company? How do you face listening to coworkers bitch about the homeless, comments about how they prefer to live like that, that they're worthless scum when you're staying in a hotel with people who are basically homeless? I don't know how really but I did it. Mental compartmentalization and disassociation were certainly involved. The Econolodge was serving a mix of marijuana tourists from out of state and people without any other long-term housing options, plenty of them obviously strung-out drug addicts (meth and heroin). Contrary to what you might expect the vast majority of folks we encountered during our stay at the Econolodge either ignored our presence or were decent and guardedly friendly. The parking lot out front wasn't exactly a comfortable space, there were always a couple vehicles there that were obviously packed with someone's entire wordly possessions and there were certainly drug deals going on out there openly several times a day. You didn't make eye contact out there with people you didn't already know. Other than a little paranoia - sleep deprivation, anxiety from our precarious situation, and stress from the new job will do that to you - I didn't really ever feel threatened while we were there. Shooting deaths in grocery store parking lots were a repeating theme while we continued to live in the same general area for nearly three years though. The danger was there we just didn't stumble into its path. There were plenty of folks in desperate circumstances but they weren't monsters, just people who got stuck in a bad situation, mostly through bad luck or a series of bad decisions. They were just people. Having to keep re-upping our stay with the hotel's owners was an ongoing source of stress - the possibility of having to suddenly find yet another new hotel if they had re-booked our room was an ongoing risk. How much money do you tie up with booking it out a while versus having money in our bank account or capacity on the credit card for any emergency that might come up? Eventually we seemed to reach an equilibrium with the owners, they having decided we were paying on time and not causing (or likely to cause) trouble despite our three pets. Meanwhile all of our wordly possessions that weren't in the car and the truck (and then in the hotel room as you sure as Hell don't leave /anything/ in your vehicle in a parking lot anywhere around there) were in a rented storage unit over in Auburn. Furniture, clothes, books, a larger cage for the chinchilla, dishes and cookware, appliances... hoping that we kept making enough money to rent a place (and actually find one) and to keep paying the storage in the meantime and come back for them. Hoping that my job didn't fall through or something. Two months of /that/ and we found a house to rent, had the money to rent it, and life began to somewhat return to sanity, although the experience certainly traumatized us both. Eventually our finances stabilized, the credit card balance was paid down, but by then the situation at the new job was already not looking so hot. Less than two years in we had to announce to the employees that the company would be closing (at that point I had been keeping that fact to myself for about four months). After a year spent winding things down at that job and searching for another /new/ job - with thankfully a generous severance for sticking around and helping to close things down gracefully - the move back across to the East end of the country was even worse if you can believe it. Recall as well that our experiences were mitigated by having some savings and a reliable credit card and a good long-term relationship with our bank. In each case my new employer gave us some significant relocation help without which it would have been much more of a scramble and risk of serious problems. We have no illusions about the fact that we had advantages over many of the people we saw in more desperate circumstances that were largely a result of luck in the big picture. There is a romanticizing of the desperate circumstances of the poor in American culture that works to excuse the way they are treated by the political system, employers, and anyone with enough money to be able to ignore their plight. The myth that you can get somewhere in this country and improve your situation based purely on hard work and your wits without some measure of good fortune or outside support is just a useful lie told by people who want a population of ready labor truly desperate for work and a paycheck, without the means to readily look elsewhere once you're working for them. If you don't believe me, go back and read some classics by the likes of Charles Dickens or John Steinbeck. They weren't making that stuff up. I recall being taught in school about the results of laissez-faire capitalism run amuck in early 20th century America: deadly tenement housing prone to collapse, filth, poisonous food, disease, starvation, inhuman living conditions, workers maimed and tossed aside for the next sucker that needed a job. The iconic Hoovervilles. We didn't shy away from that history back when I was growing up we were taught about it in school as early as the fourth grade - Great Depression, starvation, the Dust Bowl, the whole nine yards. The fucking Hoovervilles that are still with us, all over the place now. They understand these things and they don't want us to understand. So go read up on our actual history, look at some photos of skinny undernourished Americans living in tarpaper shacks clothed in rags and compare them to the Hooverville down the street from you. Read Barbara Ehrenreich's 'Nickel and Dimed' - read it slowly and let the facts sink in. Go read a history textbook from the 1980's or just look at the black-and-white photos of thin Americans slowly starving. When we moved into Indiana some years ago, on the drive west to our new home I saw billboards encouraging donating food for Americans who didn't have enough to eat. Today while walking our dog around the reasonably comfortable and safe neighborhood in a 'nice' suburb of Detroit I saw what from a distance looked like one of those Little Free Libraries - a little box with doors on front. It was actually a small 'take what you need, give what you can' food pantry with canned goods and such on shelves inside. I had not seen one of those before. Cheer up, smile, nertz! ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. (Hunter S. Thompson) NO CARRIER