Sitting here having to put in a fucking password to open my own (licensed) copy of Microsoft Word. I can’t fucking imagine a world where I would need to put in a password in order to put pen to paper. The future is a fucking, nightmarish, hellscape.
How then, to explain that their (Berkley’s) performance today could be described a degrading. And this could be used to describe many aspects of this organization. Degrading. De-grade.
To lower in status. And it’s this hierarchy. This hierarchy of grades, this bastardization of status and culture that holds Denver back. I think this alone is the greatest hole in this city. It is saddled in this undeserved hierarchical belief system (that doesn't serve it in any way) that is just degrading to experience. And it’s like one of those B-movie horror narratives where you can only cure the curse by sharing it. So, in this sense the only way to escape the degradation is to pass it on. And it gives me pause. Am i afraid of this reality?
Am I afraid of my work? (the work?)
But I (in a sense) I love the fight; and in a sense the approach that I have to things is a way of relieving that warlord aspect of myself.
I believe (in a sense) that to live in bad faith* is to bastardize our character, and every trespass asks the question if I will let it erode me with its banality.
No, I don’t want to go these dumb motherfucking Hort meetings where, they have icebreakers because their turnover is so insanely high 50% of the department can be new from one season to the next. Where it’s both an attempt to recruit talent AND “shut-the-fuck-up and do as we tell you.” Its degrading as fuck. Truth be told, the presence of character that is on display: its fucking weird.
And I guess this is where these worlds intersect. At Hort meetings. Hort meetings that I, a literal master horticulturalist, find degrading to attend. Every time I go there is something, some nugget of insult that I cannot get past. Be it the urban forester that gives a literal 10 min segment about how she has no idea what her job is. As if to rub the salty nepotism in our stupid little faces. I fucking applied for that job! Why does this person have it? Why does she get an opportunity to speak? Why does she get an opportunity to speak— about nothing! (What the fuck am I doing here? These people are fucking idiots.) Literally; “Here’s the birds I watched.” “Here’s the uncountable reels I post about gardening 200 square feet.” “Guys, Plants need water.” and who can forget the classics: “Shut-the-fuck-up and sit down you’re not getting any more money.” have all been memorable keynote speeches.
The most priceless of these moments being the special accountant adjustment guy they rolled out to bullshit a study that was internally conducted (after exhaustive months) that found horts were being paid equitably, so (conveniently) there was no need to get a pay adjustment. What an incredible fucking dick-wag in the face. Then this mayor lost some unbelievable number of millions of dollars magically to the Venezuelan immigrants. What an absolute cum-on-your-face no-money-on-the-dresser, insult. Fucking de-grade-ing. Like were just the guest of honor at the bukkake. At least there’s free bagels.
But if we raise a wrist, it’s a torrent of emails from people that believe that hierarchy can be obtained from a chair, clutching their pearls if I even make a sound at the symposium. If we raise a wrist its discipline through social isolation. And I have come to know this discipline through segregation well. As if through the separation of hierarchy, the powers that be will make their authority more pronounced. As if power worked like that at all —They’ll never have it. And they don't deserve to.
I learned this a long time ago, and it is something kind of cool about myself, I only have power by never holding it. I hate to exert, or pull rank, or flex on anyone. Sure it feels good to knock a dude to the floor, but only you feel that way, and the rest of your peers are mortified. Like watching Scott Gillmore talk over someone. Its cringey degrading, but they don’t realize it. Often in this example, I imagine, they’re kind of into it. Our mutual tolerance of this behavior creates a kind of permission.
I think for everybody, there is this psychosocial aspect that must remain known but beneath the surface and I am no exception; to actualize this is that stark moment when the record skips and everyone sees you for what you are. I may also be more sensitive to this, in such a way that I believe that the true nature of the universe is somewhere between ‘poetically apparent’ and ‘belligerently obvious.’ Alas, I digress.
We were talking about the degrading nature of weaponized incompetence:
also called strategic incompetence, is when someone knowingly or unknowingly demonstrates an inability to perform or master certain tasks, thereby leading others to take on more work. This generally occurs in two domains—in the household, between partners, and at work, between colleagues. And therein lies our experience with the Berkley horts that is the catalyst of all of this.
The devil of this is that my mind refuses to tolerate control dramas such as this. A control drama is the concept that we steal energy from one another through archetypes that are formulated through our previous experiences. And in this sense, after the life that I’ve had, they seem utterly transparent. Kind of like a character that somebody is playing in lieu of being their authentic self. * And this is essentially living in “bad faith.” Living inauthentically to oneself.
Which is to say, when these people are being actively lazy they aren’t lying to me; they’re lying to themselves. And if you can’t be true to yourself, why should I, or anyone else have any respect for you? I mean, be polite, but if you’re lying to yourself you already can’t be trusted.
But that’s just some ghetto shit, some San Bernadino-ass wisdom.
I’ve always been relatively smart. I definitely lost some IQ points along the way to some fights, those hot desert nights where nobody is sleeping and the meth grips the landscape like some kind of weather pattern. Serious San Bernadino-ass shit, where everyone present is made equal. In exactly the same way that Denver resists gentrification. In the way that honesty cannot repair our damaged edges, only glorify our scars. To this end I think about my high school valedictorian: got a full ride to Stanford, then had to dropout sophomore year because he got someone pregnant. All the brains in the world and not a lick of sense. I remember their family photos, professionally taken in a studio, looked adorable as I unfriended Nolan Wu on face book. Let’s be real, I’m never gonna see that motherfucker ever again. And I’ve known this cat since kindergarten.
I am caught up in the propensity of it. I have a certain personality that cares little for anything beyond the result. This, I think, makes me a good horticulturalist. And beyond that, it’s all really the same note. I believe it outlasts other positions, I believe it proliferates through them, like some unstoppable liana, that subsumes everything.
This sounds good, but it's a bit more compulsive than I'd like to admit. I seek knowledge in a way that aims to become it. To be deeply knowledgeable on all things that interest me and I have so many interests that I don’t think one lifetime is enough to grapple with them all, consequentially I draw an odd solace in understanding how the sausage gets made. I like to see the finished product; in my mind’s eye it is the most important part.
And it is these two interlocking parts, the will to see how things work and the realized efficacy of production that are something of a dynamo to my identity. I am obsessed: with the perfect garden design, how to fix the planet, the most sublime experience. My mind is unrelenting, as if learning by doing is the only way to know anything truly. And I have become practiced over these years, and still, everything remains painfully imperfect, as if there is always a greater technique or some more articulated expression. It is, a kind of beautiful madness. But I know of nothing else, so it is normal to me, and we have already gone over the importance of being true to ourselves. So, the time has come to get down to the brass tax—
Just like the Daoist parable of the 12 blind men and the elephant, depending on what part we examine there will always be a vastly different interpretation of what the essence of a thing is. Any fraction can be its own entity but I mean to make it quite clear, the “elephant” in question is way more complex than even a real elephant.
The way I see it the Northside is broken upon several fault lines, they are at times lines on maps, though they don’t necessarily have to be, they are numbers in bank accounts. Go-like territorial accumulations, something of a land grab to a unique ecosystem of people, corporations, and institutions. All of which hold and divide it in unique ways. But this is the essence of the Northside, this is the reality of what we’re looking at.
The players are :
the trains
the refineries
the housing magnates (investors of domiciles, real estate capitalists, and the institutions based on these ‘industries’)
the regulated and unregulated auto operations (from reputable diesel mechanics with storefronts to tweaker-fueled chop shops, from car dealerships to car-jacking rings)
the recycling institutions
the city
the homeless
Small business in this context is non-existent. The migrants are just pollen floating on the surface of this cesspool. There are other aspects of this that I don’t understand quite as well but their influence should be noted. Like the airport, or the judicial system, or the military industrial complex. That may have far-reaching effects on these things but that’s beyond the scope of this now. Let’s get to the pieces.
The Trains: In short, the trains are the root of this whole problem. They are the trunk for which this city seems to be built on. They are the bullet from which the sepsis spreads. They are an institution that seems so immovable that this famous Slavoj Žižek quote comes to mind: “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
The trains are where this starts and where it ends and the sooner the city can realize that the better off they’ll be.
This city is built on trains, in its formation I imagine Denver was little more than an outpost for them to get soigné before crossing the Rockies. To this day I wouldn't be surprised if that is how the train companies still view this city. Literally, if you were to get an honest response from BNSF we are a gas station to them. Or that’s just how they treat this city and its people. One could not (in good faith) assume that the way that they treat the land and the air has any concept of reverence. They don’t give a shit. They treat the environment as a thing to be used and as such deserve neither the permit of use nor the presence within it. And I mean this as someone that has lived in a ‘weather pollution alert’ zone for the entirety of the year.
And don’t get me wrong I get it: like, the trains make this city possible. The trains are the reason this city probably exists in the extent that it does, in the manner that it does, and even (in the case of that fuckhole train track design of 39th & greenway) with the aesthetic that it does. [we will come back to this.]
But the truth is saddled on a knife: we will have no kind of quality of life as long as these industrial complexes continually hold the city in the manner that they do. We can force them into our parks in some play at normalizing their aesthetics. But they are the immovable object for which this city has been built upon. And that presents us with a conundrum that I ruminate on tirelessly. Is there a Denver without trains? Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?
The trains make the powerplants possible and this is where Swansea makes its entrance.
The powerplants: Nearly as influential as the trains, the powerplants hold this city by the nuts. What are we going to do? Bite the hand that feeds us? In winter? We'd be fucked. But the truth is: they have some sort of sweetheart deal with the trains, shipping coal daily to fuel the city at the expense of the planet. And I’m sure there’s some regulations in place or whatever. But we have been living under a pollution dome for years and it’s starting to feel like an episode of The (fucking) Oblongs.
All the while, the dog-food smell permeates everything at Dunham Park and intermingles with the various petroleum-based smells as one rides down the freeway. As if to implore the casual visitor: welcome to the northside, see the sights, smell, the smells. (And they are all some variation of the glamourous concept: l'odeur de Carcinogen.)
Put plainly, the pollution that the industrial institutions create (in spite of the lip service laws and regulations) is fucking killing us. And I’m deeply concerned that this is just like the “cost of doing business.” We just sacrifice like a fifth of the city to die of airborne particulate matter in the industry fields to the north so that the rest can live in inflated housing market. It’s the makings of a dystopian cyberpunk novel. But I definitely don’t want to die like this. As if the convenience of ‘business as usual’ can operate without regard for the people of the city. Which is to say, the living, breathing part of the city. And we have to understand that these enterprises are not parts of the city but rather the framework for which it is situated upon. To remove them from the city would be like surgically extracting our own backbone. And I don’t think it can truly be done. I don’t think that the immediate need will ever outweigh the long-term damage. And by the time it does it won’t matter; which is telling, in a way. (...the way that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.)
I cannot stress enough how objectively ridiculous it is to wake up every-single-day to an “air quality alert” on my phone and computer. We know that this shit is killing us and literally just do nothing. Why doesn’t the city act? Why is there no government or local action? These companies are fucking poisoning the air, daily, every damn day, and we do nothing! It makes me feel like we are all rats on a sinking ship. As if we are all dogs, in god’s hot car. Because the writing is on the wall. We cannot continue to sustain ourselves in this manner, the climate of planet is changing because of the actions of industrial complex's behavior. We see on full display every day: the profits of the few at the expense of the many. We are that prestigious many. So fortunate are we, to be slaughtered on the altar of capitalism. But you must see it, these institutions are the agents of pollution; they contaminate everything. Even the literal silence they manage to cut into. As if they are gigantic mechanical worms that devour and colonize everything. They take the earth as if cheating at a game of Go. They pollute the air in factories where I can only imagine reviling things take place. And perhaps that’s a commentary too— maybe we should just stop living like this. As horses and leftover livestock get processed into kibble on the side of town where the, poors live. It’s so fucking degrading.
And, the thing about the truth is; it’s the truth. And the truth is, I fucking hate shit that isn’t about it. Anyone can complain, we can just bitch about the state of things until we’re blue in the face but it solves nothing. Words are just words. And I think that we need to envision a future that we would like to live in and not just complain. And my short-term solution is this: move them. Move them the fuck out of the city, the whole-ass operation. The concrete plant, the fucking dog food factory, every-single-drop of infrastructure. They can have a little wally-world operation somewhere way up in Adam’s county away from human contact. If one wants to construct a nightmarish industrial hellscape with money and infrastructure, they can do it the fuck out of my way. Instead of leaving us all these divisions just looming all over the god-damned city with weird bridges, and rail shit that's constantly blocking everything. Like we’re just an entangled municipality caught in this industrial silkworm’s web, bound every-which-way but loose.
No matter what, it will cost a fucking ton of money. Just in general, take no action, ton of money. Make a difference for the better; ton of money. We'd be paying some form of blood money to whatever northern county we’d be relocating all this kipple to. We'd need to pay to construct said facilities, pay to remove or modify their former infrastructure, in all likelihood we’d end up paying them to remove their own shit. But is the arduousness of the task greater than sacrificing our people’s health forever? Not forever, just until they die. Which is to say that every case of respiratory cancer in Swansea, every unenforced traffic fatality in Elyria, every tweaker scratching up recycled metal in Globeville is a win for this machine. We’re feeding it: and what we’re feeding it is the intangible parts of ourselves. Until we all erode into shells of humanity.
Bringing us to, The Homeless: The interrelated reality of trains and homeless are like fleas on a stray cat. Or the rats that inhabit the mechanized fallout of industrial desecration. It’s the slag of capitalism. Like a fungi that prefers to exist under and within these cheap bridges that never have enough lighting. It’s for a reason. They are here because something enables them to be here. To cling to an existence where they would rather have drugs than stable housing or regular meals. The reality of this is hard to comprehend in words. It must be experienced to truly understand its magnitude. It is there behind the McDonalds on Washington. It is there in splintered plastic at the bottom of a slide surrounded by alcohol bottles, as if fragments of human soul, scattered all over the playground. And the destitution of these various enabled theaters begs serious questions. Namely, what cash-related resource is available to be exchanged for drugs in this area? Alternatively, how exactly does the city fit-into/enable this? And finally, (what the fucking fuck!?) why can’t we just give them what they want? I’ve often held the belief that ‘the universe wants to do itself.’ And the viability of the path that we are currently on seems to persist but it does not flow in the way that it needs to flow to function into the future.
The homeless are like, whatever the opposite of grease to a machine is. They are in the fucking way, their behavior is in the fucking way, they break and steal, and abuse drugs and the song and dance. But the truth is simple; homelessness causes trauma, and trauma causes homelessness. They are the manifestation of our failings as a society. Failure to protect those in need, failure to properly administer medical attention, failure to address a myriad of things that could have been addressed at some previous other place and time. If a dog weighed a ton: it’d be a big dog.
And the why is belligerently simple: housing in this city is fucking fucked.
The housing sitch is in short, insurmountable. It is impossible to get to in this city and there are a ton of implications of this that should be examined. Cardinal amongst these is the nature of society, of civilization and its future. And to think it is anything less is to be subsumed into the false narrative that capitalism is greater than society which (on its face) cannot stand.
As of today, the median age of a first-time homebuyer is now 54. This is an unachievable number. This place is a shithole. This timeline sucks. At the time of writing the average age of a homebuyer has changed to 56. Literally in the two weeks since I last wrote the previous sentence the age has increased. By the time I finish this part it could be up to 60. Basically, not gonna happen— considering a 30-year loan would mean we need to live to be 86 to pay it off. Considering most men in my family die from cancer in their 40s its not looking great.
I need to take a break here and address the very reality of this: the FUBAR-ness of it. Like, this is where we lose the narrative. Where people give up on the whole thing. Who gives a shit if Suncor poisons the air. Who cares if Elyria is nothing but unregulated auto industries slowly being converted into high-rise housing. Who cares about the poor, ignorant masses that will never amount to anything that spawn from the cracks of these places. They will never know greatness, and maybe that’s the point; they cannot know greatness because we cannot achieve it in this environment. It takes everything I have to sit up and keep working on this, not that its good, or meaningful because it isn’t. But because I don't think anyone has ever given it an honest look. It just becomes overlooked, forgettable and in that ignobility it remains the same unchanging cesspool, without imagination or the dramatic attention that it requires to even become something more. But I guess this is the promise; this will come full circle. This setup will have a punchline. So bear with me. I imagine a thousand other things we could be doing than reading this essay about north Denver, and a thousand more that I could be doing than writing it. And it will never change unless we lean in and give it the attention it deserves and up until now I feel as though nobody, save for those that wish to ruthlessly profit from it, have ever paid attention to it in any context more than what they can siphon from it. And this won’t make any real difference in the scheme of things, but it’s cheaper than a movie and wont damage your liver.
This then, brings us to the wild west auto industries and the metal scrapping operations: a truly Northern Denver experience! If the triangle communities wanted a mascot I can think of none better than a crackhead stealing a catalytic converter and then selling it to the scrapyards. Like some based-out rap name, Lil’ tweek n’ scrap. Dropping his new mixtape ‘get that copper’. Available only on Washington Blvd. While supplies last.
Jokes aside, that’s what it is. A whole system of industries based upon the slaughter of cars and their parts. Allowing for all the criminality and side hustle that comes with it. While slaughter and dismemberment of animals and the slaughter and dismemberment of plants also take place in our district, it only seems to be the automotive version that enables crime. And how could it not? Rhodium is $165 a gram, platinum $35, palladium $30, all are found in catalytic converters. Not to mention the regulations that can be skirted by recycling these materials illegally, there is a river of dirty money flowing down Washington blvd. Why in the hell would the literal hundreds of homeless with their shopping carts be there if not for a quick off-the-books buck that can be converted into a down-and-dirty sack? Its not fucking rocket science, (it’s DiGiorno) is a social network that has failed and a healthcare system that is high-centered on its own criminally weaponized ignorance. And it begs the question, are we just weaponized ignorance? Ignoring the hordes as they shuffle to the metal recyclers, carts in tow all up and down the boulevard, for another sweet, sweet hit of... whatever dirt drugs they can get their hands on. It’s a subhuman lifestyle that we contribute to with our permissiveness; somebody should have helped these people a long time ago, but here we are: allowing the main artery of our district to be a third-world, drug-fueled, shithole.
And what the fuck are we going to do? Send a strongly worded email? They couldn’t even vote the slaughterhouses out of the area, the same ones that exploit migrant workers; laden in controversy. Meanwhile all of Elyria (save for the park) is automotive wrecking and storage yards, funneling whatever comes off those machines right into Globeville and onto the trains to be shipped off to the exotic places of... wherever has looser refinery laws.
It’s hard not to lose heart. How could anyone care about this? (in any meaningful way) eventually they will sell the land for mass overpriced housing. Slowly absorbing these processing endeavors into another form of processing: human financial batteries, cogs in the gentrification machine. And why even resist? There truly is nothing to lose. And, for the right people, there’s money to be made. The truth is; we are not those people. We are just caught in the undertow of the players. Fish adrift in the riptide of industry.
For its part, the city need not raise a finger. The homeless will eventually OD. The Land that these business run will eventually be absorbed into housing conglomerates. Law enforcement doesn’t need to do a thing. Eventually the citizens will die from their polluted air and then they’ll all be quiet. The trains will roll through, unincumbered as all the players at the top collect their coins and the blood will wash off. New families will emerge and raise the next generation of blue-collar nothings that live in the shadows of unapproachable industry consumed into the maelstrom of capitalist fallout.
I think that it's the pseudo-hierarchy that fills the place of actual brass-tax problem solving. This is where the degradation of this comes to a head; in lieu of committing our energy into working toward goals we have this game of looking the part but not being the part. In essence, where weaponized incompetence rises into visibility is when it is a crutch to prop up those that don’t deserve the authority they have and are masking their lack of problem solving with pseudo-regality.
And I am aware that some things are well beyond the realm of possibility. Some things will never come to pass no matter their intentions nor their feasibility. But I didn’t come this far to just complain and shrug. So, I think it’s time consider different solutions— thinking with thoughts unbridled is the tenement of change. Assuming I had billions to frame the change I seek; this is what I would do—
1. Move those fucking trains. Move the overblown industry out of the city. Move them out of the city into some place where they aren’t this sprawling shitshow that pollutes and enables every-criminal-ass-thing in this city. Surely it will cost money, but everything costs money and we have crossed the Rubicon with quality of life in the northside and outlying areas, so cost is really just a by-product of what’s already happening.
2. Build them some place with intention and design and planning that isn’t this undercity, ghetto-hell that they’ve enabled and created. This includes a smaller line that can bring resources into the city but not staging nor switching tracks, just the train that enters the city and drops stuff off and picks things up and then goes to some moderately far-away place to do their normal logistical activities. I am aware that this city was built on train infrastructure but I deeply, earnestly suggest that it does not have to be dependent on the whims of these companies for the rest of this city’s existence.
3. Hold these refineries accountable. There it’s probably millions if not billions in regulations that they are skirting. The roads are fucking destroyed, the air is contaminated, the land is just littered with a never-ending cesspool of equipment and machinery and you can see it all from the river. Make them pay for every infraction, there is so much vileness coming out of Suncor alone that it is mind-boggling how we are powerless to regulate one company’s bastardization of our natural spaces and environment for decades. It cannot go on. It must change. And when massive swaths of our quality of life are at stake there is an involuntary imperative to act. Is this vile, toxic, shithole the legacy we are trying to leave future generations.
They will listen to money, money caused this and the sequestration of that same money will be speaking to them in a language that they understand. Up until now it seems like we just let them get away with it, and that's why it’s so fucking profitable. Honestly, what are the consequences if we just forced them to leave. More money? As if it costs too much to have an environment worth living in. Hold them to the fire and make them finance their misdeeds for the trespass.
This would also require tremendous community involvement. But you put a couple of their executives where the sun doesn’t shine and they’ll listen. Make their only options compliance I assure you they will comply. Because they’ve been killing us since day one. It needs to get there first, but once it does, they will understand the precariousness of their position.
4. Housing should be directly correlated to income. Nothing fuels inflation like our housing market. It needs to be either subsidized by Universal Basic Income and/or taken as a portion of one's earnings if they are beneath a certain income level. Just whatever 1/3 of your income is, that pays for housing, it might limit your possibilities for finer, more extravagant things but being both full-time and homeless should not exist. Being both full-time and having half of my monthly income go to my landlord is a situation so bullshit it should be illegal. Every bee has a job and every bee has a place to live as long as they’re working for the greater good of the hive. There’s no reasonable justification for housing to cost what it does in this city and it hinders our capacity as a society to sustain itself. This must be resolved or the collapse of our culture is imminent. I believe that this is resolved by aligning our housing (and earning) costs more directly to inflation. We must remember in this scenario that society is made of people and if those people cannot exist the society will not exist either.
5. The homeless can be divided into clear and separate categories. A hierarchy, if you will. I often make the analogy that ‘homelessness’ is like tide pools. There is a region by certain shorelines where all sorts of animals live, we call them the tidepools, but that minimizes their overall impact and underestimates their varied and complex lives. “The tidepools” does not distinguish between the urchins and the mussels. There are starfish, you might even see an octopus. We need to grasp homelessness as a complicated system of interactions spawned from myriad levels of circumstance and disadvantage. The irony here being a system of hierarchy: 4-5 categories, broken into other smaller categories that I believe will help us understand the concept of ‘the homeless’ more completely.
(1) Those that are homeless because of circumstance, these are like your LGTBQ teenagers and people with abusive (in all contexts) homes, people thrown out or situationally separated because of their formerly at-home circumstances that leave them nowhere to go. These are where homelessness starts and leads to the greater traumas that tend to skew towards younger individuals and women are still reachable provided, we act with intention and don’t lose our nerve in the bureaucracy of situational action. When we turn these individuals into numbers, they become lost in the mælstrom of the rest of these categories and then, as if by design, they become these other categories of homelessness. These are the people that I imagine the shelters and public outreach programs were initially intended for, a meal and a place to lay your head and you’ll “be back on your feet in no time.”
(2) Then, there are those that are homeless because of circumstance; lost their job, injury, go-fund-me didn’t work out —bullshit late-stage capitalism realities. These are the homeless most affected by the flaws of our timeline, people that lost everything from circumstances largely out of their control. Their tragedy is their lack of understanding of unfairness in our modern world, they tend to skew older, unable to understand that the world has bypassed them and their situation. This is your amputees, your anti-establishment guys, veterans that were DOD’d and can’t navigate the department of veteran’s affairs, etc... This group is still helpable but they are the beginning of the of the other sections, that is to say the downward spiral that leads to social, economic, and societal fallout. It begins here: These people unlike any other branch of homeless are living on the streets because the failure of our society. The same society that seems to rebuke responsibility for its failings. This second category could be cured with systemic changes to our operational system these are the people that need medical care, housing, therapy, and money. These are the people that would succeed with Universal basic income, which at this point would really just be offsetting runaway inflation.
(3) Thirdly, there are the homeless that do not want help. Career homeless, those that live under the freeway, mark their spot and will not leave. The guy at Metizio-Curtis that has been there for like 17 years (he’s back btw). These individuals are the creatures of routine, institutionalized in poverty, largely hopeless. Theres a certain pouting, self-deprecating, stick-it-to-the-man by acting-out-in-no-confidence nature to their suffering. These are usually the hyper-independent but also not too proud for a handout types. In particular they are an interesting case because ludonarratively they make no sense; generally framed in their own confusion to a world that has seemingly passed them by “a dime bag used to cost a dime!” and “back in my day, the men were men, and the women were men, and the children were men! And there was no time for all these fru-fru genders! Or any of this D-E-I whatcha’ call it!” Jokes aside, the irony of these people is that they are utterly unemployable and are dependent on handouts and the generosity of others. You could not have a racist, misogynist, homophobic, street person, in their 60’s, that smells like piss at all times washing dishes for minimum wage and treat it like they were an asset to your operation. This alone makes helping them quite difficult. They too, would benefit from UBI, and are often on Medicaid or have some moderate source of income that helps sustain them but their social skills and behavior is such that they are like stray animals that can bite. Making it domestically hard to justify extensive resource allocation when the risks of their upkeep is vastly disproportionate to their social contribution; which is a net negative.
(4) Then there are the criminally homeless: the wire-stripping tweakers that are observably filthy. Coupled with any number of mental illnesses, any number of years on the drug, any number of prior criminal activities, any amount of self-destructive behaviors coupled compellingly with no respect to self or others. Some of them so perpetually strung-out and societally challenged they are difficult for my mind to see as something other than a stray human. As some feral dog, covered in ticks, the pits on their face from decades of drug abuse, missing teeth and damaged frames through thousands of nights of violent, substance-fueled chaos. These people live perpetually in a hell of their own making. It is the Tartarus of the human experience; the slag of capitalism, an event horizon of human capacity. And, somehow that horizon has pulled these unfortunate souls into the gravity of its influence, and it will hold them in orbit of its influence to death. These people are unable to see that this is not the real world, (smoking fentanyl underneath an unlit train bridge) somehow, they can resist the possibility of a better world indefinitely. And there’s always just enough of them to perpetuate the cycle. Their world doesn’t even need to be that way, but the psychosocial environment that they inhabit cannot conceive (whatsoever) of otherwise. They, are stuck this way. This carries into other thought processes, and the absurd, confusing, and outright surreal strangeness of it. Is a topic for another time, suffice to say these are the poorest among us, beyond money and power, beyond normalcy or conduct, beyond circumstance and luck; there is a place in our society where the shadows never recede. The longer a person dwells in those places the more likely it becomes that they can never leave. And then we’re out there cleaning their garbage from bashing apart an air conditioner on our playground equipment until they die from something substance-related. So, there are three parts to this solution: Give them what they want. Give them what they need. And be deeply considerate of what and how those two things are interrelated and how those two things interact.
The fact then becomes; money. Money wants to make money. There is no money to be gained in any of this. In the same way that money creates class (or class disparity) it is that same money that holds these things in place, intransient. This reality is not lost on me, I see how there is no feasible way to make the train companies move or the housing oligarchs come to heel, there is no realized way to remove the refineries from the landscape or hold them accountable for their actions, as if we are just waiting to die from the pollution they generate and the fallout from their contamination. Like district 12 in The Hunger Games, we bear the burden of the city's profits, we are the heel for which the capital stands, and I see this.
However, I also see a different horizon. A different system. An upheaval of thought. In the same way that these pathetic hierarchies exist; I see their end manifested in revolution.
It is time that we stopped imagining the apocalypse and started imagining the revolution. Even now, thoughts of shoeless militia covered in rags vaulting over burnt-out cars, musket superimposed with the black furniture of a contemporary AR-style rifle. It sounds cool, but that’s also not what I'm talking about. However, it is the import of this imagery when speaking about the type of revolution that needs to take place. We must see this within the theaters of violence and act in a way that is discordant with those actions.
Revolution. Because it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. I assure you, Denver will be a player in that coming revolution. (As they try to quarter and divide our sanctuary status as literally write this) I have wrestled with the nature of this: I do not think it will be in the way that I had in mind. Though I have no problem adapting that strategy. I do however see revolution as an avenue towards solving some of these woes. Upheaval seems more viable to the resolution of these challenges than the current path.
In the sense that I am writing some sort of wish list for what happens after, we must think unbridled thoughts. We must view the end as a more-perfect solution, like a gardener’s work; it is never done. There is no end to the kind of refinement that is required of us. It is now that we must begin the cultivation of our future, one without the degradation of hierarchy. Like a noxious weed hasa subsumed everything into the hierarchy of itself it deserved to be degraded into nonexistence so that a future of greater design may grow.
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