I'm still around if anyone cares. Shit sucks yo

Breaking my exile

I almost died. One doctors said they almost put me on a machine. I had to call 911 and could barely make it down the stairs. Then I fell down in the parking lot while they wheeled out the gurney

All because of a little alcohol withdrawal

People defending the honor of worms is actually one of the reasons to have Twitter

The Dutch labour party has a very cool logo that I decided to make into a print

I bought linoleum and paper for printmaking at Hobby Lobby on Friday. Why were they even open? Stolen antiquities don't illegally purchase themselves. I also got a bandana. I'm not sure I can even make prints with what I have on hand but I can carve blocks. I've been mulling what to do because of this which is a good strategy for printmaking so whatever I guess

I also started to write a story about one of the many times I've been a gigantic dumbass but I'm pretty much at the first editing phase so I set it aside so I could watch videos and have mild panic symptoms over viruses and whatever the fuck has been happening in my apartment for six weeks or so

I'm alternately living in hotels, my car and one night in an Air B&B that was a violation of several county ordinances. I detoxed myself off of alcohol which is not easy or a particularly good idea.

AND I'M STILL WORKING ON MY GRAD SCHOOL APPLICATION BECAUSE FUCK YOU LIFE! I'M TOUGHER THAN YOUR SHIT!

Tomorrow is my birthday

Edit: the plan is to get Chicago pizza in Atlanta with my mom on Sunday. The idea of Chicago style pizza in Atlanta is both frightening and exciting

I get to hang out with this thing tomorrow

Feel better than I did in the last two pubskis. Three job interview in 4-5 days. Will hopefully get me out of where I am

John Cusack blocked me on Twitter at some point which is weird. I'm not a prolific tweeter.

I went to the dentist for the first time in a decade. No cavities. Floss daily and quit smoking. I've been too depressed to brush my teeth for days during that decade so I wasn't sure that didn't do severe damage.

Odds are I have a new, slightly less shitty, job.

I may have a new job starting in a couple weeks. _refugee_ is going to be jealous. I'm going in to work with dogs as a kennel tech on the 16th. I have no idea why they want to wait two weeks. The owner made a point to say that she pays attention to how people leave their previous employers. Just bringing me in to see how it goes isn't enough for me to put in notice so if they're picky about that they should have brought me in sooner so I can put in notice sooner. The delay is making me a little nervous about whether it will work out. I've been working at a sandwich shop and being reminded how unreliable kids can be in getting to work has been testing my patience. I've been about ready to walk out the door a couple times. I was pretty desperate for a job so I picked one to apply for that I assumed was just looking for a warm body. And I've been having car trouble so sandwich shop 1.5 miles away ticked all the boxes. It sucks though and I'm nearing the point where I'm just going to go to a temp agency and work in a warehouse somewhere. Hopefully the dog job works out though. I think it will be good for my mental health.

Adventures in homelessness!

At the end of March I got kicked out/left sober living. I possibly could have stayed but it had been 6 months and that was the agreed to length with my family. And I've had a social worker since January who was supposed to be working on getting me housing. That's the part I want to talk about because it was fucked up and I don't want to bitch about my mistakes and what a raw deal I got because of them.

I slept in my car for a bout a week. I got a couple nights in hotels but that didn't last long because I'm poor. After a week or two I got ahold of my social worker. I'd not seen her in a few weeks because of work. I got ahold of her by calling her supervisor. That process took a week or two. She told me the housing program she'd applied to for me took six months. A detail that would have been nice to know up front and I have no idea why she left out because I told her I wanted to leave sober living because it was expensive and not very beneficial. So we meet the next week and she has two more immediate programs I can apply for. The one through her agency involves the application that I fill out with her, a letter from a random shelter I've never been to verifying that I am homeless (pretty much because I said so, but I need a fucking letter from a stranger who doesn't know anything about me), and a medical records release. From the doctor who works in the agency I'm applying for the program through. I have to drive to the shelter, twice I think it was, drive to the doctor's building and wait like three days for the doctor to sign the ROI. That's a lot of fucking leg work in an area with piss poor public transportation to apply to a program meant for mentally ill homeless people. How the fuck do you do this without a car?

I get all this bullshit, give it to the social worker and a week or so later I get interviewed for the program. Not admitted. I do get admitted right away and get a call about an apart a few hours later. The state agency contracts with apartment complexes in the area. So I go to the complex the next day and fill out the application like I'm a regular tenant. And the next day I fail the background check for a misdemeanor. Why the fuck would you contract with a complex that is that strict about renting if you're serving a population not known for clean criminal histories?

A little about the agency, I don't know the exact structure of how things work in Georgia but we have community mental health boards that serve low income people who need mental health and/or substance abuse treatment. Which is great in theory. I've dealt with the ones in three other counties and had no serious problems. The one in a different suburb got me into a similar arrangement to the one I'm in now in a week and put me in a hotel while I waited. Whoever is distributing money here decided to combine the largest suburban metro county with a neighboring county that's not small itself. There seems to be some flex in how these different agencies run themselves and this one is a dumpster fire. Structurally and due to the burden they're under.

But back to the joy of dealing with them. I get turned down which was pretty devastating itself but now I have a second social worker who tells me there's an availability at a different complex with a roommate. I get a call a Week(?) later from a third social worker telling me that that unit is available and he'll call me the following week. I don't hear from him. I wait until Wednesday and try to call him. II tell my original social worker what's going on. By this point I've lost my new, housing social worker's number because I over estimated how long numbers stay in recent calls on an iPhone. She doesn't know who the other two are and they don't know who she is. They all do the same job in the same location in the same agency.

The timeline is not as clear at this point. It was about forty days from the denial to actually getting into the apartment. And the two new social workers are under the impression that I'm sleeping in my car the whole time. My mom was putting me up in Air BNBs. Which is not legally homeless here. I'm legally more homeless now than when I was in an Air BNB or a hotel. According to the first social worker I was homeless for six months according to the state because part of the definition is being in temporary housing which according to her a sober living qualifies as. So luxury apartment in boujie Cobb county: homeless. Hotel room in ghetto Cobb: not homeless.

I forgot the part where I had to meet social worker 3 in a parking lot one day for no reason I can figure out.

This is a shortened version of all this bullshit. Last year I was on the street for a similar amount of time and this has been so much worse. I spent a lot of that time last year in hospitals for a few different things. I got more dramatic sounding stories from that experience but repeatedly having the ladder kicked out from under me this time has been way more taxing. And I'm getting better treatment than a lot of the people in this area.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I drove some rando four hours to Savannah. And spent two hours in the city while he figured out where exactly to go. I got over $200 in gift cards out of the deal but he was seriously testing my patience. FML. I might have an apartment later today.