I've talked about this before. I don't talk about being homeless a lot. It's painful, living in hotels for two and a half years. It's a short story if I leave out a lot of the detail. Two and a half years ago, around Christmas, we were evicted from our apartment in Mission Viejo because my publisher sat on their asses getting my advance check to me for my book, Getting An IT Help Desk Job For Dummies (available on Amazon, cheap plug). I worked my ass off to finish that book. 330 pages in three months. They didn't care. Companies don't care, so we were screwed. We figured we'd be out for a month or two then find a new place.
I wanted to write about Slack and my new project, The Human Family Foundation, but I landed on my admin page and was smacked in the face by my reality.
Emotionally, I’m about as drained as one can be, without simply keeling over dead. Spending day after day after day just being little more than alive, constantly searching for a solution that cost more than my heart can afford, is like a desiccant for my... me. I have these little fires in me somewhere, but I can never quite track them down. I know they’re burning and sometimes, on good days, I can even see a wisp or two of smoke, but then it’s gone. If I could just find one, I’d stoke the flames as high as I could.
On Monday morning, we'll need to check out of our hotel. That's significant because, after that, we don't currently have another place to go, though not for any lack of trying. Ever since I got my job at Mirantis a few years ago, and lost it a few months later due to a big shakeup in their ranks, I have been unable to find work. That leaves us on a fixed income of a few hundred short of $3,000. Considering the Extended Stay America we're about to end our relationship with costs us just short of $100 a night, the math isn't difficult to understand. Of course, we need the kitchen that the hotel provides, or our daughter would get sick all the time. She has terrible food allergies, which basically means she can't eat much of anything.
NOTE: The original title to this piece was "If you feel like someone's out to get you, they probably are". I decided to change it because I had just written down what popped into my head and it's a little "out there", if you know what I mean. Nobody is out to get me. When I spent some time thinking about it, a visual metaphor came to mind. Hence, the new title. The cape is a beautiful distraction. Inside, my soul is broken and the laughing, jovial, juvenile, and kind imbecile I project is just a shadow of who I am. Look inside the cape, and the elegance fades quickly away. And yet, I remain optimistic, hoping that one day I achieve something, even something small and insignificant. Or, something big, like saving my family.
Ah, good old paranoia. It's an American classic with two slices of cheese and a side of Freedom Fries. The funny thing is, sometimes you are completely right to feel paranoid. I know I do, and with good cause. My little family has been having the shit hit the fan for well over a year now.