I witnessed something terrible last nite.
When going down the hallway towards the room I was supposed to be in upstairs in the shelter I heard a woman screaming "security!!" and a trans person was fleeing down the hallway saying "she's saying I'm a rapist and calling the police". It was a young person, obviously someone born male but identifying as female, trans, binary etc.
As I arrived in that room the staff women minding that floor looked annoyed but did very little to even address the situation much less rectify it which surprised me.
This made it harder for me to get my bed ready because I usually do so when people are asleep and I am quiet and dont wake anyone.
My nightly ritual is a bit involved. I had gotten a case of head itchies that I immediately recognized as early head or body lice from going to southern California for many years as a Traveler. I know how to get rid of it before it progresses but I don't want to get it again so I have a way of making my bed that prevents it. Theres been no sheets late at night for a long time now anyways.
My pillow is a plastic bag with my hoodie and vest in it which gets disposed of the next day and so on. My boots get tied to the bed and the bed gets wiped down with wipes. It doesn't take that long but most women just drag their sheets into the bare mattress and pass out.
There's cameras in the place nowadays but years ago basically if you left anything in your bed (wonderful comfy old fat mats thrown on bunk beds) to go to the bathroom for 5 minutes when you came back guaranteed it would be gone. I was raised up old school being houseless and I did my time in shelters off and on as a young kid and then after 9/11 to supplement my traveling to be safe if I got stuck in the winter.
I do things in the old school way which is partially what I learned in shelters and then from traveling.
To remain clean and to prevent people from stealing your stuff while trying to be polite to other people who might be sleeping.
The problem with this place now which is near Mass and Cass in fact the problem with a lot of homeless places nowadays is that they no longer kick you out at 6:30 am. Which in some ways is a good thing but in some ways it's a bad thing.
In the old days if you had to leave at 6:30 in the morning you weren't going to have bags and bags of crap with you. Nowadays in this particular place it's almost like transitional housing instead of homelessness on a day-to-day basis.
When I'm go into these rooms especially on the upper floors where there is more room for people's stuff I'm shocked at what I see in the bed. They have all this stuff as if they're in their apartments or something. It's all over the bed and it's all over the window sills and I've seen women basically take up the entire area so you can't get up to the top bunk the bunk bed. It's almost like they've become completely oblivious that it's a shelter and someone else is going to be living near them or above them for the evening.
So in a way it's become like transitional housing opposed to a night shelter.
They're not even thinking about other people and that isn't something that I've ever seen before in homelessness in shelters. People usually mind their own business in a night shelter and follow staff. In the old days the only problem was noise now that's not so much a problem but looking back now I prefer that to be the problem.
Another thing I have never seen before is people challenging trans people.
Which doesn't also make sense in the situation that happened because it's a hell of a lot safer nowadays.
years ago when it was a co-ed shelter (men and women on different floors segregated of course) they allowed trans people in the shelter. In fact they were the only shelter in Boston that would allow trans people in there.
I can only recall one distasteful incident probably around 2010..the mid-2000s at some point when you had this old school Puerto Rican hooker trans person who was sitting there keeping everyone up all night bragging about how good their bjs were. And you can just do the whole thing in your head with the accent as well, which is kind of amusing. If you're old enough to remember you know the person I'm talking about one of those Spanish street trans girls from the old days. Harmless but still it's obnoxious that someone's keeping up women at night talking about this crap however it didn't happen that often and no one really said anything because it wouldn't the polite thing to do. Because regardless of who it is the person obviously needs a safe place to stay at night regardless of how they're acting.
Nowadays it's much safer with cameras everywhere. Theres cameras in the halls, day areas and sleeping areas. The trans person did not look dangerous or like a problem person at all. She had long blonde hair and glasses and looked like a student.
The supervisor did indeed try to put the person in another bed but the person was so freaked out that they just didn't want to be in the building. So the people in charge are usually pretty good in this place it's some of the people that are minding the different floors sometimes and it's definitely a lot of the guests in there.
To add to that overly dramatic stressful incident now because the women were awake now they're realizing I'm coming in late and I have to make my bed. Now they're going to notice any noise because there used to people just coming in dragging a sheet and throwing it up there and passing out instead of having some kind of ritual or a certain way that they make their bed and now this is going to bother them even though it happens every single night and nobody even notices. So now one of the older women starts bitching about oh God and talking to God and all this shit because here someone now having to make their bed and they just want to sleep. well of course I'm a little freaked out as well so I started saying things like "well maybe you shouldn't have screamed at the trans person and people wouldn't be awake right now" "I usually do this at night and nobody even notices or wakes up."
It was eerie they all suddenly seem to stick together ironically except for the mentally ill white woman who's the one who screamed at the trans person and caused all this to begin with.( I noticed after I came in the room after she had screamed she started pointing at the cameras being paranoid of the cameras on the ceiling and then she lay down and went to sleep and covered her entire body with a black blanket look like a dead body. Of course that only added to how disturbing this whole thing was did she now looks like a trouted dead body in her bed).
All the other women try to ganging up and basically trying to push me around. One of them actually started on me and said "well what are you doing over here if your bed's over there". well the problem is is that I need to use a flat surface called a table because you women have all this crap everywhere and you bring your entire fucking house with you instead of getting a goddamn storage like you're supposed to be homeless and treating this like transitional housing so therefore there's no flat surfaces so I have to go over to this other table that isn't near my bed because everyone's selfish with their damn space and strangely inconsiderate of other people considering that we're all homeless.
For someone to ask me that question and start trying to push me around and then the young girl with the earphones who has all these toys and all this nice stuff. If this chick had all this crap in the old days she would have had it taken from her immediately when she walked outside the shelter.
After 40 years of dealing with this crap I'm dealing with the same crap I dealt with 40 years ago during bussing. Except now it's dressed up in a politically correct costume. I'd rather deal with the old homeless scene. Behavior the core behavior hasn't changed. In fact it's gotten worse because these are not street people.
And by the way if I went to any other part of the United States I wouldn't get this behavior I could go to New York City and people act much cooler than this. I could go to the West Coast and people act like adults who are urban. It just never fails that Boston continues to perpetuate this behavior and continues to use corruption as part of the system and then covers up for it and makes excuses.
Because I'm older and because I'm looking towards writing books and having a career maybe with podcast and speaking engagements about mind control and programming and like everyone else who gets to write books I know now that I have to be diplomatic so I simply talk to the supervisor when he came up and I asked him to just move me to another floor and that's the end of it.
What was also stressful to me is the lady who didn't respond at all to the person screaming at a trans person looking for shelter for the night in an inappropriate manner, when she had to come back into the room because the hens were cackling at me she started saying "I'm going to put everyone downstairs for the night" but she kept looking right at me again. So thank goodness an adult male came upstairs it was in charge but this is what I mean about it's no longer about homelessness it starts becoming about like the neighborhood and this is not a neighborhood this is a homeless shelter it's supposed to be night by night.
The people who are in charge in this place are fair and a lot of the staff are actually very good there's just one or two bad apples and I noticed they rotate people so you don't have to deal with bad apples for very long. There's some solid people there that are there usually that you can depend on. And there are people there that have heart like the old days surprisingly.
When you get a bad apple in the middle of a bad situation it's stressful and I know I can handle high stress especially being mobbed by a group but I am getting old and I don't want to deal with it anymore. In menopause I no longer have the estrogen or the hormone to cover for the stress that is created by this.
Nobody should have to put up with this behavior at all. Trans people shouldn't be being screamed at and sent out into the cold. You know what there's overtolerance of besides drugs? Disruptive mental illness.
Years ago in the mid-2000s when it was a men and women shelter segregated, in the women's dorm if you even acted out in some of the ways I see in this shelter now they would call BMC and they would have the men in the white coats come and take you away until you learn that you couldn't behave that way and be what's called disruptive.
what I learned from observing that in the mid-2000s at the shelter is that even the most mentally ill person-like any mammal, can be trained through conditioning.
So the mentally ill person who you think can't control themselves can because if you keep having the men in the white coats come and take them away then they stop the disruptive behavior. I came up with a saying which is 'if I do this I get taken away, if I don't do this I can stay'. That's what a lot of these people learned and they were quiet after that and they didn't do that behavior anymore.
Another disturbing thing was that the women dominating the room started talking about God. And then I think I said something about "God has nothing to do with it" and then I tried making it clear to them that we can stay up all night or go to sleep it's up to them.
Then I felt somebody looking over my shoulder at my vest with my metal patches from black metal bands and stuff on there and I sense this really disapproving vibe.
So now we're dealing with people that have this culture that might be a Christian culture within their old community ways and they might actually believe that men identifying as women don't belong in there and neither does anybody else.
By the way this is the first time I've seen this. Usually it's peaceful in there and women that are competent enough to communicate do so minimally and in a friendly way or that nobody wants any trouble.
There is one or two women in there that seem to have a hard time with people picking on them and I just try to be nice to them or stay out of their way. One woman in an elevator was expressing that she wants to take the elevator by herself and keep to herself because people make comments to her all day long and mess with her in the shelter all day long. I didn't share any theories with her because I don't think she's up to it. However I did show support as she was talking to a nice staff woman and just agreed with her that it does get annoying day after day after day when people start with their comments and messing with you.
I just didn't give her any information about working with these theories. She's older and she just seems like she's not too far gone but she seems as if she just couldn't handle it right now which is very sad. Sometimes she talks about her past when she's babbling to herself on the bathroom and it sounds like a sad story. To have a sad story and then to have people mobbing you and picking on you all day I just can't take it My heart can't take it. And it makes me feel so glad that a lot of us found the stuff on the internet where we can work with theories and make it so that we have lives and we don't end up like that.
I am going to do some activism in the area by putting up flyers for a domestic violence as well as human trafficking as well as meeting lists and of course some information about GS which I'm sure immediately will be ripped down.
The one thing I am not going to be quiet about is what I saw last night. I'm going to make a video with advice to trans people of what to do in Boston if this happens to them. I've also been speaking to local health centers that I know focus on the trans and gay community and asking them what can be done about this.
How would these women feel if I came in there and started screaming the n-word? And I didn't want them in the room with me because of the way they look or who they are or what if I started saying I don't want fat women in the room or what if I started saying I don't want any Asian women in here or I don't want any lesbians around me or anything like that do you think that that would even fly? No and it would be wrong.
Plus there's another problem where they're hiring people that stay there to clean and the place is never clean because staff used to clean it and now you have more women and less people cleaning in a way that seems the way it's supposed to be done professionally. There should be a night shift of cleaning as well.
. One thing I can say that's good about the place is that they have a grievance policy nowadays and it's very clear and the papers are right there in front of you I've actually done it once when it was clear-cut that there was a ridiculous problem and I did have someone call me but begrudgingly but they did call me and take my complaint with a forced teeth clenched smile you could hear over the phone lol. But they do have a process and it does get done properly.
The other good thing about the place is that there are women who are disabled and elderly and seeing them in the shelters years ago I always used to feel so bad for them because these are women that belong in nursing homes at this point or they belong in memory care are they belong in elderly housing and they used to use the shelter just as housing and they're like 80 years old carrying the suitcase around every night I used to feel really bad about that well now they've improved another shelter has an over 55 program and I know that they've improved conditions for women by keeping bottom bunks for them making it so there's a more beds that are on the ground instead of top bunk which I don't like cuz I like top bunk I sleep better I'm like a cat I like to be up high however they are a accommodating people who are disabled and old which is nice also they have a sitting room during the day that you can actually sit down in inclement weather which I don't like it because it's causing this let's call it the pine Street effect where women get clicky and caddy and think they own the place however it's good for women to not have to leave at 6:30 in the morning. A lot of women are not capable of doing that.
The reason I call it the pine Street effect is because any old days pine Street has a lot of problems because it was mail staff and female staff with all women and then the women could stay inside all day with that you get pimping going on saving beds for working girls a lot of corruption and over familiarity as well as the girls start to get clicky like they're in a neighborhood or they're in a tenement building because they're there constantly all the time so women naturally start to form little groups etc.
And I don't agree with any mail staff working with women and women setting unless they're over the age of 40 years old I'm sorry I just don't. There have been some younger males there that are very questionable and I don't see them now so like I said they seem to find out who the bad apples are pretty quick and rotate them out.
Last thing we need is pimpin gangstas in a women's shelter full of disabled mentally ill drugged out and old women or women like me who are in a situation that with a relationship that's difficult and there's no DV beds.
One thing I can say about the place is when I go there I do feel safe and they're always there and there is a lot of staff that check the rooms every 15 minutes so you do feel safe. There are problems but a lot of these problems were created it looks from administration and from people redesigning the building that had fantasies they were dealing with women that have home training in how to keep a house which they don't or weren't mentally ill which they are because the entire bathrooms that they rebuild are completely ruined already.
And some of the way that it's set up doesn't work because of the population you're dealing with but the renovation they did recently is a hell of a lot better than the first one that they did.
When it was co-ed it was the perfect absolutely one of the most perfect shelters for sleeping I had ever been in in my life. He didn't have any LED lights yet and they had these wonderful lights that were in there from when it was a morgue or part of the hospital and somebody had painted the bottom of these round lights and they were soft and they didn't get in your eyes and it was so nice and you could just sleep. And there were other things about it that made it a good sleeping environment but you have to remember may or menino is in at the time and there's differences in culture between the way a Catholic Italian person is going to take care of wayward women and the current globalist approach.
Also you're dealing with an administration back then that was probably connected to a lot of the organized crime in some way or fully aware of it and they had sort of a Catholic way of looking at it which is we know we help create a lot of these problems in this elitist place that forces people into these positions and leaves them no other options because remember there was no internet back then really so therefore we should help take care of them.
There was a little more humanity and heart back then. The problem now is that the system is masquerading under this cosmetic renovation and even pine Street is doing this even the pine Street van has a cosmetic renovation but the heart has been removed.
Let me tell you something about being out in Kenmore square at 2:00 in the morning still trying to panhandle in front of the 7-Eleven. And you're like fuck it I'm outside now I'm also just stay out here and I was younger and I was road hard and so I could just stay out there and I knew a bunch of people out there I'll just stay out here and get tired and panhandle. Well at 2:00 in the morning that van from pine Street would show up every goddamn night religiously all over Boston and you could depend on them and this was not a common thing back then with outreach as they call it now. This was a very special and unique thing and the people that worked in that van actually cared it wasn't just a job or they didn't have to mute themselves and make their responses muted or whatever they tell people now that makes them not fraternized with homeless people anymore maybe it's too dangerous now because of the meth I don't know people are very non-responsive and very they don't fraternize anymore.
It was probably a different homeless scene then because there was no meth.
People will come out of that van usually two guys an older guy and a younger guy would be in the back and they would ask you if you needed soup or socks or a blanket I mean these were absolute necessities we didn't have these programs where people just threw clothes around and stuff around as if it was easy I mean you had that emergency blanket and that was it. Things were scarce and the pine Street van was beat up it had dents in it and everything but we didn't care because it had a big heart. And the people were cheerful and they made things a little less stressful because they were hey guys how you doing and stuff like that and they would help you and move on it made you feel as if someone recognized you helped you and moved on they made actual contact which might be more important than a bunch of free shit everyday.
Now that van was there because it was necessary. There's a lot of outreach I don't agree with nowadays because the places that they're going are supposed to be places where people are houseless because they're self-sufficient or travelers or selfish efficient urban campers. And now these places Yes like Cambridge are ruined because you've got home bums coming out there who can't care for themselves and depend on the van. And these are the kind of people that are going to leave messes everywhere and make a mess of like the library like they had in the last couple years they have it down to a low roar at least. I was aghast when I saw a couple bring one of those foldable portable couches out to the lawn of the Cambridge public library main branch. I thought I was going to fall over I thought to myself this can never happen here and it's happening. A friend of mine who's a regularly that told me the police finally came and put it into a dumpster themselves thank God.
When people don't understand is that they're supposed to be different levels of homelessness that's supposed to be different kinds of homeless people That's how people naturally well self-determination if you will. You have to remember that going homeless is like going feral it seems like what they're trying to do is they're trying to prevent people from going into those primitive modes where they start to become either going back to their DNA which is now getting triggered and it's awakening and people start to act like their ancestors did to survive and so therefore that's when you're going to find out what kind of homeless person you are when you get out there and you have to make decisions based on experiences that are new because society doesn't give you any information so you have to depend on upbringing and your DNA.
So someone like me goes into shelters when I was younger and it didn't work for me because the shelter rats are not like me. Like pine Street for instance these people enjoy fridaynising they enjoy sitting around creating little groups and clicks and they just enjoy sitting around doing nothing all day waiting for housing and they're annoying and it's like being in high school and the women pick on each other and I just don't have time for drama. I tried to be a bartender and a strip club and the same thing happened where I just cannot fucking stand female drama of course it's always when women are protected inside of a building with people watching them and they know they're safe that's when they create drama. If women are out in the challenging environment where there's no safety you're going to see women being self-sufficient keeping to themselves keeping their heads down focusing on survival dressing like boys and not screwing around with any drama because nobody wants any trouble because it might just get you put in a ditch.
So that's what I don't like about female drama because I'm not in high school am I? And who has time for this but some people that's the way they are or that's the way their DNA runs they're not hunter-gatherers their farmers if you will.
And by the way that's another solution that I wanted to come up with a lot of these people that don't do well like in Southie years ago that didn't do well and they have too much Viking DNA and all they know how to do is steal or fight? The reason that these people are wild-blooded people is cuz they're on farms also if you put people out in a farm environment and they have to farm to eat they're not going to have the energy to screw around all day and a lot of people can't be put in a classroom regardless of medication nor should you be medicating people if they're meant to be just on a farm.
So when you get out into homelessness years ago you had to kind of find your way and you said okay shelters are not for me I don't like the stealing I don't like the dishonesty I don't like the drama and people are wasting their goddamn time in this place doing nothing so then you move on to going to different shelters around the country and you go okay this isn't working for me either I can't seem to find a place and these places are just as bad as the last other place is because it's full of shelter people which aren't the people that are like me. So you find out maybe that Urban camping might work but then you figure well it doesn't really work for me because what the hell are we doing out here again we're just wasting our time in one place again well then a drunk guy from a camp comes and takes you to rainbow and then he disappears off with his friends and you're just left in rainbow and you go oh my God this is so great this is just like the ancient days there's no money it's like trade it's like my Norman invader DNA is being activated I understand merchant trading I understand traveling I understand all this. And then you realize oh I'm a traveler You're not a trainwriter you're too old and you don't want to lose a limb and also I looked at some train writing videos lately and I totally would not do some of that stuff it's not safe I'm not that damn daring even if I was younger it's not my nature but there are other ways to get around and it would suit me better just because of my bills the way my brain works and the way I navigate things so you find your niche you find where you belong you find the kind of traveler or the kind of homeless person that you are.
The system is now making it so that the minute these people become homeless they are controlled and they're put into one tiny little area siphoned into another tiny little area and then they're totally controlled and then probably they're given housing or somehow some other way put into the system somehow.
What bothers me about this is though even though these shelters are safer they don't allow for the kind of creative expression and sort of seeking out one's own destiny self-determination free will free association fraternization they just don't allow you to find out who you are and where you belong and sometimes people need to be homeless in order to have a reset like a computer button has a reset button.
I understand that the circumstances in these areas where there's now meth which I wonder isn't sabotage in itself I understand they're dangerous and you need more control and more order but the overtolerance I think is a big mistake. And I think that allowing everybody into every area everywhere is a mistake. But I think you're wishing for the moon if you think that we're going to go back to say Harvard square or Berkeley or whatever being some exclusive area just for people that if they didn't have a bad upbringing or a drinking or drug problem probably could have went to those colleges because that's why people were accepted as being homeless around those colleges because they belong there. Nowadays people are going to these places that do not belong there and because of this they're building student centers with a students cannot fraternize with street people and they are becoming anti homeless under ignorant of what people are about outside of these controlled student environments which is also probably by design over time.
Believe me I am not a fan of waking up in the morning and hearing a male voice That's one of the things that used to bother me about the shelter years ago when I had estrogen in my system and I was a younger woman and in the mid-2000s I must have been in my late 30s early '40s it was a little disturbing to wake up and hear the trans person's voice because it's it is a man's voice. And when you think you're going to wake up with just women around you and you're pumped with estrogen and you're younger it is a little disturbing but the person was nice enough and I think they had somebody in there that was their wife or something crazy like that so they just sort of got tolerated and they were nicest pie and didn't bother anybody. Tolerance is supposed to mean just that tolerance it doesn't mean that you submit to abuse or domination from other groups of people and their culture it doesn't mean that you give up what you're supposed to have so that they can have something did they want instead.
Nobody should be being dominated by anybody and this is what I'm seeing now in this new shelter system I think it's because it's set up more institutional style I have no idea I can't put my finger on that I'm not an expert and I'm not analyzing it from that perspective but there are issues going on and it has to do with a very fake and very heartless sort of institutional feel to the way it's run and women becoming very spoiled in the way that they're homeless so they don't have to go out and test their meddle or they don't have to go out and find housing or they don't have to behave properly in order to stay somewhere that's free.
The thing that aggravates me about this is in the mid-2000s I had multiple people working in different shelters around the country telling me the problems with the system and what they thought needed to be done but they needed their jobs and they couldn't say anything and they thought that maybe activists like me could say something.
Think I wrote about it a little bit but I just didn't have time with everything else going on. And now I look at the system now being back in it and it's actually worse. And the problems are so ingrained that you just can't address them now because now they have this fake veneer of a cosmetic renovation of the way it's run and the way it looks to make it look like there are no problems and if there are problems they can be addressed and solved which isn't true.
The people that used to work in shelters were real a lot of them still are or they do the best they can to be real around this creepy institutional system now. I mean you're dealing with people that work in a shelter especially the day shift especially the people that work in the offices at advocates or whatever it is and you feel like you're calling customer service at a big corporation. You have to understand something The homeless industrial complex is a big business complex and we are the product.
I have a few very strong memories about seeing things in homeless shelters that showed how much the people that work there were wired to care about other people. Not saying the people that work there now don't care but I'm saying that it was a humbling experience that showed the magic of human mercy and sympathy. Now it seems like there's a lot more evil being covered up for that could be fixed and could have been fixed in that simpler shelter system we had before.
Shelter system now seems to be just something that was created to cover up for a bunch of people making money off of selling drugs dealing drugs and banks laundering the money of the people doing that in this area. So the taxpayer has to pay twice?
I cannot believe that when we had the chance we didn't come up with a system where the more capable people could have come up with something that was more self-sufficient or something where it's like a homeless hostile where people pay to stay or do chores or can do work or something like that once they're feeling rested. That we could build something or we could co-op or we could have some kind of squat house like they do in California or Holland. (Sadly those places are now doing away with productive homelessness. And see it's an all around the globe thing. To make sure that people can't recycle or repurpose a space. Using the value of human energy and work. This is what shocks me about socialists nowadays they really don't seem to value the work that you do with your hands The work that you produce through your own energy and that's supposed to be what it's supposed to be about not neoliberal capitalist politics. )
I have an acquaintance who's an elderly Russian woman. I visit her sometimes. I've learned that the way she likes to be referred to is specific. She is either a Russian speaker or she is from Soviet Union. She does not like to be referred to as Russian. I try to use USSR or Russian and she corrects me in her strong accent and says "no, I am from Soviet Union. Soviet Union was better!". I don't think any Americans can understand why the Soviet Union will be better.
She explained to me that in the Russian society prior to the Soviet Union it was run by the czar, I think she called it imperial Russia, it was not good for Jews and they were segregated. So for a Jewish women her age the Soviet Union might have seen better.
It's interesting how if you don't know the history of something or you don't know the old peoples experience you don't understand things completely you may have a limited view of something.
It seems where you were from in the Soviet Union was very specific and very important to your identity also.
When we discuss different institutions she refers to them as 'human captivity' or 'medical captivity'. I agree with her assessment in many situations. Somehow in her strong old Soviet accent it comes across a lot more convincingly. As if to be taken more seriously.
I remember in the mid-2000 staying at the old version of the shelter the original version where I am now. One womens dorm on the second floor and men upstairs. They had these round light fixtures that were held in these cross cross things and they were low lights that someone painted on the bottom half so it was low light for sleeping. No LEDs. You got the best sleep probably becuz story was told that it used to be the old city morgue. It was always so peaceful.. when nobody was making noise.
I remember getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom area and in the low lights when it was quiet I got a glimpse of the staff woman at the desk in the dorm. She was a foreign black thin older woman. She was quietly counting on her Rosary beads very intently. This is why she did what she did she had cause and she had purpose. This is how strongly she believed. And that is what motivated her to get through all of the hard times because believe me the workers in the shelters back then they should all be recalled for their service and given special recognition (except for the bad apples like the male staff at pine Street inn in that stole my ID out of my bag. you have no idea the stories I have to put in this book). There was no EMT in the shelter back then there was no mental health specialist and there was nobody to take care of medical emergencies you had to wait for BMC to come back then in the early days it was Boston City hospital. These people dealt with a lot of different issues that they absolutely had no training for. We needed medical people on site very badly back then but they just weren't provided.
It's was her faith obviously they got her through it.
Just like it's our faith as people working with the TI theory it gets us through whatever happens and we find ourselves anew and reinvent ourselves or learn how to live in society with our condition. The person that becomes a traveler after being homeless for so long and learns where they belong tests their meddle and learns about the strength inside of them that is denied them by living in the structures provided by mainstream modern culture.
From every person who has ever been part of their upbringing that's taught them anything to every piece of DNA that's within their fiber that is now active and working to help them survive.
A lot of when I came up with when I was traveling- the ideas and the mechanisms and the ways that I would do things came from somewhere in me that I have no idea becuz it was never taught to me, it's all primitive..recall.
Another memory I have is from Pine Street Inn women's shelter maybe early 2000s. There was an old woman that was there that was I think from Haiti or maybe an African country but I think it was Haiti and she couldn't speak any English. She was also a bit mentally ill and would talk to herself and hear voices it's pretty interesting to see somebody hear voices in the other language and talk back to them. She was also completely blind. The people that worked in that shelter specifically some of the men that worked there treated her as if she was their own grandmother.
That woman was guided everywhere and she was helped everywhere and she was given everything that she needed by the staff. They were so gentle with her.
Again that takes a lot of energy and effort and there should have been things like nurses or elder care or someplace to put her but instead other people had to take care of her.
The lesson that we have learned in these places and that's the lesson that I have learned while traveling with the traveler community you have to take care of each other.
And that's the lesson we learned in neighborhoods as kids when there were neighborhoods.
The first lesson I ever learned about crazy homeless people (I've probably told this store before) when Marcus an Israeli man from the 1960s culture of Israel was working and living in the United States here in a suburb or a borough of Boston that is very nice and used to be very Jewish, I had the chance when I was young to be tolerated and accepted even though I was on drugs no one ever said anything maybe I wasn't that bad yet and I didn't steal but I was given a job surprisingly in a bakery.
I did the best I could it didn't last very long because my habit progressed.
During the time I was there I remember there was a man who would come in with a trench coat that was ripped up with writing all over the back of it that he done himself and it made no sense. He was the first person like that i think I ever saw up close in a place where you don't expect them to be.
It turns out that he supposedly was a child in the camps in Germany during World War II and his parents were killed and he went crazy and he was crazy ever since. This is back in 199, this person's probably passed away by now.
Everybody politely ignored him and Marcus simply sat him down at one of the tiny little cafe tables that everybody was sitting at, food was provided for him with no question asked he ate quietly and left. That was the way this man was treated everywhere he went in this Jewish neighborhood.
With tolerance and a quiet human dignity that I remembered for the rest of my life and that was my first experience on how you should treat homeless people.
I understand that was a different time, a different world. There were controls, there was strong culture ethnic ties, there was reasons why he was treated with reverence and I understand that.
The things I remember from when I was younger and the world today that just seems to be about being on your phone buying things and ignoring everything else and everyone else is such a sharp contrast.
An amusing part of the story is because I was so young and I think I was traumatized which is why I was on drugs I turned to Marcus and I said "Marcus what's wrong with him?" and he told me the story of the camps and how it happened and I became very upset and I think I started to cry a little bit. Marcus, being this sort of '60s person from Israel does not want to see a woman crying but he's also a Jew and wants to get back to work lol so of course what he did is he told me a joke. Now I've tried to repeat this joke to Americans and I got a lot of crap for it so I stopped repeating it but this you have to remember is the Jewish way of dealing with Hitler- is to make fun of him. That's what all those movies were about in the old days is to make fun of him so he's not so scary so the situation isn't so severe.
Marcus turned to me he said "Be quiet, be quiet for a minute.." in his Israeli accent. "Listen, listen, listen .." "Why did Hitler kill himself?" I said I don't know why teared up .."because the gas company sent him the bill and he couldn't pay" followed up immediately by a sort of half-hearted hahaha but somewhat cheerful, then immediately followed by "Now get back to work! " Which wasn't so much harsh as it was part of the tailing off of his joke.
Somehow this made this better. The humor alongside the compassionate way that this person I saw was treated.
The problem with the cities nowadays is that people don't care their face is in their phone and the kids have not learned the value of whatever it is I see that they're missing and I just can't put my finger on it.
I know part of it is they were put into this dimension that lives inside the internet and they live in the internet as if it's a real dimension and a real place and that's what they believe is the real world and I think the world outside of them escapes them. the world that we live in with other human beings and nature and trees the physical realm The emotional and mental realm that exists without the internet on the phone. I also have my concerns about video games. I've seen kids as young as 13 playing games where there's things like the dark brotherhood new murder people and stuff and there's actually no consequences at all but they're learning a reward system for underhanded or bad behavior. There's also deeper concerns about the video games I won't get into right now.
Our generation mimics our grandparents we simply use the phone as a tool and then we put it down. It's strange to think that a person could be a small child and have the phone and actually be immersed in it and now they don't understand the difference between reality in the physical realm or the realms of the senses and this other realm.
Also hear kids talk about having trouble putting the phone down and the look on their face is very stressed and serious and that's something our generation can't understand- just put it down. It's really boring anyway. I look around and see everyone on the trains and buses on their phones and I wish there was something else. I try to remember what people on trains and buses were like years ago. I recall people doing crosswords or reading. My god! People used to have actual conversations on trains...or think..quiet reflection. To exist in that space on a moving vehicle.
I think they've done to them with the phone and the internet what they did to us was television and it's very cruel.
To this day I seem to require a TV on in the background if I'm housed. It's like a pacifier. It's like a comfort and it's wrong. It isn't real and it's bad for your brain. Gen x had an opportunity to try to get rid of television out of our lives but a whole bunch of things interrupted all the good things we were trying to do.
I don't know how to correct this I don't know what to do All I know is that something has to be done and now it's more complicated because the system of course has made it look like something has been done when actually it's probably worse now.
All I can do is tell you what I've seen that's why I just collect the Intel assess it and then write it down That's why I'm just going to write a couple books I'm not a hands-on activist type of person I'm not strong enough I'm not bold enough and I lose my motivation to follow through on things when they involve real world stuff and dealing with people too long.
An art project I could actually complete like writing a book or something.
So I know this is too long once again but I think it's important.
I don't know what's going on but the bottom line is is that it's not safe out there at night. Not without the old street scenes so I don't think it's right for people to somehow gain precedence over other people especially when the system is now is cold hearted machine that makes you feel like you're more invalidated than you ever were before.
I think a lot of selfishness and callousness and cold heartlessness is acceptable now and I think one of the reasons is because it's all too easy there's too much overtolerance and there's too much provided and that's fine for some people and if that's what the cities and the states want to do then let them. I would like to see something alternative but what's really creepy about this is that it seems it's getting less and less viable to create something alternative.
I'll go back to that place tonight because I have to because it's raining but I don't like the way it makes me feel. I did feel safe at one time and now I'm starting not to and it's not because of the general population or the staff but I just don't like the feeling that I can no longer fight for myself but this is I guess part of getting old people just don't respect me anymore. I think that makes me more upset than anything else.
There is one good thing about being an older woman which is if you can muster up the energy solutions are very obvious to you and you know if you really wanted to you could just crush the opposition even if it's 100 people in front of you who are younger in one swoop of your hand it's just the question is like do you want to deal with it do you want to bother with it?
Maybe something can be done where there's some kind of rule like they can put a trans person somewhere that's a little more open on one of the other floors where it's not these tiny rooms with a women don't want to be in an enclosed space because that is something new. The other shelters have always been dorm style and that gives you a little more breathing room where people are not right near you or you're not in an enclosed space with other people so maybe they can make a rule like if anyone's trans and a women's shelter in the Boston shelters they go into an area that's more open so that there's more trust so that the women feel like the staff can watch more easily because they're in a bed where it's open and you can see them putting them into a small room of five or six women that's enclosed that gets checked every 15 minutes by a monitor might make some people become afraid so that might be a compromise of some kind.
Don't they just have trans shelters I don't understand it?
It used to be my dream to open a hostel / laundromat because for some reason I love laundromats I used to work in one. But now it's coming to the realization of maybe we should make alternative shelters and also maybe we should try to have the shelter system streamlined with federal oversight because some of these private company shelters are absolutely outrageous and I can't believe they're getting away with what they're getting away with I'm not referring to anything in Boston it's in the suburbs and some of the stuff I've seen around the country..
It used to be kind of obvious years ago that shelters were a white collar criminals dream and now that's getting subverted where people can't see that there might be corruption there because everyone acts like they're working at Macy's department store and smiling in your face so I'm not really understanding what you'd have to do maybe you'd have to do an audit or a full scale deep investigation I have no idea but something needs to be done.
As it is as of tonight once again I'm just another nobody going in trying to get out of the rain trying to deal with a curveball being thrown my way where I have to be in a place like this again. Maybe the universe is making me go back to these places so that I can see what they're like now because maybe something has to be done sooner than later.
THUR 07/01/26
6 days ago
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