Between the End 
    and the Last Time
 

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We'd been literally homeless since December 2016. As of April 28, 2017, we had moved 8 times.  Here is a video of Child #1 and I in a vehicle and moving somewhere.

 

There really aren't many truly available resources for most people who find themselves without a home.  There's a lot of advertising,, or maybe just a few ads that stick out from the others because of the subject matter.  And the ads make you think, see - there's no excuse for anyone to be homeless.  Just look right here, there's a referral number homeless people can call with their cell phones, and there's plenty of shelters - no reason for anyone to be sleeping out of doors unless it's because they for some reason choose to.  

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Despite the advertisements on the local public transit buses and the comforting thoughts they inspire in us, when it comes down to it, there are only a few organizations that actually would possibly take action on your behalf, and even less of those organizations has the availability to even talk to you.  Click here to see a 211 referral I received to an "urban encampment" for my family. 

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There are ridiculous, fire-ringed hoola hoop-like obstacles that must be successfully jumped through in order to leave a voicemail for an unpaid, volunteer department representative who, due to the burden of a much higher-than-normal number of phone call inquiries, will need up to 10 business days in order to (hopefully) respond to your message, but is not legally required to return your call.  If you answer your phone at the time of the only call-back that the organization will give you, you will be blessed with privileged information on how to get on a wait list for an initial intake interview.  If your intake is able to be processed, you will be further blessed with information on resources for homeless persons; not actual housing by any means, but perhaps an updated list of confidential homeless shelters (you'll still have to call 211 first, once you have the written referrals 211 requires you to have before issuing its referral.), a place where you can gather with a large swarm of homeless men between 6:00am and 7:15am for morning foods. and 11:45am and 12:30pm for sandwiches, etc.  There are rules like,: if you don't answer your phone the first time you are called by this organization, they will not call again and your only chance to get help from this place will be ruined because your name will be flagged in their system as an irresponsible person who just didn't have what it took to pull themselves by the bootstraps right out of that pesky but easily-resolved budgeting issue you selfishly acquired, despite having a family. The organization will likely call sometime in the next 2 years.  It all just depends on all the things that it depends on.  And so on.  Most often at the end of it all, a list of phone numbers that you already have is recited to you and you're instructed to call, and to keep calling.

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And this phone call requirement is a conflict of interest, or something.  Because you're supposed to be available at all business hours of all the days in the case that an appointed person from a charity organization calls to offer you charity and help you get to some place where it will be easier for you to once again have the privilege of privacy enclosed in your locked box of an apartment.  And while you're waiting for that phone call, you're supposed to be calling these numbers over and over, all day and every day, numbers that always get you a person who tells you that nothing has changed, to call again tomorrow.  And if you don't do these things you are not actually trying, you are not actually doing it right, and you likely will not get the help you are seeking.  But ok so in response to these places all telling you they can't help you and your family, to me the logical thing is to try something else.  If they're not going to help and told me so,  how many times am I supposed to keep calling and asking the same thing before I realize that doing that alone is kind of nuts?  So you spend your time doing things that may make a difference, but that cuts into your phone call time, and that is unacceptable to the social worker guy, "Daniel," who has been teaching the interview class at WorkSource.

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To begin our journey, we stayed through December and into the beginning of the new year in Kirkland with an ex named Max that neither my daughter or I could stand.  But it just so happened that while I had been working to unsuccessfully save my family's home, Max had been staying in the large-ish home of his grandparents in Kirkland.  The story is that, despite medical caregivers who provided in-home care that were assigned post nearly 24-7 and were state-assigned and paid-for, Max was there for helping with the care of his grandfather, who was nearing 90 years old and paralyzed from the neck down.   Max had begun an intimate relationship with one of the caregivers, an older immigrant woman named Aster, but after Max's long-term girlfriend and drug dealer found out about it, he awkwardly ended his intimacy with Aster by simply ignoring her, despite her regular, expected presence as a state-paid caregiver in the same place that Max lived.  That's right; Max ignored Aster when she was present, and ignored her text messages when she was not working in his grandparent's home until she figured out that the bizarre treatment was Max's way of "breaking up." 

 

About 2 days before the legal eviction vacate-by date for the Magnolia condo, Max's grandfather and grandmother relocated their lives to a retirement home.  Before we arrived, I was told we could stay for 6 months to a year or longer.  Child #1 began getting up much earlier to catch a bus downtown; the travel was relatively painless, what was awful was getting to the bus stop on foot in the winter weather (not many in Kirkland use the bus as a daily transportation method, and if they do, they use a Park & Ride, and don't have to worry about walking to their stop like Child #1 did.).

Here is a link to a short video that Child #1 took of us at the Kirkland house - I'm the one in the back dancing with a bird on my head: https://youtu.be/qrtfkZ5yRfQ

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We left Kirkland when a surprise visit from my ex's (MAX) East coast-dwelling family members, who had a vested interest in the property we were on, and no amount of trust vested in the well-known shady character of Max, we  unexpectedly had to leave, and rather quickly, at that.  We  ended up at a hotel in downtown Seattle, very near in location to the intersection of Denny and Aurora .

 

At the hotel, a particularly mean physical attack on me by Max, whose family had prepaid for the hotel we were at, occurred.  Because of his exceptionally malice-filled violence, I wouldn’t let Max back into the hotel room without his agreement to rationally confer with me.  My demand had the effect of causing myself and my family to once again be suddenly uprooted (with no housing arranged, as I had failed to factor in the drama), except this time it was in the middle of the night in January. 

 

There was no negotiating with hotel staff, and not even the police officers who came to talk to me at that late hour could convince them to let us stay, because my ex had asked a hotel employee to assist him in breaking into our room, which was categorized as a safety risk to the safety of the hotel’s other patrons. I think it was past midnight after the hotel room attack when I was able to find a friend who would come out and help us get our things packed into a cab and to his rental studio in Belltown where he let us stay temporarily, maybe 2 or 3 days, until I obtained a bright 1-bedroom short-term apartment rental for a month in Phinney Ridge. After that, we ended up renting a cold, dark, and observed-feeling basement for another month in North Ballard, where my abused/neglected companion bird, Desi, almost lost his mind due to claustrophobia and lack of stimuli. 

 

The Wonder of Desi: More Than Just Another Textbook-Perfect Physique 

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The story when Desi was brought to me for love and care in my family’s magical home was that he was used for breeding when he was a younger parrot, and he definitely fits the role – he is large in stature (for his tiny species) and muscular (I’ve seen this guy fly across the room when startled – with his wings freshly clipped), extremely intelligent, and brightly and uniquely colored. At some point after being used as a breeder (which means little human interaction/domestication, causing the bird to act much more “wild” than one with constant human interaction and observation), Desi’s owner allegedly kept him in an attic without any windows, and above a pet store where he could hear all the activity, but couldn’t see any, and never got interaction himself unless it was indirectly when he got new food. I was told he lived like that for about a year. Caring for Desi the past few years has given me purpose during extremely dark times and has acted surprisingly as a mirror when contemplating my own vices and virtues, effectively providing contemplation of my thought processes and emotional states, as well as the depths of emotion birds feel and express, and the emotional intelligence they’re capable of. I’ve watched this bird become excited with a new interest, then confused and broken by his interest’s distance, lack of caring and sudden disappearance. 

 

Desi stared out the window, looking for the person he had chosen as “his,” for days and days, maybe weeks. I remember specifically that on the third day of Desi’s deep depression, I got home from work and offered him one of his favorite treats, when he looked at me with his proud, feathered shoulders heavy, gave a deep sigh, showing no interest in the treat I offered, and quietly turned back to stare out the window for his love. Since then, the person Desi pined for has reappeared after many months. I was very worried about how Desi would react to the renewed presence, but Desi’s reaction was unexpected– he acted disinterested in his old flame. Any visitor gets both birds excited as we honestly never had a large amount of foot traffic in my home and lead rather quiet lives. Desi did not act phased by this visit at all, and acted like we did not have a visitor. He wasn’t rude or angry or disinterested – it was just like everything was normal. Upon additional visits, Desi has recognized his old flame and still gets excited, but not as excited as before, and doesn’t seem upset with the individual’s absence. It’s like he used logic and problem solving to emotionally distance himself from the situation in order to preserve his feelings, a very complex and difficult thing to do for anyone experiencing an emotionally trying situation. 

 

Desi has been slow in trusting me, I think his previous and neglectful/abusive owner may have been female, but lately, he and I are able to communicate with each other rather well when we want or need to, and I’ve even been able to understand some of the stuff he tells our other bird, Pepper (mostly warnings about making me too irritated – Pepper is handicapped and therefore inevitably extremely co-dependent). 

 

“The Basement,” Part II & Final Act:

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Flash back to our current situation! Our fourth “homeless home” in the dark basement really started to mentally wear on Desi during the last week of our stay. The window that I had Desi’s cage situated by was at eye level with the ground of a backyard which was surrounded by very tall, wood fencing with no breaks in the planks. We were almost constantly in the shadow of the fence, and there was absolutely no activity of any kind to keep Desi interested. He has a guard-dog mentality and likes to let us know when a predator bird is in the area or when a visitor is coming to the door, and sometimes he likes to talk to me about the traffic or tell me excitedly when a dog he takes a liking to and its owner are walking by. Without this, a few weeks in, Desi started acting very neurotic, chewing on everything he could find that didn’t instantly demolish in his strong and DNA-superior beak, including the wall behind a hanging mirror I bought for him at a thrift store (he’s near obsessed with looking at himself in mirrors). Thankfully, all neurotic and unhappy behavior was gone immediately the moment we left that location. 

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The Doors in Greenwood, A Bedroom in Ballard, and Life on the West Side 

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After the Ballard basement, we stayed for about 10 days in a tiny, blue, two-bedroom house (we had our own space and privacy for the first time since the eviction – no more tip-toeing, worrying about being too loud or cooking smells bothering someone, and freedom to sing as loud as we wanted) in north Greenwood. In contrast to the exhilaration that came with our previously taken-for-granted freedom of sound and dance, we were creeped out by the house, which was randomly sunken into some kind of bog in a large and unkempt yard behind a large, newer building built up on a man-made hill on Greenwood Avenue. The surrounding houses were of normal size and didn’t have the severely sunken-in yard (at least 7 inches, or more) that this tiny, kid’s play-house looking shelter presented. Most of the doors in the house didn’t latch and actually had the latch itself removed, and all but one of the few other doors that latched were missing the door handle. There were strange, deep carvings that looked like the angry, hysteria-driven work of some geometrically-inspired artist in the old wooden floor (circa 1910-1930) in what seemed deemed as the child’s room. 

 

We were happy to have a new place to go, one where we hopefully didn’t get a severe case of the creeps every night, but we did cherish the freedom we had experienced, not knowing when, or if, we would ever what we used to think was an every-day thing again. From there, we stayed in a bedroom with a microwave in Ballard for 2 nights, then came to land where we currently are in West Seattle, and we’re supposed to move again on the 1 st of May. The money I had saved is now nonexistent. With each place we have rented, I harbored some hope that the owner of the home and I would be able to discuss turning our short-term stay into a longer-term one, but the opportunity never presented at any of the longterm live-able places, and the relationship I had with those homeowners wasn’t one where I felt I could force the point.