That Unemployed Friend #002: Nightmares, New Bedsheets and No Need to Solve the Homeless Problem When It Works in Your Favor

Get a job like you should jerk

Downtown LA is the story of two worlds; street level and high rise. I live about six blocks from Los Angeles’ skid row neighborhood, my street is the river styx between staggering poverty and the attempted “nice” part of DTLA. It’s a fascinating street, where tourists completely unaware that “downtown” doesn’t always mean “safe” and people just openly smoking crack cocaine commingle. The two blocks directly in front of my apartment look like b-roll for a Fox News segment on America’s crumbling liberal cities. We could fix this. It doesn’t have to be like this. I’m always saying that the solutions are easy, the work is hard. Because if that’s street level than then the high rise is the metric fuckton of empty luxury apartments they keep building for nobody. I look up and into them to count the signs of life within. There’s never anyone there. For every desk and monitor, nightstand with lamp light, there’s just empty unit after empty unit. An A/C humming for nobody above clean countertops and a gorgeous view of the tents people are living in on the sidewalk below.

LA hates the homeless. They want to ship them to the desert, pack them into a warehouse, imprison or intern them against their will, whatever it takes to prevent the homeless from inconveniencing their trip to Sweetgreen. Okay, well, maybe not whatever it takes, after all the solution to homelessness is housing. Duh. Housing that we have tons of. But, “Oh gosh, don’t put them in my neighborhood” cry the well off Angeleno homeowner. Put them somewhere else. Do not put one brick down on affordable housing in my area or we will pack every town hall from here to infinity until it’s dead. Think of the children! These fucking people. If you gave the homeless a place to live and a life to cultivate do you know what would happen? They’d get jobs at your Sweetgreens and your Ralphs and give you another person to bark at when they get the kale-to-walnuts ratio a little off. That’s not a good reason to want the homeless housed, I’d prefer to appeal to their sense of decency wherever it may be, but it’s the only one I could ever imagine resonating with these jerks.

It won’t though because those people need the homeless. The upside to so much visible poverty is it keeps the underlings in check. I know you’re awfully tired from working back to back 13 hour shifts and, man, you really could use a pay raise or even a day off let alone a union but is it really worth the risk? Word travels fast in this town, cause trouble at one studio and suddenly other studio might see you as a liability and next thing you know… It’s why one of the most common refrains amongst the downtrodden creative class is "Could always be worse!”

If LA instituted the kind of social safety nets, took the steps necessary, to fix the problem all of this city’s battered underlings - besieged day in and day out by bullshit coffee runs and sexist, racist jabs coated with only the thinnest veneer of deniability - would quit. They would chance it on their own or with friends to chase the passions that brought them here in the first place. All of culture would improve - movies, music, video games, everything that has been in artistic free fall due to neverending concessions to capitalism - and LA’s fake email job working management class of Tesla crashing assembly line white guys would have nobody to send on coffee runs. So they won’t let it happen; because as firmly as they believe things can never get better than this, they also believe it can get a lot worse. The system that forces me to walk past one or two dead bodies a month must stay. It’s all they know.

Like concrete falling from the sky

If September was unemployment euphoria then October has been a bit of a comedown. With the work stuff that used to fill up 110% of my brain draining out, the fumes of my dissolving busy cloud are turning out toxic. Doesn’t help that I bought these new sheets that are like full on blankets. Amazingly comfy if it’s cold enough but when the nightmares hit and my body temperature goes through the roof they only exacerbate the panic. So after some insane vision of a world where a stranger gets mad at me for stopping him from throwing a dodgeball at his son in public or being caught in a mass shooting when a guy steals a security guard’s modified dart gun that shoots real bullets to murder the two people right next to me taking shelter under this table (I have zero idea what that one was about) I bolt awake in a panic and proceed to use that time to reflect on what a wreck I’ve made of my life; occasionally these sessions are exacerbated by drinking too much finally culminating in a dark morning of the soul when me and my hangover look at each other and say “I can’t do this shit anymore.”

Sorry, I don’t mean to be melodramatic. Everyone ends up doing this at some point or another and I sure am more content being like this than I was working days/nights/weekends but it’s such a weird moment I’m at right now. I have to right this ship before the fuse of youth burns out. And trust me, it is burning. People love to say 30 is still young which, yeah, but it’s the end of being young too. The shit you can get away with at 20 you can mostly get away with at 30. But the shit you can get away with at 30 you cannot get away with at 40. I do think millennials with ask for (and gen-z will [please] lend) a bit of slack to keep living out their youth due to general economic shit tamping down the fun we’d like to be having but there’s no leniency given to my aching back and I’m still only two years away from being that guy at the house party. The one thing that brought me to Los Angeles is over. Just, the end. No real finale or proper send off it just ended and here I am. When the biggest part of your life for the last five years goes away one day after failing to build to anything bigger on its own those five years take on a certain horror. It wasn’t time wasted but was it really time well spent? What life did I forsake in order to live that one?

I’ve been struggling to finish this one for like three days. Haven’t been happy with it yet. I think it’s too Substack-doomercore. So let me try finishing it with this. I wake up everyday and recommend music that I love to thousands upon thousands of strangers on the internet. I get to platform young bands, legitimize legacy ones, and uncover the forgotten. Awesome. I got this newsletter going. I got a podcast I’m yankin’ the pull cord on. I stream. I want to start DJing for real. Merch? Getting there. Patreon soon. I want to believe through a rough amalgamation of those things I can create the life I really want to be living. But I’m still having nightmares and still waking up at weird hours because I’m not there… yet.