At present I sleep on a lumpy, folded futon because my sleeping loft is out of commission. My spine despises me, & rightfully so. This is all my own stupid doing. I have to tear out my makeshift ceiling & insulation (again), install a roof vent, screen the soffit vents (again!), & reinsulate & rebuild my ceiling. This is what you get when you make a house out of a shed.

I always imagined, were I to have a structure of my own, that I would cover it in murals. I’m not sure why I imagined this, but it might be a knee-jerk reaction to the dreary, drab uncolors the houses in the PNW are often painted: various shades of gray. As if the sky doesn’t provide enough of it. I also must’ve imagined someone else painting the murals. I’m not a performance artist. I don’t paint or write outside where people can see. My process is trial & error. There’s a lot of error.

When traveling in Italy I enjoyed the shrines on the outsides of buildings, & the thought of adding these 3-dimensional aspects to my imaginary shelter took hold. Again, I wasn’t sure who would be creating these structural adornments. If up to me, all the attaching, detaching, moving,  repositioning, then fixing whatever mess that all left behind would exhaust me before I even began. Looked cool in my head though.

After the shed was erected, the company that built it left instructions for proper care & longevity. These included screening soffit vents, patching any gaps, priming & painting, & attaching gutters & downspouts so rain spatter doesn’t rot the siding. I did some of those things. Of course I pictured gargoyles at the corners, their mouths dribbling into the pipes that run down. What gothic sculptor do I think I am? I’ve come to view my imagination as rather impractical, if not out to get me.

Gazing balefully upwards to my dwarfish bedchamber (it’s only 4 ft high at its peak), I can’t help but think ‘Abandon all hope ye who mend this ceiling.’ This will be the 3rd time. The first, after I ran out of funds from getting the main floor insulated & sheetrocked & electrified, I covered some scant leftover insulation panels with cardboard in the loft so I could safely sleep up there. It proved to be freezing in the winter, sweltering in summer, naturally. I managed to snag a construction friend to finish insulating up there, & then he recovered it all with brand new cardboard for me (because I didn’t want to ask if there was any scrap plywood about– I was still broke). He was happy to receive one of my paintings in exchange. But due to following only some of the initial instructions for my shed, the ceiling was invaded by wasps. I had neglected to fill all the gaps where the rafters emerged, & a few soffit screens were compromised as well.

This time I consulted the ‘tube (as in You), & vowed to lower the insulation for proper airflow, fill those offending gaps with exterior spackle, rescreen the soffits, & slap some damn plywood over the lot. 3rd time’s the charm, right?

Sometime in the 90s I ‘slept rough.’ Not in parks or shop doorways exactly. Squatted in a garage from Sept – Nov. Lived in a broken-down van on the side of the road for some months. Crashed on a friend’s catering business (in an old house) floor for a few weeks. Then took a corner in the basement of a roominghouse near the university. Not really nomadic, but definitely kinda homeless. My lack of fixed address was of my own making, yet wasn’t something I longed to do.  

The fascinating thing of being unhoused is experiencing how easy it is to fall into the trap of viewing yourself as society views you (even if you don’t agree with society): as refuse. As if  only the ‘addressed’ deserve rights, dignity, restrooms, healthcare, respect, life. A consumer culture has no use for the indigent, & it does everything in its enormous power to indulge the myth that those who need help lack humanity. I would say ‘Since when did America become so devoid of compassion?’ but that would suggest it had any to begin with. I may not be the best student of history, but I’m aware this nation was built on genocide & slavery. It’s exceptionally easy to turn people against each other, sad to say. I don’t even like people & yet I like them more than corporate interests.

I take full responsibility for my own homelessness, but that doesn’t excuse a system set up to create & ignore the unhoused. Many teeter off that razor-fine edge through no fault of their own. Many live their entire lives poised on it. & many are just one unfortunate event away, demoralized by the strain. A way to lessen the chance of uprising. Culture Control 101: Make those in need feel unworthy of life. If the culture suggests ‘failure is not an option’ can callously be directed at people who struggle, what do we call the environmental disasters that the fossil fuel industry continues to commit? Wins? Yay. 

The sardonic side of me (do I have another side?) sez why bother to fix my ceiling? There’s not much point. Sure, I have to live somewhere, but for how long really? Right now I swear the only thing keeping me going is dropping my jaw at the dumbfuckery. & plotting rebellion. It’s still too small-scale though. The best I got is to refuse to help the economy by not buying shit. A roof vent & some plywood are purchases I wish I didn’t have to make, but I can’t sleep on this wadded up futon much longer.

Here’s where my imagination takes me now, dodgy knees & other creaky joints along for this ride, picturing climbing up on that roof– 15 ft high– to cut a hole & install a roof vent:  Here kneeling on rough asphalt shingles, never to get up again, a perpetual penitent on the slant, clutching a power saw. Perhaps humming “Nearer My God to Thee,” because this heathen doesn’t remember the words. I envision rolling off that roof in the attempt to rise from bending the knee, thereby making the hymn apt indeed.

This image screams for me to find someone else to install the bloody vent. Someone who doesn’t struggle to get back up after kneeling. For once, my imagination takes my side & doesn’t go on flights of fancy! Maybe when I finish rebuilding the ceiling, I can paint a mural on that… of someone else painting a mural on a tiny house, with shrines & gargoyles, in the woods.