Money

Money update!

Still poor, but a little less so at the moment.  Found someone to sublet while i’m away, GST cheque when i got home the other day, and a place to stay in New York which i was hoping to go to, but couldn’t because of money, lack of money to stay somewhere.  It feels weird to put this down, after being so negative below, a little tail between the legs feeling, anyway there it is.

I hate being poor. Most people think i’m not because i dress okay. I am. Money poor, rich in my mind. I imagine i can go away for a month, pay my rent before i leave and when i come home, and still go away, go to 2 cities, spend 4 nights in a hostel, bus there, which is banana’s since i get easily claustrophobic, and have trouble sleeping in reasonable conditions. I am challenged by my reality at this moment. Lack of education, money and what it means to not be educated and to be poor in the culture i live in, in the city i live in. It means my upstairs neighbour who is 6 lives better than i do and will have more opportunities because her Mother is educated and owns property. I am sick of this, i’m sick of feeling less than, because i didn’t pay for what i know, because my father sold cars and my mother has been sick in about 80 different ways and i have been looking after her since i was child, looking after all of them like i was their servant, uneducated servant girl. There are days like today where i feel like i’m being wasted, and then like i’ve hit a wall with the amount of knowledge i have, and that i can’t go any further without more tools. I think i should go to school, but i don’t know what for. Everything?

I hate the word class, its a put down , its a compliment. You have class, you are working class, and god forbid you are middle class. I think i came from all of it. My mother grew up with money, my father with none, we collectively had some, and then none. My father tried to fit into my mothers idea of classy, and he never was, it wasn’t him. Its like spontaneous, people who say they are, never are. I work in a community where being poor is a badge of honour, being working class, even better, any thing past that and your a service provider. I don’t want to benefit from someone elses poverty but i already have, i have for years now. I also live in relative poverty, i don’t know how to live with money, i don’t know how to hang on to it, and i never have very much to hang on to. I feel somewhat ashamed of being poor, it is not a badge of honour for me, but it has provided me with a small amount of credibility and some insight into the community i have lived, worked and volunteered in for the last 15 years. I also think i have been really resourceful with not alot of resources. I imagine sometimes if i had more i could do more in the world, and then i get lassoed by my ego. I look at people i know who move in the world with such confidence and have the ability to act when they witness injustice, or have great ideas that they can put in to action. They are also people who have sufficient incomes, education, stable housing and a partner. I don’t. I have been able to act on a number of occasions in relation to projects and issues, but i haven’t been able to sustain my participation.

I’m in a writing spin, thought spin, about money, feeling less, because i have less. I know i have other things, people kindly tell me all the time, how talented i am, sending me job postings, pushing me to go to school, offering their time to flush out ideas with me about what i should do with my life. I feel well loved by my friends, they just want me to be happy, not struggle so much. I have felt a bit like a burden though, not having money, having friends who treat me a lot, knowing that. Friends who have offered their homes, when i have been without one, and being there for me and listening when i have been in pain. I’m conscious of wanting to keep things fair, i cook for friends, help them out with their kids, their gardens, their pets, and listen to them when they are struggling. I am generous with my time and skills, because it is the currency i can share. I like the barter system, it recognizes the value in work that is often undervalued, that we all have something to offer, it is also feels good to exchange goods and services outside the legal currency, the papers and coins.

I have worked in a neighborhood where charity is the dominant paradigm. I think its been helpful and devastating at the same time. To not place value on someone or something implies worthlessness. I have been doing it for years giving my time away like i’m some middle class art maven that can afford to volunteer, and i can’t. I see others giving their time away constantly, who also can’t afford to, but do, because it gives us something to do, gives us meaning, to feel needed. The devastating part of the charity in the neighborhood, and not just in my neighborhood, but all over the place is that it often does not recognize capacity. You can’t take care of yourself, so i will do it for you. I will feed you, clothe you, listen to you, and you don’t have to do anything, or be anything. The reason so many people suffer is because they feel worthless, not connected or needed in the world. I just seems like common sense to me that if someone is suffering and not feeling valuable in the world, then the best kind of giving, would be the opportunity to give back. I have seen it hundreds of times, people donating money from their welfare cheques for a man who had died to be sent home to El Salvador, another woman donating money towards the craft supplies, and so many other people, helping set up for events, helping in whatever way was necessary. Its a way to feel a part of things, not feel like a burden, to feel like we are needed and valuable human beings, and we can do that without money, we need to do that without money.

I look at this endless post today, and i realized nothing was resolved. Not like these posts are all meant to resolve something, there more like questions, but this is one i want to answer for myself. I want to answer it because the quality of my life is at stake.

For the Downtown Eastside

I fell in love with you when i first moved here 16 years ago. I felt taken in and accepted by you in a way that i had never known. You believed in me, you showed me how muddy the world is, that i have a great capacity to give, and that i have a strong voice and i have a right to be heard. You were human scale in a sea of towers, you were warm, awkward, unpredictable, crazy, generous, desperate, caring and harsh. I felt at home with you, i know you better than any place in the world. I have an intricate map of you in my head, deaths, protests, memorials, celebrations, clinics, restaurants, phone numbers, streets, who owns the different parts of you, and who wants to claim some, but not all of you, because not all of you is marketable.

I see how you suffer, i suffer too, i watch all these people that call you home, suffer. They don’t leave you, maybe they don’t want to, maybe they can’t. I have had it easy with you. I know that. I will never know what it is like to walk the sidewalks of you with such vulnerability. I organized a parade on your spine, Hastings street, i drew pictures on your sidewalks with people aged 6 to 70. I painted with others on plywood lining your streets, made music with others in your parks. I have loved you because you let me, i have loved you because you have shaped me, you have taught me about commitment and i have loved you because you don’t fit. You don’t fit in this city of beige and glass, with yoga asses sealed in lululemon pants, art fucks coming out the yin yang, lefties that are actually conservative, and an entire city comatosed, anesthetized by the ocean, the mountains, the rain, its own prettiness and privelidge. We are the Valley Girl of Canada and the Downtown Eastside, well you, your a wise guy, you don’t have alot of money, didn’t really care about it much, people mattered more, justice mattered more, you hold our stories, our ghosts, you know the truth. The Valley Girl with her asshole older boyfriend with money don’t want you around anymore, they want to kill you, they want to kill everything about you that reminds them of their humanity, of their roots. You remind them that they built their empire at the expense of all the lives you have seen destroyed all the people that you held that no one wanted to hold, you remind them that they really are small town no matter how hard they try. If they get rid of you, they can maintain the illusion of a world class city, but your ghost will haunt them when they exist as a shell, a city with no memory, and filled with droids in the same pants, living in faux-heritage duplexes.

I will miss you when you are gone. I won’t miss you suffering, i want your suffering to end, i want you to know what it feels like to be honoured for who you are, to feel healthy and to not be asked to fit into some hole that will never fit because you are too big. People are working so hard to save you, and i don’t know if i can help anymore, or if i ever did, and sometimes i wonder if i made things worse. I have been talking about you for years, defending you, speaking about your value, helping care for and be with people who were suffering on your sidewalks, in your parks, in your buildings. I am tired now, as i imagine you are, fighting for the right to exist. Everyone is trying to change you, make you look shiney, hide the suffering, put on your handsome clothes and a brave face, the Olympics are coming. I will stand next to you when they come and we can give them the finger together.

Love,

Sharon

Signs, signs, everywhere the signs…

I am going through old files, cleaning my place, getting ready to leave, maybe forever, i don’t know, but something is never coming back. I am looking at old articles, some about me and others i’ve worked with, papers i’ve written, and lots of really dramatic, intense, deeply confused journal writing. I turn on my old iMac which i use for music at this point. I have Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech on my iTunes, the setting is almost always on random play, and the speech comes on. This feels like a sign, he was before. Winter of 1994 on the History Channel, he came to me in a dream that night and i woke up knowing i had to go back to Carnegie. Feels hokey to write about, cliche. What’s the sign now, or is it just more hippy, new agey stuff that has invaded my persona since i arrived at the never ending hippy parade in Vancouver. To be honest, its also what i still love about this city(when i’m not finding it flakey and annoying), the part that i think is inherent, maybe to me too, the part that is natural, loves all the pretty colours and really believes in peace and love. Its also the part of this city it tries to hide, like an embarassing relative, that you still let hang out for the colour they provide to your life, so to speak. Unlike the Downtown Eastside which is the relative you feel bad for, are angry at, also embarassed by, but don’t want around, too much trouble, and it doesn’t fit with the current image of yourself since you abandoned your tie dye for beige.

Coping

I met with my friend Dave on Monday. We talked for 2 hours, about confession, exposing truths, connecting the dots about those truths, like how we got into this psychotic mess, and we talked about sadness. The sadness part was interesting to me, his take on it. That being sad is a natural response to what is happening around us everyday, and it doesn’t nessecarily require a diagnosis or medication, but maybe just a validation that sadness is an appropriate response to the state of our world. So is laughter.

Last summer, i started having what felt like an unusual response to sad news, i would start laughing. It would only happen around people i knew really well, and when it wasn’t someone i knew as well i would do my best to hold it in. I laughed at cancer a few times, the prolapsing uterus of my friends mother, and my own mother’s illnesses and depression. I felt crazy. I realized that this wasn’t a new thing, i used to laugh when my father would get angry when i was younger, nervous laughter. I had reached a saturation point. I have been hearing about death, disease and violence every day of my life, i grew up in it and i work in an environment where these are everyday community issues. So maybe its nervous laughter, or going crazy laughter, but i think its coping laughter. I think its how we deal with living in the daily war on people, on our cultures, and being wired into a system that we would never have willingly created, and its one way of coping with our role in maintaining it, willingly and not so willingly.

warning- related tangent

Sometimes i think that addiction is not only a cultural pandemic, but the greatest conspiracy ever imagined. A world is created where we tell people they aren’t enough. We have magazines, tv’s, films and radios blasting it all day long. Then we steal land and resources from people, who prior to our meeting, lived relatively well, then we build Gap factories on their land, and hire them for outrageously low wages and have them work in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. I get a cute top out of it for 20 bucks and then feel guilty, I’ll buy second hand, i won’t shop there, i flog myself emotionally , and then eat too much. When they were redesigning the corner of Main and Hastings in yet another effort to elminate the open drug market, i explained in the nicest way possible that it didn’t matter if there was a clinic around the corner where drug users could go or a safe injection site within the next year, the dealer and the user are a team, you may think one deserves your kindness more than the other, but you cannot seperate them, they need each other for the addiction to be maintained.

Zippers

Every time i look at a YKK zipper i think of this guy i met named Eddie on the corner of Main and Hastings whose mother worked at the YKK zipper factory in El Salvador. She worked there 25 years, got sick from copper poisoning, was fired because she couldn’t work, and now he sends her money to live on from his work as a dealer in the Downtown Eastside. He and his brother have both worked out there for years. The older brother, the one who told me the story about his Mom, also has a wife and kids, they live in Burnaby, and vacation in Osoyoos for a couple of weeks in the summer. So does Richard, the developer that evicted me and 5 others from Salsbury Garden, along with all the urban wildlife, sued us, demolished 2 hundred year old houses, destroyed thousands of species of plants, some over 100 years old, demolished a cob house built by 75 people, and then sold the property to other people, who built 2 faux heritage duplexes. I sometimes imagine them in Osoyoos, Richard and his family, Eddie and his. I think of the cycle of violence, and how these two men, besides sharing an affinity for Osoyoos in the summer, will justify their violence in the name of family.