Thread by @LiteraryRealism

My most memorable moment this year was … #HappyNewYear #2018Memory

That's the sad thing - there weren't any memorable moments, and that wasn't for any lack of looking on my part. I lived a quiet life, not because I wanted one, but because I didn't have any other choice.

Everywhere I went, nobody talked to anybody other than the people they came in with.

Hard to escape solitude on those terms, especially when you're long term unemployed, stuck in the "no experience, no work" cycle and nobody is willing to give you a chance to get out of it.

There is one way I've seen other poor people escape the boredom, and that's by being violent lunatics, which might be one reason why the rate of violent crime is as high as it is in Chicago.

But that's not me and it's not going to be me, so I have to ask, is there another way?

The answer I usually get is sort of bullshit-y: "do volunteer work."

That doesn't really solve the social problems of poor people, but it does allow for the taxes being paid by the passive-aggressive rich people giving this suggestion to be cut.

They're giving advice in bad faith, crafting it to benefit themselves while pretending to help others. Indeed, this "solution" is part of the problem - by wiping out leisure time, volunteerism serves to kill the social lives of the poor.

If we can't hang out, we can't meet.

This is one I'm going to have to work out myself and that's part of what you're going to see me TRY to do this year.

How? I'm working on that and I don't know that I'll succeed, because let's face it, in Chicago, authority and society aren't on my side.

The local culture seems to have a reputation for being free-spirited that is in no way deserved. I'm an adult and what I want is freedom, real freedom, but what I keep running into is crowd control.

Chicago is a nanny state, dominated by people who don't mean well.

Typical experience: I get on the El with some of my classmates. Drunk homeless guy starts playing charades with us. Everybody's laughing and having a good time, even if the homeless guys keeps forgetting what he was doing.

Sad life, but he seemed like a cool guy.

Not that we'll ever know. A few stops later, the police marched onto the train, dragged us off, illegally searched all of us, and took the homeless guy into custody, after threatening to arrest one of our friends (who had some alcohol on him) if we talked back or complained.

Well, hey, Sieg Heil, officer. So glad you were there to serve and protect us from the dangers of a good time that was hurting nobody.

This was control for the sake of control, and one sees it in Chicago, every day.

There isn't a lot of spontaneous human interaction happening, in significant part, because the moment it starts, somebody will abuse the power he has to put a halt to it.

In the short run, this makes for order, relatively speaking. In the long run, the cops retire and the aldermen who let them get away with murder leave office.

But if truth be told, it makes for a miserable life. Chicago only looks good when compared to the region it's in.

Like the country it's in, this city is highly overrated, but being poor, I'm stuck here, so I will cope with that reality as well as I can, while looking for a way out.

Maybe to somewhere in the tropics?

First thing I'm going to try is doing some fiction writing and then taking it to some open mike nights. Shared interests are a way of meeting people, so I'll try that.

Also, I'm going to try Meetup.

I'll try that and then decide what to do next.

I might or might not mention where I'm going to be, but before I do that, I want to get some sense of who is reading this and who might show up.

There are some crazy, dangerous people on the Internet. I don't know that I'm interesting enough to get their attention, but before saying "you can meet me here, today," I want to be sure that I haven't done that.

If that works out, cool and if not, it's just a website, no big deal.

Don't expect a lot of updates any time, soon. Mostly, I'm going to go out, watch, scribble and maybe do a little improv, which you might want to avoid.

Amateur improv can be cringe-y to watch, even if it's fun to do. Not going to be uploading any videos of that.

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