Becoming Clean

Dear Diary,

Exciting news:  You're about to become known!  Some of your pages may be read by more than ten people, believe it or not.  And there's a dim chance that people will tell stories about you, and about me.

One story that might be told is that I'm some random homeless guy who got it into his head to write you.  This would not be particularly true, but an especially nasty counter-argument might claim that I'm not homeless at all.

See, I'm not without resources - friends, family, and at the moment even my own, since my $1200 came the other day.  I could certainly go spend a week or three in a hotel, and miss out on all the exciting parks news with which you, dear Diary, are filled.

Nor is this just a theoretical possibility.  You've come along so late, dear Diary, in this shutdown, because I did spend the three weeks from March 14 to April 4 in two hotels, thanks to a friend.  This friend is both professionally and personally concerned with public health.  I had at the time a nasty, incredibly long-lasting cold, and my friend (who caught it from me)  wanted me quarantined.  The bait for me was that it seemed a real chance to change my life, although the specific trigger that led me to accept the idea was the libraries' closure.

As it turned out, it was not a chance to change my life.  I'm very bad at job-hunting, but even I could tell there were strong headwinds on that front.  More importantly, I couldn't find any way to shrink the rent to something my friend could pay long enough to enable a real job search.  Most ads for cheap rent were fraudulent; the few others demanded that I have income, not just a friend, even for a three-month sublet.

So I decided to stop.  My cold had finally ended, and it was obviously a waste of money to keep slinking from one historically cheap hotel to the next, especially as their prices began to rebound.  There are better ways to change my life.

I hope not to be homeless in three years, but, well, I've hoped that for most of the past eight years, and it's yet to come true.  While there's a sense in which I am, right now, that stereotype "homeless by choice", that's because all the other choices are worse.

The reason the story that I'm some random homeless guy who thought you, dear Diary, up on the spur of the moment - the reason that story isn't true is that I'm not at all random, nor was the idea for you, dear Diary, spontaneous.

In my youth, I worked on a college newspaper for several years, and conceived journalistic ambitions.  The only advice I got as to how to fulfill these was to write, so I did.  But it rarely paid my rent, my ambitions were going nowhere, and the writing petered out.

It came back, as the second page in you, dear Diary, suggests, when my glasses were stolen.  Again, it was too desultory to add up to much, but it got me used to writing about my homelessness.

So much for me being random.  You aren't either, dear Diary; as your other credits page practically shouts, you're a successor to a lot of articles by Erica C. Barnett.  I e-mailed her March 26 about a then-recent story, and eventually started to visit the parks of northeastern Seattle in emulation of her looks at southeastern parks.  The list of parks in your sadly unread page "Our Main Characters", dear Diary, comes from that work, and from my time in hotels, before it became survival information for me.  I was, at the time, contemplating a different story, which I pestered Ms. Barnett to publish; when she refused, I started thinking of writing it as a blog.  And then, one extremely rainy day, I hiked to Magnuson Park, and there you were, dear Diary.

Ms. Barnett was the first person I contacted, trying to make you known, dear Diary, but near as I can tell, she hasn't read any of your pages.  Instead, the person who's read more of those pages than anyone else is going to make you known, dear Diary, and now I think these explanations are done.