Awkwardly On-Topic

Dear Diary,

I wanted to dismiss this as off-topic to you, but I can't.  True, it has nothing to do with parks, or hygiene, or (except as a dark mirror) homelessness in general.  But I've always made my own homelessness prominent in my writing on that topic, and perhaps nowhere more than in you.  Not just as a random example, either.  I'm well aware that by being middle-class in origin (and standards, albeit Bohemian middle class for those), college-educated, and non-trivially white, I seek sort of a "there but for the grace of God" effect among those likeliest to read me.  This is probably part of why you have few faithful readers, dear Diary, but more who read what they can stand and then leave.

Well, as it happens, I'm trying to leave myself, which is the point all that verbiage is trying to hide.  I think most homeless people keep a desultory lookout for chances to improve their lives, but without much imagination for wholesale change.  But the Seattle Times profile that recently brought new readers to you, dear Diary, also brought about an attempt at just such wholesale change, to return me to the housed workforce.  As I write this, it's anyway raised enough to get me out of COVID winter.

I'll be narrating, as I continue with the January hikes, events that make me readier to leave homelessness, and maybe to return to housedness.  Some of these events make it harder to finish the series, and I'll probably pop into and out of a motel soon to be named if only for that reason.  In February, which it'll probably be before I can return to boring few readers with "Land and Water" and working on your last series, dear Diary, I expect to be in a hotel, motel, or if I'm lucky SRO the whole month.  With the hope that by March I might, really for the first time since I came to Seattle, be stably housed.

Or to abbreviate:  To apply the purity standards of 1980s alt-rock to homelessness, I'm selling out, and cursing the rest of you, dear Diary, with the dread shade of inauthenticity.

This is, of course, a dark mirror of another path.  The government could have paid for the hotel (though probably not the blog-enabling motel, although its stimulus money will in fact pay for that), could have eased the transition out of the hotel.  But I've already lived through two entire presidential terms homeless, and would expect the current one to pass too before the government noticed me, shouting as I've been since 2014.  Some might argue that things are different now, but I dismissed insta-change in the first Times article to quote me (and publicise you, dear Diary), and the recent hikes have only driven home how right I was.

So I should get on with narrating them, but first, dear Diary, my thanks.  You're where all these events started, and I won't forget that.