10/25 silent pain, they'll say you enjoyed it.

It's 3:46 AM Sunday morning February 20, 2022 I'm awake again. A motorcycle goes roaring through the night as I start to write this. It's the weekend, but the sounds of chaos outside have not made any sense. They seem to happen sporadically - not just when clubs are letting out or anything. I have to play binaural beats in my ears or the random bursts hurt me. I still don't know why the sounds can rip through my body, or why they do when they do, and don't when they don't. Fell asleep an hour or so earlier. Laying in bed with chest pains. Bass outside so loud it's like being repeatedly hit in the head with every boom; vibrating the inside of my body. The bass: slicing the music into parts hurting you with only the lowest sounds on the scale taking away the middle and higher notes taking away the vocals broken down and breaking you with what you loved the most. Has everything gotten so much worse or is it just because I've been trapped in this box? This sanctuary? I can never seem to concentrate on any one thing for very long. There have been reports of six shootings in nine hours between Thursday night and Friday morning. Then, six people shot at a protest Saturday night - one dead. Was I naive to not be afraid like this in all the time I've lived here? Lived anywhere? I know statistics: Chicago has a shooting once every two minutes, or once every other hour, depending on the source. New York City would celebrate weekends when they had no shootings. Everywhere is reporting an uptick in gun violence since 2020. Everywhere. I have always had anxiety, but it wasn't over the thought of being shot. I was never scared of going to a protest before 2020. Before the pandemic I was scared of dying outside sick and alone, but now the world feels like a place that actively doesn't care about people, while all the time before it's like the carelessness was just a mistake and if you pointed it out it would change. It was supposed to change. Now the cruelty seems so deliberate. I keep thinking: all the most powerful people must have access to the best ideas and the most resources to get things done - more than I could even imagine on my own from my position in life - they must just not want to do that. I don't want to give up. I know failure is just when you stop trying. Take a break if you need to but never stop trying. I don't know what to do. The city keeps kicking around the idea of shoving unhoused people into camps. At least there seems to be plenty of responses denouncing that. #3000challenge My own eviction is ever looming. The threat has been hanging over my head for years now. Not only losing my home, my resources - art supplies, a kitchen, a bathroom, electricity, shelter for me and my cat - (I haven't had everything I need for a long time now; at least I've had that) but my life to COVID or violence or some other cruelty. It could happen in September. It could happen next week. There could be extensions and more help, or there could be nothing but more chaos. And so many people could get lost in the mix of some kind of war and COVID and who knows what else. Would anyone even notice if they didn't know you? How could we have known each other just enough to know if we had suddenly disappeared? To know each other enough to care? When I say I'm afraid it isn't the image of someone shaking in a corner. It's a far away stare mouth slightly open in total disappointment and disbelief. It's watching videos online petting my cat doing research making up sci-fi stories eating as much as I can and sleeping with the thought in the back of my mind that this could always be the end. Trying to ignore or drown out the sounds outside that seem to tell me they hate me in one way or another or convince me the world out there is full of monsters now - and not the complicated kind but the merciless senselessly vicious kind who will destroy you and everything good and never care kind - and there's no escape. I hate this. Posted by L L G Sunday February 20, 2022 5:42 AM