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This blog is a work-in-progress "table of contents," with links to all of the threads I have written on Twitter since I started using the social media platform in October of 2012. So far I have posted links to all of my threads through February of 2020.
Every once in a while, I like to do a "thoughts" post, talking about my life experiences over the time frame for the threads I've recently posted links to.
Everybody, I'm sure, remembers that the first couple of months of 2020 were months when America was anticipating the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of us were unsure about how the situation would unfold.
All the way up through mid-March of 2020, I didn't mention anything about COVID. I was honestly so shell-shocked by the years of disaster in the media that I had decided long before no longer to push anymore disaster stories. So, as the COVID story unfolded in the beginning of 2020, I paid attention but didn't amplify it.
This attitude was compounded when I started seeing Democratic presidential candidates using COVID as a talking point. Granted, they were using the threat of the COVID pandemic to highlight the need for much more equitable healthcare in the United States. And I agreed with that.
But I was still so angry about the fact that so many people were running for president, and, in my opinion, sapping the attention for more important down-ballot races in 2020, that I seriously didn't want to amplify a single word any of these candidates were saying. They were engaging in a huge cash grab, in my opinion, that would hurt the Democrats in 2020. And I didn't want to help their cash-grab efforts.
But, probably most importantly for me personally, it was pretty clear from the beginning of the COVID pandemic that Americans and Europeans were going to use the situation as propaganda against China. This, obviously, has played out.
Early on in the pandemic, Asian American organizations and Asian American sex worker rights organizations were calling on Americans not to let the fears of a COVID pandemic drive racist sentiment against Chinese Americans. I agreed with this call. But I also hoped that the fears of a COVID pandemic wouldn't drive nationalist sentiment against China.
So I simply kept quiet about the COVID pandemic, feeling that enough people were talking about it, and that the best thing to do to counteract the panic-riddled messaging about the pandemic would be to push the messaging against racism that Asian American organizations were pushing.
Unfortunately, in 2021, we see that in America, there are plenty of racist attacks against Asian Americans, and Chinese Americans in particular, founded on stupid messaging about the COVID pandemic. And we see that the Biden administration is striving just as hard to start a war with China as the Trump administration was, and is using COVID propaganda as a messaging tool, just like the Trump administration did.
The first thread I wrote about COVID was in mid-March, after it became clear that Colorado was going to go into a pandemic lockdown soon. My biggest concern at that time was for homeless folks who were going to lose a lot of their access to public accommodations. But my only other feeling was that, if we all needed to do lockdown, I was 100% for it, and that I was actually looking for creative ways to benefit organizations -- like art institutions -- that might lose visitor-number-based funding because of the lockdowns.
However, as time went on, and I paid more attention to the news reports on COVID, I could see that the pandemic was being used continually as another piece of political disaster-mongering and propaganda. By this point I was really angry with the media, and especially with my fellow Democrats, who truly were only thinking of the 2020 elections in terms of "no Trump" and nothing else, and were now using COVID as a "no Trump" propaganda point.
So in March of 2020, I wrote a couple threads that aimed to counter the climate of absolute fear that the news outlets were propagating. I don't regret these threads. However, I do think I took them a bit too far.
On February 1, 2020, my landlady gave me a phone call and let me know she was still looking forward to me moving out of my house on the date we'd agreed on (mid-April of 2020) a few months back. She said she had an artist couple that wanted to use the space as a studio only, and that they were looking forward to moving in as soon as possible.
This put me in a difficult situation.
As I've mentioned in a previous post, in July of 2019, when I'd made the agreement with my landlady that I would move out in April of 2020, I was in a totally different situation financially.
I'd made the agreement with my landlady because her husband had been harassing me in person whenever I'd step outside of my house. I eventually either didn't leave my house or left my house so carefully and quietly that my landlady's husband (who stayed inside a small unit on my property all day, every day to monitor me) wouldn't notice me leaving. So when the guy couldn't harass me in person anymore, he started doing so by texting me harassing texts.
I asked my landlady to ask her husband to stop harassing me. She said that the only way I could ever be truly free from harassment in any place I lived in was by buying and not renting a home. She also tried to convince me to move into another property, half the size of the one I was in, but pay the same amount of rent, to be free from her husband's harassment.
I'd said no to moving into the smaller place but, very upset by what she'd said, told her I was just going to move out when I'd hit an even three years of living in the place.
At that time I was in a position financially where I could think seriously and prudently about buying a house. But, like clockwork, as soon as I told my landlady I would leave, my clients started dropping off, one by one, until I was left with only two clients. And, while those clients did keep me on an even keel financially, there was no way I could think seriously about making the commitment of buying a house.
In fact, by January of 2020, I was thinking of not even moving from the place I was in. It simply didn't seem prudent, when I only had two clients, I didn't seem to have prospects (or, honestly, a desire) to get more clients, I had just bought a used car, outright, in cash, in November of 2019, I was rebuilding my savings after having done that, and I didn't want to drain my savings all over by taking up all the expenses of getting moved into a new rental property.
So I stayed quiet about moving. And, honestly, when my landlady contacted me -- literally as I was walking out of a theater performance (the last one I've attended) -- on February 1, 2020, and told me she was looking forward to me moving out, I felt like it was really the worst time it could have happened.
Nevertheless, I knew I had to get out of the place I was in. The harassment from my landlady's husband had only gotten worse. And there was no way I'd be able to deal with it for a longer period of time.
As I said above, my landlady's husband would stay on my property 24/7, living in a small carriage house on the property. He never caught me leaving the house. And he was told not to harass me via text, either.
So, after a few months of quiet, he then started harassing me by going down into my house's cellar each night. The cellar was small, and it was directly below my bedroom. The guy would go down into the cellar each night, and just shout up into my bedroom. He would yell all kinds of curse words at me, generally slurs against gay people.
I knew it would be pointless to even try talking to my landlady about it anymore. So I just stopped sleeping in my bedroom. I'd sleep at the other end of the house. My landlady's husband's shouts would wake me up. But they were quiet enough that they didn't scare the crap out of me each night.
So it was a pain in the neck that my landlady told me that she wanted me to move. And it was a pain to think that I would have to use my money, just as I was trying to rebuild my savings, to get moved. But I also knew there was no way I could stay where I was for much longer. So I decided simply to go along with my landlady's plans.
However, I did ask my landlady if, instead of leaving in mid-April of 2020, I could leave on May 1st or June 1st -- just so I could build up a bit more cash in my savings. My landlady said she'd talk with the artist couple who wanted to use the place for a studio and see what they said.
She got back to me and said I could stay until May 1st, but that she'd really appreciate it if I could leave sooner than that. She said she'd even incentivize me for leaving sooner than that by not making me pay an early leaving fee if I left before mid-April.
I should mention along these lines that, on April 1st, my heater stopped working. My landlady tried to get away with not fixing it. And I personally believe that she wanted to keep from fixing it because she thought that if I didn't have heat I'd just move out of the house.
My belief is not just conjecture. My landlady texted me to the effect of, "I don't think I can get the heater fixed for you for at least a few days. But, maybe the positive of this is, if you find a new place before the heater's fixed, you won't have to pay me rent for very much of April. So maybe you'll find a new place soon."
But by this time there was a clear time frame for when the pandemic lockdowns would be over. I texted my landlady that I wasn't going anywhere until May 1st, as I was going to wait to get totally moved out until the lockdowns were over. And then I complained a lot -- until she ended up getting the heater fixed.
But she wasn't happy. She wasn't happy that she couldn't freeze me out of the house -- in the middle of the pandemic lockdowns.
I also experienced a tiny bit of a financial scare in mid-March of 2020, when the pandemic lockdowns caused one of my clients to close down their business for a while. They let me go. And so I was only left with one client.
However, the other client I had experienced a boost in their business because of the pandemic. And so I was able, almost immediately to double my hours with them. Because of this, I ended up, through the entire year that followed, not having any financial worries -- though, again, I was only making enough money to stay on an even keel financially. I wasn't making a lot of money. And I definitely wasn't making enough money to feel comfortable buying a house.
Also, because of the pandemic, very few property owners were willing to show their properties. In fact, if I remember correctly, it was sort of against the law for property owners to do rental showings during the pandemic lockdowns.
Because of this, there were a lot of really good rental properties on the market that were definitely within my price range, but which I was completely unable to move forward on. The property owners had these properties listed. But they weren't getting back to anybody, because they were simply not allowed to show the properties during the lockdowns.
I did a lot of searching and a lot of outreach. And finally I got in touch with a couple who would let me view their property. This was in mid-April of 2020.
I'd like to note that, even by mid-April of 2020, I was not a believer in wearing masks. I'd heard so many mixed messages about mask wearing that I didn't think it helped prevent COVID and I did think it was just a part of the disaster-mongering that was part of a type of Democratic Party mindset that had severely injured me and, in a lot of ways, destroyed my social life already.
Nevertheless, when I arrived to my house viewing in mid-April, I came wearing a mask, just to be polite. But the property owners weren't wearing masks. So I just took my mask off.
The property owners and I got along really well. And I ended up moving into my new place in late April of 2020 -- though I did not officially move out of my old place until May 1st. I had a lot of cleaning to do on the place. And I simply was not going to move out of the place one second before I'd told my landlady I was moving out. I was already being forced and bullied out of the place. I wasn't going to be forced out early.
But my physical move from place to place occurred in late April, I believe right on the day that lockdowns expired in Colorado. I might be wrong about that.
And I need to note that the entire moving process took place without the moving folks wearing masks. Again, I wore a mask when the movers arrived, to be polite. But the movers weren't wearing masks. And so I just decided to forget wearing a mask myself. The move was a multi-hour task. And the movers and I were not socially distanced from each other during that entire process. And, at the end of it all, I seemed to be fine.
I mean -- I didn't have a choice but to move during the lockdown. And all the points of my move were conducted without the use of a mask -- not because I didn't have or wear a mask, but because the people I interacted with didn't wear masks, so I decided not to wear one, either.
As all of my moving process ended, on May 1st, and I reflected on all the time I spent not wearing a mask, I got even more upset with all of the messaging I'd seen in the news. And so, in mid-May, I wrote another thread about COVID, criticizing what I felt was panic-mongering for the propaganda purposes of a Democratic Party that -- I emphasize ad nauseam -- had essentially used me, thrown me away, wrecked a lot of my social life, and shell-shocked the hell out of me.
Of course, I ended up changing a lot of my thought as May of 2020 developed. But, for the time being, I was furious about the fear of COVID being propagated in the news.
As poorly as I talk about the Colorado and Denver Democrats, the fact is that, as 2020 started, I got right back on the horse with them. I was attending and tweeting about central committee meetings, caucus trainings, and caucus itself. In fact, the 2020 caucus meeting, on March 7, 2020, was the final event I attended physically before the lockdowns officially happened, on March 16, I believe.
However, I also removed myself from the central committee of the party. It's an easy thing to do, as, basically, I stepped back from my PCP role -- a role I knew, due to my move, I couldn't hold onto, anyway.
My plan was, as 2020 began, not to do any work directly with the party. I would do work to get out the vote. But the way I would do this work, I told myself, would largely be by working with abortion rights organizations. This is why you also see, as 2020 begins, me doing lobbying work, through Women and Families Wednesdays, for groups like Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains and Cobalt, which is Colorado's version of NARAL.
I also figured that, since I'd essentially been boxed out of my role with the Colorado Democrats' outreach committee -- a role I'd been elected to but was not allowed to be active in, thanks to the head of the committee -- I would figure out a strategy of statewide outreach I could fulfill myself. This strategy basically had to do with getting out the vote in Eastern Colorado.
However, I'm really ashamed to admit that once the COVID lockdowns happened, and once it became pretty clear around May of 2020 that social gatherings were just not going to happen safely during the election season, I abandoned all my efforts for 2020. So the last meaningful political volunteering effort I did was, in fact, the 2020 caucus, in early March.
This time frame was also the time frame in which I started formulating my fanfiction novel Spring Quarantine. I hope to discuss the story in greater depth in another post. But the events right at the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns really affected me. They inspired me to write a novel. It took me a while to formulate just what I would want that novel to be. But after a few weeks, I finally had my ideas in place for Spring Quarantine.
As the pandemic lockdowns continued, I also tried to be more creative with my Twitter threads. I might discuss this in more depth later, too. But I wanted to figure out ways to drive traffic to art institutions' websites. I was worried that, because of the lockdowns, institutions would lose their visitor-based funding -- since a lot of institutions get some of their funding based on the actual number of visitors to their buildings.
I'd heard that some institutions did get funding, as well, based on the number of visitors to their websites. So I thought I could come up with creative ways to drive visitors to as many art institutions' websites as possible by writing threads about old and new art exhibitions and then putting links in my tweets to the institutions' pages for the shows and even the individual works of art displayed at the shows.
Some of the threads I did during this time are my favorite threads I've ever written.
It goes without saying -- but this has been an incredibly tragic time in American history.
Also, I do feel it's important for every single person in America and all around the world to share their story of their experience of this time. It's good for us to express ourselves. It's good for us to have that release. But it's also important, as future generations look back on this time, for them to have as many stories as possible to look back on. My story is only one of many. And it's not even that interesting a story. But I'm really happy I've been telling it.
Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.
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