Thank you for visiting my blog.
This blog is a work-in-progress "table of contents," with links to all of the threads I have written on Twitter, from when I started using the social media platform, in October of 2012, through July of 2022.
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.
For this post, the time frame is basically April through July of 2022.
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As I've mentioned in previous posts, my livelihood and finances were pretty much destroyed in 2021. In October of 2021, I was in such bad shape that I moved from the Front Range area of Colorado to far out on the Western Slope, where, for a while, I lived with my mom and my three adopted little sisters.
In April of 2022, I was finally able to move into my own space again: a unit in a fourplex in a city about 20 miles away from my mom's hometown.
I'd spent from 2016 to 2021 working as a consultant for startup companies that were looking to grow their sales operations. But by September of 2021, I was so sick of the roller-coaster ride of consultant work that I looked for a permanent position at a company. I found a new job at the beginning of October and started that job in November.
I'd also, in October, started working at the Walmart in my mom's town. Between my day job and Walmart I was, between October of 2021 and January of 2022, working seven days a week, with the exception of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's.
From February through April of 2022, I'd taken down my days worked at Walmart, so I'd have one weekend day off. So now I was working six days a week. But after about a month of living in my own space, I finally stopped working both weekend days at Walmart. So I was working only five days a week. But between my day job and Walmart, I was still, on average, working way more than 50 hours per week.
Finally, toward the end of June of 2022, if I remember correctly I stopped working at Walmart altogether. The hours were just too much for me, especially since now I was driving between desert towns to get to work. I was so tired that it was impeding my ability to do both my day job and my work at Walmart well.
But, in addition to the hours at Walmart being too much, there were some things I didn't like about the culture of the place. The more responsibility I was given at the job, the more I found I was being pushed into having a mindset that all the people who came into the store were crooks.
It was really distressing to me to feel like my coworkers were forcing me to think this way. I insisted to them that I would never start thinking this way. But I knew it would be a losing battle for me. This was one of the reasons I left.
But I do have to admit there were some times at Walmart that I was myself cheated and spooked by customers -- sometimes in a big way. Maybe I'll tell some of those stories someday. They aren't unique, though, I'd guess.
If there were something, though, that scared me more than the shoplifters or slightly violent folks at Walmart, it would be the ultra-conservative conspiracy theory folks who came into the store. They were really scary.
People would come through my lane and tell me how they couldn't wait for "the revolution" to happen, so they could kill Democrats like me, liberals like me, Hispanics like me, and/or queer people like me. They wouldn't even have any qualms about saying they were just waiting for that moment when it became okay to kill people like me. And sometimes they'd even justify what they said by talking about some kind of conspiracy theory that proved people like me were just asking to be murdered.
Of course, I'd bag their groceries, hand them their receipt, and tell them to have a good day.
The Western Slope of Colorado isn't as conservative as people claim it is. In fact, continually, the conservatives only win votes over liberals in this part of the state by very narrow margins. If anything, this region is centrist. The problem is, ultra-conservative voices are amplified a lot out here, partly because of the funding they receive from national and global ultra-conservative groups.
But, just as in the rest of Colorado, the Democratic parties out on the Western Slope don't do a lot to invest in amplifying the voices of the more pro-equality people in the region -- especially where they are of the opinion that investing in these voices won't provide them on a suitable ROI (namely, winning an election). As a result, the Democratic parties on the Western Slope are lethargic and muddled, in my opinion.
In April of 2022, when I first moved back into a space of my own, one of the first things I did was visit my local Democratic Party. I tried to get involved with volunteer work out here, getting out the vote, as, again, I felt like there was enough liberal sentiment out here, and it just needed to receive outreach and encouragement.
I was essentially ignored in my requests to be involved in my local Democratic parties' outreach, basically all the way through November of 2022. I never stopped asking to be involved. And I never stopped involving myself in community events, whenever I could find out about them. But, ultimately, I was never involved in any efforts to get out the vote. I also feel like a lot of other volunteers in this part of Colorado would say they had a similar experience.
Nevertheless, I found ways to involve myself in the community, here and there -- even if that meant going to community events, events at museums, etc. I started making connections in the community. And I felt more and more like I was a part of the community. As 2022 continued, I think I developed that connection.
At my day job, things were pretty tough. A lot of people already know this, but 2022 was a pretty bad year for fintech companies like the one I work for. So my company, like many others, experienced a lot of turbulence. There were layoffs and, especially during the first seven or eight months of 2022, a lot of people left my company for other opportunities.
My job was affected a lot by the people who were quitting at my company and going other places. Almost from the beginning of 2022 I had very little stability in my day-to-day work -- mostly because, just as I was getting used to supporting a group of folks, all those people would leave. I'd be left without people to support, or I'd have to get used to supporting a new group of people -- only to have them leave, as well!
It was really stressful. But that stress only increased toward the beginning of May when my direct manager, having gotten a new manager of his own, was being tasked with cleaning up his operations. Part of this cleanup was, apparently, to target the work I'd been doing, with the aim, as I understand it, of showing how I and the people I supported were purposely working together to do a bad job.
This looked to me like a really bad and unfair situation. So I made a pretty big deal about it to my company's human resources team. I'd been speaking to them on a regular basis, anyway, almost since the time I'd started working at my company. I'd just wanted to make sure I always had a paper trail for everything I was doing and experiencing. So when I brought this specific issue to them, it was taken care of pretty quickly. But it was still a really scary situation.
My family life between April and July of 2022 was also pretty stressful. As I said in earlier posts, after I came out to live with my mom in October of 2021, I felt like I might like to go ahead and focus my life just on my mom and my little sisters from now on. But when I discussed this issue with my family, they made it clear they were happier with me living my own life. In particular, my oldest little sister was really emphatic about this -- so much so that I just started to feel like she didn't like me or want me around at all.
Additionally, as I've mentioned before, when I first moved into my mom's house, my brother had been living there. Not long after I moved in, my brother left the house, under some not very good circumstances. My nephew, who is twenty years old, moved in only a week later.
There was something very strange about the whole situation. But I can't explain it without unfairly dragging my family's stories into my own story. All I can say is, the situation wasn't very good.
But I will mention one thing. Every night that I worked at Walmart, I'd work until about 11:15 PM. I'd get home around 11:30 PM. And I'd generally eat my dinner, or at least a snack or something, when I got home.
But my mom, my nephew, and my oldest little sister would all three start waiting up for me. They'd then sit there, while I was eating, having the same exact conversation every night. The conversation would be about a specific type of crime. The three of them would say things like, "Death is too good for people who do that kind of thing," or, "If I ever learned that a person did that kind of thing, I'd just kill them -- no questions asked."
I had no idea why my family was so obsessed with talking about this specific thing. But it made me sick. And eventually I just stopped eating my dinner after work out in the living room. I'd eat my dinner at Walmart before I clocked in for work. And I'd bring a little snack home, like a candy bar, which I'd eat in my room after work, before I went to bed.
So, as I've mentioned, I left my mom's house in April of 2022 and moved back into a place of my own. Not more than a week or two after I left, my nephew left my mom's house and went back to live with his mom. And only a couple days after that, he was arrested, for the same crime he and my mom and my little sister would spend every night lecturing me about. This whole situation upset my mom so much that she, a diabetic, went on a huge sugar binge and almost went into a coma.
The situation really upset me, too, on a lot of different levels. It seems bad enough, just as I stated it. But there's a lot more family history, even behind this, that I can't talk about, but which really upset me even more. And, at the same time as all of this was happening, I was being hounded by my manager at my day job, who was being told by his manager to uncover something bad in my cooperation with my colleagues that couldn't be uncovered, because it simply didn't exist. So I was pretty upset and pretty depressed.
But in addition to this, my relationship with my oldest little sister just kept getting more and more strained. I made a point of spending two days or nights per week with my family. But things were just getting so stressful there that I had to limit my interactions with my family to one day per week, usually a weekend day.
I was tired of always only hanging out in the house with my family. So I started making my visits with them into little road trips, which I thought they liked. But my oldest little sister really used our time in the car, in a pretty cramped and close space for five people, to needle the hell out of me.
It finally got to a point on one of these drives in early July that I yelled at my little sister. I was extremely hurt and upset. I'd expressed these feelings before. But I expressed them pretty explosively at this point.
After this day, I went... I don't know... possibly two or three months without hanging out in my mom's house at all. I also went... maybe five months... before I allowed my oldest little sister back in my car again.
Pretty much all through the late summer and early fall of 2022 the only time I spent with my mom and my little sisters was if they met me at public places and public events. Most of the time, this meant that when my little sisters had sports practices or games, I'd go watch them. That would be my family time.
I think a lot of this stuff shows up in my patterns of activity on Twitter.
As I've mentioned before, as 2022 progressed, I wrote fewer and fewer Twitter threads focused on one topic. Instead, I'd write threads that were more journal-like, and were based on a number of different experiences I'd had over the past few days.
Also, whereas in 2021 and previous years, I wrote Twitter threads at a frequency of maybe three times a week, I now started writing threads only once a week, if not even once every two weeks. So my Twitter threads were far less frequent and were about far more things.
But I think what is clear from the Twitter threads I wrote in April through July of 2022 is that I was trying to get outside again and get myself more involved in the communities I lived in. I was also trying to open up my range of artistic experience and present more of a general range of thoughts in my reviews of the art I experienced than I'd done over the past couple of years.
There's a lot more I'd love to write. But I think I'll leave things here. This all gives a pretty good picture of this time frame.
Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.
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