Tarin’s year in review, 2015
The year I lost my home and found my voice
2015 was notable for me in two ways: My knock-down, drag-out fight with my landlord ended, finally, in me losing my apartment after more than a year of fighting to save it. And, in many ways because of this, I started writing again.
Good things happened this year, although moving every week or two is time-consuming, and it’s starting to wear me down. I have to remind myself on low days that I wrote more this year, while homeless, than I have in the last ten. That’s something. That’s a lot.
But being homeless for 7 months is a lot, too.
There’s more to life than words and houses. I co-organized and taught at two witchcamps this year. I attended three weddings. Several of my friends had babies. A friend, poet and mentor died just today of a stroke, and he wasn’t even 50 yet. More than a few friends got cancer, many of them healed, some of them may not. I priestessed the death of a rabbit. More and more friends were driven out of the Bay Area by the scourge of high rents, and more and more dudes launched apps that deliver and automate things. This isn’t the space to talk about how violent and terrifying the world is for people who aren’t rich white men. We can’t lose hope. We carry on.
If you just want a list of links, see here.
I actually wrote my first essay in ages for the 2014 election. And then I spent the next few months doing battle with Voldemort, my landlord—a task that sapped all my energy, until the day I finally realized that I needed to be documenting the situation in writing longer than tweets.
Dream a Little Dream of Dreamweaver
I used to write for a living. I wrote entire books, lots of them, and I ghost-wrote several. These were books about how to do things with computers and on the Internet: Make web pages, search for things, get your pages found when other people search, automate tasks in Microsoft software, lay out a computer manual. (That was the most meta job I had.) I also wrote poetry, I got published (I have a real book, Sorry We’re Close), I went on the road a few times.
I quit writing computer books because I burned out, spectacularly and with a great deal of wreckage strewn across the landscape. Life happened. I got sick. Time passed. I got better. Time passed. I did a lot of things in my new life as a disabled person: Taught witchcraft, studied criminalistics, played percussion in an Afro-Cuban orchestra, served as chair of a large nonprofit, learned to sing choral music and classical solos, saved a man’s life.
Somehow, ten years passed.
At the beginning of 2015, we met Voldemort, our new landlord. After a bunch of fakeouts and a lot of yelling, after an entire year of threats and countertaunts, Voldemort served us with a capital improvements eviction notice. That kind of eviction is supposed to be a temporary move-out; he’d renovate the cruddy apartment, we’d move back in at basically the same rent, with a small increase to start paying off the improvements.
Suddenly the stress became a motivator intead of keeping me nailed to my bed.
The Beginning of the End of the Middle
Moving out, even temporarily, was a daunting task made more nerve-jangling by the fact that we were playing chicken with Voldemort. We didn’t know if he was going to let us move back in at the end of our 90-day displacement. Maybe he’d just break the law by locking us out, let us sue him and take his chances.
Displacement Blues
I started making plans to stay places during those 90 days. And I decided to chronicle the process, so I started a TinyLetter—a weekly report that would tell tales of housesitting. The first issue was short, but I got 50 people to sign up for it in the few days between when I announced it and sent it out, which was very exciting!
Vertigo and Overwhelm
Packing up my stuff to go into storage meant I was handling each object with the idea that I was paying to keep it.
The Case of the Purloined Thin Mints
Everything, even boxes of Girl Scout Cookies, became fraught with meaning. I was the only person in our apartment who was not in total denial of the actual amount of time we had left to pack, and so I was managing the move, excavating other people’s belongings that long preceded my residence in the flat.
Everything Is Permitted
At the eleventh hour, less than a week before our move-out date, I did some detective work that resulted in Voldemort’s permits being yanked on Day 56 of the 60-day notice. Our eviction was called off. But the fight with Voldemort wasn’t. We were costing him thousands of dollars with every day we remained in the apartment. We negotiated a buyout, most or all of which I still owe to the IRS. (Old chits.)
Living in Maslow’s Basement: The Hierarchy of Needs in the Golden Age of Gentrification
The next 60 days were nailbitten. We moved out. Permanently. The last slacker flat in the Mission, as we called it, was finally gone.
Of Homelessness and Luxury: Housesitting Has Become a Heavy Lark
Two months after our eviction date, I wrote about the surreality of living as a housesitter, how I was both homeless and housed. Five months after THAT, here I am, still looking. Still homeless. Still looking for a place that I can afford and from where I can pursue happiness.
House or No House, Desk or No Desk
I wrote a newsletter every week from February 20 on unless I was traveling off the grid, and they grew in length and scope so they were like a little magazine. Each one has several sections: Gleaner’s Index (a riff on Harper’s), two photos, usually of San Francisco streetscapes or art or household items, a selfie of the week, and reviews of the best five essays I’d read since the previous episode.
I also archived my best tweets of the week and used them as section breaks. I have always wanted a way to make my tweets last longer than a few seconds.
And that’s not to mention the main event: A few words about what was going on with me expanded until I was writing one or two short essays every single week, about my life and about San Francisco, and I somehow learned how to write with perspective and authorial distance about events that were currently happening in my life. This was a brand-new skill for me. It was like leveling up in a video game.
The upshot is, I began writing 3,000–4,500 words every Thursday, every week, no matter how stressed or sad or apathetic I was.
Some favorite issues: Loose Leaves (No. 31), Crickets and Frogs(No. 27), Face Astigmatism (No. 21), Valise in Wonderland (No. 18).
And Then One Day I Became a Freelance Writer Again
One day on Twitter someone saw a call for witches. I sent a witch pitch. I got published! I told a friend which pitches the witches had rejected. He picked up one of the other witch pitches. So, I had two published, researched pieces for-real published, right before Halloween!
How to Cast Spells Using Emoji
The idea is, keeping in mind all the ethics good witches use so they don’t hurt anyone with their magic, you can cast a spell via text or Twitter or Snapchat or what-have-you. (Part of the magic here is that by asking your friends to witness your witchcraft, you can gain the confidence to execute plans you might otherwise have skipped.) The ending of this piece is one of my best-ever paragraphs.
Halloween Is for Dead People
I started thinking one day about how the word “adorable” when applied to the kind of toy ghosts we can buy at Walgreens for Halloween applies to the adoration of the dead that runs much farther back than modern Halloween does. Ancestor worship, Aisle 3! I did research for this piece on history and spirituality instead of just speculating and prognosticating. Good job, self!
Postmodern Voting Guide
I came full circle by writing another voting guide on the eve of the election. San Francisco had a local election with many ballot propositions—and some of the races for seats in local government—having do with affordable housing. Also, I carved a jack o’lantern portrait of my landlord. I combined local politics with an eviction narrative and photos of how to design a portrit on a pumpkin. This is one of the best things I’ve ever written, but it’s probably a little too into the weeds for non-policy wonks.
My First Gun
I spent the rest of the fall researching and writing the biggest story I’ve ever worked on. This wasn’t just research, this was actual journalism. I bought a gun.
Solstice Bonfires and Christmas Trees: How San Francisco Witches Celebrate Yule
The year wrapped up with a celebration that was poignant for me for two reasons: We lit a fire in the rain, and we didn’t have our annual all-night gathering.
I have more journalism assignments now. I’m working on a sports story of all things. And guess what? I’m for hire.
2015: Just the Links
If you want a list of links to all my articles, essays, press, and appearances in 2015, here you go.
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Thanks for reading, and thanks to my most helpful readers/editors/friends: Sam Stecklow, Brock Winstead, and Elizabeth Creely.
