The Line In The Sand

It has been a year now since I was evicted from my apartment and made the decision to refuse to comply with parole and sex offender registration. That year has seen me returned to jail on parole violations for a total of four months. Most of the remaining eight months, I’ve been able to use my disability benefits to pay for motels, but in this past year, I’ve had to spend roughly 75 nights sleeping in the street. 

I continuously find myself trying to think of ways to convey what the emotional experience of my life has become. That just about every night, I hope that I will not wake in the morning. That I stand on the beach and hope for a sudden tsunami to sweep me away. That of the more than 16,000 days that I have been alive, the 2,700 since my arrest top the list of the worst days of my life. It’s like the joke in Office Space has been almost literally true for me: for the past seven and a half years, every day that you’ve seen me, its been on the worst day of my life. 

After my near-death kidney failure episode in 2012, I began to paint my life history rose as a way of coping with the reality that I might not live much longer. While I can describe my life in a way that sounds outstanding, I’ve never really been happy, and it isn’t because I’m spoiled or impossible to please. Yes, I’ve enjoyed some rare material privileges and these things do matter. But the MOST important thing in life is the quality of the relationships you have, and on that scorecard, my life has been a disaster, from my pathologically dysfunctional family, to my failures in romance, to the toxic frenemies that I naively surrounded myself with. Probably the best relationships I had in my life were professional ones, and even those, in retrospect, were exploitive and unbalanced, especially in light of the fact that I worked with hundreds of lawyers and none of them came to my aid when I found myself in legal trouble. 

My life has literally become a living nightmare over the last eight years, a nightmare from which I cannot wake and from which it feels that there is no escape. I literally contemplate the possibility that I have somehow navigated my way to the Biblical hell. I always hated the saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions. “. What then?  We’re supposed to have BAD intentions?  It seemed to me like the mantra of an evil person. But yet, nothing rings truer today. Starting out from childhood, I always tried to be the absolute best person I could be, and look where I am.  

I had a court date schedule for October 22. I was scheduled to be arraigned on the charge of failure to register as a sex offender. Keep in mind, it has been a year that I have been out of compliance and have told authorities, on the record, that I refuse to comply, and I still have not been arraigned on this charge.  I went to San Diego’s sparkling new courthouse on the 22nd with a combination of anxiety and expectation. I didn’t know if I would be arrested or what might happen. Here I am, supposedly a wanted fugitive, a parolee at large thumbing his nose at the system. I walked into the courthouse past dozens of Sheriff’s deputies, some of whom certainly know me from the nearly two years I’ve spent in county jail. I walked through security. I walked to the court clerk window and presented my identification to two different people. I was told that my arraignment was not happening and that a new date would be scheduled. I walked out past the crowd of Sheriff’s deputies and back out onto the streets. 

I felt deeply disappointed. I want my day in court. I want a trial where I can explain to a jury and a courtroom my reasons for refusing to register and attempt to put facts about the injustice of my original conviction on the record, even though I expect the judge will try to stop me from doing so. But this is a brand new game. The court has nothing left to threaten me with—not jail or prison time, not contempt. I’ve lost everything, so I’m now the most dangerous thing there is to the establishment: a man with nothing to lose. My only hope is to bring attention to my case, but my fear is that it won’t matter because no one gives a damn. 

My appearing for court highlighted the comic absurdity of my situation. The San Diego police are ever-present in areas where the homeless congregate and have an unbelievably strong presence on the streets of San Diego where the vast majority of citizens love cops and soldiers with an uncritical, almost religious reverence. On a typical day, probably twenty police cars pass me. And look, I’m a HIGHLY recognizable person. There are just very few people answering to my general description: a six-foot tall Black man over 200 pounds with a medium skin tone and green/hazel eyes.  Add to that the unusual way that I dress for someone in my demographic, and the fact that I know local San Diego hotels routinely provide police with guest lists, if I was actually wanted by the police, I’d be arrested within a hour. I remember reading some years ago about a concept in law that the courts and law enforcement have an obligation to make a diligent effort to execute a warrant, and if they fail do so, the warrant becomes invalid. Someone won a case on that. It is my intention to argue in court that this should apply to me, and that the County of San Diego has actually forfeited its right to prosecute me by its failure to arrest me, including on TWO occasions when I attempted to turn myself in, despite my having been on prominent display in the public. Hell, on three occasions in the past year while technically a wanted fugitive, I was asked for ID by cops and gave it to them, and they didn’t arrest me or mention that I had a warrant. 

Of course, the cop spin on all this would be “Well, we know Michael and we know he’s not really dangerous so we spent our law enforcement resources in higher priority targets.”. But my response to that would be, “Well, why won’t you just let me go then?”

I feel like a prisoner in San Diego and in America. The US government used to rail against the Soviet bloc nations for effectively keeping their citizens prisoner, but given the high cost of moving abroad, combined with the tens of millions of Americans who are either presently incarcerated or have felony criminal records, moving abroad for most Americans is as practically impossible as it was for a Russian in the Stalin era. 

When I got out of prison, I started researching the possibility of moving abroad and I was shocked by what I found. Even the poorest countries in the world, the types of places that Donald Trump referred to as “shitholes”, had all these elaborate immigration rules basically mirroring those you find in US law, and there was basically a general global prohibition on moving to a new country once you had been convicted of a crime. I found this fascinating because all these other countries are constantly going to the UN making sanctimonious statements about America’s out-of-control mass incarceration regime, but yet, unless you are a rich fugitive like Roman Polanski or Marc Rich, or a politically relevant one like Edward Snowden, other countries will not offer refuge to victims of the American legal system. They treat American criminal verdicts with the assumption that they are all valid. And Americans do the same thing. For all our talk about how bad our criminal justice system is, most people, liberal or conservative, get scared and distance themselves if they find out someone has been to prison. And to be completely fair and honest, this is not without good reason. 

The time I’ve spent incarcerated and homeless has reshaped my view of those populations. The vast majority of incarcerated people are unrepentant career criminal sociopaths. The real reason we need criminal justice reform isn’t because these people shouldn’t be locked up, but rather because our society is producing these dysfunctional individuals at an astounding and accelerating rate such that incarceration is not a viable long-term solution. We’ve got to get the the root of the problem and stop producing sociopaths. It is now my view that the worst crime, the worst injustice in our society is not that we have nearly three million people locked up. There are probably twenty million more on the streets just as bad as those. The real sin of this society is that in our desperate scramble to deal with an army of sociopaths in our midst, we’ve lost our sense of justice and become blind and indifferent to the fact that the system sweeps up many people who don’t belong in it because of their class or color or the political expediency of the moment. We’ve become so afraid of the criminal class that we’ve given up our own rights and sacrificed many of our innocent fellow citizens in a generally failing effort to crush the sociopathic criminal class that has been a part of American society dating back to the Old West and 19th century urban gangs. That really is what the millions of people who cycle in and out of jails and prisons are—a criminal social class that actively rejects the values of American society. And cops, prosecutors, judges and others who work in the prison-industrial complex are engaged in a sort of extortion conspiracy with the criminal class against the rest of us, fear-mongering so that we hand law enforcement and courts more and more power over all our lives. 

The criminal underworld, the incarceration world, the homeless world, these are all very hyper-masculine environments, and thus I hate them with a passion. These days, I cringe usually when I have to talk to a man at all. One of the great annoyances of being homeless is that guys are always trying to talk to me for one reason or another. It’s funny, throughout my life, I’ve been frustrated with girls because they always assume a man has an agenda if he speaks to her. Now I get it, because whether they are talking to a girl or another man, dudes always DO have an agenda. 

One of the great frustrations of my life is the fact that it seems I’m far more attractive to gay men than straight women. I finally figured out that about 2 times out of 5 when a man starts a conversation with me, he’s gay and he’s trying to pick me up. Another one out of five he’s trying to sell me drugs or see if I have drugs for sale, and in most cases that guy’s gay too.  I want to be clear here that I am pro-LGBTQ, but as with every group, the gays you find in the street life underworld are the worst representations of the community. The gay guys in Hillcrest are totally cool with me. 

So three out of five men who start conversations with me are gay. And the other two out of five are either trying to sell something nobody wants or run some other kind of hustle. Ninety percent of men have no real intellectual life to speak of, so they really have nothing to talk about. All they do is tell stories from the past, argue about sports and politics and spout misogyny. It’s truly striking how dumb most male conversations are if you really listen. Every day homeless in the streets, I’ve got to try to avoid conversations with like a dozen dudes looking for drug buddies, street buddies or butt buddies who want to waste my life talking about nothing. 

Then lately there has been the phenomenon of obviously affluent middle-aged White men condescendingly offering me their pocket change and restaurant leftovers. It takes every bit of moral fiber I can muster to politely tell them “No thanks” and not go nuclear asshole (“Do you see a sign in my hand asking for your help?”) and intellectually humiliate them in front of their pretty wives. But hey, being a homeless asshole is never a good look. But I love the looks on their faces when I turn down their dollars and leftovers. Priceless!  “How dare that arrogant homeless Negro refuse my utterly meaningless gesture of false charity!  Who the hell does he thinks he is?!?”

It’s so frustrating that I constantly have men offering me help of all kinds (always of course with some string attached, visible or invisible). Men won’t fucking leave me alone but the world of women has apparently forgotten I exist. I’ve had half a dozen guys (all gay I think) offer me a place to stay, but not one girl. Even though nothing would ever make me go back to Boy World, and nothing will change my view that a transition to a female-led society is necessary, I can’t help but feel let down and betrayed by girls, as if they chose me as a human sacrifice because they knew I’d lay down on the altar. 

I just want this all to be over. My dreams of joining the female world seem so distant now as to feel irrational. I laugh at my hope of girls coming to my rescue like I used to laugh at old Black church folks waiting for Jesus to come back. These days, I feel like men are actually the ones who are sentimental and emotional (although those sentiments and emotions are mostly directed to one another). It doesn’t seem like girls have any feelings at all. But I still love them anyway. I guess the other guys were always right: I am a sucker and a fool for girls. 

This morning, October 28, I sat preparing to check out of my hotel and debating whether to book one more night. I really can’t afford it. Winter is coming and I need to by a coat. I need a new pair of shoes, and a few other accessories if this hell continues such that I find myself sleeping outside in November. San Diego temperatures always look good on paper, if you’re coming outside from a warm car or house. But after twelve straight hours outside between dusk and dawn, 60 degrees feels damn cold, and 50 degrees feels arctic. 

Booking another night, with two weeks until my next disability check arrives, after buying a coat and shoes, would mean putting myself at risk of going broke to the point that I wouldn’t be able to afford food before I get paid again. But I realized something: I finally have an addiction. I’m addicted to sleeping indoors at night. 

I finally convinced myself to book another night because of the significance of the date, October 28. While I enjoy holiday festivities, most of the holidays on the calendar don’t really mean anything to me. None of the people that I admire most have holidays, nor do any of the concepts that I value most. I’ve never been into celebrating my birthday. I generally disliked my birthday as it meant I was another year older without achieving my goals. I love the end-of-year holiday season festivities (one of these Hanukkahs, I want to eat latkes and jelly donuts with Scarlett Johansson!), but both Thanksgiving and Christmas annoy me conceptually, and I’ve always been bothered by the foolish and irresponsible ways people celebrate New Years from driving drunk to firing guns in the air. 

For me, a holiday should be a day that marks an achievement, so over the years I’ve collected my own private slate of holidays that I commemorate. It was the evening of October 28 and the early morning hours of October 29, nine years ago, that I wrote my Unified Field Theory equation. That was nine years ago. Nine years. That seemed to mark the point where my life began to unravel and it has been virtually a non-stop downward spiral since then, aside from that magical weekend in Vegas when I saw Scarlett. But despite all that has gone wrong, I remain resolute in the belief that, whether my theory is correct or not, the changes I’ve undergone since have represented growth and spiritual advancement no matter how uncomfortable this may be for the people who knew me before. 

I don’t know how to feel about my physics ideas anymore. Strangely, I no longer care much whether I’m right or wrong. The longing I once had to sit down for a few weeks with an intellectually qualified person and explain it all no longer really exists. But I was able to convince myself that the anniversary of that (possible) discovery was worth giving myself one more night of shelter. I’ll deal with the consequences when they come. 

I no longer know how to feel about myself or my life. You can’t be treated like a piece of shit by society for almost a decade without losing yourself to some degree. I try to hold on to the hope that this could all end tomorrow. There are a dozen things that it seems could happen that would at least afford me the opportunity to have what I regard as the minimum basic requirements of a decent life, or even perhaps something far better than that. But yet, I feel like there is some force that won’t permit this to happen. It feels like civilized society has voted me off the island, and I’ll never be allowed back again. 

A lot of people won’t understand the approach I’ve taken to dealing with my situation. We are a society full of Monday morning quarterbacks. There is always someone waiting to say, “You should have done this” or “You could have done that” without understanding all the factors at play. The fact is, for more than seven years, my life has not been worth living. Enjoyable times I’ve had feel so distant as to almost seem like past lives. I feel ridiculous writing about these beautiful multi-millionaire girls I write about on this blog. They inhabit another universe, far from where I am. What value could I ever have to them? I constantly think about deleting this blog, but the only thing that stops me is a desire to leave behind some record of how I was feeling and what I was thinking if, as it seems, this will end in disaster. But even that seems pointless. My dreams of being a writer are fading as I look at the world and I no longer can see an audience for my voice. I just don’t belong here. Maybe I don’t belong anywhere. 

I believe everyone has the right, perhaps even the RESPONSIBILITY, to set minimum acceptable standards for their participation in society. I’ve drawn the line in the sand that I believe I deserve better, and I will fight until I win or perish. Even though I don’t know how to fight anymore. I don’t even know if there is anything left of me worth fighting to save. I am a mentally, physically and spiritually destroyed person. The bad guys have won. But still I hope tomorrow will be the new day when things are different. But after more that 2,500 tomorrows where each day is worse than the last, that hope is hard to hold on to. Most people fear death. My fear now is that I can’t die, and I’ll be trapped in this nightmare reality forever.