[xx-29] To Officer Juarez

 To Officer Juarez,

I’m writing this to let you know the impact you’ve had on me.

Since our interaction, I’ve had a flood of intrusive thoughts that have provoked my anxiety and opened old psychic wounds about abuses of power. You don’t know anything about me, and I know this is the basis from which you were able to trap yourself in the fantasy that justified your actions.

I used to work as a Department of Child Services Assessor. I’ve worked hand-in-hand with law enforcement for years. I’ve worked in the Indiana prison system. I have friends who went into law enforcement. I’m not anti-cop. I’ve spent years defending the basic premise that police are fallible and human and serve considerably more good than harm.

The problem, which I’ve seen up close in my role at DCS, is a few contrasting stark examples can betray that sentiment aggressively. I know the culture of different departments can be radically different county to county or town to town. I think you end up in bad places procedurally like the toad in the slowly boiling pot. I say this to try and depersonalize this, because I know behavior doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and I know there are “innocent” reasons that contribute to prejudicial thought.

I know this because I’m a counselor, which I told you. While reviewing your body cam footage, I noticed several times you did not appear to take in what I said. Some of those things include being from NW Indiana, one street away from St. George where we used to go to church, and 10 minutes up the road from Calumet Cemetery where my grandparents are buried and I occasionally help my dad landscape graves. I come home often because my friend and I, who lives in the complex we stopped inside, go to shows in Chicago.

In your self-dialogue during the search you said things like, “He said he was poor, but has 2 phones.” I can imagine you now reading this thinking, “You’ve got money for shows, but can’t afford car insurance?” My phones are almost 10 years old, one isn’t active and functions as a bad iPod. I’ve been borrowing the gas money and my friend has thankfully been covering my tickets for months. Details matter. I carried two phones, one being a work phone, when I worked for the state.

You seemed to doubt whether or not I lived in my car. You seemed unable to recognize what a bowling bag is. You called my bags stuffed, when my backpack is visibly sunken in. You seem to grasp that the humidity and temperature were high and could explain why I was sweating. In any heat, I sweat constantly. It’s why I tend to wear all black. I rolled the windows down because cooking myself in a hot car during a traffic stop adds insult to injury. It’s a car without air conditioning. You found this suspicious/curious that I would roll down my windows, but not consent to a search, as though it is unreasonable to exercise my rights.

I had been working my new job for 2 months, and it had yet to pay me. I had been stressing about trying to get my back bills paid for that entire time, including my insurance. From my perspective, the negligence of the State of Indiana was preventing me from getting paid (they pay my employers for counseling services), and here we are the State of Indiana giddy for the opportunity to cite me when the consequences of their disorganization carry forward into the consequences of their abuses of power.

You had decided the moment you got back to your car that it was “nothing” to get a dog out there. This is the kind of thought that anyone in your position of power should seriously reconsider how you understand it. Nothing for whom? This decision predicated on something beyond reasonable doubt, has been specifically litigated. Me, exhausted already, dreading the expenses and humiliation and consequences I didn’t know were going to play out, including my license getting suspended in spite of immediately paying the ticket and getting insurance an hour after the stop, are all “something.”

Was I impolite? Was I slurring my speech? Were my eyes red? Was I off balance? Did it smell like any kind of drug? Did you see smoke? Did you see residue or paraphernalia? Did you notice track marks? Was I traveling with something in a dangerous way? Did you ask me about any medications I might be taking? Recall, I’ve been a literal investigator. These are things I might think to ask before I paint someone a certain way.

No, between my dad’s house and my friend’s house, my headlight went out. Between you, your ride-along, and the other officers, it meant I’m somewhere I don’t belong, carrying either dildos, bags of narcotics, or have secretly been lying to you about my finances, therefore I deserve this, to you, mild interdiction.

As you get done searching my car, you say, “You think he has it on him.”

This so succinctly demonstrates the gross negligence and depth of the problem. The other officer says, “Yeah.” You invite him into your fantasy, through camaraderie or laziness, he plays along, and you both walk away satisfied for a job well done.

I’m an addiction counselor. I had an unopened drug screen, accidentally bought as a weed-only one, for one of my clients I wanted to screen after she showed up in the middle of the night intoxicated. You were curious if that screen would give you license to search my person. You qualified your ride-along’s commentary about how I might be there to meet “my guy.” You talk about my shaking several times as though it is not normal to be nervous when people with guns are nakedly presumptuous and showing you how they’re going to violate you one comment and action at a time. You think I can’t read the writing on the wall and pick up on body language, tone, and word choices? You think it’s unreasonable to fear you? People shook in front of me, and have told me how much more fear they had for me than the police because they thought I was about to take their children.

Did you know I was violently beaten for little to no reason for most of my childhood which has resulted in a panic disorder that’s followed me up to 38 and 2 days old when you stopped me? Why would you entertain that context though? You’ve got a potential bust on your hands! In the fantasy. In the presumptive judgment devoid of reasonable evidence. In the face of refusing your listening ears to even grasp that I grew up in Merrillville and Crown Point and my grandparents lived in Highland, and my dad’s from East Chicago, and there’s nothing criminal about living in the country and visiting. I made a decision to live in the country because, yes, I am generally poor as a social worker, and saving up to buy land and a shed to live in 10 years ago is what allows me to straddle the poverty line and yet present like the middle-class.

I have the tools, knowledge, disposition, and sense of personal responsibility to address this situation as comprehensively as I feel it needs to be addressed. I worry about everyone you treat this way who is just going to turn into a little node of hatred and fear spouting off commentary about police that is as unfair to them as you were to me. If you can’t handle the weight and consequences of how you conduct your role, you have no business occupying it. You shouldn’t be teaching your ride-alongs that this is the right way. You shouldn’t be so impervious to the counter-narrative or conflicting evidence that you, unironically, matter-of-factly, after getting your way and making veiled threats to cost me even more money, land on, “You think he has it on him.”

There was nothing on me. You were wrong. You were so wrong in so many things you thought, said, and acted on, you stayed unable to entertain the truth. It’s shameful. It’s psychological and financial pain. It’s a miserable standard that poisons the societal well from which we all drink. I think you can do dramatically better, but it’s only if you really sit with my words and act with accountability.

I got pulled over and had my difficult circumstances thrown in my face. I immediately paid with money I didn’t really have to try and fix where I was in the wrong. I continued to get punished by the system from the fees to even begin learning how to go about filing complaints or reviewing footage, to the costs of navigating my license getting suspended that was in no way conveyed to me by you, the ticket, or the website where I thought I was paying and getting done with the situation.

It’s 2 months later and I’m still in that stop. I’m still feeling like I need to exercise the responsibility that was not present. I’m still taking hours out of my day and navigating the emotional labor. I’m doing so because I don’t want to hate and feel helpless. I don’t want to distrust and give license to people you give good reason to pile on. I want to believe with enough work like this and instantiation of reasonable consequences we don’t have to act like we’re trading ways of terrorizing each other.

[1271] In Progress

I had the thought, "No one wants to watch you learn." It gave me pause. It happened after I thought about how I feel I’m generally perceived on reddit after I posted about looking for help in developing Civic Mirror.

 

Most people, most of the time, do not have “the answer.”

 

I don’t care if it’s something as simple as trying to find an item at Walmart, most people, most of the time, will tell you they don’t know, need to look it up, or need to ask someone else. There’s a likely chain of events that you will incur in the pursuit of nearly anything. It can be small hiccup like your familiar fast food changing its menu, or a lifelong effort zeroing in on some existential “why.”

 

For my part, as a counselor and social worker, I’m constantly bearing witness to “the learning curve” and the resistance or struggle with combating what it takes to change. I know that nothing is a given, “common sense,” or given or won without a catch. I know there are a dozen reasons, or excuses, that inform people’s pictures of the world and sense of their agency or responsibility. We want clips and scrolling and background noise. We want our choices stripped from us.

 

It’s not what we “need” that we’re often in pursuit of.

 

You don’t need to know the answer. You need to know how to discover the answer, scrutinize the answer, and apply the relative strength of the answer to the pool of all your other relative answers. That’s work. That’s balance. That’s a series of discreet, measurable, decisions you can often literally account for. Or, it’s word salad and soup trying miserably to project and protect against being found out or seen through.

 

I’ve put a lot of work on my plate over the next few days. I don’t want to waste the money I’ve reinvested in vibe-coding. I don't want to let a project that excites me in a way I haven’t felt in years rot on the vine. I don’t want to pretend like I don’t care, am not invested, or can’t be bothered to “dig deep” and budget my time and energy to pursue all of the things competing for my attention in their due course.

 

But in order to achieve what I want to achieve, I have to put myself out there, often in environments that are dispositionally opposite, to put it mildly, aggressively dismissive and antagonistic often reliably predictably. It’s the struggle of anyone reaching out to anything. “The world” doesn’t care about you or where you’re coming from until it feels your impact on them. You make them laugh and you might turn into their “favorite” comedian. How many comedians do they watch? Shut up, silly, no one asked for an investigation. Just believe * the chuckle and words and we’ll stay getting along.

 

I can spend money. That’s easy. I can drive myself to the next show. I can organize my calendar. I can spend the extra few hours staying up late debating and correcting the AI. I can’t make you believe in what I’m doing. I can’t make you inclined to join me at the show. I can’t pay you anything to care about “saving democracy” or “provoking agency.” I can’t reasonably assume I’m going to find “productivity” and “maturity” and “help” in mad wild places like a social media platform. I know the hit rate of thousands of emails might number in a dozen or so tepid responses.

 

That’s also, begrudgingly, despotically, annoyingly, the game. No one I’m searching for really has the answer. They might have slightly better questions or directions. Big maybe. They might have a vague idea of how what I’m doing might make them feel, or feel one day. But right now, forever, no one cares, no one understands, and no one is interested in trying to care or understand. I hesitate to say “that’s okay” more than “that’s the game.”

 

So, if nothing else, I offer levity, money, and obligate myself to create more and varied kinds of pitches, explanations, and guides into my world. I weigh, each time, the impact of my invitations. I weigh the depth of the disappointment in the response. I weigh the materially progress I make alone. I’m constantly in flux, trying to balance my desires and goals against the environment that often provoked them. It’s work. It’s emotional labor. It’s time consuming. It’s humbling and lonely and objectively aberrant.

 

I also wouldn’t be doing anything differently. I’m not going to stop. I’m not going to “be normal.” I’m not going to accept that everything driving my behavior is peanuts to “the way things are” as though I’m just a passive animal that can only bark and scroll through it. That’s dumb. I’m not dumb. “The internet” is dumb. “People” are dumb. Abuses of power and privilege are dumb. You, as an individual and me as someone attempting regular accountable participation and creation in life, don’t have to be dumb.

But you look and sound dumb while you’re learning, and that’s enough for the sea of reactive apes around you to fling shit at. 

 

There’s no way to do something well if you’re not prepared to field the response. You do that by recognizing the response has nothing to do with you. The response is the mindless reaction or chemical explosion of the unconscious. Making decisions is an exercise.

 

Taking control and responsibility for things is a moral demonstration. There’s a visceral rejection of that by our basest animal selves. Your pets are not ashamed they ate out of the trash, they may only fear your reaction to your own negligence towards what it means to be an animal.

[1270] Tax Code

I’ve been decently frustrated recently. It ranges from a series of very specific things to familiar, but broader, existential sources of angst.

I’ve been working my new job for 17 weeks starting tomorrow. I didn’t get paid for the first 2 months of that job, and I didn’t get 2 months of back wages on the day I finally did start getting. In that time I had to borrow money. In that time, I got a ticket for not having my car insured, then my license was briefly suspended, and all the fees associated piled on, including what it cost to get the body cam footage from a persistently prejudiced police officer.

I get paid well. I have a schedule I can more or less dictate. I’ve managed to be “extra productive” by utilizing my time commuting less and pocking my days with more and more shows. I still feel “broke” and “stuck.” Why? The police interaction has cost me approximately $1,300 of money I really don’t have or would have loved to use in paying my dad back.

But, I’m a particular kind of cunt. I can’t let it go that I was at the ass end of a needless presumptive fishing expedition and wholly invented fantasy of an over-eager gun-carrying power broker. My stomach has got to drop over and over again as I reflect on the anxiety of that night, as I pour over the footage from the body cams and dash cams, and as I look, helplessly, to find a lawyer to put the information in front of that seems to clearly display an aggressive violation of my rights, and even disingenuous attempt to pretend otherwise.

That’s just me personally, who has been invited into a fight I know very few people are willing or capable of taking on. Had I encountered this bullshit a few months earlier, I wouldn’t have had the money to get the footage. It’d feel like needlessly dragging others into what is my fight in soliciting money for anything but necessary essentials for the time being. For the woo woo types, it’s almost as if “the universe” was presenting me with a scenario to really test if I mean what I say.

I mean it when I say I’m disgusted and violently angry at the idea that people in positions of power abuse that power. I’ve held incredible amounts of power professionally, socially, and physically at different points in my life. I wanted to enable with it, share it, and explain it. I wanted to find other people who could exercise power like I felt I was capable of doing, and see what we could do together. I’m still attempting that project.

I have to*fight, because if I don’t, “I” don’t really exist anymore. I am the fight. I am the “fuck you.” I am the one who is literally writing the variable book on why it matters, what it means to him, and why you’re kind of a hopeless fuck if you don’t pick your fights and stand on principles too.

The Shererville, Indiana Police are not the only thing I’m fighting. I’m fighting an extremely disingenuous and aggressive bully overseeing Recovery Works. Now, I’m fighting them less than the owner of the company I work for, but they’re coming for the money that pays to run the whole program. They’re doing so in ways they’ve been dumb enough to write emails about. They’re doing so in violation of their own published policy. They’re doing so in a way that threatens the safety and security of the people in our care, and I’m deeply looking forward to the court appearances articulating all of this.

I listened to a podcast recently where they relayed an idea, “Give a busy person something to do, and they’ll get it done.”

I volunteer myself to try and attack my greater existential woes. I try to create. I try to prepare. I’ve been working on not just digital infrastructure that makes under-resourced social work easier, but civic-mirror.com, and other pieces of local software that I’d like to eventually get listed for sale or components developed into workable software in other domains. I spent 2 solid months of 22-hour days creating something that was finally worth trying to share and connect to people with. It’s cool enough that, while no one can figure out how to make it work for them yet, they see/feel it’s potential, but are inevitably bogged down in their own work and lives.

I’ve cold-emailed hundreds of people in the informatics department at IU. I got a couple bites, but nothing they’ve otherwise followed-up on. I’ve got components to the site that my computer can’t run consistently, but I could run or build things separately, if I had the time or money not feeling burdened by other obligations. I have this golden wonderful project that speaks to literally dozens of issues I have about the current media environment as it pertains to getting information or becoming locally informed or involved, and it just kinda gets to mock me as I think about the job-in-and-of-itself that it would take to create a kind of pitch-binder and tutorial in searching for paid help.

I also haven’t had running water at my house since December of last year. So if I want to do a yard project, I’m either hauling buckets of water to set concrete, or needing to ensure the project makes space for me to drive to Bloomington to shower at Planet Fitness. Pretty much every physical project or just yard work itself stays stalled because I need to build in 2-3 hours to get clean.

Oh, and my job is to field the drama and asks of a sober-living house for women, so, you know, nothing related to that drops giant piles of shit into my weekends or nights every 2 days or so.

I, technically, have just over $6,000 on it’s way to me so far. I won’t get paid for another week, where that number could, in theory, go up another $1,000. What I’ve already made pays back what owe my dad, buys a cheap car from my friend, and then still pays the bills for a month. Yet, with how much I’ve had to pay to clean up police misconduct, I’m hovering between $200 - $600 for weeks at a time, trying to keep my balance between “fun” and “work” and “free” and “busy” without looking too stupid spending money on things I, never “have to” in the same way I have fight the powers that be, but no less feel like I have to in the sense that…what else would I be doing?

The whole structuring my life around living out of a shed in the middle of nowhere is literally so I can try. It’s so I can try to create what I want to create. It’s so I can pick the fights I know need to be had. It’s so I can go to the artists I enjoy and stop debating and negotiating myself out of having fun or owning an overpriced t-shirt that reflects my values and interests. In the horse race of how or when to express yourself, when should one value trump another? I owe my dad money that he’s told me explicitly he’s not hurting for right now. I want to buy a car my friend has offered I take for free (Seriously, get yourself a friend from Saudi Arabia, they have different rules.) I want to keep sending chunks of money to a friend who supported my effort to run my counseling operation. I also want a one, maybe two, Dewalt nail guns, and 50 bags of concrete, and to get my water working again.

Literally every week of my working life could mitigate one or more of these problems except the state of Indiana and its incoherent tyrants at the grant wing can’t help but betray how much they wish everyone poor and addicted would just die and get it over with already? The ambivalent yet predatory state thinks I owe it hundreds of dollars, weeks of stress, and my time and ingenuity in order to meaningfully account for and address an abuse of its power?

I want to write a letter to the officer and describe in the excruciating detail the nature of his fuck ups. I want to be able to collaborate and develop what I know is an incredible idea and useful tool that is Civic Mirror. I want to be able to say “I’m not in debt!” without an asterisk because it’s not to a credit card company, and whether a dollar amount was attached or not still carries an emotional one. I want a lawyer with domain expertise to take some of the burden off my shoulders to make sense of what happened to me.

I’m, always, the one who has to make it make sense. I’m fighting “my” battle. I’m supported, but it’s mine, and I’m alone in that specific kind of way that gets very hard to navigate when you’re trying to figure out if you want to do “the thing” or are desperate to escape from “all the things.” If pointless TikTok likes and followers are any indication, there’s plenty of solidarity, but no one does the work.

This, is part of the work. I don’t need convincing that I’m a good person or capable or going to pursue every end available to me the moment it’s possible. I need to see it articulated and organized. I need to see it as one more blip in the endless sea of thoughts I have about how to orient and see straight.

I’m gonna see at least 100 shows this year, and pay everyone back, and buy a car, and the tools, and get my saxophones fixed, and fund the back end to keep the AIs churning and Civic Mirror infrastructure online, and fight the state, and juggle my clients, and keep reading, listening, watching, to the thousands of hours of podcasts, shows, and articles. Then I’ll get new shoes I’ve been complaining about getting for, checks watch, 2 years at this point, and then maybe somewhere in there I’ll meaningfully continue to build on and around my house before the weather turns impossible.

It’s taken 4 months to course-correct considerably more dire financial straits. That’s a blink of an eye in which plenty of other shit happened too, but also that. My head routinely wants to jump years ahead, and this is the first time in a long time where it hasn’t felt like patience was more or less imposed.

Anyway, if you know a civil rights lawyer, website developer, or where to find DCN680, DCN681, DCN692 and DCN694 nailers that fell off a truck…