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Boulders Lost: Jann Scott’s Journal
Dec 23rd
Kathy has been living in section 8 housing for 5 years. She is 50ish has a bad leg and drinks everyday. She lives in one of Boulders section 8 apartment buildings. Social security and Medicaid keep her propped up so she can drink all day and get sicker and sicker. Kathy is an alcoholic. She admits it. Most chronic alcoholics do. Her alcoholic gout is so bad she can barely walk. A visiting nurse drops in to see her twice a week. Social worker interns from the Boulder Homeless shelter see her monthly. They are all very nice and hopeful for Kathy, but her basic problem is she is an alcoholic. If she stopped drinking 90% of her health problems would go away. But you and I pay for her lost lifestyle. We enable her. Now the county mental health officials, nor the DA will agree with me on this. They think I am uncaring and mean-spirited. But I know what is going on out there. I mentor a lot of these folks. They are honest with me. They don’t have mental illness. They have alcoholism. Last month Kathy fell and drove a spike into her head. She was found by her friend Austin who took her to the hospital where she spent a week. Now she has a little brain damage, a hole in her head and she can’t drink enough.. so she takes pills…… Disappearing into pitiful demoralization.
Austin has been in and out of prison, jails, the ARC and hospitals over the past 35 years. He’s always been an alcoholic. He went to prison 30 years ago for molesting his daughter while he was drinking. That is actually a plight of a lot of alcoholic men. They just don’t get reported or caught. But Austin was an alcoholic speed freak. Today he has served all of his time and has put stretches of sobriety together. We talked earlier today at his campsite. He lives under a tarp like hundreds of drunks in Boulder. He is a registered sex offender for a crime he committed over 30 years ago and he can’t catch a break. He never re-ofended, but he has an SO jacket. 20 years ago he was sober and had a job in the kitchen of one of the dorms at the University. H’d worked there for 5 years, was an exemplary employee and CU wanted to make him a supervisor. Austin had learned kitchen management in the penitentiary. He could fix any piece of industrial equipment, cook any meal, run a kitchen and serve 2000 people 3 times a day. He was excellent at it. When the university ran a background check they discovered his past and fired him on the spot and had him escorted off campus. From that point Austin gave up and went down hill. He told me today from his campsite that he is persecuted for his past. He can’t get a place to live, can’t get a job…. so he collects SSI and Medicaid and drinks… He is waiting for death.
Sometimes Kathy lets him sleep on her floor. But she is being thrown out of her apartment because the landlord hates section 8 rentals. They all do. Austin can’t qualify for section 8. The homeless shelter can’t help him. So Austin crashes where he can. Sometime I let him sleep in my heated garage in my big beautiful house….. but he is always drunk and he knows better than to come around me when he is drinking.
Scottie lives in a trailer. His kidneys gave out from drinking. He is nearing 50 and is friends with Austin and Kathy. He got fired from his gas station job last month for drinking. Austin says he’s not long for this world.
Scottie rents a room to Harmony who is 20 something. She tells everyone she has cancer and shaves her head everyday. But Harmony is a chronic alcoholic and drug addict. She doesn’t work but she always has money. Scottie and Austin theorize that she is a prostitute because she disappears with various older men routinely. Some of Harmonies friends who were strippers and hookers from the Bustop got killed over the past few years. One flipped her pickup truck in the Canyon last year. She was drunk and high. The other got killed by a John. The police are still looking for him. The case never even made the papers. Why ? Because these are people no one cares about.. no one knows… they live in the dark shadows of Boulders trailer court. Richard lives 3 trailers down from Scottie. He is a bad alcoholic too. He used to be a finish carpenter and cabinet maker. Richard says he could just never stop drinking. He gets his SSI check each month and drinks.
20 street alcoholics died this year. The public officials call them homeless and want you to believe they died from exposure and mental illness. Nothing could be further from the truth. You know what they died from right ?? They died from what is killing my friends above.
Citizens of Boulder are killing these people with kindness. so what are we supposed to do? Here is the rub. Make all public assistance contingent upon being sober. sounds reasonable right ?? Nope .. not to all the drunks and drug addicts who run our city. They feel threatened too. After all we live in Dope Boulder. we live in beer Boulder. so we will just lie about it all and make up some nice story.
Jann Scott
from Boulder Colorado
Jann Scott’s Journal is Boulders official voice of reason and conscience.
Occupy Boulder, Really?
Oct 14th
Corporations, Are they really bad. If you are a communist they are bad. Communists want everything to be controlled by the state. Look how well that worked out for Russia and China. They switched their economic systems to model after American Capitalism.
Corporate Person hood. Is it evil? By definition corporations take on the characteristics of a person. But corporations exist to protect individual share holders, officers, workers, and managers. A corporation is an entity. Now in Boulder the communists want the federal government to end Corporate Person hood. Why? so that the proponents of anti capitalism will gain power is my take. When I see Regina Cowles an avowed Communist , head of NOW ( a communist radical organization of women) trying to get our children to vote out corporations, it makes my head spin.
Occupy Boulder? Why bother? What’s wrong with Boulder? How about nothing. Everything is right about Boulder. The economy is good. There are plenty of Jobs. Capitalism is at work. The Commies are happy here. There are plenty of government jobs supported by American capitalism. There are more corporate and government jobs here than we know what to do with. Everybody is rich here. The Entrepreneurs are making money hand over fist. Start up “corporations” are flourishing. We are in fact a hot bed of rich American capitalists with communist ideals. But just try to take our money. No I don’t think Boulder wants to do away with Corporate Person hood and neither do you, if you plan on continuing to eat at the Kitchen.
The Kitchen, The St. Julien These very hip, very left speak easys are Bastions of Boulder super Capitalism. The men who opened these two establishments made millions dare I say billions off the American Capitalist system. Do you think they want to do away with Capitalism and corporations?? Bullshit.
Boulder Weeklies Pam White is a communist But do you think Boulder weekly is a collective News Paper?? Think again. It is owned by Stewart Gallo and he runs it with an Iron Fist. Pam White may try to sell ” shared wealth” to you and Stewart Gallo may let her have her say in “Uncensored” but Boulder weekly is all about the money. All about advertising revenus. All about consumerism. All about the sell. All about perception. They fucking want to stay in business and their advertisers better get results or its all over for Pam and the other writers there.
So what’s the problem with Wall Street? Well, nothing really. We have had financial markets in this country since our birth…even before out birth. If there weren’t banks and financial institutions to finance our homes, cars , business’s, our float, international credit, commercial lines of credit, we, my friends would descend into chaos, anarchy, civil war, starvation in a heart beat. So none of that is ever going to happen. The American Capitalist system is here to stay and “it ain’t never going away, bucky”
It’s the Banks I agree the investment bankers, hedge funders, the traders who leveraged our money market savings, who sold us short “literally” are the scum who should be charged, tried and executed by firing squad in front of the New York Stock Exchange. We used to do that sort of thing in this country. Maybe we should bring it back.
But for you to blame Wall Street because you can’t find a job, or you took out a dumb student loan is they wrong way Jose’ Speaking of Jose, he loves it here in Boulder. He has plenty of work because the privileged white American kids don’t want to work. Now stop complaining and stop blaming and go to work. Make something happen.
From the richest small city in the USA
Jann Scott
Boulder Colorado