News about Joy
Long time listeners will realize that I have been kinda on the edge of disaster recently. First was the eviction from our home of 5 years due to finances and losing a job. We moved in with a roommate and things have gone progressively downhill.
I’m not going to go into all the sordid details of our stay there, just imagine the worst possible situation of financial and emotional abuse and you have what Mary and I were living through in the past 11 months. We tried to get out of there, but every time we got ahead we somehow got behind even more.
This past weekend it came to a head. Again not to give too many details, the basics of the matter are these:
- On Wednesday the roommate demanded a check for rent. We had already given her all of our money for rent, and she demanded another one saying that the other check was for “past due” rent that we owed her. She threatened us.
- Thursday she stayed home from work to browbeat me even more. She called her brother and his wife to come over and get “the lazy trannie out of here”. Yes, she used transphobic slurs. About 3 hours later, he and his wife came over, kicked the door in and started yelling at me, screaming really. My laptop was thrown across the room and outside, I was threatened with being beaten up, I was told that they had bail money so that they could beat me down with impunity, transphobic slurs more and so on. I called the police.
- Cops came, removed roommate, brother and his wife. The cop told me that she would be gone for a few days. I started packing everything we owned to put it in the car if no place else, since we had no place to go.
- Friday Morning comes, I’m still packing, roommate shows up again, with boxes. I figure she knows the complex has given us official eviction notice due to the police being out the day before. Let her in to pack.
- Twenty minutes later, 8 more people show up, all hostile to me. Brother is there, as well as his wife.
- I call complex begging for some protection since I’m there alone. They refer me to the police.
- I call the police, they state they are coming.
- Wife throws my laptop again, while calling me more transphobic slurs and getting in my face and shoving me. I push the lady away from my belongings, brother hits me hard in the face.
- I black out
- I come too, nose is out of joint, blood all over my face, can’t see out of one eye. Police now arrive and ask why I’m intimidating them and instigating a problem. No one is arrested. I’m told to leave.
*** I now have a choice, leave and give them free access to all my and Mary’s belongings and let them steal/damage anything they care to, or stay and continue to “provoke” them as the cop put it.
- I go to the hospital.
- They continue to remove whatever.
- I get back about 4 hours later, find the house locked up and the locks changed. A few of my belongings are outside. I can’t get in to get the rest. I was also counting on being able to sleep inside that night.
- Now I’m sleeping in my car, Mary is sleeping in the car, we have the few things that were outside in the car with us.
- Finally get into the apt the next day, what they left us is pretty much destroyed. The major casualties of the incident are my laptop and the terrabyte harddrive which is stolen. The laptop is destroyed.
Much longer story short, they did over $6000 damage to our possessions, including what they stole. They are gone, Mary still has to work with roommate, and now we truly ARE homeless.
I was able to borrow an old laptop from a friend and get Terms part 1 up, and will probably edit and post Terms 2 and Terms 3 so they will auto-post, but until we get a home, some of our possessions, a laptop for me, and a job, Magical Musings will still be on the Internet, but will probably not be creating any new shows. Currently the only way to get in touch with me is through my smartphone (a gift from the roommate), and trying to edit or post an episode from it (even if it is a Windows Phone) is just not happening.
So, that’s the situation. Things went from bad to critical.
They took my tarot cards… omg…. FUCK!
Sorry, I remember another thing that I know I had there, that I didn’t see when packing, and it’s like I was raped all over again. They took a small deck of Tarot cards we had received as a promotion from a TV show, but they were the miniature version of Mary’s Hanson-Roberts deck (Mary’s preferred deck). They also took the ENTIRE Ruroni Kenshin anime on DVD.
Yes, we are getting lawyers involved. We filed a police report. We got what we had left out of there. We are in another location. Physically we are secure. We are doing spells to bring about their ruination. But that’s it.
In order of importance:
- Shelter. We have to find some place to stay for more than a week. Right now we have crash space, that’s all. They need to be transfriendly and willing to let a 63 year old woman stay in the same room with a 47 year old transwoman.
- Employment. I don’t have a job, Mary has one, but if we leave the immediate area, she loses it. Those jobs need to be making in excess of $14 per hour for each of us, and they need to be accessible to the transit lines in the city we live in
- A lawyer. We have connections we can follow up on, and are, but a lawyer who could work pro bono or on contingency for us in this matter, without messing us up totally would be stellar.
And donations are ALWAYS needed, this time more than ever. The site is safe, thanks to many who donate, but all else is up for loss soon.
Joy
Joy is a Seax-Wican Priestess, a Druid and a Witch. She owns Erin's Journal and is present on a lot of places, most notably Tumblr, Dreamwidth and some email forums. She's co-host of Magical Musings podcasts.
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