The Melting Reactor Core by Simian Beard

The Melting Reactor Core by Simian Beard

"I read an article on Medium and I'm going to say upfront that there is nothing about that article I disagree with. Except for one thing. The article was essentially about being unapologetic about existing in this world even if it expresses itself as mildly annoying — you know, asking the same question repeatedly, caring too much about certain things, taking pictures of kind text messages. And here's my issue with it and it's not that it's not true, it's all true. That's the problem. If that's your greatest friction in life? It doesn't need an article written about it. These are all safe things. Every single one of them. Bringing your own Pepsi to a party. That's not newsworthy, maybe a little bit odd sure. Newsworthy? No. Inspiration article worthy? I guess? And this article is actually beautiful because it's point is so clearly defensible. But the world, as beautiful and beautifully told is also the container of things that are so ugly and real that we abandon them for the cleaner narrative. I'm sorry for what I'm about to do to that beautiful world view because, meanwhile, somewhere in the world there's a nuclear reactor that is melting down. And somebody is trapped inside of that room. They didn't ask to be put in that room. In fact a lot of people who found themselves in the locked room with the melting nuclear reactor issue, they didn't even know that was the room they were walking into and they certainly didn't know that that door was locking behind them. They are the most innocent of innocent bystanders. And yet it happens right? Somebody walks us into a situation that they cannot possibly hatch their way out of and they weren't given all the details because either the details were obscured or just lied about and all the sudden somebody finds themselves in a horrific situation. There is no negotiating your way out of it. There is no creative problem solving your way out of it. The stark reality of the situation is simply that you are trapped in that situation and you have to survive it or well you don't right? I can write from experience about this. I'm in a very similar situation. My melting reactor core is in the shape of a yellow house in Phoenix. Now I don't want to get into all the meticulous detail about how I ended up in this house but, it was extended to me as a sort of you know hey, get back on your feet situation. The only thing I will say as far as exposition on this is just simply that constructive evictions aren't just some piece of terminology. It's when a landlord makes your residency unbearable, so much so that it crosses a legal boundary. Structural issues go unaddressed, locks changed that bar the entry of a property, harassment, all the dirty moves a landlord can commit on a tenant. And if the eviction court is the place where truth is brought out into the light, you will find yourself in one of the coldest, harshest lights imaginable. The eviction courts are not what you think they are, they operate more like an assembly line. And that assembly line has two clear goals, to clear a resident from property and extract money from them. The funny part is that we attach the word court to it and that word court does a lot of heavy lifting but it's lifting the wrong object. It's lifting an object associated with justice, a fair trial, and definitely not a federally sanctioned arm of our judicial system whose job it is is literally just to evict. If you look at the statistics it becomes very clear the eviction courts in the United States of America are no more than 15 to 20 minutes long and the end result statistically is eviction. Notice the absence of a very specific court related word? Justice? Absent from the equation. So back to the nuclear reactor right? And you wonder how somebody gets in a situation like this. So here you are. So what does the nuclear reactor look like? Well the funny thing is that this particular kind of nuclear reactor takes all kinds of shapes. For some it's a relationship. For others it's an unbearable living situation. Want a metaphor? Sure, here's one. Think of a bear trap. It's agonizing. And it forces an unbearable binary. You either bleed out and die. Or you are going to have to liberate your body of the body part that's in the jaws of that trap. And you very well may still bleed out.

I want to take a moment and offer something that for people trapped in the nuclear reactor situation, they often don't get without an insulting extraction.

If you are in this situation. I'm so fucking sorry. You don't deserve this. For those very rare humans that did something to bring this on themselves? They are not in a nuclear reactor situation. Because that insulting extraction I merely hinted at? The, "what did you do to end up here?". That is one of the very defining parameters that draw a very clear difference between the, what did you do, and the often so overlooked and inappropriately charged entry fees to victimhood.

I am currently living in Phoenix and I am precariously housed, a much more nuanced version I suppose. I am a little on the right end of precariously housed. Stable enough for some to say, "What are you complaining about? You're housed. You have a clear trajectory to being stable." And it's in that statement where all manner of evil exists. Because this stability comes at a great cost. And this my dear reader is going to cost you something. If you think what comes next is disorienting? Imagine what it's like for a person trapped in a world where all the defining aspects of "grace" becomes something else, something foreign. Gratitude is no longer something you offer in deep reverence for the kindness. It becomes currency. That currency itself has extraction rules. Gratitude currency says that you earn it in a sort of emotional labor market of compliance. Not your traditional house rules compliance. That's categorically different. This compliance has its own rules of conduct. "Compliance" rules say for instance, "because I am helping you, I get to treat you a particular way. I can treat you with all the intrusively insulting and stereotypical assumptions of who you are without so much as a gesture of kindness or the courtesy of actually getting to understand you as a human before ignoring the very narrative of your personal experience and filling in those blanks with a standardized checklist. Oh, and if you disagree? Then let's go back to "gratitude currency."

Imagine looking at a mirror and watching every single defining feature of your face, who you are, the struggles that you didn't just earn, but the very struggles that you fucking earned. Every single one. And all those features are now replaced with someone else's narrative about you. And why? You are going to walk yourself in circles in this reactor situation room around this question because as deserving as this question is, its answer is so starkly dry that it's existentially terrifying.

Because they can.

We hear this term all the time, "let that sit with you a moment." It's a request to look at a fact from a perspective that asks you to pause your assumptions, to check your baggage at the door and really "think" about their truths, to try to push aside your misconceptions or explore their deeper meanings. This place, this living situation of a melting reactor core is filled with many such items to sit with, and this situation will demand you sit with them.

So go ahead. Take all the time you need.

I've sat with these questions, and their answers so long, that the furniture is made entirely out of expletives and even the furniture has run itself out of the will to perform its designated function. You know, to "sit with it".

Yeah, sit with that.

And this melting reactor core of a living situation is filled with all kinds of these pieces of furniture, all made out of expletives, all screaming, all competing for the same space, for the same demand to sit with their questions and their truths. All screaming until even their screaming becomes the typical Muzak of your living situation. Like the moving goalpost of an armchair that promises if it just gets addressed then it can be resolved. Apparently it has never been sat in. No one can keep it stationary long enough to fulfill its role as an armchair. Another piece of furniture in the house are the vicious gossip cycles, the misrepresentation of who you are as a person. And weaponization has the same modular functionality as a Lego kit. You can make anything out of it. Noise, movement through the house, labor, eating, sleeping, groceries, your habitual patterns, your thoughts, experiences, fears, trauma, physical needs, mental health, just look up the definition of, "everything" and you begin to understand that the tracklist of your current living situation is some quirky post punk band named, D.A.R.V.O. Not DEVO, but the devolution of something profoundly blacker. Your reality will become a perverted checks and balances, where every violation of the self is deflected, and weaponized and suddenly a simple, "please don't treat me like this is reversed. Somehow you are the aggressor, you are the one manipulating the room. And the sum total of your reality, what you know to be true? Becomes your new narrative, and it lies and misrepresents. Truth here is a perspective, not fact, but a perspective that somehow you lost control of. It's no longer your to tell, it's theirs.

And currently two pieces of furniture are screaming at the top of their lungs, "WHY!" and "BECAUSE THEY CAN!" without the sweet release of a tiny sliver of silence. This is a place that not only does not know the word "grace" but is parasitically hostile to it. Yeah, add that to the list of, "everything".

So why a melting reactor core in the shape of a yellow house? All one needs to know to understand this reactor core house is in my analogy of the bear trap. You have a choice. Options are on the table. But they are very few, and each one has consequences that play out like a live game of, "Would You Rather?". You could leave any time. That's the first option. But this is Phoenix where homelessness is treated with such a deep vitriol that the euthanization of homeless people looks to be the more humane resolution. Maybe stay with someone else? Being gone from a city long enough that you have passed from its memory of you to where you might as well be brand new to it. Suicide? It's an extreme choice that has a zero percentage of recovery from. So what else is left? Survive. Make it through the situation and make goddamned well sure you make it out alive. But if you think you're going to make it out being the same person going in? Once you cross the threshold of this domicile, there is a place to hang your umbrella, and also abandon all hope. And the moment, that very moment when you realize that it's not that you want to die, it's just that if a thousand pound safe fell on you from the sky, you wouldn't complain about that either.

Maybe you will survive this. If you are spiteful enough to survive it, then and only then, maybe. But you will not recognize that person. And you absolutely will not like who that person had to become to make it out alive.

The world is indeed beautiful and that beauty is sometimes awkward and their truths to tell are as important to that beauty as anything beautiful can be. And simultaneously, this beauty is manipulated. Not so much so that when you look at it your suspicion is activated. Because for some, that beauty is camouflage. Camouflage for a good Samaritan. Camouflage for your next door neighbor, just helping someone out. Camouflage for someone in your church. Camouflage for a world that runs in parallel with the world of our beautiful assumptions of purity.

So as you "sit" with this piece allow me to help you understand what it actually is that you are being asked to sit with. And I acknowledge there isn't one clean chair in the room and yes it's fair to say they are all asking you the reader to sit with all of them. But from the inside of this melting reactor, in real time that moment you can't be sure of what the final result of what "critical meltdown" may become. When all the paths are still just ambiguous enough to trigger the survivors final read of the room and all the humanly necessary defensive routes to try to keep "destruction" from spilling into "total destruction". There is to me, the one literally crying out into the void, a very particular chair, and it's overlooked. In fact, so much so that the whole subject I am addressing becomes not just relevant but it's absence from public discourse is its own explanation. We have exhaustive data on homelessness. We have mapped it's relationship to poverty and housing security, and all but abandoned a significant population. Not necessarily significant by numbers, but significant in the magnitude of disproportionality. When the mechanisms of all the situational devices lock into place, that there is a space, between the ship that has sunk, and the ocean that promises oblivion. Where is the federal funding for (and let me be crystal clear here) not "life raft survivors" but the kind of survivor who is right now, lost out in the ocean, hoping that someone, anyone can see them, that can provide the most significant of human rights, something stable enough to stand on, to rebuild from. And more disturbingly, when that space is not a place of federal funding, of some kind of organized outreach. It's in this space where a hand can appear to reach into the darkness and pull that individual on some kind of deceptively stable surface, and only too late is the truth revealed, that that space can be what's called a "pan", which is a plate held under a very careful tension and it's truth is it's relationship to the intent of a particular kind of device. A device with springs, tension, jaws that clamp shut under immense pressure and teeth designed to keep what is trapped inside immobile, severely injured, and in agonizing pain. And the genuine truth that device registers. That some stability offered is not stability at all, but a cruel trap that exists because it's operational deployment is hidden in the shadows of blind spots where the allocation of funding is in a vicious tug of war. These are more than blind spots. They are for some, "opportunity zones" and it's in this space where the trap is deployed as help. That trap is the device that keeps an injured victim held steadfast in the melting reactor core, places like that little yellow house is an extraction mechanism. They work in unison, and those agencies, advocates who are so desperately pulled in all directions at once creates the perfect camouflage.

And if you look hard enough there is one last chair to sit with. It is the weakest voice. It does not scream itself hoarse. It is not made of expletives. It's meek, deeply overlooked and lost in the cacophony of desperate voices. And it is the most gentle, sincere and meek voice in the room, and it asked the most profound question. A simple question. "Who is going to believe me?"

The bear trap is set.