It’s Always about Poverty: COVID Has Finally Hit My Flophouse

This is a rant. I have a few of them in the queue, and I had planned on another topic for publication today, but things move quickly here in Canada. So if you’re in rant-reading mode, buckle up…

It was only a matter of time. I’ve been waiting for it, and frankly, given the living situation and how things are managed here, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. I came back to my windowless micro-room in the shithole in which I’ve been forced to live due to poverty in my shithole country (Canada) that punishes women for being ‘old’ (among many other things) only to find a note on my door informing me that we’ve been infiltrated by one of The Infected, but that the management will not be taking it seriously.

What?

A little backtracking since you may not have read further back on this blog. I’ve been unemployed for more than a year-and-a-half now. Part of that was planned as I transitioned from a paying job in China back in July 2019 to a full-time studentship in the US, the idea being that I would use the time in the US to make connections and work my way into some employment. Everyone knows that getting jobs isn’t about your education, qualifications or competence, but about who you know and being in the right place at the right time. I’m 48 and this is how it has worked my entire fucking life. This is how men still dominate the job market despite their inferiority. Men help men, and sometimes the women they are fucking or want to fuck. If you are a woman on the outside (smart, gay, old, etc), things are very difficult, so you have to be good at networking.

Anyhoo, the pandemic hit, and suddenly I was stuck in the US with a shut-down educational program, an insanely expensive place to live and nowhere to go. Literally nowhere to go. I have no family, few Western friends who actually do more than say hello electronically and who certainly won’t help me in a time of need, and no home base in my home country of Canada. I hadn’t lived there in a decade. But finding a job in my former field (teaching ESL) in a foreign country was out of the question, so with more than half my small savings depleted, I repatriated to Canada with dread in my bones. And I was right to expect the worst. After being lied to by the Canadian government (they officially told me after a formal inquiry that they would pay for me to quarantine due to having no home to return to) and being forced to stay in an expensive and very specifically designated ‘COVID’ hotel with no affordable food access for 2 weeks, I moved out to a city I had lived in about 20 years previously. I found a ‘cheap’ place to stay in an overpopulated house full of very strange people in the sticks via AirBnB for a few months, but had to flee due to an abusive male who threatened my life because I looked at him in what he decided was a disrespectful way. And given that without a job, you can’t get an apartment, there was nowhere to go but a downtown hostel that did extended days (meaning month-by-month rentals), but functions more like a flophouse, centred as it is in the dangerous homeless- and drug-addict-ridden area of town, and strangely still accepting random travellers from all over the place despite COVID restrictions. I had stayed at this place in a 4-month extended stay 20 years previously when I first moved to the city for a job. It had gone downhill a bit, attracting a lot of really weird, listless and creepy men in addition to people who are flying in from hard-hit Virus areas of Canada as well as other countries. The worst thing about hostels, even in non-COVID times is that you always have to share kitchen and bathroom facilities – hotbeds of germs and disease even under normal circumstances. I know for a fact that the males who share the bathroom closest to my room don’t wash their hands and leave disgusting messes all the fucking time. This is well known because of social research on post-bathroom hand-washing, but the more fucked up the population of men, the dirtier they are. And the cleanliness standards of this place are dubious to me. They don’t clean door knobs. The toilets aren’t cleaned properly, and the showers might get sort of cleaned once a week. Maybe. I had applied for a part-time cleaning job here, but wasn’t even given the time of day. Over the past few months, I’ve noticed the only ones getting the cleaning jobs are people under 30, and there is a whole parade of them, constantly changing staff. I know for a fact that I clean better than any of those fuckers. I’m a Gen-X’er who grew up in a time where children, especially girls, still had household chores starting at a young age. And as the eldest child with a completely useless mother and a mostly absentee father, I had girl jobs and boy jobs. I am a cleaning master. And I know I’m physically stronger than all of the females they employ in this joint. Further, I have more hostel experience than all of these young people put together spending most of my adult life working and moving around abroad as I have. But this is a sexist-ageist world. I can’t get hired for anything to save my life. If I were male, my age wouldn’t matter so much. But I suspect there is a connection thing going on – millennials and Z’s make sure their friends get jobs.

So I get the notice of infection today, they detailed a few things about when the Infected arrived and what their activities were after arriving and when they left. The person was staying in the same area where my room is, which also means we shared a bathroom. The hostel has indicated that it is no big deal. The only thing they are going to change is that they are going to stop taking randos off the street for short stays – but it won’t be implemented until March 1st???!!! How is this helpful? We’re going to continue putting you at risk for another 3.5 weeks. Whatevs.

Now, this particular region where I am living is one of the least affected COVID areas of Canada in a province which has done much better than many of the other provinces (which I attribute to there being a female physican in charge of regulations here), and this is good considering it has a large population. We are on an island, which has helped to limit much of the traffic that would normally pass through a large city. So to have a case show up here speaks to what happens when you have poorly managed (aka ‘money grubbing takes primacy over public safety) congested housing with low-income people, especially males, who generally don’t give a shit how their actions affect other people. Our national media has only focused on the effects on poor immigrants, but there are tons of poor locals who are as affected by disease and poverty as idiots who come here illegally or who come expecting to find streets paved with gold and government hand-outs for people who haven’t contributed to the tax base (trust me, this is a common perception of Canada and why many, many foreigners come here). Poverty is rampant in Canada and it affects all races and citizenship status. But liberalism has its agenda…

I’m pretty sure I had COVID early on while in the US before anyone was taking things seriously, and I really don’t want to come down with the dangerous new strain that has made its way to Canada from the UK. I will say for certain that I think China did things correctly – not the withholding of information from the world part and failing to help the world in a significant way after infecting us – but their local policy implementation of locking everyone down and enforcing strict policies on comings and goings at the community level. They nipped it in the bud before COVID could destroy their economy. Chinese nationalists (according to my former students) are laughing at us Westerners with our fucking ‘freedom’ talk and our limp dick approach to letting people do whatever the fuck they want and thus spreading the disease everywhere and destroying many people’s economic lives (including my own!).

I’ll never be a communist (or a capitalist for that matter), but when I can finally get out of here, I won’t have any problem moving back to a country living under dictatorship. It’s not ideal, and the racist sexism is always there, like it is here, but at least I can be employed and any crises will be dealt with swiftly without entitled shitheads ruining it for everyone. I hate all male political systems, but after going through this pandemic business and coming face-to-face with the rabid anti-woman liberalism that is a worse infection than COVID ever could be, I’ll take the dictatorship, than you very much. In an ideal world, however, things would be male-free and the system would look very, very different in every possible way and this blog would not be needed at all.

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