Life As Performance Art 58

I tried to go out for a short walk yesterday after dinner. With the bright sunshine of the incredibly long days of early June it was tempting to want to be outside. In the past, I always went out after dinner, regardless the time of year, but especially in the spring and summer with the beautiful prolonged daylight. I can't do this any more. Not while living here in an unsafe neighbourhood downtown and this is frustrating. I still try to go out sometimes, but nearly half the time I come home regretting it. There is always something going on, the shadow of which I often end up taking to bed with me two hours later. Yesterday, it was an attempted dog attack. It was a golden retriever, so one would assume he would be friendly and gentle. No, I did not approach said doggy for a pat, Gentle Reader! I am not stupid! First the dog started barking and threatening a young woman just ahead of me, then it was my turn. Fortunately his young woman human had him on a leash and she was very quick to reprimand her darling pet. Too bad she wasn't equally quick with an apology, but she was probably coping the best she could at the moment. I simply said, "We have just as much right to this sidewalk as you do, doggy," and the woman who was also threatened smiled and thanked me. As if the dog would actually care. So, what should have been a quiet, enjoyable stroll in the early evening sunshine turned out to be yet another endurance ordeal, heightened by the hordes of other people out at the same time, a lot of them tourists. I don't know what my housing providers were thinking when they decided to build in this area. Downtown is not fit for human habitation. It is crowded, noisy, polluted, and often unsafe. And they expect people who are trauma survivors and worse to do well here! And for one unfortunate while, they were even campaigning for us to thank them for our lovely little government subsidized apartments! What nerve! But I am grateful to live here, but this is also my one available option if I don't want to sleep on the sidewalk or in a low-barrier shelter. So, why do they need us to thank them? We're already grateful. We're still alive. The mornings are much nicer. The idiots in the neighbourhood usually don't emerge from their coffins till around noon, so it is usually quiet and serene and I can hear the birds outside. This isn't a perfect arrangement. And it would be helpful if our housing providers would openly acknowledge the problems and challenges that often confront those of us who live here. But for some reason, they don't want to. Maybe they still have so much of their personal ego invested here that they have to hear regularly our paeans of gratitude and praise. So much for Christian humility. It really got a lot worse when the Spirit of Howe Money Laundromat, or, oops, I mean to say, Liquor Store, opened next door, and our housing providers did absolute nothing to oppose them opening here, neither did they pay me an ounce of attention when I raised the issue with them. But I was long problematic to our housing providers, and for the simple reason that I am both intelligent and articulate, as well as assertive. Okay, so humility is not one of my other virtues, but who's perfect, eh? But this can make for a very annoying tenant, especially when we are rather expected to be ill or half-ill, medicated, submissive, compliant and not very intelligent. Well, sorry to disappoint you guys, and yes I am going to keep on keeping on, as I like to say, because these issues need to be continually brought to your attention, if for no other reason than to help you form and establish better-informed future policies and practices for the general well-being of your tenants. By the way, Gentle Reader, management has improved, a lot, in my building anyway. But this building has been operated by some real doozies in the past.