Foreclosure Emergency. This is really it.
Doação protegida
This is really it.
My home faces actual foreclosure on July 15th unless I find a friend to buy it and save it...or I raise $150,000.
Those of you close to me know how the final blow was that final act of kindness I did, for my most hard-hit "rescue tenants" yet: a family of four (a thirtysomething domestic violence survivor and her three kids under twelve) sent to me for protection by a friend skilled at rescue: a special operations veteran who exemplifies heroism.
That was mid-2024.
And you know what has happened in Sarasota since then: our first direct hit by a hurricane in a hundred years. And another.
Here's how those hits impacted my household:
- Both my properties -- the bungalow bequeathed me by the suicide of my partner at Ft. Bragg, and the home I live in beside New College -- were damaged so badly as to be declared unliveable;
- I was sent to six months of FEMA housing as a result;
- I lost any tenant income as a result;
- My ability to keep up with schoolwork suffered as a result;
- My bungalow, front fence trashed by falling oak limbs, suffered looting, including of some of my father's materials;
- That same bungalow began accruing fines of $400/day from City Hall Code Enforcement for "unsightly damage",
- ultimately resulting in a lien since I couldn't afford repairs...
- ...not that I could have effected repairs, whether long-distance from my FEMA Sheltering and Housing Assistance room nor even if I could have stayed in-town: even folks with savings accounts, good credit, or home insurance encountered shortages of rebuilding materials in the price-gouging aftermath of any major natural disaster.
You'd think those cataclysms would have been enough for one year. But the hits kept coming. The manmade disasters piled onto the wreckage of my life left by the natural ones:
- The shot-at family of four meant to repay me for all the months they were provided food and shelter at my home. That young mom really did. But when the five figures of Domestic Violence aid money at long last hit her bank account, and her options were to repay me, or start a new life with a new name with her family..... Well, what would you have done?
- But the hard-money lender who mortgages my home didn't care. Across ten years I've paid down this $540,000 house to only $150k left that I owe him. But he's opting to call in the entire debt instead.
- To afford a foreclosure attorney, and to make a bid to "catch up" mortgage payments, I applied for work in the town I was relocated to by FEMA. But after two months of background checks and interviews I was declined for a police dispatch position: two more months burned.
- Then my partner, Chris -- our sole remaining source of income -- was fired from his trucking job. He will not be eligible for another trucking job for at least a year.
- And last week my father passed away, from complications from his diabetes, Parkinson's, and age. His successful open heart valve-replacement surgery in February had provided false hope that he had years more to live. So his rapid decline this past month, and his passing, were hard shocks.
You might think that all that would be enough. And indeed, for a little levity and very dark comic relief, my Christian friends have asked if I've been trying out for the role of Female Job; while my cartoonist colleagues praise my choice of artistic medium. Since where else besides comic books could such a melodrama of concurrent disasters be believed? Surely all this hardship is going to lead up to a superhero origin story??
You laugh. But that comic book theory is actually supported by the appearance in my tale of two supervillains.
I kid you not: Fate was not done with me. Because, upon seeing (in shared Mutual Aid groups) my pleas for help as life dealt me one blow after another, like I was a piñata...
...two wealthy, connected, and skilled pillars of my New College alumni community, blessed with all the resources to save not only myself, but so many of our affected communitymembers likewise reduced to begging for basic needs...
...these luminary leaders of my society of Honors College graduates, saw the death spiral of events entrapping me, and they rushed in!
To pick up the piñata baseball bat and finish the job!
File their brutality under "no good deed goes unpunished." Because, yes indeed, those course materials and books I saved from the Dumpster, when one of New College's founders died and his daughter was just going to throw them all out (along with her family's piano, art, crystal, etc., etc.: "trash" which my "rescue tenants" -- including NCF music students -- have made great use of, since).
Now that New College is famous, that "can't be bothered holding on to Dad's things" academic princess of yore, decided she wished to undo her Dumpstering.
And no less prominent a figure than the General Counsel himself of New College, the former Honors College of Florida. Well he, rather than feel even one twinge of conscience (I guess you have to trade that in to receive your "esquire"), looked at my broken world considered the harm it would cause and time and terror it would cost me to try to defend myself against not one, but two lawsuits, weighed that against just letting me alone to rebuild my life...
...and that man said, "Hot damn! I'm in!"
And then this princess and her hit man got a judge to rule that I was a destruction risk and order that Dave Smolker and Lynne Buchanan be allowed to conduct a raid on me.
A no-shit, eleventh-hour, jackbooted SWAT-style raid.
And hitting the legal library and trying to figure out how to file court motions and stop this unhinged duo soaked up all of Spring semester: all of my remaining, depleted, energy and time.
Yep: from the moment I returned in February from FEMA housing to see, for the first time, the damage and looting to both my big and tiny home. Through my dad's illness, Chris's firing, and my dad's death. I've also been getting the shit beat out of me by these two famous community paragons. Both of whom I had really looked up to.
I mean, I guess "looking up" is the only vantage I have left to view them from, seeing as they've kicked me down in to the gutter.
So I'm sure they're celebrating now that my electricity is going to get cut off, Chris and I are at the back of a three-month wait for food stamps (thanks, DeSantis' "Social Service" office), and I've had to petition -- rather than failing out of my doctorate -- for my professors, at least, to be compassionate, and provide me grades of "incomplete" instead of "failing.".
Each and every one of my professors has found that compassion in their hearts. While meantime, two particular members of my community are on a second, exciting, spine-tingling raid: to discover the secret hidden location of their own missing hearts!
I'm just kidding. They're not looking. They're not interested in finding or re-installing those antidotes to narcissism. What use to brutes would a heart even be?
But speaking of hearts. And compassion. You fine, intelligent, kind soul still reading this plea (for which grace, I thank you).
I am completely fucked.
I'm unstrung by grief. Derailed from college. I don't know how the living hell we're going to find a job for my partner with his felony conviction and now a suspended commercial driver's license (and court case of his own to fight to reinstate it. A court case...in Idaho).
Hell, I don't know what job *I* can even find, now that I've got eight grad classes to start and finish by August. Or else forfeit my degrees. Waste on top of waste. On top of natural disasters, and human disasters, causing more waste.
I have never, ever been this fucked. Not this fucked. Truly, this is Marvel Universe levels of cosmically fucked. I do not have any idea what the hell to do.
So this is what hitting absolute rock bottom looks like. I can't say I recommend the view.
But, back to you.
Can you buy my house for me?
Just until we can get on our feet and buy it back?
I promise: the hurricane damage just adds character. Like me, my resilient house is a survivor, amirite? One of a kind.
But if you can't, I don't know, reach in your back pocket and purchase my home.
Can you perhaps find just enough back there to keep me going for a month or so, until we do figure out what the hell to do?
Organizador
Jinx Ashforth
Organizador
Sarasota, FL