If you're threatening my writing teacher, please stop. You don't know what it's like to be an adult who not only isn't rich but who has to worry about bills and any sort of possible crisis that costs money.
What he did was not nice, but the school's charge against me that was brought partially because of him was dropped. I proved that what he'd said wasn't true, and I'm sure that he was embarrassed by the public steps that I took to refute what he'd said about me.
Something else that you might not realize is that the Section 8 voucher that I got in 2012 and the apartments that I've been able to have because of it are unusual. It doesn't happen every day that someone who wasn't even thinking about applying for a Section 8 voucher is called by a case worker and told "You can have a Section 8 voucher in a few months; all you have to do is apply for it." I don't often talk about the things that people have done to try to help me, because the conglomerate attacks anyone whom I talk about that way. I'm telling you this about the voucher because you, and probably a lot of people, don't realize that the normal waiting time for a voucher like what I have is something like 10 years. The only possible way that the opportunity was given to me is that someone, or several people, in government who respected what I have tried to do against the conglomerate every day since 2010, got it for me so that I'd be able to stop being homeless. I'll never know who they are, but they are some of the people who have helped to save my life. Homelessness is dangerous.
Being evicted from my last apartment could have made me lose the voucher. I sent the documents that I had written for the court hearings to the housing authority; the housing authority read them and decided that I should be able to continue to be part of the Section 8 program. Even so, it took another 2 years of homelessness for me to be able to get a place to live, because nobody wants to rent to someone who just got evicted. If I get evicted again, I'll probably lose the voucher.
The apartment that I have is not a typical apartment for someone who is as poor as I am to have. It is not in a project. It is not in a building whose rents are low. The rent for my apartment is usually something like $2,400/month. Because of something called the Cambridge Inclusionary Zoning program, many owners of nice buildings have to rent a percentage of their apartments to people who are poor. I wouldn't even be able to manage the lower rent that the owner of the building is contracted to charge through the program if it weren't for the voucher, which pays most of it. I know how fortunate I am, even if you and most of the conglomerate don't, even if you think that all an impoverished person has to do is sign up for programs to get things; that's not really how it works.
Fame and fortune are difficult temptations to resist for many people. Also, the conglomerate has done a lot to try to make the public hate me. Understand that, from what I gathered the one time that he talked about it in class, he and his wife are living in a studio apartment. It's probably not even as nice as my apartment.
You are so successful in your industry, and got so successful at such a young age, that you might not realize that there are people who are your age and much older who have tried for years to get work in that industry; they'd be texting all their friends and getting congratulated if they got to be extras or say one line in one of your movies that didn't even turn out to be successful by your standards. Publishing is similar; it's difficult to be a professional writer.
I am atypical in some other ways, also. Vermont is not as much in the middle of nowhere as people think, because the Northeast of the United States is such a powerful place. Although it took me years to realize it, because to me I was always me and not really someone who Knew People, I do know people and have all my life. I wasn't trying to make my writing teacher resent me with my suggestions about the class he was teaching or my descriptions of my background; I was trying to explain why there were some things that I knew that he might not know. He's probably at least 10 years younger than I am also; I'm sure that you know how it feels to have me writing pages about how you could improve something. Sometimes, you don't feel like reading it or thinking about it,
Don't worry about it. My writing teacher hurt himself more than he did me by selfishly trying to capitalize on my undeserved, bad reputation. The conglomerate brings out the worst in everyone, and it would be sad if all of the people whom it has led astray suffered for it all their lives; he REALLY wants to be a writer, more than I ever have. Nobody needs to praise him, but hopefully he's gotten some much-needed wisdom from having tried to sabotage The Dragon and he'll never do something like that again, to me or anyone else.
Copyright L. Kochman, May 31, 2016 @ 5:29 p.m./additions @ 6:02 p.m.
