Month: March 2024

by Travis Mateer

When I appeared on Tin Foil Hat on November 24th, 2021, I was trying to turn my content creation into a full-time job. Platforms like Rokfin claimed to be censorship-free IF you were allowed to use them, but my application to Rokfin was never accepted. After somehow running afoul of Mark Steeves, the guy who does the booking for Tripoli, I was effectively blacklisted from MULTIPLE opportunities to continue sharing my perspective on the topics I’ve written about for years, including homelessness.

Mark Steeves also has his own podcast in addition to a podcast collective I was invited to join, then kicked off of. Here’s the email pitch for the cool-kids club:

It’s funny now to read about this “professional” community of podcasters because there’s nothing professional about how Mark Steeves conducts his business for himself and his boss, Sam Tripoli, as this very articulate email response to me indicates:

Am I an asshole? Yes, I certainly can be. Does that change the fact I am doing amazing work exposing local corruption in Missoula with potentially national implications if what I knew came to light? No, but don’t tell that to the “synchromystic” who was told I’m pretty kick-ass by a fellow synchronicity researcher.

Despite making big financial investments for equipment and technology, and despite making the rounds to provide podcast interviews to promote my work, my attempt to launch a podcast was not successful for a number of reasons, including my own poor choices in choosing a co-host to help me expose local corruption. Those choices now have me facing criminal charges with a court date coming May 1st.

Doesn’t the legal persecution of a local truth-teller sound like interesting content, narrative controllers?

If it was just podcasters giving me the sads by ignoring my BIG ego, I’d possibly be more capable of bouncing back from my trip to Butthurtville, but there’s also the entire LOCAL media landscape in Montana driving me nuts, and on topics that I’m a fucking expert in, like homelessness.

Before I get to the Urban Camp Working Group charade, let’s look at how excited The Pulp is about moving into their new office space in the ZACC:

Hey There,

If you know the story of The Pulp, you know about the Missoula Independent, the alt-weekly newspaper that was shut down by Lee Enterprises in September 2018. After losing our paper and home, Indy staffers began to discuss how we might start another publication. We had nowhere to meet but coffee houses, bakeries, and bars—all welcoming places that often offered us complimentary drinks and pastries. But then, an artist named Geoff Pepos reached out to us to say he had an office at the Zootown Arts Community Center. He was able to work from home and wanted to let us use the office while we figured out our next move.

I had gotten to know Geoff when I interviewed him for a story about virtual reality. He was building a VR world set in Glacial Lake Missoula—“either 10,000 years in the past or 10,000 years in the future.” (That’s the magical way Geoff conceived of place and time). Glacial Lake Missoula VR was a laboratory to explore music and visual experience, and Geoff had lots of ideas about how the technology might enhance people’s lives, especially people who don’t have access to far-off places or expensive machines.

The ZACC was located on the Northside back then, and a small crew of us would go to Geoff’s office and gather around a whiteboard to brainstorm ideas on building a new paper. That’s where The Pulp’s seeds were planted (though we didn’t know it then). And over the next few years, as former Indy staffers moved away, and life (and a pandemic) happened, I stayed in touch with Geoff here and there. He eventually gave up his studio at the ZACC, but he was still engaged with the arts and music community, and with his particular talent for using technology, like VR and AR, creatively.

A couple of weeks ago, Geoff suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. A week later, The Pulp was offered its first home: an office in the ZACC. We will move in soon. I wish I could tell Geoff thank you for giving us a temporary garden to cultivate our early identity. We’re excited to now be putting down roots in one of Missoula’s most vibrant art hubs. But we will miss Geoff’s bright, kind presence in the community. I didn’t know him well—not like some people did—but he was, to me, one of Missoula’s quintessential creative spirits, always doing cool things. Hard to imagine this place without him.

Congratulations, Pulp! I’m so glad you are moving into the building Nick Checota helped the ZACC purchase. Hopefully you produce the kind of gelded content this town requires to remain strategically ignorant about everything that actually matters.

The Missoulian article about the Urban Camp Working Group provides another catalyst for my butthurt state of perpetual indignation. From the link (emphasis mine):

Establishing an additional Temporary Safe Outdoor Space percolated to the top of the priority list for the Missoula Urban Camping Working Group this week, but finalized solutions remain unclear with only two remaining scheduled meetings. 

The Missoula City Council and 12 other community members spent five hours on Wednesday exploring prospective policy to  remedy people sleeping outside in public spaces. That number, according to the city, is roughly 100 people in tents and vehicles. 

The working group spent much of the day brainstorming both an overarching city policy around urban camping, as well as specific ordinances that the council can pass to alleviate the issue in the short-term.

If this is what came out of Wednesday’s meeting, then citizens in Missoula are in trouble, and I say that as a FUCKING EXPERT who was quoted in this stupid town’s FIRST 10 year plan to end homelessness.

Before repeating the TSOS model, I suggest our local leaders pay attention to what the fuck I’m exposing about the homeless industrial complex, including the alleged actions of this woman:

Yes, the woman my sources tell me has knowledge about how Joey Thompson ended up dead in the river is just ONE of the people out there “helping” the homeless. Did Jim Hicks from the Union Gospel Mission ever call me back after I reached out to him? Nope, they want to keep enabling people like April and other two-faced grifters preying on vulnerable people for whatever they can get out of it.

Reading further in the article just deepens my level of butthurt, like when I see the name of a former volunteer of mine getting quoted because he’s now a municipal judge. Back when Jake Coolidge was a graduate student doing this thesis on how AMAZING my coordination of the Homeless Outreach Team was, this community appreciated my perspective. Now Jake is a part of a court-system currently chewing me up and getting ready to spit me out in a month.

Here’s my former volunteer talking about addressing the core issues of what he’s now helping to enable (emphasis mine):

Members also questioned how judges can impose reasonable penalties against homeless people, and Missoula Justice Court Judge Jacob Coolidge said many proposed options are mostly dead-end ideas.

He said the framework around punishing the unhoused is broken because the city keeps trying to remedy issues in court rather than provide services.

“I believe the more valuable intervention mechanism is with the officers and referrals to services at the initial point,” Coolidge said. “… if the thing that keeps someone from housing is lack of resources and gaps of services, that’s what we need to give them.”

Well, Jake, I don’t know how to tell you this nicely, so let me just be blunt and state that many of the “officers” you think should be doing more actually DESPISE you and your fellow Municipal Court judges for what they see as your political decisions to REMOVE the stick from the carrot/stick equation.

A poet and unpaid citizen journalist like myself with a creative writing degree shouldn’t have to be explaining how the simple equation of INCENTIVE and CONSEQUENCE is supposed to work, but there’s so much goddamn FAILURE everywhere I look, I just can’t seem to help myself.

I get it, I can come off as an insufferable egomaniac with zero patience and even less fucks to give for the sensitivities of others who aren’t engaged in a local information war against this cabal-tentacle with ties to Pritzkers and other creatures that go bump in the night.

I’m risking coming off as a whiny little bitch in order to examine the new layers of narrative control developing with people like Sam Tripoli because I think it’s important. Also, can we agree that once you make an appearance on Joe Rogan, your claims of being heavily censored is kinda bullshit?

While Tripoli gets to be a guest on one of the biggest podcasts out there, I go trolling for opportunities to throw micro-tantrums on Twitter.

It’s not just me and my research that I want people to take seriously, it’s this entire region–the weird Pacific Northwest–that I think people should be paying attention to, and for some serious reasons I’ll be getting into next week.

When I get trolled by a movie like Miss Congeniality, it feels like a confirmation of my hunch that there’s something brewing in the northwest, and Missoula is a big part of it. Movies have played a BIG role in influencing my thinking on Hollywood’s investment in narrative control, especially a movie like Donnie Darko because a scene in that film echoes a tragedy in my own life when my friend Lisa was hit and killed by a drunk driver on April 1st.

I am mentioning Donnie Darko because I just came across a little factoid about Jake Gyllenhaal’s reprisal of the Dalton character from the reboot of Road House. Am I being trolled with this esoteric middle-finger thrown in my face?

From the link (emphasis mine):

In March of 2023, spoilers were leaked about the upcoming remake. Barstool Sports posted behind-the-scenes footage of the filming of the new movie. The footage shows that Elwood Dalton’s character is a MMA fighter from Missoula, Montana.

When I sat down to watch the new movie, I was anticipating seeing the scene from the leaked footage. I couldn’t wait to hear the announcer say “FIGHTING OUT OF MISSOULA, MONTANA!”

Instead, we get an entire scene where Dalton briefly explains his origin story. Talking about how he is “from Montana.” Only to elaborate and go on to say “A little town called Missoula.”

Do I want to remain in a perpetual state of butthurt? No, I do not, but things in Zoom Town are getting pretty serious for me, so I’m just taking things day by day until I join the homeless ranks in June to fully embrace becoming the TRASH ALCHEMIST.

On my worst days, I’m a bitter cunt throwing mantrums on Twitter, but on my BEST days, I’m a fucking rock star with a ukulele and an ability to rhyme that’s so damn good, my words will reverberate LONG after I’m gone.

To all you narrative controllers out there, that isn’t a threat, it’s a fucking promise.

https://vimeo.com/927983538?share=copy

Thanks for reading.

by Travis Mateer

The easy way: support my cleanup efforts on April 8th when I ECLIPSE THEIR BULLSHIT or, at the very least, stay out of my way. I can coordinate a safer, cheaper, more efficient cleanup than ANY individual or entity in this town, and if you doubt me, just scroll through the 20+ links featured in yesterday’s post if you want proof about how kick-ass I am.

The hard way: allow what’s currently developing to continue its destructive path toward a full-fledged public uprising against our local cabal, which includes public officials, non-profit influencers, and badges who use their power to protect all the wrong people.

I surveyed the area near Lion’s Park yesterday for a potential alternative location for my dumpster in case Imagination Brewery continues to be unresponsive to my multiple attempts to make contact. If I had to place the dumpster on a city street instead of a private parking lot, what would that take to get permission?

After being bounced around different departments and talking to FOUR people, I finally got the person on the phone who could answer my question about cost and process. The cost? Nearly $100 bucks for the permit AND it has to be reviewed by an engineer. Just to place a dumpster on a street? Yes.

I laughed at this person on the phone and said NO WAY am I paying the city $100 bucks to do some kick-ass trash removal, then I hung up to see if the private sector could be less insane and costly.

I made a call, then sent some subsequent info via email to the private business that has a PERFECT spot for a dumpster. As of this writing, I haven’t heard anything back, but I’m cautiously optimistic, despite being told that the owner sits on the Urban Camp Working Group, which met for the second time this week.

From the link:

“You got people way over on this end who are going to be extreme, and people on the other end who are going to be extreme. You’re never going to solve it for everyone,” said facilitator Ginny Tribe. “We aren’t here to solve all the problems related to homelessness.”

But the task force, created by Mayor Andrea Davis, does seek to achieve a number of goals. Among them, it looks to define the problems created by and associated with urban camping and find general agreement on desired outcomes.

It also looks to recommend actionable solutions and regulatory tools – and monitoring metrics – that support community safety. Members of the group on Wednesday shared feedback from their mailbox regarding the wide range of opinions in Missoula related to the issues around urban camping.

Does reading this shit make me a little crazy? Absolutely, especially because I can quickly boil down the problem these people are struggling to “define” in stark, simple terms, like this: Missoula needs CARROTS (treatment incentives) and STICKS (real consequences), but we have NEITHER of these things in adequate quantities to make a difference. No carrot and no stick means no progress. It actually is that simple.

But MONEY our supposedly helpless officials bleat as they trade-in their human cognitive faculties for this:

No, this isn’t a picture of our Mayor, Andrea Davis, it’s an image of what happens when you accept the false notion that you are helpless in the face of immense corruption and deception. You are NOT, so start acting like it, people.

If you want a GREAT example of how my former employer, the Poverello Center, is more concerned about OPTICS than genuinely continuing the work I did as the Homeless Outreach Coordinator, check out THIS bullshit from Jill Bonney, sent to the organizer of a cleanup at Reserve Street in 2021:

Guess what, Jill? Kevin didn’t need you OR the HOT team because he has ME, and there’s NO ONE with more experience in this area, so good try leveraging your staff to exert whatever narrative control you think you still have to keep the lid on.

When the Missoulas County Sheriff’s Office euthanized Sean Stevenson, no one working at the Poverello Center took time to reach out to Sean’s family, so any concern Jill and company may express over RESPECTING homeless people is utter bullshit.

No, who Jill REALLY wants to protect is her funders and political enablers, like United Way and that State Senator who started her political career on the corpses of homeless men, like Clay Salcido.

Do you appreciate getting all this history and local context on the efforts of our local officials regarding this supposedly COMPLICATED issue? If so, consider supporting Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) because in a year’s time I’ve done more with the meager donations that have trickled in than anything our city can produce.

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in an absolutely TERRIBLE mood the last few days, so I was tentative about showing up to City Council as the TRASH ALCHEMIST on Wednesday, but thanks to Virgil’s help, I was able to make a fairly coherent and mostly positive comment to the Public Safety Committee.

https://vimeo.com/928229400?share=copy

Despite Virgil’s presence, it was still a little awkward when I told Council that I’m calling this thing my ECLIPSE THEIR BULLSHIT trash removal and poetry reading event. Don’t worry, I assured them, I include LOTS of local entities under the “their” pronoun, not just them.

I left Council to meet with Parks and Rec (Virgil stayed in the car) feeling fairly confident, and the conversation went as good as a conversation can go with me when I’m caffeinated and optimistic sanity might slip in somewhere, but the takeaway is a HARD NO for any kind of cleanup on CITY land, like the West Broadway Island.

Am I deterred? Fuck no, I’m simply challenged to be more creative, like shifting to this idea: how about instead of putting trash in the trash bags ourselves, we simply hand out trash bags to those living on the island? Then, if they’re so inclined, they can put trash in the bags and bring it to the dumpster I’m still planning on getting placed in the parking lot of Imagination Brewery (if I can get permission).

If CITY land is a no-go, there are different jurisdictions to clean besides just city property, like the area Ryan Tollefson has been trying to address–that spot is NOT city land, it’s the Montana Department of Transportation, I think, but if my decade of experience tells me one thing, it’s this: NO ONE wants to be the entity responsible for cleaning up these “urban camps”.

I was going through a recent email thread to parse out the issue of jurisdiction, but some areas along the river continue to confound our local officials. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

What falls under the purview of DNRC? Amy, from DNRC, would like to set up a meeting to figure that out. I spoke with Amy and EVERYONE involved in this stuff over a year ago, so it’s kind of discouraging to see that this basic shit STILL hasn’t been figured out.

I went looking for additional insights and found something from DNRC about a bridge in Ravilli County that shows what they’re willing to claim when it’s NOT a homeless encampment we’re talking about:

Montana Code (MCA 70-16-201) provides for state ownership from the low water mark to the low water mark on navigable water bodies. Based on historical evidence the Bitterroot River is commercially navigable from the mouth of Jenning’s Camp Creek on the east fork (SW1/4, Sec.27, T2N, R18W) to its confluence with the Clark Fork River. Therefore, the state claims ownership of the riverbed below the low water mark between these two points. YC properties is seeking an easement and land use license from the DNRC (between the low water marks). DNRC has no jurisdiction above the low water mark. YC Properties has applied for permitting from other agencies with jurisdiction above the low water mark (Conservation District, Floodplain Administrator, US Army Corps of Engineers).

These conversations about ownership and jurisdiction are critical to cleanups–or, I should say, are critical reasons why cleanups DO NOT HAPPEN until they get to crisis-level-bad. Is this frustrating? Yes, tremendously so. Is it helpful to go on Reddit and say this? Probably not.

This is Ryan on Reddit, talking shit. As someone who has turned shit-talking into a formal methodology, I appreciate the sentiment, but doubt the strategy, and I say that as someone who wasted a stupid amount of time in comment threads when I first started blogging at 4&20 Blackbirds 14 years ago.

Since jury nullification is a thing, it’s interesting to document some examples of public sentiment, as expressed on Reddit.

If I didn’t have my Butthurt Self-Reporting System in place, I’d be in a similar state of perpetual martyrdom, like earlier this week, when I threw a big WOE-IS-ME party for myself because my big fat ego got the sads and needed petting.

I looked up “healthy ego” just to see what came up, and I like the first result:

Healthy Ego: Involves a profound self-awareness, recognising strengths and weaknesses, and a willingness to pursue self-improvement.

Unhealthy Ego: Characterised by a lack of self-awareness, often blind to personal flaws and resistant to acknowledging areas for improvement.

So, do I have a healthy enough ego to get the band back together for one last run at collaborating where now only frustration exists? Or, am I merely deluding myself as I slowly turn into this?

I didn’t always have to dress like a street character to get attention for my work, once upon a time I was actually paid to be the Homeless Outreach Coordinator of the Poverello Center. With that in mind, here are some links that show the scope of what I’ve been doing for more than a few years. Though this particular coverage starts in 2020, my work in the Reserve Street area goes back to before 2015, when this article was written.

Here are LOTS of links to show you I got the damn receipts for what I’m talking about:

On My Involvement With Missoula’s Reserve Street Homeless Camps (August 5th, 2020)

Reserve Street Camps Update And Interview Teaser (August 5th, 2020)

Cleaning Up The Homeless Camp: A Former Service Provider’s Concern (April 18th, 2021)

The Narrative Gatekeepers Who Congratulate Themselves In Public Op-Eds Are Undermining Cleanup Efforts At Reserve Street (April 20th, 2021)

Zoom Town: A Conversation About Reserve Street Homeless Camps (April 20th, 2021)

The Work At Reserve Street Continues… (April 26th, 2021)

A Video Statement Regarding Missoula’s Reserve Street Homeless Camps (June 21st, 2021)

A Compilation Of Links Regarding Missoula’s Reserve Street Homeless Camps And Who Benefits From Our Community Response (I’m Looking At You, Blue Line Development) (July 19th, 2021)

On Trying To Understand Martin Kidston’s Confusing Reporting Regarding Reserve Street Homeless Camps And MDOT’s Fence Strategy (July 29th, 2021)

After Years Of Inaction, Missoula City/County Leaders Are Claiming It’s Now Time To Clean Up The Reserve Street Homeless Encampment (December 6th, 2021)

How Will Private Security Patrol The Reserve Street Homeless Encampment? (January 6th, 2022)

Will The Countdown For One Reserve Street Bridge Dweller Become A Showdown? (January 24th, 2022)

What’s The Reserve Street Camp Plan Now That The Gates Are Up? (January 31st, 2022)

The Reserve Street Plan For Homeless Resident “A” Is There Is No Plan (February 4th, 2022)

Missoula County Shelter Project Coordinator, Casey Gannon, Is Either Lying Or Ignorant About The Reserve Street Homeless Camp (April 14th, 2022)

I Told You, I Told You, I Told You, But NOOOOOO, You Do This Shit Anyway (April 15th, 2022)

Preparing For The Earth Day Encampment Clean-Up (April 22nd, 2022)

40 Tons Of Homeless Trash Removed While Clueless Service Providers Allow A New Shanty Town To Be Built (May 18th, 2022)

Missoula’s “Authorized Camping Site” For The Homeless Refugees Of The Reserve Street Encampment Is An Unmitigated Failure (August 1st, 2022)

On Storing The Personal Belongings Of Homeless Tenants When Their Home Is The Great Outdoors (Or An Authorized Camping Site) (November 23rd, 2022)

Remembering The Summer I Helped Identify A Homeless Killer (July 26th, 2023)

If you appreciate all this context on homeless camps in Missoula, Montana, consider supporting Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) because it turns out I know a thing or two about this kind of shit!

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

Did you know that blocking people on social media can get officials like Ellie Boldman sued? Yep, according to the Supreme Court, elected officials like Ellie Boldman should NOT be creating barriers for constituents to view partisan bullshit if her constituents want to view partisan bullshit. From the link:

The US Supreme Court said public officials can sometimes be sued for restricting access to their private social media feeds, ruling in two cases that evoked former President Donald Trump’s efforts to block people from his Twitter account.

The unanimous decisions set up a new test for determining whether officials effectively convert their private websites into government sites — making them subject to constitutional requirements — by using them for public business.

Will Ellie respect the decision of the Supreme Court? Ha! That’s a good one. No, Ellie has NO respect for the law, and I suspect she considers herself safely above it, at least locally.

To highlight local impressions of Ellie Boldman (formerly Ellie Hill, then Ellis Smith) I’ve curated some Reddit comments from this thread. Here’s how it starts:

Having worked under this individual when she was the Executive Director of the Poverello Center in Missoula, I can say this is definitely NOT out of character for Ellie. Here are some more funny anecdotal stories from Reddit:

The magazine referred to in poop_wiper_’s comment is Time’s 40 under 40 issue from well over a decade ago, something I guess Ellie is still getting mileage from. She also references starting her own blog in the Time piece, but when you go Tales From The Dome, you’ll see Ellie only put out two measly posts. Maybe she was too busy doing other things in Helena?

Yes, Ellie’s partying antics are somewhat notorious around Missoula, and one of my earliest memories is a story I was told by a Poverello staff member during a night shift training session. This staff member said Ellie drunkenly called the shelter one night and demanded that they allow a homeless client to stay the night despite the fact the client was intoxicated, which was a violation of the shelter’s zero-tolerance policy at the time.

Should Ellie be concerned about having to be accountable for any of her shitty behavior? I think this comment accurately describes why the answer to that question is NO:

Is this commenter correct? Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a young woman fucked Ellie’s husband, and let’s say that when Ellie discovered this extra-marital affair, she bullied this woman into committing suicide. If family members took text evidence of this harassment to a County Attorney with the same last name as a cheap beer, would anything happen? Or would the commenter’s assertion that Ellie is above the law prove accurate? Since this is obviously just a hypothetical scenario with no basis in reality whatsoever, I guess we’ll never know.

If the above scenario DID happen, imagine the controversy were it to come out, especially considering the ANTI-bullying work Ellie did in Helena nearly a decade ago.

Montana could go from being the only state without a law against bullying to the 20th state to criminalize cyberbullying under a bill legislators considered Tuesday.

Rep. Ellie Hill, D-Missoula, proposed a measure in the House Judiciary Committee that would make online harassment of children a misdemeanor offense.

Specifically, House Bill 317 targets bullying on social media by criminalizing electronic communication of any statements, photos or information meant to torment a minor.

For more context on why Ellie Boldman has me blocked on social media, here are some posts I’ve written over the years. Isn’t the first amendment GREAT?

Rules For Thee, Not For Me: The Political Career Of Missoula Democrat Ellie Hill (November 17th, 2020)

Montana State Senator Ellie Boldman (no longer) Smith’s Survival Guide For 2021: Covid Cash! (January 4th, 2021)

Is Focusing On The Geographic Distribution Of Missoula County Job Retention Grants A Purposeful Media Deflection? (January 13th, 2021)

Another Missoula Current Article About Job Retention Money That Omits Scrutinizing A Democratic Politician Named Ellie (January 21st, 2021)

The Job Retention Financial Report(s) Ellie Boldman (no longer) Smith Will Have To Fill Out For Her Covid Cash (March 22nd, 2021)

Using My First Amendment Rights (December 23rd, 2021)

Weathering The Covid Financial Storm Is Easier With Uncle Sam’s Umbrella, Right Ellie? (September 13th, 2021)

On Good/Bad Information And Bad/Not-Bad Misinformers Like Justin (Bad) And Ellie (Not-Bad) (November 13th, 2021)

Where Does Free Speech End And Criminal Cyber Bullying Begin? (January 3rd, 2022)

Missoula Democrat, Ellie Boldman, Does What The Missoulian Refuses To Do: Kiss Governor Gianforte’s Ass (October 7th, 2022)

What The Media Won’t Tell You About Missoula’s 10 Year Plan To Control The Narrative On Homelessness (October 24th, 2022)

Cannabis, Public Money, And The Soft Power Of The Nickel Duo (November 4th, 2022)

Zooey Zephyr Joins Ellie Boldman In A Shared Experience With…Time Magazine (September 19th, 2023)

Coming up later today, or maybe for the post tomorrow, I’m going to curate another nice list of links detailing my involvement in the Reserve Street area in anticipation of some much needed scrutiny coming, scrutiny that MUST understand my critical perspective before any Gay Biker conning can occur, so stay tuned.

If you want to be a part of finding creative solutions to complicated problems, it’s as easy as clicking here and giving me some money. I guarantee you get more bang for your buck donating to my shoe-string efforts than any organizational pretenders out there with their hands out begging for money.

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

I got a good idea yesterday after visiting my alma mater to prepare them for THE TRASH ALCHEMIST making a campus appearance on April Fool’s day. I still need final clearance from UM police regarding my evolving marketing device (pictured above), but that shouldn’t be a problem, considering I actually ENJOY talking to cops and, last spring, I gave UM Police Chief, Brad Giffin, multiple updates about my removal of Todd Spence’s meth shack.

If you click that link you will find MORE links covering my work last spring, work I was hoping to recoup a modest $5,000 dollars for, but as of this writing, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) has only received $2,428 dollars. Compare that to the price tag being reported today of $138,000 dollars and you might begin to understand how fucking pissed a person can get (or, my preferred term, BUTTHURT) when you’re essentially a goddamn expert and your vast skillset is roundly ignored so THIS bullshit can occur (emphasis mine):

The Missoula city government has spent about $138,000 since the beginning of last summer on cleanups and code compliance related to unsheltered living and RVs in the public right-of-way, according to city records.

The city compiles “urban camping reports” for each month and posts the total cleanup costs associated with each event.

For example, in August of 2023, the city spent $13,729 for a “coordinated, all-day effort on the part of multiple departments to remove garbage, debris, needles, human waste, RVs and trailers” from Market Street. That included a vacuum truck, a backhoe, a police presence, a hired towing service for the removal of seven motor homes and dump fees.

Isn’t this “coordination” of local resources simply amazing when compared to the tons of trash I was able to remove at a fraction of the cost? Yes, amazing, but not as amazing as what I am attempting to pull off on April 8th when I ECLIPSE THEIR BULLSHIT with a trash removal and poetry reading event.

Later in the article, the Poverello program I coordinated since its inception in 2010 (I left my job in early 2016) is mentioned as doing work to address this issue. Really? Because, as I’ve said before, if I was still coordinating this program, the controversy with Ryan Tollefson would NEVER have happened.

Here’s more from the article, including some hilarious complaining from Ginny Merriam about narrative perception (emphasis mine):

Ginny Merriam, the city’s communications director, said in an email to the Missoulian that it seems like the “public narrative is that we’re not doing anything.”

“I think this illustrates that we relentlessly are doing a lot,” she said.

The money comes from various departments, including public works, parks and recreation and code compliance. Each department has its own budget, and the city council is responsible for passing a budget along with the mayor every year.

The city has a standard protocol when cleaning up places where people have been living without shelter. In an interview recently with the Missoulian, Mayor Andrea Davis said people are given four or five days’ advance notice. Also, the Poverello Center’s Homeless Outreach Team works with people to connect them with resources, and social workers from Partnership Health Center are available to work with people as well.

No, Ginny, the public narrative isn’t that you are NOT doing anything, it’s that anything you DO do is inefficient, expensive, and borderline retarded. Does that clarify the public’s stance for our “communications director” with the elitist provenance I’ve been harping on for years?

How was grandpa Merriam an early example of narrative control? Maybe this will illuminate readers about how long these narrative controllers have been trying to influence your perceptions about this world:

A century ago, H. G. Merriam, chair of the University of Montana English department, launched a journal he said would “serve as an outlet for the very living literary interest that is on the campus of The State University.” Its editorial board consisted of the students enrolled in his new undergraduate creative writing course.

By the 1930s, that journal, Frontier and Midland, had gained a national reputation for the quality of its contributions and intentional focus on regional writing. Now, UM’s Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library has made the entire run of Frontier and Midland available online.

The Frontier was one of the first journals to feature content from and about the Northwest. In a 1963 oral history, Merriam recalled, “I was conscious of the necessity, if possible, of getting the Northwest states – that is, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana – to realize their common culture … It seemed as if the region had no sense of being a unit, and if possible, I hoped that the Frontier might help establish some such unity.”

Do you see what’s happening here? It’s the same thing old Benny Franklin was up to when he wasn’t getting freaky with the Hellfire Club, and that’s the meta-project of social engineering. No one in the Northwest was screaming for some “common culture” because the only people who saw this as a necessity were elitists who want to CONTROL populations, not empower them with knowledge.

I’m going to have some serious FUN using my poetic skills to continue my exposure of the local cabal who have been way too comfortable for way too long with their tight grip on local narratives. They know that their grip is slipping, and they know that what I’ve been doing these last 4 years has been a big reason why. Why else would KGVO stop responding to my emails after my popular appearance criticizing the crisis mill levy, which ended up failing that year when voters JUST SAID NO?

I finished up poem number 22 yesterday, and it’s probably the most aggressive, zero-fuck-giving piece of writing I’ve ever produced, so get ready, Zoom Town, because the TRASH ALCHEMIST is ready to GET TO WORK!

Thanks for reading!