@TheDrexxus

2 years ago

At one point in my life, the company I worked for fired everyone and closed down the building I was working in very suddenly an I lost access to health insurance and thus my medications I need to live. After some research, I discovered a place nearby that provided free health care and medications to people who were unemployed, which I had just become. I decided to sign up at this place for health care until I got a new job, because I needed my meds and couldn't live without them. Anyway, this place was setup in a real bizarre manner. They only accept new patients on one night each week and you have to show up at around 4am and form a line and at 8am the doors open and the first 10 people in that line get added as new patients. So when I went to sign up there, I got there at 4am and was already 3rd in line. Now this place was in a pretty shady area in the city and wasn't well lit, so it was already uncomfortable to know I had to stand there for 4 hours waiting for the doors to open. Not only that, but both of the people in front of me in line were homeless drug addicts. They were having conversations with each other, with me, and sometimes themselves, talking about all kinds of things. They believed all sorts of crazy things. I don't remember the specifics of what they talked about, but I do remember all of it sounded unhinged. They were like conspiracy nuts, the sort of people who believe there are listening devices all over, in common objects. The one guy made a comment that he had special equipment and detected 4 of them in the wall of the building we were standing in front of at some point. They also talked about how they came to be homeless. I never asked, but it felt almost like a compulsion on their part, like they just had to tell their story. It was deeply unsettling being next to these two individuals alone in this dark alley for hours in this shady part of town, and it was impossible to know how much of what they said was true, how much was an intentional lie, and how much was just crazy shit they believe is true but isn't. I ultimately got inside, signed up, and was given my medication. Once you sign up, you can just show up at any time while they're open to pickup meds for a full year so I was already employed again and had health insurance and didn't have to go back. But that experience was very otherworldly to me. It felt almost like being in a dream because I was in a place I would never have gone to, surrounded by people i'd work hard to avoid being near, and so on. When I watch shows like Atlanta, it reminds me of that experience. It was almost like being sucked into the twilight zone where all the rules to the world suddenly changed for a short time before going back to normal.

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