It was pretty shitty. I used to deliver caskets on the South side and West side of Chicago. I\u2019ve actually had a huge resume of crazy and weird jobs. I\u2019ve been a locomotive engineer, slaughtered pigs, and delivered caskets. When I was 21 I used to manage a head shop, selling bongs and dongs and stuff like that. Also lots of service industry jobs and shit work, some construction. But I didn\u2019t really learn anything, I\u2019ve just done a lot, but not for long enough. A lot of them I came in and did for like a month and was like \u2018Fuck this.\u2019<\/p>\n
Driving a train wasn\u2019t too bad though. When I was a locomotive engineer, I did that at quite a few different places, but one of them was a yard job. And those are restricted speed, which means they want you to do under five miles an hour. It was just long cuts in the yard where I\u2019d go into the track and tie up, and then the conductor would have to walk down 30-40 cars and pull the pin so that I could drag all the cars out. And we\u2019d do this all day. So it got to the point where I\u2019d just lean back in my chair \u2013 my sudoku in one hand, my radio in the other \u2013 driving the train with my foot because I could just kick it up one notch.<\/p>\n
But I never got my shit together. A couple years ago, I was suffering from depression and basic ideation almost. I was also living with my mother who suffered from a series of strokes and was bipolar. I had a shitty job working at the slaughterhouse for a long time, and I got really bad depression, which made me suicidal. So when some shit went down one day, the police showed up and I got shot twice by a SWAT team. They missed the other four times. Apparently they just have really bad aim. Statistically they only hit about 30% of the time, so that\u2019s right on the mark.<\/p>\n
After all that, how I view the world changed and that\u2019s why I\u2019m in a different country. I\u2019ve been on disability and I can\u2019t afford to live in the United States. I mean, I could, but I would be in housing projects and all kinds of other programs. So why not just pack up and move to Mexico?<\/p>\n
As soon as I got off the airplane here and was driving down the street in the cab, it just felt like home. Like, at night there\u2019s these stray dogs running around, all these chain link fences and potholes. The traffic sucks and there\u2019s spray paint everywhere and it\u2019s a little bit chaotic. And that just felt like home. It\u2019s been comfortable since the first night I got here.<\/p>\n
\u2014James from Indiana, USA<\/p>\n
[photo: x-ray of titanium plate in arm, product of bullet strikes]<\/p>\n
Interview by MJ, Ari, E and Jack<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was pretty shitty. I used to deliver caskets on the South side and West side of Chicago. I\u2019ve actually had a huge resume of crazy and weird jobs. I\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":183,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oaxaca","post-design-default"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/WhatsApp-Image-2022-02-06-at-9.02.11-AM.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":198,"href":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions\/198"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unschooladventures.com\/homx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}