Revisit Death
Non fiction - Real time
For the second time in two years, I’m living in a home where the ceiling has collapsed. Who the fuck hexed me? Call it a coincidence or fate. If my witch powers allowed me to see more than the dead, I would hunt them like Ichi the Killer and finish them off in The Audition.
Horror is political and these films embody the rage, the despair, the hopelessness, the collapsing beneath our heads. What motivates you, when your life has been a constant war?
For the second time, reporting safety issues resulted in the same outcome: no one will touch retaliation unless you’re in eviction court. In Missouri, there is a loophole so wide you could drive a U-Haul through it. If a tenant reports habitability violations, the landlord can simply refuse to renew the lease. No eviction. No hearing. No legal protection.
Retaliation becomes “invisible”. Agencies from city inspectors to state and federal channels won’t take the case. This is class warfare. Nothing spells an oligarchy harder than the pigs licking their lips and letting a motherfucker starve. Good intentions? They’re too busy with their legs propped up on your corpse sucking on champagne frozen in cubes with cheap fruit from their daddy’s wine cellar. Influencer culture runs the masses because hell was full.
I have gone through every resource, every advocate, every nonprofit in this city and I have been turned away by all of them. The official message is: “We can’t help unless you’re being evicted.” The unofficial truth is: you can be legally punished for asking for basic safety as long as the punishment arrives disguised as a non-renewal.
This isn’t just my story. It’s happening to people across St. Louis every day. Tenants living in mold, code violations, collapsing structures, and unlivable conditions, with absolutely no recourse unless they can afford a legal fight most of us never get. The system protects the people with the keys, not the people who sleep under the ceilings they fail to maintain.
We call them “bandos” they’re everywhere all over the city, and the problems just increases day by day. It’s worse in the winter. Fires to keep normal everyday people warm because the system failed them. They’ve become homeless. The city allows full control of landlords who cut corners to fill their coffers, it only increases, it only degrades. Historical buildings in shambles.
This map includes (follow the red markings)
→ Buildings officially marked as vacant, properties in the Vacant Building Registry, units flagged by Citizen Service Bureau, building inspectors/code enforcement: some departments doing the bare minimum for a paycheck, properties owned by the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA).
What we don’t get the full picture on:
Some privately owned buildings marked as neglected, dangerous, or condemned
Properties landlords haven’t officially registered as vacant
Buildings that are occupied but severely deteriorated
Informal/hidden abandonment (landlords refusing repairs, tenants forced to leave, but not reported)
This is not new, we get headlines about this every year, sometimes a journalist will try to boost the situation, it gets shoddier the farther up the chain you go in the city. There’s a reason for that too, the Delmar Divide. False promises, year after year.
I’m in this system right now, as I will call it, “The great loophole and the greatest failure” for tenant protections. It’s in my blood, my late family member uncovered fraud in HUD, his name is scrubbed all over the internet for reasons.
My timeline ends on March 19th, 2026, officially on March 20th, 2026.
This house will be a ghost town with cutted corners paid for by certain city inspectors who perpetuate the corruption, on record.
They will do the bare minimum repairs, and I assure you the next person who moves in will watch the same problems just as the people before my family. For legal reasons, I cannot name who they are; but they’re the top of the crop.
Google search: How many abandoned buildings are in St. Louis? I dare you. The numbers will burn into your skin forming rage you cannot verbally express. Don’t get me started on the Delmar Divide. It’s wishful thinking this problem can be solved overnight. There’s centuries of strife.
If I don’t secure stable housing with my family by then, I risk losing everything I’ve worked toward including my transfer to university in Fall 2026 to complete my BS in Psychology to lead towards Clinical Psychology. I have two careers moving alongside me: Writing (the dream), Clinical Psychology (advocacy/help to communities who are overlooked and deserve more).
My goal is provide accessibility to people like me right now at low income costs because you take an oath; the oath relies on your ethics. I can’t help it half of the psychology industry is barren of ethics. Yes, I am looking at you, California. The data doesn’t lie. Systematic oppression comes in many forms, and Cerberus’ heads aren’t large enough to fill the damage.
My long term goal is to take this lived experience and turn it into something bigger: a watchdog project, a long form investigation, and eventually a dissertation on how Missouri’s landlord-tenant loopholes function as legalized retaliation.
HUD and HUD(OIG) is on my radar.
If I get one advocacy watchdog branch, press, and other agencies involved, I suspect it will happen swiftly or anywhere between summer of 2027-2028.
I will take it to Washington DC, if I am allowed the audience. I have stage fright that will make me pass out, so hopefully, if I end up in DC you don’t watch me timber flat on face live on television. If it’s one thing I learned from the modeling industry, you get back up, bloody nose and all.
If anyone wants to help in this process for St. Louis, Missouri. These are the avenues we will be looking at long term. This will not happen overnight. I would expect a years long investigation.
Welcome to the escalation spiral. Places I have yet to hit. Ground running. Feet bloody. Fighting until I am alive or dead.
Federal oversight committees:
House Committee on Financial Services, Senate Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs Committee:
What they do→ Oversight committees investigate state retaliation loopholes, unsafe housing patterns, collapsed buildings, failures in code enforcement, and political obstruction of tenant rights.
National housing organizations:
National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) → publish federal reports and influence HUD rules
National Housing Law Project (NHLP)→ Specializes in retaliation loopholes and weak tenant states.
ACLU Housing Project → Focus on civil rights impacts
Human Rights Watch (HRW) → Documents abuses in states with inadequate tenant laws.
Do any of you know these Presses personally?
Get at me, we have enough documentation that the only leg work will be sorting it, I will happily assist those presses for free.
Presses of interest:
ProPublica
The Atlantic
Washington Post
The Intercept
NPR
Mother Jones
Los Angeles Times (National desk)
Any press who believes in helping ending the homeless epidemic, and fighting oversight in laws that increase homelessness.
Due to the nature of lip service by my senators who are happily sitting with cutting costs for corpses; they will be completely ignored in the process. There is no point arguing with senators who only want to fill their coffers while others go hungry and die.
I can’t do any of that if I’m on the street.
So here’s where I ask for help with something I can genuinely give back: my writing.
From December 6, 2025 → March 19, 2026, I am writing personalized, stream-of-consciousness, zero-draft stories to anyone who wants to support my relocation fund or just wants to middle finger the patriarchy.
When you donate, you give me a three word prompt:[ 1 noun, 1 verb, 1 adjective]
I will have to incorporate all 3 into the story somehow, stream of consciousness, zero draft; just how I’ve always done it and how you see it here on this publication (besides very specific niche stories que in The Diary Entries)
You have 2 options here: Be tagged with your publication as a personal anecdote, and I will write whatever it made me feel at the time, that will be completely public.
If you decide to keep it private, I will email you a personalized note on how it made me feel, the post will still go public with your name as [REDACTED] and you will have an email link that connects to the title.
All posts go public, all posts will be free to read.
None of the posts will support bigotry, provide harmful phobics, and be anti anything I ethically stand for; if you give me money and expect me to write hateful diatribe, thanks for the free money, no returns for bigots! If it’s especially Nazi propaganda, my WW2 grandfather’s ghost is standing over you with a rifle to the head and my bloody knuckles aren’t bloody enough.
Tier Options:
$20 → 400 words
$30 → 600 words
$50 → 1,000 words
$75 → 1,500 words
$100 → 2,000 words
$100+ → No word limit + ultra-personal extras
Any number you want where you have issues with systemic oppression and want to middle finger corruption is up to your discretion. The writing project is purely optional.
P.S. I might write over the cap limit no matter what you give me, if I absolutely love the prompt. These limits are for me personally to restrain myself, but I have no guarantees this can turn into a series in the future with just three words. If it becomes a book, you get the book for free with my signature, a note and acknowledgement if you allow me.
Once I’m safe and housed, the real work begins.
Right around my birthday—yes, a personal middle finger to the patriarchy and the system. I will hopefully be in transit on my birthday. It also happens to be International Women’s Day. It would do me justice knowing that any of you would honor women in your life with pride on its special day.
My quote every year, “I love my birthday because I get to share it with every badass woman on the planet.”
I intend to take this experience and militarize it academically, politically, and creatively.
I’ve studied politics, philosophy, law, and systems for most of my life as a hobby. I can read legalese better than most of the officials who’ve dismissed me. My plan is to build the kind of public pressure and written record that makes legislators, watchdog groups, and housing agencies take notice. If I can close this loophole, even a little, even for one future tenant, I’ll have done what I came here to do.
Hell hath no fury than a woman enraged at the oppression that attempts to dismantle her.
None of this will come to fruition, if I lose everything before I can begin.
WHY HELP?
Because housing instability creates an infinite loop that no one can escape alone. People need a community and a village, and they need fighters who fight against the current class war we cannot escape.
Because Missouri’s current system ensures landlords never need to face accountability; they can simply refuse to renew and wash their hands of responsibility.
Because people like my family fall through the cracks every day, and the cracks are widening with inflation, unsafe housing, and an economy where even eggs have become a luxury for the rich.
Rich people’s nature is not created in the image of humankind’s compassion.
We fight because silence is cancer to the soul.
I’ve survived things people write movies about:
I’ve walked servers to their cars with an infantry marine knife strapped to my thigh, named, “The Ribsmasher” giving the ‘mom look’ for any drunk weirdo west county fucker who thought it would be their lucky day.
I’ve gotten out of Hollywood alive.
I’ve dodged bullets shot at me or my car for various reasons. Sometimes, for simply existing in the same place at the wrong time.
Judo threw nonconsensual SA creeps over bars in heels. Nobody likes a man who doesn’t understand consent, takes advantage, takes, takes and thinks the world is built around his DNA. A self righteous prick is still a self righteous prick, and in my world, they better meet their maker on that bar stool.
I’ve seen what happens when you drive full speed off an overpass into oncoming traffic on HWY 101.
I painted alleys, ran with underground artists, woke up in Compton making friends over vodka I hated, outran danger more times than I should have survived. I’d rather hang out with people in Compton than Long Beach. I know they will stand on business.
I taught UC Berkeley students during the Occupy Movement their rights; so they wouldn’t get arrested and kicked out of their college.
To name a few. I honestly did not think I would make it this far.
I’ve been homeless before, but the world is different now—more violent, more desperate, more dangerous.
I don’t want to lose everything I’ve built as an adult. I want to move forward. I want to finish my education. I want to write. I want to expose the loophole that harms thousands of tenants every year. I want to build community and something resembling a future where people are allowed to thrive.
HUMAN RIGHTS ARE CIVIL RIGHTS
I refuse to go back to survival tactics I outgrew. I refuse to let this system swallow me.
I’m asking for help because I have a plan and I will execute it with the same ferocity I’ve brought to every chapter of my life.
Phoenixes revisit death. We burn, transform, eat the catastrophes in our mouths and build a new version.
Let’s see what I create this time.
For email inquiries: bowedith1@gmail.com
Send Prompts or other donations to Venmo: @EtherDreams99
There may or may not be a Gofundme in the future, look for updates.
Thank you for everyone who took the time to read my goals, motivations & want to help the cause.
One day, we will return to some sense of normalcy in this chaos, you and I, my co-pilot in life, in eons, untold by time: Emil Ottoman, “The Unofficial Editor of Substack”, “The Editor”, my fiancée. It’s no coincidence we unintentionally used Ichi the Killer in both of our posts. We share distinct similarities and that’s what makes us powerful. I will support you in any adventure we undertake because our world isn’t conquered yet. Thank you for being patient with me as I attempted to decipher our next steps.
We helped y'all get you out the first time and we'll sure as shit get those engines running again.
Jesus Horatio christ. im so gutted you are in this shitty situation again.