deathworm
hippie scum
Downtown north past the airport
A dream in switchgrass and concrete
Three gray floors of smoky windows
Facing the street
From the outside it doesn't look like much. Dirty concrete, fading graffiti, a parking lot full of weeds and garbage and no working cars. Half the windows are broken or boarded up. Most people who walk past the apartments assumed they're abandoned. And that's exactly how the residents want it. Sometimes at night you can see a few faint lights, shadows passing by curtains, voices and screams carrying through the thick walls and down to the streets. Maybe if you're patient you'll catch someone stumbling out of a backdoor and you'll get a brief glimpse inside which is like a different world. The walls are covered in murals and tapestries, walls are knocked down to create massive rooms, half finished art projects and stacks of dumpster dived furniture dominate corners and hallways. People flow in and out of the massive basement guided by harsh voices and harsher guitar. Empty liquor bottles and their more menacing counterparts fall from windows and shatter, sprinkling the sidewalk in an accidental mosaic. Water and electricity are limited but the inhabitants don't seem to mind. They've set up solar panels and they can steal wifi from the coffee shop across the street. One ambitious kid even set up rain collection barrels on the roof in the middle of a struggling garden. But the sunlight can only keep away the shadows for so long.
Under each eye little greasepaint smudge
You can't judge us - you're not the judge
Nobody can ever remember when this place first became the largest squat in the city. Some swear it's been around since the 80's but no one believes them. Nobody can even seem to remember how they ended up at Lakeside View, a name given as joke- there's nothing to see out the windows but alleyways and walls. Most people who live here feel like they can't remember a time before Lakeside. Maybe they came to a show, woke up on a couch, and just never left. Maybe they heard whispers about it when they were sleeping beneath the overpass and wandered in when it started to get cold again. Maybe they had a friend who disappeared for a few weeks and came back with a hollow light in their eyes, talking frantically about a place where there were no more rules. No rent, no landlords, no cops, no parents, no school, nothing but whatever you want. Where every night is a party and every day is new. It sounds too good to be true and it is.
One whole life recorded
In disappearing ink
What Lakeside View really is is nothing more than a hideaway for society's castoffs. The homeless, the drug addicts, the drunks, the runaways, the criminals. Broken people from broken homes with nowhere to go but down. And you can't get much lower than here. So maybe you're new here. Maybe you've been here so long people have started making jokes about what they're going to do with your body when you choke to death on your own vomit in the makeshift kitchen. Maybe you're trying to better yourself. But you should know you can't do that here by now. You can always dig deeper. There's always a new high to chase, a new score, a new hustle to keep your cravings quiet and your hunger at bay. So it never gets better. But at least you have a home.
(In simple terms- a big punk squat full of drug addicts and other various criminals just trying to get by. It's dirty and awful and everyone's a bad person. Yeah, I'm basically just craving some angsty druggie drama. But not like over the top ridiculous stuff, I want it to be at least somewhat realistic. So please, if you want to join do your research on the drugs. A lot of people have very misguided ideas about what drugs do and what being an addict means and I really want to avoid that.)
