Martin Ballard Recovery-Startup Fund

Dear Friends,

Under the volcano it was just another day

of whistling past the graveyard to the hits of Marvin Gaye...

It's hard to believe but I've been homeless now for four and a half months. On March 19, I arrived to my apartment of 24 years to find myself locked out by the sheriff. I had no access to my belongings, I had no money, and I had no phone.

Amidst the frenzy, I dropped it one too many times, and lost a whole day dealing with Spectrum, at the end of which I still had no phone.

The Spectrum chapter would be reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch had it not me in incredible jeopardy -- which anyone without access to a working phone is. But at any rate, I arrived home to find I no longer had one.

Everything about the progression from my apartment of 24 years in Los Feliz to my current residence at Le Hotel Blackhole, 1617 N. Cahuenga Blvd, is worthy of the word "dystopic."

Why was I evicted?

I was way behind on the rent. That happened because I got extremely ill. It's uncomfortable saying publicly that you were experiencing cognitive difficulties, but I was. I've always had blinky days. But I was very ill and simply overwhelmed with managing the illness. There were many days when I simply could not get my words out.

What is this blasted illness? Something in the inflammatory/chronic/autoimmune category that for my entire life was like having my own body gaslighting me.

It has done that my whole life. In 1983, I had a spinal tap. The results should have shown a way forward -- had the lab not lost the sample. Forty years later, I finally got diagnosed with suspected Sjogren's Syndrome, Lupus, and possibly Mixed Connective Tissue Disorder -- after quite literally halving more than half the life knocked out of me. It can't be proven, but I am fully satisfied that the succession of vaccines I had in 2022-23 -- not just Covid, either -- were pulling me down a very large drain. So this isn't a vax issue. But it does point to an issue of the gauntlet of skepticism that autoimmune sufferers face at the primary level. Two years before diagnosis, I said the following to my doctor: I have either Sjogren's Syndrome, Lupus, or both, and I need to be on hydroxychloroquine. A bunch of specialists were all passing the buck back and forth, with no concensus about whose fucking responsibility it is to give the patient the basic gateway blood tests for Autoimmune dysfunction, the anti-nuclear titre and rheumatoid factor. I demanded the ANA and it turned out I was dead right.

Were I not the kind of hyper-nerd I am, I'd be six feet under, pretty sure. I started figuring this out when I was working in for Amgen as a biotech quality control engineer back in 2019. No, I didn't make that up. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. Nobody ever told me. But I have a pretty decent basic science background, so I started cross-referencing the gene locii for a particular condition I knew that I did have and took it from there.

Yeah, Doc Martin, here. I lived with med students while I was in college. Had a girlfriend who later became the head of spinal surgery at USC/County hospital. My uncle was a surgeon who used to operate on us on the kitchen table at the Ballard farm. Sometimes he had his medical bag. Sometimes he used a pocket knife. I actually just operated on myself because there is no dermatology appointment available for two months for a cyst on my leg. The doctor looked at it from a distance at screamed 'That's CANCER!' Dermatologists are the strangest people. I used to live with one of them, too, but that was out here. I looked at it and said, "It most certainly is not." Trust me, I'm right. It is a very common kind of bump for people with Sjogren's. It has been looked over many times and was never deemed ominous. But it did become very sore so I lanced it and removed the core with a razor. It's much better now.

It was after the onset of Covid, which I never tested postive for, that my condition went from crappy to just awful. I kept missing doctors appointments because I was too sick to get there -- and apathetic about it because I had been going through this for years and nothing ever changed.

I was like the frog in a pan of water on a slow burner. Almost cooked before I realized it was getting warm. And too foggy to realize that I really needed to see a doctor. I was running a chronic fever of 2-plus degrees above my normal of 97. I could not convince anyone in the medical profession that I felt like I was being crushed from the inside. I had drenching night sweats and weird muscle spasms.

Doctors just blinked at me and friends called me a hypocondriac.

They always had. I finally did my own research and insisted on having my ANA Titre tested, and after being smirked at since 1983, was validated in my years - long insistence that I had something to the tune of Lupus, Sjogren's or Vasculitis. I am not hyperbolizing: I was hearing angels singing by the time that doctor put me on that legendary wonder drug, hydroxychloroquine.

It is actually the first line of defense for most autoimmune diseases. Its first application is as an anti-malarial. I found this interesting because my symptoms were quite malarial -- sweats, a low if not medium-grade delirium, and a bunch of other medication adjustments that, shall we say, allowed me to explore interesting new aspects of my nature.

I'd had these episodes of prolonged illness earlier in my life, and am quite sure the illness hit me in childhood. I have no doubt it was what hit me in the colon 20 or so years ago. It runs in the family, whatever the hell it is.

A prior attempt at fundraising was mounted when I was just diagnosed, about 9 months ago. It's hilarious in retrospect, but I was sheets to the wind and not managing well. A friend came over to help me organize some art for sale, a kind of Hail Mary pass. I'd just started hydroxychloroquine and promptly went from delirium to ... well, just being flat out crazy. I introduced her as my personal curator, who was also head of the Buenos Aires something of polytechnic whatever. And we bantered about being jet-lagged from Tokyo one day and Barcelona the next.

To my astonishment, numerous people believed my friend was an actual international something, rather than a friend and me just being silly. I actually loved her off the cuff analysis of my art, but apparently she was controversial. I can't remember a word she said, but somebody complained that she made my art sound complex and fraught instead of nice to look at, like something you'd see in a museum, not something you'd want to buy. Sounded fine to me.

Anyway, whatever this affliction is (candidates are/were/? lupus sre, systemic sjogrn's, mixed connective tissue disease, vasculitus, and MS) started showing up in my kidneys.

I dropped to 152 lbs. I'd never been below 170 since reaching full heighth, and that was a long long time ago. My speech, vision and hearing were all affected, I developed Raynaud's Syndrome and have lost considerable sensation in my hands and feet while experience general numbness below the waist. I am in a fair amount of pain right now from walking miles on concrete and lugging stuff around like a dust bowl rag picker.

Yet, I was bread-crumbed here by verifiable daylight coincidences and premonitory dreams make me glad I'm a stone-cold material reductionist with side helpings of nihilism. Otherwise, I might get carried away and think that it means something.

That's what some mystical nut-bag by a and genesis of their residences I had been down at the courthouse trying to understand WTF because I'd received no written notice confirming the two-week stay I'd been granted by the judge. Turns out he didn't grant it after all, after saying he would. The court would argue that this was a technicality and made no difference in actuality; I would argue that according to every bit of information I was given, it mattered to the tune of five days.

But it doesn't matter. I didn't lose the place because of money. The money was finally there. I screwed up on the legal front. It is not really worth explaining, but I was suffering cognitive and physical impairment; I could not manage the situation myself and I could not get adequate help.

As it happened, I managed to hang on to the place long enough to achieve apparent remission. Hydroxychloroquine, ironically, takes 9 to 12 months to kick in. Amazingly, I just hit 9 months on it a couple of weeks ago, at which point I actually felt like myself again. I don’t feel too much worse for wear; three months ago, this would have killed me. It would kill most people my age, should they fit the typical American profile of obesity, high blood pressure, and the naivete to expect anything less than savagery from this hyper-capitalistic world of thug legislators, corrupt judges and the ravening realtors who seek ever greater control of our destinies.

To be evicted is to have one’s residential options reduced to something equivalent to that of a serious criminal offender.

E is the scarlet letter of choice.

What I encountered is a cautionary tale that needs to be heard. Los Angeles will soon look like east end Victorian London at the rate we’re going.

Returning to my thesis statement, I spent years trying to understand resilience because generally speaking, most people do not survive any one of the things I have, let alone all of them. If they survive physically, they are destroyed spiritually.

Not me.

Resilience is the ability to transmute adversity into determination, but determination to what? I have a very specific and well defined mission called the American Primitive Guitar Project. It is as practical as it is lofty. I have seen first-hand over generations how music can heal, physically, mentally, interpersonally. Growing up in Kentucky, I was the weird kid who preferred listening to very old people on very old porches, and from this I learned some things that need to be remembered right about now.