SEPTEMBER 4, 2026 WHERE I SLEPT LAST NIGHT Where I slept last night JAY COOPER Groundcover contributor Last night in Ypsi, I slept in a bed, in a room, in a house, and I feel survivor guilt. I don't deserve to be in a house any more than anyone else. Everyone deserves to be housed. It's a grave injustice that people aren't housed. It's horrifically unfair, and all because useless landlords want to sit back and collect rent. If there were any justice in the world, landlords would have their properties seized and given to the public, but there is no justice. The room I was sleeping in before this one was unsafe. I brushed aside red flags because it had walls. I knew it was a risk. I voiced the risks, but I moved in anyway to get out of a tent. I tried writing this article in that room but I couldn't. I had moved the tent to a more isolated place, because it had been robbed, and drug dealers came knocking on my flap at night. Even after moving, drunk and high people were getting more and more comfortable coming out to my tent, and every night I fell asleep holding a weapon. I tried writing this article in that tent, but I couldn't. Before the tent I slept on the Frog Island tridge. I felt the vibration of every footstep and bike tire. I felt like the spiders all around me: even with my eyes closed I had acute awareness of things creeping along the web. There also, drug dealers would disrupt my miserable attempts to sleep to see if I wanted a sample. Before the tridge I was in a townhome in Ann Arbor, caretaker for three years to a drunk bully. I was breaking my back for less and less money, working shorter and fewer shifts as my boss layered abuse atop abuse. Before, in the same townhome, I was caretaker for eight years to an elder. Before that, in LA, I slept on a West Hollywood rooftop and bus benches, a 4chan nazi's floor in Koreatown, a sycophantic comedian's couch in East Hollywood, I got scorched on Venice Beach in Santa Monica, and with a voucher I slept in a roach motel in South Central. On my way to LA, I slept in a Seattle hostel, where I lost a half-written novel. In Vancouver I slept in an East Van basement too short to stand up in, a sex worker gave me a cookie once as I was crying myself to sleep on Hastings Street, and before that I slept in a West End high-rise apartment. Before Vancouver I slept in Ann Arbor, in the basement of the same townhome I was evicted from last year, and in punk houses, before gentrification ran them out. Before that I was in Traverse City, on a futon, a basement couch, in a brutalist concrete youth shelter cell, in a foster home bunk-bed, in lovers' beds, on heated sidewalks, in cars, on countless floors. I learned to be a good houseguest while people marvelled at their own generosity, before they threw me back into the street. Blaming the kid sleeping on the floor is easier than dealing with real problems. Before, in Interlochen I slept on a mattress in the basement. I escaped at GROUNDCOVER NEWS 11 seventeen. Before, in Ypsi I slept in a bunk-bed in a duplex. Before that another bunkbed, another duplex. Before that I slept in a bunk-bed, and originally in a crib in an Ann Arbor townhome. I don't know what's next, I wish family there would stop being a next, I wish this country wasn't a shithole that abandons people to the street so landlords can keep draining people of all their resources, and using those resources to buy ever-more property to exploit, but that's where I slept last night.
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