There is a small glimmer of hope for me. Escaping the financial prison medical problems trapped me in has been like digging a tunnel with a spoon I smuggled from the mess hall whenever the guard isn't looking. Either that is light at the end of the tunnel or headache inducing damage on my glasses I can't afford to replace is finally giving me fun illusions.
I found some vegan cream cheese I'm not allergic to and made some bagels to enjoy it. Not being able to eat breads or most packaged foods from the store is inconvenient, but it's probably saved me from a different set of health problems if I was able to walk into a grocery store and buy whatever I wanted without regard for my allergies or money. I've become really good at surviving a situation most people could not handle. That used to be an egotistical thought to me, one I'd scold myself for entertaining. What I've come to realize is that's my "I'm such a good person hur-dur" shadow side that is a remnant of growing up in immersed in American conservatism.
So living as I do is a difficult thing that most could not. I can give myself credit for that without the insincere modesty. Home made bagels and cream cheese once a year are better than being able to have probably-not-great store bagels any time.
Nobody bothered to tell that after requesting my prescription be refilled I'd also have to call back later and set up a date for delivery, so now it's been a week without my medication and my immune system is in full revolt against my skin. My face is peeling off. Even soft scratches make me bleed. The delivery comes on Wednesday and I have to treat not getting a skin infection and being hospitalized until then as my job. I have to be awake early to make sure I'm ready to sign for the package. Last time I had to sign for a package it seems like give you 30 seconds to open the door before running away. Between the scratching and the not sleeping it's going to be rough being awake at whatever time the mail guy comes. "It should arrive sometime between 9am and 5pm on Wednesday" oh ffs just shoot me
All this just to get a pre-packaged bottle of immune response regulating pills to me. They could just have recurring re-fill/delivery setup since I need this to not die so there is little chance they'll send a 30 day supply and I won't need it.
Two months in a row the pharmacy/dr's office have messed up causing me to have a treatment gap for my daily eczema medication. Last month the gap was 3 days and caused a massive flare up that I'm still recovering from. I wake up cut up and bloody from involuntary sleep scratching. The medication I have to use to prevent skin infections burns so bad. It feels like I fell in a vat of acid and ants are running all over me. It looks like it too. This is making the slow crawl out of poverty become another episode of watching everything wither and die again.
In other news my attempt to sell plasma was thwarted by the medication exclusion list. The very same medication I have to deal with a delay getting is also the reason I can't sell my blood for food money. Days like this seems like reality itself wants to annihilate me.
I've been sick and dealing with moving so I haven't been keeping up with world news. Today I learned about Aaron Bushnell and how many thousands of people are being murdered as the world passively watches. I broke down and wept over all this shit but nobody in my life has the patience to hear about it. I feel so damn helpless - I can barely help myself right now and I am forced to either watch or look away and pretend this is not happening.
Seeing a friend I haven't seen in over a decade tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it, but I'm also a bit worried because everything has changed so much.
In the process of moving again for like the 5th time in 10 years. I'm so drained, broke, and stressed from the ongoing process. No car, no money left, so I've resorted to moving things in the middle of the night by wheeling things along on a little movers dolly. Every move I've had to shed things I love because it either won't fit in my smaller new space or I can't afford to get anyone to help me move it. So I'm down to clothes, books, computer tower, laptop, futon, kitchen stuff, and a few odds and ends.
If I want to keep my bookshelf it'll be a several hour ordeal rolling it along the sidewalk on the dolly for 1.5 miles. I've mapped out the streets I can easily roll things on, but that still leaves plenty of rough roads and intersections without an accessibility ramp where I'll have to carry the damn thing across. How the hell do they expect people in wheel chairs navigate this city?
I've already done things several times with the things I absolutely need so giving up my bookshelf is starting to seem like a fair trade for not having to spend what little energy I have on another midnight moving run.
gratitude: narrowly avoided becoming homeless. It's starting to warm up, and my new place isn't an unheated cement slab, so no more bugs or wearing my jacket indoors.
Everything above my shoulders has been inflamed, flaking, and peeling for 3 days now. I'd just like this to pass without having to go to the hospital again. I've been financially zero'd out by ER visits and long term spells of being unable to work I can't handle going through it again. Yes, I'd probably survive, but why would I want that? I'm tired of being uncomfortable, cold, hungry, etc, just to survive to miserable longer.
I need to catch a break. Survival mode and health problems is getting so damn old.
A fool who knows says it all too directly They lose the audience, they lose themselves
The truth becomes an alienating lonely thing Doubt becomes an ally against the madness of certainty "Those who hold their truth so firmly despite being so wrong I despise" I'll never be like them, right? I say I'll keep an open mind
Taken for a fool, but taken all the same Lest walls become the world
Medical frustration.
Everyday I have to take a pill to keep my eczema at "bad" instead of "wish I were dead" level. I get a 30 day supply, and about a week before I run out I get a message telling me it's time to request a refill. This is all done over a healthcare app. I can't order my refill too soon, it doesn't even give me the option until they notify me. I can't check a box that says "request a refill every time because if I am miraculously cured and don't need them anymore I will for sure let you know". If I don't order this right away, they won't fill my prescription in time. Even when I do order a refill the same day I get the notification like I did this time, they sometimes STILL don't get my prescription filled and I have to go a weekend or longer without treatment. It's a pre-packaged bottle of pills ffs! I've taken this medication for a long time now. With medicare these pills cost between $0 - $2k something with a huge sliding scale asterisk by the price. I pay $0 because I don't have two nickels to rub together and I feel like this is society's solution for quietly getting rid of people like me. I'm so tired of severe eczema all over my face.
Here is what I don't understand. The disability judge basically told me to "man up and get a job" in so many nice legal words. If the day before my hearing she was bitten dozens of times by mosquitoes all over and couldn't get any sleep because she was was uncontrollably itchy, nobody would be upset if she missed worked the next day and I had to see a substitute judge. But me, a person who is 10x as itchy everyday because of a disease I was born with, I'm expected to "just get a job" and not receive any assistance. And for those who see my only value as a person as my economic output, if I had some money and could afford the creams, lotions, treatments, foods, and could de-stress, my eczema would be under control like it was in my 20s and I could WORK.
I want to work, I have a list of projects to do, but when ANTS it feels like ANTS are ANTS running all over ANTS my body ANTS AHHHH ANTS it's kinda hard to focus. I'd work on environmental restoration, carbon sequestration, writing, contributing to FOSS, and my art 5 days a week for the rest of my life if they'd just let me have medical treatment and small yurt or other cheap housing.
When the itch got really bad and started eroding at my ability to think, sleep, and have normal executive function I started journaling in a little notebook. I filled it up and I couldn't afford a new one, so I started saving all the scrap paper I could find and started writing on those with minimal ability to recall things due to the hassle of rummaging through a box full of semi-organized papers.
Even though this system wasn't very good it helped alleviate the anxiety that I have when I can't put an idea down to focus on something else because I'm afraid I'll forget it. Still, I knew it could be better if I just gave in and used my computer for this task. Looking back, I didn't because I haven't had a properly ergonomic setup in a long time and actually sitting and writing on a crappy mattress in a cold basement with poor lighting hurts just to think about. I forgive myself for not being productive enough back them to prevent my current situation. Now that I have a table and a small monitor on a box I can at least work for more than 10 minutes without my back and wrists hurting.
Now that the urgency is becoming uncomfortably distracting instead of motivating I want to list a few things I'm grateful for, lest they find me in a heap, tut-tut about my wasted potential, and find no evidence I was at least trying.
Next up; gotta prove I'm not useful to some people. It's going to be a very hard week even if I do my absolute best.
My main goal for 2024 is to not be a burden on anyone financially. I will make at least one of the things I'm working on into a money getting thing even if that kind of ruins it for me. This failing shell of a body be damned. I've been told this desire to be independent is "being ableist toward myself" but what other choice do I have?
Applying for disability was a bust. Traditional jobs have been rejecting me for close to decade now, and my current situation is only sustained by those who resent me for not "pulling my weight". Shouldn't have been born with a chronic illness that makes my body feel like invisible ants are running over me 24/7 I guess. Sorry for stuff that is beyond my control! Do I think other people with health issues like this should have to work? No. But since nobody in the world is going to ever extend that kindness to me (and we're certainly never going to collectively demand that disabled people aren't treated like shit by society), I have to choose between the painful road and the certain death road.
I choose the painful one because I'm FOMO about how reality plays out in the next 20 years. that's it. I-told-you-so's are inherently useless to me, but the curiosity of watching the entire global order collapse because powerful people refuse to entertain scientific realities is the most compelling storyline I have in the queue.
I needed a long song to time out the process of kneading bread, so I picked Storm by GSYBE. I haven't heard this song in a while and I didn't have much of connection beyond a "that's neat" sort of way. In the middle of spinning the dough around the rim of the metal bowl I felt how I did growing up in a cult. This song starts with the feeling of euphoria everyone else is signaling to you. The middle is the crash and burn out for those who can't (or won't) experience it. It ends with a hollow feeling, the horror of day to day life under religious conservatism that weighs on those who don't properly fit in.
The prospect of going to live in that place "just to survive" after years of Just Surviving in the somewhat freer world is the storm on my horizon. I managed to buy myself another 2 weeks, but it's all question marks beyond that. Feeling like I have to prove I'm worthy of food and shelter everyday is getting really old. It's hard to stay attached to the non-survival mode me. Going to reach out to the rest of my long shots list before the ice melts.
The robots that read resumes and cover letters don't care. I hope they get mangled in a captcha.
Massively dreading doing the self-promotion for the stupid thing I signed up for. I've been involved in short films, youtube stuff, music stuff, things like that, but the process of going out in the world and yelling HEY LOOK AT THIS THING I MADE was handled by someone else. It's hard to reconcile extreme hatred of advertising and propaganda with creating self-promotion for the algorithm that I am putting my life in the hands of.
They demand a sacrifice to Mammon! I hate it. I don't wish to add to the spectacle. I do not want to add more noise to drown own the signal. But that's the entire economy now. People who distract society from our collective peril and those those who deliver food to those people. Walking into the woods and waiting to die is still an option.
I live in a society that demands I reject my values if I wish to eat. Social
forces weed out people like me and reward the dick rocket men who don't even
understand basics like "trophic energy levels" or "finite resources". I'm
supposed to feel resigned to being a terrible hypocrite. I'm supposed to give
into the childishly smug argument of "If RATM has radical politics then why do
they sell music through Sony?!?". Well we're all fucking hypocrites and my
egotistical desire to be a good person is path I need to navigate carefully.
side tangent: It's weird how in art school we had to read Ad Busters and other "anti-the system we're signing up to support" content. The point wasn't to convince us that the system is bad, it was to numb us to criticism and adopt a blithe mans-gotta-eat mentality.
I published my first podcast ep. I've been struggling with executive function issues for a long time, so it's a minor miracle that I was able to teach myself how to edit video in blender and do all the technical steps required to go from script to something published on youtube. The victory is that I have proof that I am not useless. One completed project vs. years of sliding into poverty.
I learned from this process that creating media is quite taxing on my old hardware. If I end up losing this space and I have to live on the run (a much nicer framing than "homeless") I'll have to stick to publishing text. There was a rush from getting something done, but an anti-podcast with 7 youtube views isn't going to the source of the miracle it's going to take to stay here.
The plan in my head that is keeping me from outright panic is renting a storage unit and getting a bus ticket to a warmer place. I'll leave those plans vague until I've exhausted everything else. It occurs to me that without an address I won't be able to receive my medication anymore unless I stay local. fuck I am stuck.
Somehow I have to trick a company into hiring a very sick person for a remote job then once I get healthcare I have to get well as quickly as possible so I can actually sleep and do the job. It's an absurd dream because of how mundane it is.
"wow this guy wants a job so he can take care of his chronic illness"
It feels like a waste to spend the one miracle I am allotted in life like that. I would hope for more, but being sick and isolated for this long has made me feel like I don't deserve more than that. Irrational I know, but the non-knowing half of the battle is one I have yet to win.
My local grocery store has several armed security now. At first they checked receipts when you exited and mean-mugged "suspicious" people like me. Now they just stick to the mean mugging. Maybe they realized selectively checking some people's receipts but not checking everyone's was some sort of potential legal liability.
Recently at the self-checkout line the machine flagged something I did as suspicious. The attendant came over and reviewed the grainy over-head video of me holding a bag of discount onions and entering the code in. They seemed to be unaware that discount fresh produce was something for sale, so they asked me how I was able to get a bag of onions for a dollar. I could see the security bro watching this exchange tense up and start walking toward us.
So I explain that this store has a bin of bananas and other aging produce that
they sell in $1 bags. They seem skeptical of this, but the alternative is that
I can somehow trick the self-checkout machine into giving me things for a
dollar and I'm wasting that power on the worst bag of onions in the store.
Note that this isn't the first time the machine has flagged what I'm doing as
suspicious and forced an employee to come over and review the video, but this
is the first time anyone did anything more than "yeah yeah whatever" the whole
situation because even if I was tricking the machine who really cares?
It strains my credulity to think that the grocery store CEO believes having their busy-body employees review video footage of me buying $10 worth of food while 4-6 armed security guards wander around in tactical vests is a financial benefit for the Kroger Company. I used to dumpster dive here years ago and the amount of wasted food surely hasn't gone down. This is America and I hate it here.
I conceptualize the task at hand in the form of a long comment or readme file.
In brainstorming fashion, write bullet points of things this code will need to accomplish in rough but not exact order.
Refine this process until I could hand this off to another developer and be reasonably certain they could complete the task.
Think about what this task is similar to. What algorithms will I need to use? What parts are fuzzy in their operation (this is generally where the fun parts are)? What parts are like something I've already done before?
If the task is complex, write a bullet point list of the first 10-20 things I will need to write.
Start going down the list. Notice I am very itchy. Start scratching my
face. Forget everything I was doing. Several hours have passed. There are
skin flakes everywhere. I am in pain and trying to tend to my self-inflicted
scratch wounds so they don't get infected. Clean up the dead skin mess. Notice
my computer is still on. Wtf is this code about? Slowly die because I haven't
had a real job in years and min-wage jobs tell me "but you have a degree and
you're an experienced developer, you'll quit as soon as you find a better job"
while real jobs pass over me for having a massive resume gap and not fitting
the company culture (read: eczema has severely disfigured my face so people
assume I'm on drugs). Suddenly go from dying slowly to dying quickly one cold
January night when the lack of money thing finally catches up.
I walked to the highest point in the land I can afford to go without any money. I went there was someone special to me. Although we didn't exchange many words I felt home and safe for a fleeting moment.
I am not completely alone, but that just makes it harder. If I were completely untethered to this world the decision would be quick and easy. But I don't want to bring anyone the pain and sadness that I know comes when these sorts of things come to pass. I wish they had the power to set me free.
We watched the waning sun vanish over the west hills. The sky was a brilliant orange. I sucked in the beauty like a drowning man gasping for life. If only it were that simple
I've always felt like problems in my life are something I should secretly deal with. I know that's not a healthy position to have, but from childhood onward I had to be valuable for what I can do without any weakness or I was discarded and abandoned.
I feel like my pain a contagion that is my job to protect others from. If it isn't life threatening than I should quietly suffer and not bring people down with. I guess this sick self-image happens when the oldest memories I have are of getting in trouble for allowing myself to be hurt by others. Always getting in trouble having needs. Help always came with the price of resentment. My goal for so long was to simply not be a burden on anyone - to not be resented - but that has become harder as my chronic illness has intensified.
In the spirit of not being an annoyance or a burden toward people I hardly even know, please stop reading my entries from now until January. The situation I am in will require a miracle to escape from and the last I want to do is harm the mental health of strangers during a time of year when I feel I have no right to ruin anyone's fleeting joy. If by chance I survive this and I still somehow have internet access in February then I promise I will have happier posts. Maybe I'll finish my book(s) or one of the dozens of programming projects I've started. Maybe I'll be working on one of the many ecology projects that I desperately wish I had the means and health to work on. Maybe there are brighter days ahead of me and maybe I will live to see my 40th birthday. Small hope keeps me from doing the unthinkable. But as the middle of January draws near, I fear that hope will be extinguished like every other bit of small hope I've clung to through these hellish years.
In mid-January my world is set to end. That's when the place I'll be living isn't here and there is no "there" for me to go. I've been homeless briefly but that was when I was in my 20s, my body wasn't falling apart, and it wasn't the middle of winter. So this time it looks like the real deal. I always had this possibility hanging over my head. Ever since I got sick, dropped out of engineering school, spent a year applying to programming jobs, all the while getting sicker and sicker my life has just been an exercise in barely holding on. But anyway, I want to don't revisit the past too much right now. There be the dragons of anger at myself for not working harder to secure my place in in the world.
So I contacted some of the easy to reach people first. No luck so far. One person even replied back saying they're sick too hope I get well. I don't think they really read my email..,
Most others have not responded. I expect to be ghosted by most people I know again, just like in the 2010s the last time I was faced with losing everything. I get so much anxiety doing this because I know asking someone to house me for even a brief time is a huge ask. I hate that so many people are going to say no that even the small chance someone won't say no is barely enough to get through the humiliating process of begging for my life. I fear that I was never anyone's friend irl, they just tolerated me.
I really wish I didn't check my phone when I woke up in the middle of the night, I could have used the few extra hours of rest before knowing. Found out I need to move in 30 days. I realize I'm not freaking out yet. Shock? No I think this is a scenario I've expected and I already know what's impossible so I don't even have to ask. Outlook is pretty grim. Shouldn't have been born with chronic eczema or severe pet allergies. I knew this day was coming but I hoped I could hold out until spring when the prospects of sleeping rough are at least possible where I am. I'm glad I get to spend the rest of 2033 here though.
I was nice while it lasted. I'm going to give myself a few more days before I allow myself to switch fully into survival mode. I want finish my secret santa gift and some writing. I'd like to walk somewhere beautiful on the next dry day to remind myself that life is more than the bleakness before me.
I submitted a bug to the gnu-recutils mailing list and once again I have this feeling of anxiety and dread. I put a lot of effort into trying to fix the problem myself and looking for any bit of documentation that may help, but alas, no luck. It's pretty messed up that I have such an aversion to asking for help and this esspecially true for free software. I feel like I'm bothering someone and I'm asking a stupid question. It's like there is an imaginary audience of hecklers that is waiting to blow up my inbox telling me to RTFM and tell me I'm an idiot for even having such a problem. The thing is, I've never been on the recieving end of that kind of hate train, so the only explanation I have for I always feel this way about seeking software help is that I've worked with many angry developers who exemplified the stereotype of the elitist tech guy who tells people off for not filing bug reports exactly right.
It's just another pebble on the "I'm kind of a socially broken person" mountain. Sounds kind of a dumb, but submitting a bug report is probably going help with my growth and healing. Plus it'll save me the hassle of writing an alternative to readrec.
I often wish I could hold spiritual beliefs. There would be so many benefits. I could could contextualize my suffering in the material world as a test. I could look forward to some sort of reward for sticking to my values even when there is no benefit in the here and now. All the "good" things I've done when nobody sees would count for something. In moments of distress I could lean on spirituality for strength.
The problem is I was raised in a cult (one of the more isolating and punishing forms of American Protestantism) so my default view of these "clubs" is the cynical one: It's a bunch of made up shit used to control people. I feel like MLMs, psychics, churches, and those companies where everyone has to wear a fake smile at all times occupy the same space in my mind. I feel like I'm missing something that others have. They can suspend their disbelief long enough to start believing genuinely.
MEMORY: Sometime in the early 2010s. I got really stoned for like the second or third time in my life. I realize that I don't hear the voice of God in my head. I never have. This whole time it's literally been myself puppeteering a deep-voiced deity saying exactly what I wanted to hear. I had been doing it since I was a little kid threatened with hell. It's like I was psychotic but nobody ever called me out on it because hearing a god that conveniently reaffirms American conservative values (ex: I asked who to vote for, "god" responded John McCain...so I guess god's will regarding the 2008 election was overridden by Satan?). In an instant I go from regularly having dialogues with God to not hearing it all.
Fast forward a few years, I'm hanging out with a new friend group of witches, pagans, other sorts of new-agey stuff. One person in the group really hated me. They used astrology to justify why X person shouldn't date me. Since this person was very popular/"the leader", I was eventually effectively excommunicated from the group. Now I'm sure if this person had different spiritual beliefs they would have used something else to get rid of me. Hell, I'm sure if they were a hard-core atheist they would have conjured up sciencey-sounding reasons. I suppose this is why I'm in the rare camp of agnostics who wish they could believe rather than putting energy into fighting the spirituality of others. I'm well aware that people make decisions or emotional and opaque reasons then use their favorite System to justify it later.
The closest thing I have to religion is the belief in the Great Attractor At the End of Time theory posited by Terrence McKenna. The main tenant is that History as we know it will end (literally, not in the Fukuyamian sense) and it will be signaled by an exponential growth of novelty in the universe. It's the only alternate form of cosmology that makes sense and appeals to me. An end to all things. Such a soothing concept
I replied in a reddit thread about how economists say the everything is fine
while shopping for groceries and talking to people irl says otherwise. I
mentioned there was holes in my shoes and I'm reaching proper Dickensian
levels of poverty. Predictably someone asked me my shoe size, indicating if
they have something that fits they'll send it to me. I reply to this that
I've had a stalker and I already patched up some thrift store shoes. I said if
they really want to help they can subscribe to my substack because right now
that's one of my only possible ways generating some income (given my current
inability to sleep and thus wake up for a 9-5 job regularly). Unlike Feels,
writing serious articles about my chronic illness or the difficulties of
doing office work without the benefit of a healthy body is hard when you know
nobody is reading.
Here there are no metrics and the act of writing is cathartic. It's the happy medium of safely "private" but also practice for publicly expressing myself authentically. It helps me learn to bypass my impulse to pretend everything is fine at all times - to mold myself into being inoffensively acceptable.
On substack, it feels like a job interview. I have to prove I can write medium to long form content cohesively. I have to be worthy of eventually charging $5/mo for four articles a month. I have 3 subscribers and until I have at least 10 it's going to feel the same way it felt to send hundreds of resumes between 2013 and now to zero response.
For some reason, the same people who publicly make reddit comments about how they're going to send me a hand-me-down pair of shoes (If I just give them my real name, address, and shoe size, woo!) are also unwilling to subscribe to my dumb little blog. I can't understand why someone would be willing to ask me for my private info so they can mail me something but are unwilling to give me a free-tier subscription. I've had a stalker for years and it makes me entertain the paranoid thought that this is some kind of trap. If it's not an elaborate ruse by my stalker (who i'm pretty sure died in 2020...), it's more evidence that most people will performativity offer help but won't listen to what I actually need even when that need is must less cost and effort than what they're offering.
Whenever I make a post on "real" social media I end up checking up on it several times a day to see if anyone has interacted with it. Usually nobody has and it makes me a little sad. Despite knowing exactly how it's designed to get under my skin like that, it still does.
Maybe I'd be better off just deleting it all of it and stick to this + the 90% of things that never make beyond my local journal. I'm too mentally weak to handle something as innocuous as a views and upvotes counter. It turns me into a performer who will do anything for positive validation.
In an alternate universe I'm a live-streamer with polar opposite values from this version of me. I clap like a seal because the people throw fish.
Engineering school gave me the means to understand it. Being sick and living in isolation gave me time to study it. Having what most would consider "nothing" put me in a position that didn't require me to build up denial around it. I have no children to make me think "I'm sure they'll figure out something!".
What I've realized is there will be no rational acceptance that leads to sustained direct action. I guess that's fine. This whole "fully body eczema but my family just thinks I'm too lazy to stop scratching" is getting really old. Maybe a collapse of the global agricultural system will distract them from what a disapointment I am.
So if there is nothing to be done that anyone is willing to do, I should try to enjoy myself while I can, right? That makes sense but I can't accept it. I'm trying to get things going like growing Azolla in the Great Lakes and establishing controlled burns of known methane leaks, but I have no clout, no influence, no power. I know there are smarter people out there with similar ideas; people who aren't imprisoned by their bodies. That gives me hope.
To the tune of Celebration by Kool & the Gang: This is pure mitigation
Yahoo!
Mitigate bad times, come on Let's mitigate...
Things I have learned but I am still in the process of internalizing:
If I work hard with the motivation of "be above all criticism, have no vices, don't waste time, don't even give them a chance to say your problems are somethings besides your chronic illness" I will eventually resent the people I'm trying to be perfect for. It's not sustainable.
If I work hard just to survive, I will slide into same depression that's defined the past decade. There has to be more than living besides that death sounds briefly painful and the little reptilian brain doesn't like that.
If I work hard for the improbable hope that it will matter someday, somehow I can do the work. I can put one foot in front of the other ad naseum.
Tricking the sleep-deprived executive dysfunctional brain is hard.
It was unseasonably warm today. I know that's not a good sign, but I also have to enjoy it for was it is. I saw a crow with blueish feathers in the mid day sun. The trees were dressed in their autumn colors performed their bright yet too brief display for the depressable apes that live beneath them. It's a small gift to get us through the long winter that will inevitably come. I am certain the snow will leave this place forever sooner rather than later. It's also a gift I will miss when it's gone. Until then, I will enjoy each day for what is it not what I wish it were instead. I'll stop bad mouthing the cold, the rain, the snow.
This week I will eat well thanks to the kindness of a fellow tonwnie. I'm going to make a meal for friends. I checked through some old emails to confirm this: it's been over a decade since the last time. It doesn't feel like it's been that long but I guess that just speaks to the fact times moves differently when you spend a lot of time focused on surviving until the next week. Eventually life feels like the chase scene in an old cartoon with the looping background.
I went to engineering school and all I got was the ability to understand climate science enough to know we're collectively sleep walking off a cliff. Oh, that, and a chronic illness from stress which has made my body a prison of unemployment and isolation. F- would not recommend.
The sun was shining, the bus was on time. I enjoyed a walk while it's still warm enough to walk around relatively unbundled. I cooked a delicious seitan steak which was the right balance of effort, price, taste, and nutrition. I got a big jar of almond butter which I can't afford, but I desperately need. I've decided that if I have no future beyond an increasingly difficult struggle with my health and [MONEY] then I should spend what little I have on good food.
Oh how I envy those who can shop without holding a small sum down to the cents in their heads as they do the caloric and financial math on each item. I lust after brazil nuts, jack fruit, flax seeds, blueberries, and the bulk bins at the food co-op where even the people with good jobs balk at their prices. I think I'd have to plan and execute a proper criminal caper if I want to get my hands on those $25 brown bags full of lion's mane mushrooms or single origin coffee beans with citrus and berry notes. I'm so tired of beans, rice, and the cheapest coffee grounds I can get. If food prices go any higher I'll have to give up bad coffee too.
People think if you give poor people money they'll just waste it. But I'd just to cook an amazing vegan meal for me and a few friends. Oh how I miss people too. Do those friends still remember me? It's strange how the pandemic normalized social disposal of those "beneath" people. But even if those people don't care about me now, I'd still like to cook them a meal. It'd be nice to feel useful again.
The other day I was moving a lot of bags on the bus because I had no other choice. Between the unkempt bags overflowing with the junk I own, the facial eczema, and the threadbare clothing I've had for years, I looked like a street person. You know, the sort of person so thoroughly discarded by society that we've all agreed not to make eye contact with even when we deem them worthy of spare change? Normally I'd be able to convince myself that I'm being paranoid about how perceive me. I tell myself that not everyone assumes people with fucked up faces are on drugs; certainly people are aware of the various skin conditions that afflict people.
This time I had my paranoia confirmed by a fellow homeless-looking person. They walked past everyone else waiting for a bus and struck up a conversation with me. Their face was also red and puffy, partly from sleeping outside in the cold and partly, I assume, from the substance they asked if I was holding. Twenty years ago asking a stranger if they were "holding" meant you wanted to buy weed. Today, now that it's legal to buy, I'm not exactly sure what they meant. I told them I didn't have anything besides the bags in my hand.
For some reason strangers tend to tell me about their problems. Back when holding meant weed, this made sense. My appearance didn't frighten people. My face didn't cause children to point at me while tugging on their parent's arm to signal that they wish to ask why I look like this. I thought the one perk of looking like a police sketch of a generic crackhead was that nobody would attempt trauma dump on me within fifteen minutes of meeting me. Maybe it's the same thing that draws strays cats to me. Maybe I give off "kind vibes", whatever the fuck that is, even when I'm sitting there staring off into space wondering how I'm going to survive the winter.
They get on the bus and sit next to me near the front where the benches make sense for all the folks who have to transport garbage bags full of cans or all their worldly possessions in a few reusable grocery sacks. They tell me they've been living on the streets for a few weeks and that it's really cold at night. Their sandals are the wrong shoes for this weather. Their thin jacket is going to be wrong too in a couple of week. Their feet are red and puffy like my face. Maybe it's because of whatever drugs they were asking me for that their life is like this. But who the hell am I to judge?
Every impulse 2010s "good tech job, eczema under control" me would have had to judge this person was gone. They mentioned that they were sleeping in the park at night with their partner. I could think of a million reasons why this situation could have befallen them because one of those reasons happened to me: genetic chronic illness time bomb, little social support because I live in America and my family was a bunch of hyper-individualists. Maybe their story was similar and the pain of being cold, hungry, and tired all the time finally drove them to the temporarily relief of whatever the slingers are slinging now.
Or maybe they're a drug addict who ruined their own life. It doesn't matter. Even if that were the case they don't deserve to sleep rough and beg to eat. It would hypocritical of me to feel any other way because whatever line in the sand we draw between who gets helped and who deserves to be left to the wolves is going to have collateral damage of innocent people.
They asked me If I knew where to get a sleeping bag. This was their indirect way of asking for the one I was holding. Vulnerable people tend to fear asking for things because they expect a "no". I know for the next 2 months I have a garage to sleep in and a space heater if I need it. Plus I was tired of carrying the damn thing, so I gave it to them. That reduced the volume of things I own by about 10% (sleeping bags are bulks). I feel lighter. I hope they stay warm tonight.
I meant to browse, but I pressed 0 by mistake so here I am.
I'm trying to be positive because I have to be. I'm currently gaslighting myself into happiness by holding a smile. It works if you can suspend the inner critic.
On a walk I finally found clarity for some thoughts regarding the violence inherent to the system (help! help!).
In the old days, people like me were met with direct violence. Internment camps or a fist to the face. This made a lot of people very sad. Even the people who wanted the violence to happen were saddened by it. It's hard to sleep with blood on your hands.
The innovation was making it as indirect as possible. I'm an "eater", a "scrounger", and all things we say about the people we want to dispose of. It's how America has such an inhumane system for disability. It's how there are padlocks on dumpsters preventing me getting some bread. The violence is legal.
Perhaps it won't even matter, but if I get out of this I don't think I'll be able to do anything besides fight this shit. Nobody really understands how insidious the forces of social disposal of undesirables are until they become one themselves.
gratitude:
Regrets: I lived the entire healthy/able-bodied portion of my life trying to fit in by being useful. It took getting sick to realize that that means nothing. People tolerated me because I was useful, but I wasn't truly their friend. I realized far too late that it's impossible to have security by not being "one of the bad ones". Just because I wasn't one of those "bad ones", I still found myself in a situation where my suffering meant that those I thought cared about me would be unwilling or unable to help so they did what most people tend to do: ignore me and pretend I don't exist. This is a reality that most people are protected from until it's too late. They wonder how those people outside ended up homeless and they invent a one-size-fits-all narrative that paints them as bad people who probably deserve it. It's like the denial of death. I guess that's the only way to be a person in a world where people desperate for love buy designer breed dogs and walk them around a cities where more and more people are joining the ranks of homeless.
Ok. I need to get some shit done before I join the ranks of completely untouchables. There is still a narrow window of hope I can squeeze through if my efforts can be met with a little luck. Anyone have a gig for someone with 15+ years of programming and linux experience? My moniker elsewhere is "Will Code for Food" and right now that's pretty literal.
*Everyone should try sitting in a public place with a cardboard sign sometime. Take a marker, write down some reasonable demands relevant to your area, and quietly sit. It's been years since I've done that and wonder how it would go now.
There is a connection between this and the gig worker I saw having a breakdown in their car that seemed to also be in shambles. As I scoot closer to the event horizon of the poverty black hole I wonder how many people are crying in vehicles don't have just enough wear and tear left in them to see them through another orbit.
We'll work together now while it's merely uncomfortable, or we'll work together later when it's life and death. Weird that this is where my mind goes when I finally get brief respite.
*unless it's physically unsafe for you.
Living with a neighbor who won't stop harrasing me is a special kind of hell. He calls the cops and makes fake noise complaints. He calls the manager and trys to get me evicted. All while -he- is the one pounding on the walls making all the noise.
The floor squeaks because the building is old. No matter how quietly I try to walk he can hear it and it pisses him off. There was a threatening note on the door but the manager says there is nothing they can do since it could be from anyone. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if he shoots me over this. Yay living in America.
I hate that right now, my only choice is this or being homeless. Even if I get a job tomorrow it'll be months before I can afford to move.
Being sick, needy, and poor is no way to meet people. Nor is it condusive to reaching out to people I haven't talked to in years. If I come out hiding now, it'll go like it did last time. Comfortable-but-not-rich friends back slowly away from the financial liability I represent. They'll stop talking about their future plans because talking about a vacation or a new house in front of me is rude. I don't even care if they did, but nothing I say about that is taken at face-value. Even if I completely minimize my present problems, they already know, and they feel as uncomfortable as if they were talking about food in front of a starving person. Eventually they just ghost.
I'm tired of this happening so I've resolved to remain isolated until I dig myself out of severe eczema and the poverty that inevitablly follows when working is impossible.
It's amazing how easily not having money or a job alienates. The people on the street, the way nobody sees them as people: it can happen to anyone and it happens long before you've officially lost everything.
i want to work on environmental restoration. Give me access to some land and I'll grow native plants, fruit and nut trees. I'll create swales that feed into ponds for growing azolla. That will create organic material for carbon sequestration via rapid compost creation. I'll create berms for directing and retaining runoff to create a drought resistant landscape.
All I want from it is basic 1 bedroom housing, access to the medication that keeps me from sliding into full body disabling eczema, food, and little bit extra to replace my threadbare clothing and shoes with holes in them. Also an SSD for my 11yr old laptop would be nice too. Point is, I want to survive - I'm not asking for holidays abroad, luxury, or electronics. I just want to live and be free to apply everything I've learned over the past 20 years toward mitigating climate change, soil loss, and mass extinctions.
Instead filled will anxiety as I'm applying toward Yet Another Carbon Spewing Tech Product jobs. I envy those well-off enough to not worry about mere survival so they can put their efforts toward doing some of the necessary work. In the end, no matter what happens, those putting out fires will sleep better than those actively setting more.
I had a strange interaction on reddit the other day. I wrote a post about how I was finally able to buy socks after dealing with having holey socks for a long time. I have socks now. Need met.
Yet some stranger insists they buy me socks. I reply to them "I have socks, please just subscribe to my substack blog about surviving poverty". judging by my tumbleweed filled substack dashboard, they did not view or subscribe to my blog. I NEED this since the algorithm rewards people with views/subs with more views. The "it's already popular so we should make it more popular" logic.
This person then replies essentially no way bro. I'm going to send you socks
I need to do my good deed of the day.
Helping people is great, but if you won't listen to the person you're trying to help, maybe this is actually about feeling good about yourself and a lot less about helping.
Now I feel like I have to help them by allowing them to buy me socks I don't need so they don't walk away thinking that poor people are just ungrateful.
In order to dig myself out of the hole I'm in I have to bother people. I hate this. I have to join the chorus of people with pitch decks and business plans and something to sell to scream "ME! LOOK AT ME! BE DISTRACTED!".
Is that the only path forward? We have to make people like and subscribe and not think about oh say...the fact that we won't be able to grow enough food for everyone on a warming world. It feels so selfish to add more noise on top of the important signals that are already fully drowned out. I wish I could just skip right to being paid just enough to survive to work directly on climate justice projects. I'd work till my body breaks restoring land and tending native plants if society would let me.
Instead I have to hustle to keep a roof over my head and access to the medication I need. I have to decrease the overall chance of species survival just to live another day. It feels awful.
Some people take "You can't change your lifestyle to solve climate change" to mean keep eating steaks but also vote and say the right things on twitter". To me it means I have to change my lifestyle AND my career/interests. That's why I went back to school. That's why my chronic illness started eating my alive.
I envy the people who get to support themselves by fixing things. Most of the rest of us have to actively distract others from fixing things to make a living and I think I'm an early adopter to the kind of pain that cognitive dissonance brings.
I built my social network by being useful. When I got sick and stopped being useful almost everyone left. I learned the hard way that I was tolerable but not desirable. I attracted the sort of people who will secretly think you're annoying but never tell you as long as you remain useful.
I'm taking the half-full view that a lot of TYPE-2 have this problem, but they don't find out until much later in life.
I'm like career Bejamin Button. 20s: decent tech job, could replace most co-workers with a shell script. 30s: I hope the convenience store overlooks the employment gap and my disfigured eczematic face and hires me so I can eat everyday.
The best part was in the middle when I could work odd jobs and afford not work for a few weeks when my health inevitably got bad. Now it's work-or-die American style and I'm leaning toward the ladder.
Growing up poor, living a few nice years in the sun, then going back to being poor when the chronic illness genetic time bomb went off has given me a perspective the world needs. Unfortunately it's also isolated and drained the joy out of, so I understand why nobody wants to Look Up.
The biggest lie I was sold was that I'd be taken care of if I became sick and faced problems that weren't self-inflicted. That's only true for a very small amount of people. There are no points awarded for being "one of the good ones". It doesn't matter that I don't have an iPhone and live a beans and rice hyper frugal lifestyle. It doesn't matter than I don't drink or use recreational drugs. It doesn't matter that I don't waste my money on whatever it is people scape goat poor people for washing their money on. There is still no help and they still sneer at me when I look visibly poor.
To most of my family and former friends, not being able to work is a Sin and poverty is God's punishment.
Ok cool, I got that out. Going to spend the rest of the day being SUPER POSITIVE and manifesting my way out of my problems.
Sorry about the negativity. I have to be perfectly positive and dismissive of my problems irl or I risk isolation. If I limit the negativity to a blog probably nobody will ever see I can maintain the facade required to navigate a social space where I'm the only one languishing in poverty because getting and keeping a job is really hard when full body eczema impacts my ability to sleep, focus, and not look the "after" on those wonderful faces of meth posters they propogandize with.
The darkest thought I have is wishing more people had to deal with a severe chronic illness that made all the "just do x and y and you'll be fine easy peasy" advice obviously wrong.
Our wins shouldn't blind us to the diffculty the losers face. Not everyone is your cousin's friend you heard about who is just lazy and doesn't want to work. Not every hardships looks like the cookie cutter version of what you think a real struggle looks like. Not every person you see with the skin falling off their face is some monsterous drug user. But those views persists because it protect's life's winners from the ego shattering possibility that with slightly different circumstances they'd be the person on the street they sneer at.
If I survive this it will be with the cost of not being able to enjoy the distractions and selfishness that many "winners" delude themselves with.
With enough money, eventually you gain the magical ability of speaking reality into existence. A billionaire could pick up the phone at any time and call their personal assistant.
"Hi, I'd like to evaluate and fund 500 medical goFundMes. Put out an ad for director of helping out the poors. They will be responsible for evaluating and funding crowd sourcing pages put out by people in desperate medical situations".
The assistant will be puzzled of course. This will be the first time their boss deigned to think about anyone but themselves, but depending on how much of a micromanager the boss is, 500 people's lives were magically saved by a short conversation and little else.
For a billionaire, that sort of spell could be cast at will with no change to their standard of living. They could do that and STILL live like Caligula. Hell, the goodwill generated by such an act would probably give them a little hit of dopamine like when their employees clap like seals for them at the annual conference.
Yet they choose not. Being generous, they're not very clever people.
A year ago my skin was an eczematic prison of pain and insomnia. The invisible ants never let up. The itch was so deep I couldn't think. I was unemployable and therefore worthless.
Today I can turn my head to both sides without pain. I can sleep a little. I can forget for a while. So if I can get enough income soon to maintain my supply of food and medication maybe I'll make it.
Maybe? I will make it. I WILL MAKE IT. Let the record show I was very positive today so according to the just world dogma that rules the world I'm bound to turn this around.
When I finally make it I will be able to enjoy it deeply thanks to what I have endured.
I remember when you didn't have to ask a grocery store employee permission to use the bathroom. I'm lucky, they still see me as a person and let me go. What about the people they deny? It's fucked up that you need to ask a cashier for a bathoom code, they are told to deny "certain kinds of people" and those people have to take a shit in the alley behind the store. So now that grocery store employee now has to clean that up. So the boss man has to pay for electronic door locks and it's inevitablly going to take longer and cost more to clean the alley instead of the bathroom.
Society has opted for the most expensive and inefficent forms of cruelty.
College was a mistake. Not because of the debt, but because I don't have the luxury of pretending "maybe those scientists are wrong about this whole climate change thing".
Help, I can't enjoy industrialized society and I'm too poor and disabled to escape it.
I live at the bottom of the sea, so it's weird to see that society has the capacity to notice and attempt to rescue people in that situation. It's a bit different though, just enough for me not to make it on the list of "problems that you deserve support dealing with".
I'm trapped in tiny space because the outside world is full of anaphalaxis triggering allergens (cats, dogs, several common foods...). The last time I accidentally ate a bite of something that touched chickpeas I ended up descending into a medical hell I still haven't fully recovered from. Until I can find remote work that is willing to work with my health limitations I'm stuck here.
The world is for people with enough money and boot straps that they can just /have/ an epi-pen at all times. It's for people who can afford to work around the dozens of food allergies that they have to deal with and enough money to seek effective treatments for the eczema all over their body. Being in a dire situation is worthy of assistance as long as that situation is relatable. I guess selling a startup for /beacoup bucks/ and never worrying about not working for an extended amount of time and finding yourself asphyxiating atop Mt. Everest is a far more relatable scenario than eating a peanut in a meal you were assured there were no peanuts in and becoming disabled.
Until I can afford to be healthy I can't work as they expect me to. Until I am healthy enough to be the shiny perfect employee I can't be healthy. It's a catch-22 anyone can be trapped in, but it's not fun to think about that.
I really dislike discussing my health problems, but I also can't run away from it the way I wish I could. So here is on substack. The urge to "be productive" has been satisfied. The I can write for fun like a person again.
https://citizeneight.substack.com/p/how-chronic-illness-leads-to-invisibility
I have a sense of urgency about my situation. Sometimes it morphs into anxiety that makes focus impossible. It has to be "If I can figure out how to make money in the next 20ish days you'll survive to see better future days". If it slides into "Make money now or you'll become homeless, lose access to medication, and slide back into health hell AGAIN" I won't even have a chance.
Finally my eczema is under control. Finally I can get a little sleep and it doesn't hurt to shower. I'm a small amount of money away from pulling off a survival miracle. If I can write everyday I have a better chance of success than if I don't. Sure, pinning my survival on a substack blog is a long shot, but it seems like getting hired in tech again with a long resume gap due to a disability which I also have to conceal is an even longer shot.
This phrase bothers me. The implied ", therefore" that follows seems to be universally be "so I may as well do as I please". I know that many people say this to warn against the futility of changing how you shop as a substitute for society-sized changes that have to be made, but it seems like it rarely plays out that way.
Unfortunately telling people that ask me to change their diet, stop flying so damn much, and (most importantly) quit your day job that encourages and enables consumption isn't popular. Alienation from my peers isn't great, but it's honestly better than sitting in someone's backyard while they grill burgers and talk about their up-comming world travel. Don't tell me you'll stop eating me when they invent a lab grown streak. Don't tell me you care about the environment so much that you've decided to replace your 2yr old car with an electric SUV. It's like being in a burning room and your host is bragging that they've decided to stop throwing kindling on the ground starting next week.
I understand the psychology of this and it scares me. My life has been a health crisis for so long that "you're going to die unless x happens" doesn't hit me the way it does for people who have been relatively comfortable and healthy for the past few years. If it were possible to protect my happiness with denial I probably would to.
But I can't, so the reality of the situation we face is something I can't ignore even though there would be many social and financial benefits to do so.
Hi, my name is Citizen Eight. Not really, (according to the government, at least) but in my current precarious situation it seems wise to keep the corporeal form that sits behind the screen a secret. If one day I'm in a secure position I might reveal a little, but right now that security seems as unlikely as my wildest dreams. That's life right now for most people, right? I can't even say for sure I'll be living indoors next month.
I've been consistently journaling for a few years as a method of keeping my mind together as a deal with on-going health problems. My general feelings about social media are that I don't enjoy it because I feel the weight of public scrutiny without the social benefit that most people seem to get. There's a lot to get into with that, but for now I'm going to take the action opposite to what I'd normally choose (hide, lurk, build a better bubble) and instead maintain a persistent presence and see where that goes.
Elsewhere on substack I'm trying to write so I can eat, but the feeling that it's a job threatens to ruin my relationship with writing the way coding for your typical up-to-no-good CEO once ruined computing for me.
In future entires I'll discuss topics including programming, linux, old hardware, consumption anxiety, ecology, urban planning, alienation, the atopic triangle, dealing with the medical industrial complex, insomnia, vegan recipes for people with lots of allergies, and fiction. I'm working on a mostly-fiction book called The Anarcho Syndicalist's Cookbook which I'll post selections from.