10 degrees outside (draft read thru once)

Dear American

If heat is something you have to save up for…

You are poor.

You are not ‘struggling middleclass’

You are not ‘going through a hard time’

You are in fact poor.

Even speaking the words my mind wants to rebel.

I won’t admit it.  America, the land of upward mobility, where we can do everything!

I find myself rationing propane, and bringing home as much pallet dunnage from work as I can.  My car isn’t registered, there’s 35% propane in the tank.  I know I can go through 6+% a week if it gets cold.  The woodstove at night takes the edge off, actually makes it hot in the house…then slowly burns down.  I have some spare cash, I could buy a few bundles of wood.  I get paid in 2 days, I can finish paying for the propane that’s in the tank now…I had the minimum delivery and paid over two payments.  I also have to pay the electric bill and buy food and gas.  I don't have the money for a cord of wood, or another propane delivery for 2 weeks.

This sounds like complaining…right?

It Isn’t.

How many people out there are saying…

‘You think you’re the only one with problems?’  How many can rattle off how hard they have it…

Do any of you consider yourselves poor?

You don’t do you?

THAT…

Is the point.

Welcome to the working poor.

We as Americans are bred to believe we are the best and can do anything.

However a lot of us cannot easily afford basic necessities…A roof, Heat, electricity, and food.

I also understand that in other countries even these are luxuries, but I’m not talking third world, the US is a civilized nation, if you don’t have these things you are homeless, and that’s a different conversation.

I’m talking to the people sitting home on their day off, checking Facebook, counting the meals in the fridge til’ payday, and saving up for heat before they run out.

If you don’t think you’re poor, then you tell me what a poor person looks like.

Then ask yourself…is this the American Dream we were raised on?  Is this where we thought we’d end up?  We work…hard, we’re intelligent, personable, and most of us work in some sort of service industry, so we have to be socially competent.  What sets us apart from the customers we service (nothing sexual there, it’s a play on customer service workers)…I firmly believe that I’m better than what I am…

I have found limited success and sufficient aptitude in manual labor, service industries, and County level Corrections.  I bought a house at 22.  Have had a 750 credit score.  I've never had more than 2 weeks of security.  I've never been able to blindly fill my oil or propane tank, because it's winter and that's what you do.  finding a way to pay for heat is a measuring stick for me.  If it is something you have to think about or struggle with we are poor.  Now I have a 475 credit score, no checking account, drive an unregistered vehicle, and plan my bills one to three weeks in advance to make sure there's money for them.  This means my fridge and vehicle both run low and only the first one to run out gets fed.

It’s cold.  I knew it would be.  I’m living as minimalistic as I ever have…I’m studying my prey.  A hunter, looking to blend.  Where the fuck is this upward mobility and how do I keep fucking it up.

the system a rant...raw

November 26^th, 2012

I should be able to get my license back today.  There are 2~ 50 dollar reinstatement fees.  I have 101. dollars.  I also have 9 dollars in one debit card account, and 1 dollar in another.  I should have 120. Dollars cash coming my way later today or this week towards bills.  I took home a pinch over 800 dollars for a two week pay check just over a week ago.  I had to pay New Hampshire 360 dollars, for a fine.  I had to pay my cell phone bill.  I had to get food, and gas.  I still have that hundred dollar bill.  I’m wondering if the registry will have any other fees…if they do I probably can’t pay them unless they’re only 5.00 so I have this fear that even after all this…I still won’t have my license back today.  I need propane, and the electric bill is growing unpaid because I paid that fine.  I’m heating with just scrap wood.  Not even cord wood, pallet stock is the only thing that has raised the temperature of my house this year and It’s almost December.  I was really hoping to buy a bed this week.  I have been sleeping on a futon mattress for almost 4 months.  Yet it feels inherently irresponsible to buy a mattress set when my electric isn’t paid yet and the propane tank is empty.  I’ve been looking forward to a real bed for months…but those fines were so much money.  As a punishment for driving too fast, and driving a car too old to take a sticker that this has cost me 385.00 to Maine, and 360 to NH…almost 750.00 dollars…Money that could be keeping me warm, or keeping the lights on, or going towards repairs for my car…which needs to be registered again…but I only have so much money.

The license has to come first…I need to get to work, and driving without it…they can take you and lock you up…they do that, they have and they will again.  Then they charge you even more money…My crime is driving…my punishment is being reminded of exactly how poor I still am.  Then I think back…

Walking up to the York Jail…knowing I would be sleeping there, knowing they were looking for me, knowing they were in my driveway.  Approaching me like I was dangerous…I suppose I was, but not in the sense they thought.  I don’t own a gun.  The warrant wasn’t even in the system.  Civil Contempt…if I hadn’t had a copy of the warrant in my pocket they wouldn’t have been able to book me.  I helped book myself…it was an odd booking…a warrant with a sentence.  The guard who took my fingerprints had trained at Cumberland…I had worked a couple pods with him, and had been in on his first fight.  I knew every phase of the routine.  I got walked down to housing.  Resigned, but closed off.  I wasn’t afraid…I was fully ready to die so there was nothing in that building that I needed to worry about.  I refused protective custody.  Other inmates recognized me…I was a guard…in orange…it didn’t matter.  No one fought me.

The days crawled by.  30 of them…because I refused to pay 435.00 a week in support.  I couldn’t have paid it, I would have ended up homeless…Knowing I couldn’t do it without suffering and ultimately failing I didn’t try.  I paid my child support, I looked for leverage, an edge, anything that would get them to see reason.  I filed motions, begged for help, never paid my spousal support.  I ended up in jail.  They have power you see, they can take whatever they want away.  For a while I was resigned to knowing they would kill me, and that my only solace would be in finding a way to let everyone know how wrong what they had done was…something big, something that would make national news…I had a lot of ideas…I’m a thinker.  Ultimately I refused to be known as a nutcase, and couldn’t find a way to adequately shake the pillars without taking the rap of a madman.  What they did was wrong, I am still recovering.  I have an ability to work, or live…I can’t find a way to do both and am feeling that now.  However that is clearly another rant.  This one is about the system and what it does to the people who have nothing, but want to get their lives back.

I can barely afford my bills, when I can’t pay them they get harder to pay, as a penalty for failing.  If you lapse on things they charge you more.  Your cars can’t pass inspection, and always need work, still you try to get to work, Today is the second time I have called in sick to work in 8 months.  I needed it…there’s something in here that I’m working out.

It’s been a year and nine months, since I went to jail.  I lost my job while I was there.  When I got out, I was angry, I was broke.  I had unemployment, but DHS was taking 250 of the 359 a week they gave me.  I still had child support to pay.  I looked for work as an angry, paranoid basket case that had just gotten out of jail.  Somehow I still found work.  I worked hard all summer, made adequate money, my anger finally got the better of me and I quit when faced with attitude from a boss.  I bounced and worked, I fought the urge to die or kill every hour of every day.  I cried, I felt loss, I tried to fuck the state over, they had made me this way, taken everything, left me as something that wasn’t worthy of love or capable of work.  I feared working, feared them taking everything again, I applied for disability.  I have been working since I was 12 years old…I was convinced I couldn’t safely do it, either they would take everything or I would kill someone.  I told myself if that was what it came down to I would rather kill the people I blamed for it than someone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I knew I would probably die myself.  This was the fall of 2011…I paced the house, empty when no one else was there, my muscles on fire, my mind racing, violence coursing through every vein…how dare they take everything from me…There was only one thing left to give them…whatever was left…all my rage, all my hate…fire, fists, and pain…I was prepared to level city blocks…that was the magnitude of my rage.  There is also absolutely no exaggeration in that statement.  I know what a propane tank is capable of doing when it explodes.  I know how much chaos, smoke and fire, and explosions and screams causes.  I know how disorganized everything will be as people try to figure out what’s going on.  At that point I also knew that I wouldn’t survive it so my tactical options were wide open.  But I wanted to last long enough that they knew WHY it happened.  They needed to know that all of this was because they ruined someone…That if they had shown an ounce of reservation, fairness, or compassion, that they wouldn’t be dying on that day, but that they hadn’t that they had instead shown how powerful they could be and taken everything, daring me to do something about it…I was prepared to show them what power was…power is the ability to make someone else afraid.  They made me afraid for my life, they took comfort away from me, as a response I gave up caring about life and comfort…I refuse to allow anyone to take things I care about…my response is to care about less…it protects me…if they would hold work, life, and security over my head I would hold death and pain and fear over theirs.

That took a long time to get past.  Clearly reading my own words now, I’m not over it, not completely.  However now I’m working, I’ve clawed my way to a raise, and am close to a living wage with a room mate.  I can feed myself.  Now I’m trying to earn things that make me feel real, a real bed, a license so I don’t fear for my life every time I get in the car.  I’m so close, yet everything could slip away.  I need to get that license back to protect myself from going back under, yet I have to give up so much to do it, that it reminds me why I hate them…

I am not a terrorist.  I love the United States very much, but I now see what it’s like to live at the bottom of a long hill that plenty of shit rolls down.  It has sullied my taste for what I thought this country was…I have always thought that if you are willing to try you’d be ok, but sometimes they make it so hard, on the people who have it hardest.  My inspection sticker runs out in 35 days…I still need to register my car, but every time I pay a fine or fee, something else has to go unpaid…it could be electric, or heat, or food, it will probably be cable…cable is a luxury after all isn’t it…of course my registration will be about 200, and the cable is only 110 with internet…so I will probably also have to eat cheap next week, and I won’t be getting my bed or another car any time soon…so when my sticker runs out, and until my registration gets paid…I’ll be walking a line…waiting for the next fine…hoping I can pay it…somehow.

Growth and motivation (very Raw-one take)

Growth

Dear god, I just read back through my blog.  Not all of it, even I am surprised by HOW MUCH I put out there.  Holy Shit….but now, reading it, it feels fucking intense…to re-live that darkness, and to look at where I’m standing and how the fuck I got here.

-It has been VERY intense.  I am surprised by how much violence there was.  How Angry I was…I know my capacity for violence is pretty intense, and it’s funny…right now I’m trying to figure out how an amazing capacity for violence translates to the peaceful world I am creating.  I know that it doesn’t…I completely get that.  But I also know…that it’s never gone.  All it takes is a whiff of aggression in the air, and like bloodlust the teeth come out…’oh you think you’re gonna use violence to get me to yield?  Oh no I know violence intimately, and you want nothing to do with my level of destruction.’ Then I realize how little it matters, it’s there if you need it, but you don’t.  No where near as much as you did when you were feeling threatened on all fronts.  You were feral back then…an animal living solely for survival…every day a successful kill…that could have just as easily taken you.

-So here in the dark with the music pulsing into the dark room, you are you.  You feel safe, unthreatened.  You look back at the things you lost along the way.   There’s a lot of hardship.  You caused most of it somehow, you were an engine of destruction, and now you’re an engine of realization and fore thought.

-What will you become?  You are begging to be real again.  You know you aren’t quite ready, but you are always jumping before you understand.  It’s a huge piece of your overall problem.  The things that are holding you back.  There are dozens of scenarios pounding in your head playing through with hundreds of variables.  Trying to predict the path with the best combination of personal success, and now necessary to your survival sense of personal worth.

-In the meantime you thirst for new human interaction.  You’ve spent years isolating yourself from trusted friends…now everyone is in different places, and you want to meet people occupying the curious in between space you live in.  You want laughs, and long talks, you want stupid pictures, and drunk faces.  You want hot breath and whispers under covers with new feels and sounds…

-But you aren’t ready yet.  You haven’t made enough money to be safe and real yet.  There are bills left to pay, things left to buy.  But you’re close enough to taste it, you’re making enough to get by without falling behind…now you just need to get caught up without worrying about sliding backwards…but you really want the times…

In-sanity

Christ it’s so much money…the fan of one thousand dollars.  It looks like SO much.  So much work went into getting it, putting it together, making sure everything else happened too.  It’s only a month’s rent.  A normal person should have three months of this set aside.  If they REALLY wanted to hold a thousand dollars they could withdraw it from their account.  It wouldn’t mean anything, because there’s that much and more in their account all the time.  To you it is an achievement in careful budgeting and hard work.  Who knows when the fuck things got this bad, but what was once trivial is now enormous, mainly because it’s three days early.  

shoulders (raw and unedited)

A cold wind blowing…

It’s cold.  I knew it would be.  I lay in bed this morning, with my arms around someone I love.

I thought back to the first night I had slept beside her.  Over four years had passed.  This morning was in all likelihood the last time I would wake beside her.  We both cried.  I would wake up and drive home to a space where just yesterday I was only able to pay half of my rent.  I would drive home with no license in a car with a noisy exhaust.  Today is the first day off I have had in 28 days.  My fridge is full of food I bought with food stamps.  I don’t have any booze, and don’t smoke cigarettes.

I have a hope that my roommate will be able to pay the other half of the rent this Thursday or Friday, returning us to the good graces of our landlord.

I need about 600.00 to have my license back.  I have 21.00 until I get paid Friday, today is Sunday.  I don’t have Cable, I do have internet and the electricity is on, although I’m supposed to pay 200 towards it today, and I don’t have it, so I will need to call them tomorrow and beg for a few more days.  The 200 will come from my roommate.  He has fallen on uncertain times, but will be getting enough financial aid from school later this week to pay both me and the landlord.  So lights and a roof seem close and attainable.

I’m not a real person.  Real people don’t have these problems.  I don’t make much, but my child support is paid.  I have mediocre part time Health insurance that I got through one of my 2 part time jobs…it costs 15 a week, but covers me for 2500 a year in medical expenses.  So I can fuck up once and get most of it paid for.  Anything more than that becomes an unpaid medical bill at a local ER.  Not pride just fact.

My 8 year old glasses have a crack in the passenger side lens.  I need new ones, I do have vision insurance through work, it cost me 1.50 a week.  However I have to buy the glasses and get reimbursed, and like I said I have 21.00 which will go to something at some point this week.

I’m not a real person.  I’m 35.  You wouldn’t know it, but I bought a house when I was 22.  I made payments on in for 8 years without ever missing a mortgage payment.  I had a wife and I have two wonderful children.  They’re pretty fucked up too each in their own way, but I have my hopes for them.  I want them to be normal and happy…I know they probably won’t be.

I’ve been to college…a few times.  I’ve got an Associates Degree to show for it…not that it matters, I owe the college money and don’t have any so I can’t get an official transcript.  That means the 90 some odd credits I earned prior to losing my financial aid and having to pay 900 dollars for that last class are being held hostage even though I paid for all of those.

My kids both need to see me more.  I don’t have the means to be there for them as much as I should.  I work too much, driving is always risky, and it takes a lot mentally to maintain even half-way decent spirits.  At work I smile and greet customers with a smile and witty banter.  I’m good at it…I’ve been working since I was 12.  They don’t know I’m a horrible person with no license, very little hope, and a bleak outlook.  Somewhere I have a shred of hope that I’m going to be able to work myself out of this.  I know in all likelihood I’m probably going to get pulled over and arrested.  That will cost more money that I don’t have and make my life even harder…on some level I’m sure I deserve it.  There is no time limit for my license suspension, I need to pay a fine for not having an inspection sticker, a fine for speeding (I was driving someone else’s car it’s amazing how it doesn’t feel like you’re going very fast when the car doesn’t shake or make loud unpleasant noises) Then I have to pay several reinstatement fees to get reinstated once…like I said 600.00.

I hope some day she’s happy.  She deserves it.  She was nothing but good to me, and would have been there for me, would have supported me while I struggled to live and pay bills.  She told me when I first changed…she only wanted me the way I was, and to Love her and to hear me say I loved her.  I do, and did.  However, I’m not a real person…she is.

I left her, and we continued to spend time together, easing each-other’s troubled and lonely hearts occasionally.  She couldn’t do it anymore…it hurt her too much to need more from me, that I couldn’t give.  She told me she was sorry.  I told her not to be.  I’m the one not functioning.  We said we loved each-other and I went home, alone; where I now sit.  I’m sad, I mourn for these losses deeply.  I know what I have to do, but it costs so much more money that I have.  I need to be a normal person.  Then I can assess what I want from my life.  Needs have to come first, and I NEED to be self-reliant.

I’m a derelict criminal.  I work hard but don’t get very far.  I’m well spoken, and fairly well educated.  All anyone seems to want from me is me.  I’m not me though.  Me is a broken child somewhere inside.  Sculpted from a child hood of moving around, never having roots, working too hard, feeling loss, only knowing what I could get for myself.  Knowing what it’s like to have everything gone, being left only with myself and the ability to work.  All everyone wants is me.  I could have everyone in my life if I gave them me.  My smile, my warmth, the love I know I have to give, my conversation, my insight, the person I am…the person I pretend to be when I’m at work.  The smile is fake.

I’m not a real person…real people have a license, their car runs, they buy their own food, they pay the rent, they don’t ever have to talk to the electric company, and when they smile they mean it.

I haven’t been a real person since I started having to play games to live.  I’ll play them, because I have to, but real people smile…I used to smile and it wasn’t fake or wasn’t a sarcastic remnant of a memory…those smiles sting.  I don’t know who I am anymore…I only know that I need to make my life safe.  I only know that it is going to take more than what I have to get there, and I may fail…in that end I can’t take anyone with me…so they will all miss me, and I will cry for them, wishing I could be what they wanted.