18 December 2012

Not Dead (Yet); Just Dismal December'd to Sullen Silence

AS I SAID in my last post, for lower-income people in the United States and its global empire, December is by far “the cruelest month.” 

As so often is the case, the political is also the personal. Two-thirds of every December is stolen from me by indignities imposed on the poor to rub our noses in the metaphorical dung-heap of our alleged “worthlessness,” the imaginary condition for which we are ever-more-forcefully condemned. 

First there is the paperwork required to annually re-certify my Medicare subsidies and food assistance: 30 pages of forms and documents including birth certificate, photographic identification and military records demanded by the Washington State Department  of Social and Health Services. The birth certificate,  driving license and discharge papers are to prove my identity has not somehow magically changed since last year; the remainder of the documentation is to verify I remain enough economically wretched to qualify for assistance – as if there were any possibility the U.S. economy might ever again improve to the point a person of my age and skills could find a job. 

Completing all this mandatory tedium invariably takes up most of an entire week. I have no clerical skills; I am a writer and editor – not somebody's secretary or clerk-typist. I am also dyslexic, and my penchant for typing errors – especially transpositions of vital numbers – is profoundly vexing. The chore is beyond drudgery, so oppressive it leaves me emotionally drained.

Then of course there is the grand climax. I arise at 5 the next morning so I can be at the welfare bureau no later than 7, ensuring I'll be at or near the head of the line when its doors open at 8 a.m. That way – assuming my papers are in order – I'm sure to be interviewed sometime the same day. (It's really an interrogation, though in deference to my age the caseworkers are always scrupulously polite.) 
 
While typically I walk with a cane, I always borrow a walker from a neighbor for my annual welfare odyssey. The walker is necessary to provide me with a place to sit while I wait for the office to be opened. I cannot sit on the floor because, once down, I am too crippled to get back to my feet without a painful struggle. 

Meanwhile gnawing at the edges of my consciousness is the huge anxiety – sheer terror, actually – the whole process invariably evokes. Will I be thrown off the Medicare subsidies? Will my food assistance be slashed – or eliminated entirely? 

Next after the annual welfare ordeal comes the physical labor of preparing my apartment for the quarterly premises inspection, the invasive procedure by which we lower-income elderly and disabled people who live in government housing are reminded – four times each year – of the extent to which we truly are regarded as worthless bums, irresponsible if not actually criminal. 

The necessary house-cleaning requires hours of bending and stooping, which for me is painful, often excruciatingly so. This in turn forces me to spread the chore out over six or seven days – the loss of another full week.The inspection itself is a proverbial snap, hardly more than a formality, but were I to leave my apartment in its usual messy condition, it would surely be otherwise. 

And even after I pass the inspection, the discomfort is far from over: recovering from the cleanup-induced back pain usually takes another three to five days, occasionally as long as a full week, once (after I badly wrenched my back cleaning the toilet), an entire month.
 
People, especially women, sometimes ask me why I don't clean as I go, so getting ready for the inspection is (presumably) less work. 

The answer is the clean-as-I-go approach merely multiplies the bending and stooping. Every surface in my kitchen is off-white – not just the stove-top and counter-tops (which I do clean daily), but all other vertical and horizontal surfaces as well: cabinets, stove, refrigerator and floors. All of these need regular cleaning. But the associated pain limits me to cleaning them only just before inspections. 

That's because I'm literally a cripple, hobbled by a bad knee and a complex back problem – multiple damaged vertebra – with both afflictions radically worsened by osteoarthritis. 

Each is the legacy of an injury. A hard fall in 1977 – I slid off a rainslick loading ramp while trying to heft an antique ice-box into a moving-van – required surgical removal of all the cartilage from my right knee. The back injury was inflicted in 1978 by one of the millions of defiantly habitual drunken drivers who characterize both the gasoline-powered moral imbecility of the United States and the desperate need of its peoples for constant intoxication to dull the anguish of their empty lives. 

My vehicular assailant had been arrested for drunken driving 19 times before he careened out of control on a busy throughfare and skidded across four lanes of traffic to broadside me in a shopping-center driveway. He was typical of the maliciously sociopathic alcoholics who routinely haunt – and hunt – U.S. streets and roads: it was only mid-afternoon, but already he was dead drunk. Witnesses said he lost control of his car because he was speeding on rainslick pavement, trying to drive and beat his wife at the same time. 

Verily, the collision itself was Godzilla versus Bambi: his 442 Oldsmobile, my (brand new) Honda Civic. The cops said it was a miracle I wasn't killed. Given the resultant disabilities, I find the miracle dubious at best.

Thinking about how painful it is to clean my apartment, it came to me this morning the kitchen color scheme in these apartments is truly cunning, obviously intended to do exactly what it does: show even the smallest speck of dirt. Thereby it forces us to keep it clean – or suffer the obvious lack of cleanliness that would facilitate eviction. It's another proof of the lower-income-seniors-are-irresponsible-bums paradigm that governs public housing. 

The same bigotry denies us gas cooking. For me – because I was never before reduced to cooking on an electric range, and because after eight years of living here it is obvious I will never learn how – denial of gas cooking means most of my food is burned on the outside and raw on the inside. 

Why don't I move? Income, pure and simple: these are the only sorts of accommodations I am allowed.

Then this year was added a new affliction: the huge anxiety evoked by a dying computer.

Thanks entirely to the generosity of my former wife and present-day dear friend Adrienne, that problem has been resolved, though I have yet to install the new machine. I remain wary because – at least in my life – all such processes are haunted by that prick Murphy and his relentless law: anything that can go wrong invariably will. 

But I'll (presumably) return, if not later this year, then very early in 2013 – especially now that Democrat Candidate Obama the Orator is shape-shifting back into Republican President Barack the Betrayer, his closeted GOPorker hostility toward lower-income people again becoming obvious in the ongoing “fiscal cliff” debate. 

Thus another of my Dismal Decembers: with Christmas only a week away, I can scarcely muster sufficient enthusiasm to snarl “bah, humbug.”

LB/18 December 2012
-30-

No comments:

Post a Comment