13 September 2017

Poverty Forces Me to Dwell in Subsidized Housing. This Means I Am Caged in Abject Powerlessness, Which Is Why...

there will be no Dispatches today, nor any until Sunday 17 September 2017 at the earliest.

Normally I manage to update Dispatches even during the always hellish week I also edit and produce the monthly newsletter that serves the federally subsidized, privately owned senior housing complex in which I am now imprisoned for the remainder of my life by steadily worsening poverty.

Yes it is extremely difficult to simultaneously fulfill both sets of obligations, but until now I have succeeded. It requires an utterly exhausting work-week of at least 80 hours, physically and mentally draining when one is young, deadly dangerous when one is old, but frankly I don't give a fuck because I am close enough to the grave I no longer care how I get there as long as it is not too painful.

In addition to reading and evaluating approximately 100 news items as I do for every Dispatches update, the monthly newsletter demands not only that I function as an editor but also as a writer and photographer and atop all that endure the mind-numbing clerical drudgery of typing manuscripts written by people who are even more impoverished than I and therefore will not ever be able to afford computers. Next I design the issue and assemble its texts and illustrations into a presumably attractive whole and send it off to be printed and hope – because the people who do the printing don't care whether or when the newsletter gets to its 90 readers – it is completed within two or three weeks.

All this (unpaid) anxiety and frustration kills seven days each month, but my neighbors say it serves them well, so I endure its discomforts because I am delighted to still be of some use to other humans.

Dispatches, also unpaid, is born of the same motive. It is always a joy to produce, even during newsletter week, because it not only encourages my journalistic iconoclasm but due to the requisite research also rewards my lifelong addiction to the sensuality of learning and thinking. Had I acquired enough wealth or been a child of caring parents, my lust for knowledge would surely have propelled me into academia rather than journalism, where such pleasures were far more rare but where entirely on my own I found a useful home despite the abandonment and betrayal that defined my childhood.

But this month the discomforts of newsletter week became unendurable. On Monday 11 September we the inmates of Geezer Hall were informed the state of Washington will on Thursday 14 September conduct a surprise inspection of our premises – this in addition to the quarterly premises inspections by which all our noses are rubbed in the turds of irrefutable truth that under the jackboots of Capitalism, we who are segregated from the rest of society as “the poor” and “the elderly” and “the disabled” are de facto subhuman and therefore must be regularly inspected to insure we are not somehow befouling the overpriced apartments in which we fritter away the final years of our allegedly worthless lives while we wait for the last bus on the route called Death.

The quarterly inspections are inflicted on a regular schedule, which means we typically have at least three weeks to prepare, and though the process is always miserable, I always manage to pass. But the grotesque realities of worsening physical disability also mean the chill of inspectophobia routinely invades my consciousness. To fail is to risk eviction. And to prepare for this surprise inspection we are allowed only the minimal 48 hours notice mandated by state law. As a result – afflicted as I am by midlife back and knee injuries that were always troublesome but with old age have deteriorated into painfully crippling disability made far worse (and sometimes excruciating) by osteoarthritis – I am condemned to three days torture by the agonies of the bending and stooping and twisting and turning required to ensure I pass this inspection too.

And of course this comes at a time when – due to the rebellion of domestic neglect into which I gleefully escape whenever I am contentedly occupied by meaningful and therefore fulfilling endeavors (as I usually am on behalf Dispatches) – conditions inside my apartment have deteriorated to maximum disorder: dirty clothes scattered everywhere, the sink stacked with rancidly moldering dishes, the kitchen stove spattered with food, the linoleum begrimed with who knows what, the bathroom sorely in need of a bath, and over everything a coating of pale gray ash deposited by the air-poisoning superfires of terminal climate change that rage throughout the drought-stricken Pacific Northwest.

By putting in 12 pain-wracked hours per day on Monday and Tuesday I have completed the clean-up save for the kitchen and the floors. Vacuuming and mopping the floors would take an able person an hour at most. They take me at least four utterly wretched hours including rest-breaks necessitated by pain. The kitchen – washing the dishes and cleaning the stove and cabinetry and counter-tops and scrubbing the stove-spatter off the refrigerator – will take another only slightly less painful four hours.

Yes of course I have prescription pain medication, but thanks to the federal decrees implicit in biblical medicine – treatment predicated on the Christian doctrine that suffering pleasures the Divine Sadist and is therefore redemptive – the quantity is minimal and strictly rationed.

Tonight I will go to bed hurting. I will toss and turn in doomed efforts to minimize my discomfort. I will consider myself goddamn lucky if I get even three hours of genuine sleep. Then tomorrow morning my alarm clock will roust me out at 7 a.m. I will make my bed, the requisite bending and stooping and twisting and turning inflicting at least 45 minutes of the nearly unbearable agony I routinely avoid as long as possible. That's why, any more, the only times I ever actually make my bed are on pre-inspection mornings. As a result I normally sleep in a hopeless tangle of sheet and blankets, but it is far preferable to the suffering imposed by making the bed.

After that I will doze uncomfortably in my desk chair as I await the inspectors – who may or may not number my dwelling amongst the 10 apartments they will scrutinize in each of two buildings.

Such is the crushing price of tenancy in government-subsidized housing – the inescapable and infinitely demoralizing inspection-taught lesson such tenancy means not only absolute powerlessness but the total and permanent loss of even the most minimal control over the conditions of one's life – precisely the reality I try desperately to forget because there is not one motherfucking thing I can do to change it but which, thanks to this surprise inspection, now kicks me in the balls and spits in my face and reminds me once again that in the eyes of our Capitalist masters I am at least as low and loathsome as the filth I must later today scrub off the kitchen and bathroom linoleum.

Finally, on Friday 15 September – assuming I am physically able to get out of bed and sit at my desk and run this computer – I will start the newsletter work I should have begun last Monday. If possible I'll also update Dispatches. But don't hold your breath. It may be Wednesday the 20th before my life is back to normal, and even that estimate might be overly optimistic. Hence my apologies.

LB/13 September 2017
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