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
-30-
