Am I a Homeowner?

Am I a homeowner?  Or does the home own me?  Still got like $65,000 in student debt, to which now is added $280,000 more in mortgage on a weenie little condo.  My household has a zany scheme to pay the condo off in eleven years, but you know how zany schemes go.  Any given thing goes wrong and that never gets paid off at all, just ends up being a permanent interest treadmill for the last owner standing.

One of these days, I’ll sell the screenplay to Gun Lemurs for a half million and knock out all my debts at once.  ONE. OF. THESE. DAAAAAAYS.

–

Floating Away on a Strange Day

Content Warnings: Homicidal Ideation, Capitalism, The Housing Market

So I’m looking to buy a house for the first time.  A butterfly just fluttered by.  What was I saying?  Oh yes.  I’m looking to buy a house for the first time or, rather, a condo – because it’s the only thing in our price range that isn’t a dilapidated pile of weirdness or vacant lot.  This search has brought me back to my hometown – not the place I was born, but the place that I spent most of my formative years, from junior high through high school, to fast food and living in attics and basements in my twenties.

I have an appointment today for viewing a place at 4:00.  It’s on a street where I used to live, a street I walked many many times.  I can remember losing some drawings there on a snowy night, retracing my steps, and finding them in a puddle with half the water soluble ink washed away.  This was the street I lived on when my oldest nieces were taken from the family by CPS and went through very bad times.

But I might live here again, in a condo this time.  I say here, because as I compose this, I am in that neighborhood.  But I want to start this story earlier in the day.  I work from home three days a week and go to the office on Tuesdays.  We’re required to come to the office on a different specific day of the week for an in-person meetingcovid spreader event once every three months, and that happened yesterday.  So my laptop was packed up in a bag this morning and I didn’t feel like unpacking it just to do a half day – I also have Monday off because of a doctor’s appointment – so I took the whole day off from work.

To save a little dosh I took the bus instead of an uber.  The first step of that trek was a fifteen minute walk along a busy thoroughfare in my grey smear of a suburb, no sidewalks.  Across the street is the chamber of commerce building, which is in the bottom of a paved ravine for some reason.  The sign looks like it’s falling, because it’s on the ramp down to that pit.  It just struck me as a fun metaphor for capitalism, especially contrasted with the side of the street I was on.  There is a vacant patch of land that is, for the moment, overgrown with trees and high bushes.  There are trails there, not unlike the trails deer create as they push their bodies through the woods, but these were created by homeless humans, of the losers in our shitty game.

I’m a different tier of loser in that shitty game.  The cost of rent here is jumping so quickly that the only way to have any hope for the future is to buy a home fucking immediately.  High as interest rates on home loans are, it will be the equivalent of taking a two hundred dollar rent hike one year in exchange for not having a hundred-plus hike annually forever.  I’m finally in a position to make this happen.  Five years ago I wasn’t, and prices then were half what they are now.  It’s kind of miserable to see what I missed out on.  Anyway,

I got on the bus, took it down to my hometown, got off at the transit station.  A little old lady – probably not ten years older than me – was trembling on the platform, in the bright sunlight.  I smiled at her through my n95, hoping in a moment that my eyes had been smiling.  Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have done that, because she had some words for me.  I can’t tell if she was begging for change or telling me I’m gross, because her language was a mysterious babble, inaudible above the noise of train tracks and freeway nearby.  Even though there was plenty of room for her to sit somewhere else or move away from where I was sitting, she just stood there, trembling away, a few feet in front of me.  I got uncomfortable of that awkwardness and moved myself to another bench.

The bus from the transit center to my old neighborhood runs half hourly.  Could be worse.  There were just a few people on it, cute-looking gay &/or polynesian mans, and they got off before I did.  Then I was there, on the street of my grody late childhood.

There are a lot of mobile home parks down here – more than I remembered.  The tree where our siamese cat got stuck has been cut down, and the fence hole we used for a shortcut to the 7-eleven had been sealed up, and covered with bushes.  I got to the place too early, and so I set out to time how long it takes to get from the condo we are considering to the nearest grocery store and park.  Spoiler, twenty-five and twelve minutes respectively.

Along the way to the grocery store, there’s a spot where you can turn left or right.  Right keeps you going towards the grocery store, left now leads to a private freight road that wasn’t there when I was young.  But also in that direction, there was once a way you could walk down to the river over some rough rocks and thorny bushes, and I wanted to see if you could still do that.

That was a mistake.  It’s private property, but you can tell it’s never attended by anybody.  The sign says the police are contracted to enforce against trespassers, but where were the cops?  Hell if I know.  The fence was smashed down around some mossy boulders.  I went inside.

The way down to the river was just clear enough that I could tell people still used it regularly, but it was grown over.  Based on the vines I suspect nobody had used it for at least a few days.  It’s a twisty hike through blackberry bushes, bamboo, spider webs, fallen logs, abandoned mattresses, emptied beer kegs and cans, used condoms, syringes…  All the good things in life.  When I reached the water I could see that it was white for some reason.

The last time I went down there I was probably seventeen?  There was a lot less overgrowth back then, and you can see garter snakes slipping in and out of the boulders on the hillside.  Around that time my sister got pregnant, and I knew she was going to destroy the life of any child that she gave birth to.  For years after she proved that to be true, I used to (creepily) tell people that I should have brought her down to that piece of river and put a knife in her heart.  Prebortion.  I never did that, so several lives were ruined, and my own was spared.  I used to regret that more.  Note: If your siblings have counted not murdering you as one of their life’s regrets, you done fucked up.

I crawled out of that disgusting patch of land, all my preparations to look presentable gone to waste.  The spider webs glued all sorts of strange things to my new black pants and they won’t come off.

I walked on this hot shitty day to the local grocery store.  It had changed from albertson’s to safeway, and the AC was not adequate to cool me down after all that exercise.  Sticking my head in every cooler and getting it misted in the produce section, also totally useless.  I went looking for a restaurant with adequate AC, hit up the mcdonald’s and the subway, before I settled on a Mexican bar & grill that was one of the last businesses standing from my youth.

The counter was sticky but you could get cold beverages and it was on the shadowy side of the strip mall, so cooler than the franchises in the front lot.  I watched a rebroadcast ladies soccer game from several years ago and consumed a few non-alcoholic margaritas before I set out again.  Now I’ve timed the trip from the condo to the nearest park, and I’m laying on a metal bench in a large gazebo…

Coming back to this post after having toured the condo and come home, and having put in our bid.  It’s got central AC and the price is as right as possible given the circumstances.  If anyone outbids us though, we have to keep looking.  No wiggle room in our budget.  I feel partially cooked, even without significant sunburn, like I’m on a grade to the status ailment “sweet juicy meat falling off the bone.”

Eager for this journey to reach an end.
–

Conservatives are Boring and Predictable

That bitch dobnal trunk is saying if u don’t vote for him democracy goes bye-bye, when any emeff with eyes has known for years now that if creeps like him or desampnis win, democracy does indeed go bye-bye.  Just another predictable predictable predictable case of right wing projection.  I’d ask if these fucklords could get a new script but they’d probably start communicating in monkey torture videos and christian music.

I tried to post a fun cheesy music video from the ’90s today and in googling “paul stanley chest hair” i had to find out about “paul stanley regurgitates christofascist-filtered terf talking points.”  If you’re gonna be a gender non-conforming transphobe, Paul, why doncha come up with something more original?  Like, “trans people are gonna take over the world with dubstep and use the cis for slave labor on the rings of saturn.”  Oh, I know why you didn’t do that.  Because you’re a boring and predictable conservative doing the most obvious shit humanly possible.

Fucking off now.
–

Delusion Collapse

So that sense of reality overtook the optimism I was feeling fresh out of surgery, before the two ambulance rides to the emergency room and my subsequent back problems.  Realistically, I’m not going to be able to accomplish shit with this time off from work.

That’s always depressing when reality gets in the way of inspiration.  I’m not feeling so hot.  I can barely wipe my ass in the state I’m in.  How is your week going?

–

The Don’t-Be-Fired Button and the Human Floppy Disk

In my youth, I once briefly worked a job where there was a button you had to press between every transaction.  If you didn’t hit that button, the previous transaction would be added to the current, which could result in you paying out a lot more money than you were supposed to.  I could not consistently remember to push that button, and cost the company more money than I was owed in wages.

At roughly 5 AM today, I awoke with a profound feeling that I had to become nothing more than a data storage device.  That I was a glowing white folder in a computer’s graphic user interface, and that I was containing files requiring some kind of work.  I could not, for the life of me, figure out what kind of work was needed.

In my job I sometimes handle electronic messages in a proprietary interface that is a little more awkward than modern email.  You have to label messages according to priority, make sure they’re headed to the right component code, set the request and “tickle” date, and other annoying little shit.  I figured that I needed to do this kind of work to the files within me, but I didn’t know how.

My current employer has a potentially adversarial relationship with people applying for certain benefits, and it was also unclear to me if some of these files represented me as an applicant or as a claim processor.  These files were just words in a void, important but unprocessable.  Stifling.

This persisted for at least a half hour.  During this time I have also been trying to work up the will to risk injury by changing the position of my body or getting up to go to the bathroom.  At about 5:45, Hecubus placed a single paw on my belly and bore down within a few inches of the site of my surgery, stirring me from my uncomfortable reverie.

This feels worth remembering, although again, I’m not sure why.

–

Should mostly conscious hypnagogic states be tagged as Dreamposting?

Edit:  I never connected the first paragraph with the rest of the post.  Now I can’t remember what the connection was, not precisely.  I’m unwell, my fellows.

a lil outpatient procedure, nice and easy

…and I went back to the ER for a truly hellish experience shortly after midnight, not getting home until now at 5:00 a.m.

if u happen to have a CT scan after abdominal surgery and nobody tells you anything about the results, you might want to ask them if they saw blood in there. if they did, do not try to lay flat on your back for a few days at least.

it seems some loose blood from the surgery lapped gently against my diaphragm, triggering spasms that felt much like what you would imagine of a heart attack, only more violent.

kinda like my chest tried to rip itself apart, followed by spasms in a heart-sized area and seeming to follow a heartbeat, during which pain was truly extreme and breathing was not possible.

over the next fifteen minutes the spasms grew further apart and more faint until they stopped, but yeah, somehow I missed a few very important memos about possible side effects of this surgery.

i try to sleep now.

–

Sweet Lovely Death

Content Warning:  Suicide.  Death stuff.  But I end on a positive note, I swear.

“Sweet lovely Death, I’m just waiting for your breath.  Come sweet Death, one last caress.”  That’s Glenn Danzig lyrics in the Misfits song “Last Caress” – at least, it’s every lyric that isn’t an admission to terrible crimes committed in pursuit of a violent end.  I’m no music expert, but there’s something exultant in the sound, the way it’s sung, that just makes me want to sing.  Is it in a major chord, contrasting with the descending punk rock ghost vocal style?  Some scholar could easily explain it, I’m sure.

But besides the music, there’s the message.  Singing of death as a thing of desire, like the central theme of Grave Pleasures / Beastmilk‘s oeuvre.  “Death is beautiful, death is the meaning of life.”  What do I find appealing in this?  I suspect it’s the blasphemy.

Blasphemy is one of my earliest passions.  Christianity got my motherfucken goat at a very young age, and as soon as I discovered hollywood-flavored satanisms at a later age (early double digits, and think it was the Tom Hanks Dragnet movie), I fell in love with it.  To insult god and jesus, this is my highest sacrament.  See that?  I just heresied in my blasphemy.  Fantastic.

The appeal there is complex and multi-layered.  There’s iconoclasm – the joy of hating on something other people love, which is the primary appeal of Neil Cicieraga hits like Baby.  There’s taboo – violating boundaries that others have set as “sacred.”  But those are all negative and I don’t think my joy in blasphemy comes from a purely negative place.  There’s something positive in staking out a place for godlessness in the oppressive atmosphere created by ameriKKKan xtianity.  Blasphemy is absolutely as important to me as prayer is to jeezis people.  I need it.

Back to the thesis, blasphemy is to xtianity as death is to life.  There’s an obvious difference between jeezyism and life itself.  One has intrinsic value and desirability, the other is an abject waste.  So why would it feel pleasing to blaspheme against something that is actually good?  Life has its downsides and they are pretty egregious.  Danzig has another song from his solo career called “When I’m Tired of Being Alive.”  That’s a thing that can happen.  Everybody who is born will experience pain, suffering, disability, and a bitter end.  Better to have never been born in the first place, for many of us.

But antinatalism – the rejection of procreation – can rouse jumped-up fearful reactions, even from otherwise reasonable people.  It’s an ethically perfect proposition – create no humans, create no human suffering – but logic flies out the window when people are confronted with it.  For the record, I don’t agree with antinatalism, because I don’t think logic should dictate everything we do, and I have a fanciful dream of the human species living and loving its way into some kind of golden future (after the millennia of unimaginable horror capitalism has guaranteed to us).  But I can’t argue against its logic, and I understand that its most heartfelt proponents are people who have experienced far worse things than I have in life.

People have a similar reaction when somebody commits suicide.  The rejection of the gift of life is personally terrifying.  Some react with anger.  I think that was part of my own process when Kurt Cobain did himself in.  I was young.  Suicide is sad, but to take it as a personal offense, or some kind of harrowing existential experience for yourself as a bystander?  It’s irrational nonsense.  It’s letting the fear of death make a fool of you.

Unlike crustyannity, life has great self-evident value, to the point one could argue it is truly sacred.  When something is sacred, part of me just wants to thumb my nose at it.  I’m not suicidal.  I love being alive.  But in a moment of embarrassment or humiliation, you may catch me saying “kill me fam” or similar things.  In times of prolonged stress and difficulty, I may long for some kind of annihilation of the self, perhaps through drugs, or just getting knocked into a coma.  But those are passing fancies, nothing in the face of my lust for life.  Still, there’s something in it.  A grain of a death urge.

There is a black hole at the center of the galaxy.  There is a spinning cosmic abyss promising the end of everything, dragging us with invisible arms thousands of light years long.  Step inside, lose all thought and all pain.  It is inarguably cool, like a skeleton on a motorcycle with a sword in its teeth.  Die.  It’s fun and easy.

When you see people defending morbid interests, like true crime buffs, they sometimes invoke another idea – that looking upon death unvarnished can give you a greater appreciation for life.  Maybe it’s something like that.  Howling at the moon.  I don’t know, but it does feel good.

At least until I’m looking at the real thing.  I’m not one of those murderpedia/faces of death -type motherfuckers, or even a true crime bitch, because this shit only works at the level of the aesthetic.  I’m an enemy of death in any way I can be, at the end of the day.  It’s rather impertinent of me – death will ultimately take away everything that ever bothered me about life, and I should be more grateful.  But I’m not.

I’ve been watching that Superman & Lois Lane TV show, and this season is about Lois Lane having cancer.  Perhaps because I’m watching it in the middle of the night when my emotional defenses are worn down, I have gotten close to tears a few times.  Why?  Last year I had stage one colon cancer.  Picked up several new abdominal scars, but never had to do chemo.  Just had the followup colonoscopy and no new polyps.  Fantastic.  But I got to look at that motorcycle skeleton, and the real thing was not so fun.

Like Michael Hutchence said in New Sensation, “there’s nothing better we can do, than live forever.”  Live forever, kids.  And in the meantime, if you wanna howl in a graveyard at midnight from time to time, I won’t tell.
–

Cat-egory Errors Explained?

You may recall I have occasionally treated my boyfriend like a cat, in moments of unconscious error.  Today I almost put cat food on my own plate.  Perhaps, rather than seeing my boyfriend as a simple animal, I see all humans as socially interchangeable with beasts – myself included.

OK, that doesn’t explain why, but at least it looks less like I’m demoting my lovin’ man to domestic creachur status.

Corvide continues.  Paxlovid NyQuil and DayQuil are surely helping.  Science suggests the vaxxing helped, and as bad as it’s been I have to imagine I’d be dead as fried chicken if not for that.  Still, no alternate universe view of me being foolish enough to antivax for comparison, so I admit room for error.

I spilled pop on my computer so this was made on a phone, slowly and painfully.  I won’t post much til I get that resolved.  Also not answering comments much, but thanks for the support, really.

See y’all later!
–

The Covid has Landed

Diarrhea starting last Thursday, sore throat Sunday, cough starting today at around five AM.  My workplace has been making us come in one day a week and I forgot my N95 at home for that one lousy day last week.  I held my hand over my mouth until I could double-mask with the freebies they have on the bus, switched to an N95 at work.  The complimentary ones are a defective batch which some geniuses stapled so the straps have to go around your entire head instead of the ear.  I had to modify the straps with scissors to make it fit.

Or maybe I got it from the person my boyfriend’s mom works with, who came in to work with a cough last week.  Who can say?  All I know is this – I haven’t coughed in years now, and since I started coughing again, that shit is mightily unpleasant.  I will never ever be without an N95 in public again.  I also have to reschedule my surgery and other procedures, but the donations will still help – I’ll have to take off the same amount of time whenever I get these things done.  Thanks to those who contributed.
–

Covid Inbound

EDIT: THE FUNDRAISER IS OVER.
Stretch goal reached!
Look for my rap video, most likely before the end of the month.
O___O

 

Somebody in my household just blew hot for the Creepin Crud.  The Corvide.  The 2019 Gift That Keeps on Giving.

There are three of us.  One is fortyish and too disabled to have a day job, one is 65 and  works in an office five days a week, and there’s me in the middle at forty-six, working in a mostly empty office one day a week and telecommuting another three.  Our resident senior citizen, unfortunately, had the largest exposure, works with covidiots plague rats (forgot my policy), and brought that stuff right home to us, breathing in our grits relentlessly until the hot test less than a half hour ago.

So we’re pretty much gonna get it, and I’m probably going to have to reschedule the procedures I have scheduled for the 25th and 27th of this month.  Vexatious.  Tempted to be pretty fucken mad at our senior citizen because she is a lot less conscious about keeping her mask on than we are, but she can’t help being a dingus, and she does mask more than most people in the USA right now.

I’m hella PO’d tho.  As ever, motherfuck the United SnaKKKes for treating the pandemic as a chance to practice capitalist medicine on the rest of the (more) civilized world, squatting over the medicines like dragons on gold, guaranteeing this will go on forever and ever.  I never stopped masking.  I surely never will.  But will that keep me from getting covid?

Fucking of course not.  Still worth it to lower viral load and minimize long-term symptoms, but yet another reminder you can do everything in the world to take care of yourself and your people and still get taken the fuck out by the scumbaggery of others.
–