Product Placement

Guess I should go into depth a bit more about myself and my circumstances, just to draw the reader in deeper..

I come off pessimistic and full of anger, and I am, so that's good.. But that isn't how I live my life, day to day. I laugh at the worst news, tell people everything will be okay, the whole perma-smile thing. Tough work. Like last night.

My cousin has a cat, who was our cat for ten years, which we got from a litter of kittens that his cat had. In that ten years my aunt died so my cousin asked for the cat back. Which is fine, because just like all poor people we have way too many animals (no money to spay/neuter + extended poverty + neighborhood animals = catsplosion). So for around two years he takes the cat (Brownie), and she hides from wild children and general loud noise for the majority of that time. Now that my father died (two years ago in a tornado, but not from the tornado, from a heart attack), my cousin is living here with us again. And he sleeps on a mattress in the living room floor. And he has two jobs. And he whines all day about how broke he is while he buys new Transformer action figures every week and the dumps that he takes have more nutritional value than the fine diet (of hotdog/mini-pizza/bologna/beans/potato soup/mayonnaise-made biscuits and ancient frozen deer meat freezerburned past the point of tasting good) that the rest of us attempt to live off of. And like the class act he is, he comes here (around 11pm each night) and then stuffs his idiot face with as much of our food as possible and then he goes to bed, and bakes up a fresh goliath shit to expel the next morning before he leaves.

So the cat. The Brownie.

She's twelve, and she has a swollen cheek. This is either a)infection from a scratch or b)infection from a bad tooth or c)swelling from an infected saliva gland. Its infection, and we don't have enough money to..

.. well. Money. We don't have money for a single thing. Currently we manage to pay our land payment (460 a month) and keep electricity on. So any time you think "Hey, this could help..", think about every object or location involved in said "help". Vehicles take money to move. And tires that have no wires showing through. Appointments need a phone to call on(they went off a few days ago). I am disabled and receive a check each month, but I also have a woman and her two kids to take care of (no friends, ignorant hypocritical unhelpful parents, and any family she has that would love to help is.. broke!! Because you're either broke and good or rich and evil. Then again, talk is cheap when you have 0 dollars, just like everything else at that point). I've wanted a window screen for months now and haven't been able to get one. We have no central heat or air (and I've only lived 3 of my 30 years with it, anyway), and the box fan in my window is constantly pumping in gnats and wood roaches and wasps and mosquitos and stink bugs. And this property we're on now is crawling with centipedes, found three inside and the last one was halfway up my pants leg (on the inside, of course.). So as I type this remember I'm fighting constant wildlife :) And its a few minutes til 9:30pm and my ancient Atomic Clock (been running for over 5 years on the same set of batteries) says its 86.4 degrees in my room.

My mom has lost over 30 pounds since my dad died. Partly from working, partly from sweating, partly from depression/poverty. My brain keeps ticking back to that.. Its pretty hard to lose weight, even in poverty. Whats the cheapest food at the store? Bologna and hotdogs and potatoes and tiny pizzas that are 1100 calories each. Whats expensive? Fruit. Veggies. Meat that doesn't snap and pop and explode when you cook it, like these hotdogs do. Anything with "reduced fat" or "lean" on the label. Milk. That last list is also a list of things we never have. And toilet paper and toothpaste can occasionally be added, too. I've whittled my standards down to where if we have toothpaste, toilet paper and sugar then I'm happy. This is poverty! Wheeee!

So you can understand why people irritate me when they say "I'm just too broke, sorry.", and they have food, and electricity, and clothes with no holes, and more than one pair of shoes. You're nowhere near broke. You'd have to put a couple hundred bucks in the gas tank and drive days nonstop to even approach being broke. If I got dropped into a POW camp I'd be the guy saving everyone's scabs and lost hair so we'll have something good to eat in the future, straining urine and eyeballing who looks weakest and which ways the sun shines during the day for drying the meat out. Can collect sweat and dry it for salt to preserve Tony, too.. Hopefully I don't ever get around to eating sweat-jerked Tony with a side of scab chips, though.

But I have pinched green spots off of bread to eat it. And fried rank hamburger so brown that it already looked cooked. And ate food I've dropped in the floor. Don't get me wrong, I don't know anything about the level of hunger on the Feed The Children commercials, I'd hit a Subway dumpster before that ever happened.

Another thing.. If you think about commenting anything about "Oh, man, its your fault!", at any point, my forever response will be: "Agreed! A portion of this whole situation is absolutely my fault.". I could try harder to find some kind of extra money, despite my disability. Seen that commercial, Chase or Mutual of Omaha or one of those other things I'll never have/need, where the guy makes magnificent structures out of simple cheap toothpicks and now he's selling pieces to museums. Whether its a total load of crap or not, its true. I've seen amazing sculptures made out of plastic spoons, and shredded tires and other completely worthless and easily obtainable materials. I could try to write (or record) a book, because imagination and pen-and-paper are damn near free.. I'm a failure, and I've idled my life away with no ambition, and until recently no real fear of living on the street. Guess that changed when dad died.

Can't remember the real statistic, look it up for accuracy if you want, but I vaguely recall that something like 700,000 people go homeless in this country every year. Or maybe it was 50,000.. Hardly matters, the odds of winning the lottery are 1 in 200,000,000. The current odds on us going homeless are probably something like 1 in 2. :) If one tire blows on our only vehicle, we're homeless. And two of them are pretty bald.

Suppose that's really it. On an average day, anyone can blow out a  tire and call a friend who can either tow the car or at least aid in procurement of said tire. We have no money for a tire, or even one-fourth of a tire. Or a friend to call to help us get to a tire. Or a phone to call a friend if there were one, anyway. My sister is working at McDonalds getting over 70 hours a week, and she pays the land payment that keeps us off the sidewalk. This is her first job ever, and for over three months every check she's received has been completely absorbed by the bills. When I got my first check from my first job my dad was still alive, and though we were always poor we were never in danger of having nowhere to live.. My whole first check went to a guitar and an amp, which I promptly ignored and never learned much on. I feel sick pretty often thinking about all her money dissolving into bills, when mine didn't have to when I was her age.

My mom keeps getting turned down from Wal-Mart, which I recently learned offers no fulltime positions to anyone less than a manager.. That should be illegal. Also firing employees when they're six months to a year away from retirement should also be illegal. We moved to this place after we were evicted from our last, which was the result of a huge snowball effect that took two years after my father's death (which locked with the tornado that busted windows and the roof of our home) to finally force us out of the last place he ever lived, and the town I'd lived all but the first two years of my life in (and those first two years were spent just ten miles up the road, besides). We barely sold our 8 year old double-wide (nicest place I've ever lived) for a disgusting seven thousand dollars, sold it just a few days before they came and claimed everything on our former land as theirs.

Whole neighborhood was disturbed by the tornado, and we weren't the only people who lost our homes after the damn storm, either. The community and out-of-town/state workers came early on and helped with food and debris, but then they left, and a lot of things still remained ruined. My best example is one of the oldest churches in our town that still, today, has windows busted out and a roof patchworked with tarps, unrepaired. And they still hold service there. But no donations have fixed it. No trained professionals have volunteered to fix it. And no other church has helped fix it. I think its a fine symbol of this country. It still just barely functions, so it doesn't need fixed! It stands there on Main Street, right in everyone's faces, symbolizing (to me) both the elderly and the religious, and how no one respects either anymore.

There's a chunk of Bible that talks about caring for the widows, and save for a few different occasions, no one gives a flat shit that my mom is widowed and suffering every day.

Since then we've had to sell a lot of our stuff, which is normal. But we've also had to sell a lot of dad's stuff. Strange how when a person dies all their belongings and plans take on greater meaning. My favorite relic of my dad's is his old pocket comb that he toted everywhere with him (along with foldable scissors and nail-clippers and a small knife).. Never thought after he died my favorite keepsake would be a fifty cent generic black comb.. But yeah.. We had to sell his crossbow and target, his hunting rifle. His lawnmower. His vehicle. And then we were forced out of the last place he lived, away from the last living memories he left. The last things he worked on and bettered in this world (which is what I think the meaning of life even is: to use our thumbs and words for good, because we have the best words and thumbs on the planet.)

My great grandmother was savagely beaten by two men posing as linoleum salesmen, who then took maybe fifty bucks and then trashed the place before they left. My brother was hit from behind while riding a bicycle after school, him and two other friends, all left for dead. Almost a hundred stitches in his head, some permanent brain damage, and no criminal caught. My mom is being sued for our back land payments from the old property (surprisingly almost five thousand dollars), and though we lived here just two weeks of last year we just received the property tax bill for 2012 for this place (another 390 bucks we don't have). Electric is behind, water is behind.

So this is why I ended up in the bathroom with a knife and Brownie, and, after calculation and a couple trajectory-plotting test runs, attempted to pop the massive swell on the side of her face. Big enough that its keeping her eye on that side half closed. And my sharpest knife (held in a way so that only an eighth of an inch or so of blade was exposed) was not sharp enough. Not so much as a pinprick. Two more failed attempts (and a sick feeling in my stomach) and I gave up.

This isn't my first go-round with home animal surgery. Poverty seems to walk hand-in-hand with it. Ages ago I had to pop something similar on our longest-lived dog, Cookie. Her bubble actually popped on one poke, and I squashed out the yogurt-mousse consistency pus-foam that was inside, hit it with rubbing alcohol twice a day for a week or so and she was good as new.

When I came back to Brownie later I had a box cutter blade this time, and though I'd given up earlier I couldn't stop thinking about her suffering, but how my failed attempts were just hurting her worse, but if it didn't pop she'd die in a matter of days anyway. The internet said not to poke with a needle because the small hole would clog up and need cleared multiple times to drain it. And the skin resisted the razor, too. Even after I pulled the trimmer out and shaved a nice central zone clear. I'm sure I was pulling my punches in fear anyway, but a couple of those times I knew that it must have popped, that time. But no, in the end I made a minor cut less than half an inch long that was less like a cut and more like a surface scratch. And today my mom wasted nearly all the last of her gas taking her to the vet "for my cousin", who was under the impression that it'd cost about fifteen bucks to get it fixed (its 15 just to be seen, then 600 for the cleaning and antibiotics). What he was hoping would happen is that mom would pay for it (because he's dumb enough to think my mom has money still, somehow), and then he'd cry "Oh, I had this bill and that blah blah blah", when all he'd really done was bought more damn action figures. Yes, we should have shoved the boot of RENT OR GET OUT up his ass ages ago, but my mom won't do it. He's family, apparently, even though he doubles as living scum. If it were my house I would have booted him a long time ago. Now he's the only alternate vehicle and phone access we even have (when he's here at all, and he keeps less than a quarter tank in his car so he can always say he's low on gas.). He likes to say he's broke when he's got a jar of rolled quarters sitting right in front of you.

The only cheap vet near here said to be there around 11am to noon, which my mom was. And there were about fifteen dogs in front of her waiting to be seen too. Guess this clinic is open one day a week for four hours. In that four hours they saw two dogs, and wasted the gas and time of nearly twenty other people with sick animals accompanying them (was hot as hell today too).

So now you know a bit more about me, and the fun fun fun I have from day to day, brewing in my own sweat in a room full of mangled bugs, trying to save our oldest cat and failing, cowering in fear of one bald tire fraying a little too much and stranding my mother (who has a minor heart condition to boot) in the middle of nowhere with no phone or familiar faces to rely on. And it'll only get better! Only reason the net is still on is because its my mom's only chance to find a job now. No word of mouth for her, no gas or money to go get a paper (not that anyone uses the paper much anyway).. And the summer is only getting hotter. Perhaps now that I've got some of this self-whining out of the way I can focus more on issues and things that disgust me later on, if there is a later on :|