This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.
Yeah, thanks wordpress, I’ll get right on that. I started this blog because I’m so fucking depressed that I can’t figure out what to do with my day. Can’t figure out why to get out of bed every morning. That’s why I started this blog, because I wanted to tell the ether world, the area outside of my home, just how nasty it is inside my head. Outside, it’s working toward 70 degrees today, after a windchill low of 9 — NINE FUCKING DEGREES — last week. How are we supposed to function with this type of fluctuation? Hard to plan ahead, eh? Today is supposed to be sunny and the sky is the color of asphalt.
Seasonal affective disorder much? It’s not the lack of warm weather, we’ve got that, the grass even needs to be mown, it’s having sunshine one day, sitting out in it and basking for a while, finding that mindful place of calm and decency, then having it snatched away from you like some kind of candy — when you’re a kid, you want the last piece of holiday cake and then your brother shoves it into his mouth with a sneer and tells you — Can’t have it, nah nah nah. We get this weather report stating it’s going to be sunny and warm. The warm doesn’t matter, the sunny does. Then the next report is about how dry our winter is going to be and it’s been raining for three days.
My stomach mimics my depression. It dances and cries out, one day constipated the next day on fire and I know it’s my diet. Being on EBT, depending on The State to supply food, as well as whatever church is handing out food stuffs, makes me have a queasy anxious stomach not driven by diet, driven more by the unwavering discipline it takes to acquire foodstuffs after having been ok with money for most of my six decades of life.
Where’s the food coming from? Can I pay for the utilities? We invested in domain names 20 years ago, they come up for renewal and are automatically added to the already over drawn checking account but to lose them is to lose something tangible, it’s who we were, we were internet designers and we didn’t get to cash in on the wealth train those out in silicon valley did, no , we were small town designers who grabbed pennies where others grabbed millions. People in small towns in the 90s went for flashing gewgaws with winking eyes instead of quality design for websites
And therein lies the source of my poverty. investing in the future when the future was not a thing I could see. Pennies for my expertise.
And I WAS A WRITER. Unfortunately, I backed the wrong horse and Popmaters.com never paid me for the 70+ book reviews I did in a year, for the 72 writers I “handled” and passed books to, and the world turned and book reviewers became a dime a dozen and they had no expertise and no editor, like me, to kick their butts and make them write well.
And so of course I’m depressed. Who wouldn’t be? I’m in my 60s living on Social Security Disability payment of less than $720 a month, food stamps, the goodness and support of a mortgage holder whose gone 2 years without a house payment, and hopefully, the State will help pay for our utility bills this winter or we’ll be without gas before too long.
We’re owed money by family members. Now there’s a statement to make everyone smile. The worst money is money promised by family. Do work in advance of the supposed payment and then find that your work is of no value and the brother will never pay the money you so sorely need to buy toilet paper and dishwashing liquid. It’s always a no show, this time, he mailed a check and then made frantic text messages all through Christmas stating his “bank account had been compromised.” Any time someone uses language that they don’t normally engage in, such as the later, you know it’s bullshit. There’s no way his account is anything but overdrawn. So he fucks us over again. The money due is once again floating around in his life, he’s overspent and his brother is not important.
I’ve engaged in a real festival of writing here. No one will ever read this and it will hang in the ether, occasionally added to by me, never discussed, and then one day, I’ll find it, on the day everything is okay, on the day Social Security granted my husband his disability, on the day the VA has granted him compensation for his PTSD, on the day we both quit smoking for good, on the day we can drive to the store by just getting into the now-non-existent car and drive there with money we have in our checking account.
The account dwindles and dies. There’s no money left for cigarettes if we wanted them, this is a good thing, it’s not negative. Smoking came from me weaning myself off of opioids about 7 months ago. I needed something to replace the drugs. I wasn’t addicted to large quantities of Oxycontin, no I just took what was prescribed as it was prescribed. Looking back to my 6+ years on the stuff, I wonder why I never took two pills instead of one, why I never had a good day followed by a bad day of oxy — meaning, overdosing on purpose for a high — why didn’t I do that? Why did I always follow orders? So very strange to me. And now today — why do I take what I’m prescribed, the Tramadol, when I’m supposed to take it, why not take more and see if it really helps rather than the little dulling of pain that it does with 100 mgs. Maybe today is the day I take 50 more mgs and the day I take a full Modafinal (Provigil) rather than half? What if I like the way it feels? What if it gets me off my butt and makes me put things away, clear away the clutter and dust and vacuum the house? I think I’ll try it and turn this blog into a diary of how much medication I can take from what is available and still function. I know I can’t take more Lyrica, I’ll run out and running out, not taking Lyrica, makes me a crazy person. The withdrawal if I’m even just late in taking it, late by a few hours, is awesomely bad. Like wondering what your name is and how to turn left to walk home.
Withdrawal from opioids was a heroic endeavor. It came from not having a car more than my own heroism. The doctor was too hard to get too, the pain contract was voided by a mistake that could not be rescinded and now I would have to spend many visits creating a new relationship with a new pain clinic to have, in my house, the kind of drugs that could, if known, cause someone to, let’s face it, commit armed robbery to get to them. The idea that oxycodone was such a negative, not just to my body but to my safety, really caused me to give it up. I didn’t want people to “know” there were such drugs in my house. At one low point, a few years ago, (not my low, someone else’s) I had family members asking me for drugs, they saw it as “I hurt, can I have some pain medication” and I saw it as — if I give it to you, then I don’t have it for myself, this causes me to suffer pain because I come up short at the end of the month. See, back in the 90s, when opioids first became really popular with arthritis docs and the like, before pain clinics, the drugs were handed out like candy.
Washington NC Historic District 