Fuck your dubstep

So some updates since my last depressing blog...

Last week mom swallowed her pride and drove down to the welfare office, which is located in one of those parts of town where you're liable to get shot in the face just for looking crossways. After a grueling hour in a filthy waiting room and plenty of paperwork, we managed to qualify for food stamps. Fifty bucks a week. That's for food only, no toiletries or other amenities.

We're not out of the woods yet, but this is a good start. Once you qualify for one form of aid, it becomes a bit easier to land others. The fact that the government now recognizes that we can't afford to feed ourselves will, with any luck, serve as a primer for other potential means of financial assistance. Can't unring that bell, Uncle Sam, you fat fuck.

While this is a step in the right direction financially, it was a sobering blow to mom's already tenuous self-esteem. She went in the early A.M. before I was awake, and I find her in the morning crying quietly to herself. When I queried what was the matter, she described how terrible the place was, how rudely they treated her, and the kind of slovenly trash with whom she shared the waiting room. She glumly observed "I'm one of them now". By "them" she's referring to the chaff. The fat, gap-toothed, brain-dead, teenage mothers and ex-convicts that make our city such a jolly place to live.

Mom has three college degrees, summa cum laude in medicine. She's worked her ass off her whole life. Despite this, here she is at 52, begging the government for money alongside the types of people she's come to despise over the course of her career.

I tried to console her, explaining that it's a system she's paid into by working honestly, and now it's their turn to give something back. She perked up a bit, and even more when we went shopping and were able to afford more than cup-a-noodles. I'm still keeping a close eye on her.

Still short on the rent, which is already a week late. Our landlord is pretty nice, thankfully, and has told us to just pay what we can when we can. He's a good guy, which only makes me wish all the more that I could pay him what we owe.

Comcast, our internet provider, has cut off our service because we can't pay them. The internet I'm using right now is courtesy of our friendly neighbor lady who, like mom, has also been a victim of medical malpractice (by the same company) and has been living on disability ever since.

The cable contract was in my mom's bastard ex-fiancee's name. He stopped payments after moving out, but due to an oversight, we kept our service until now. They're owed like $300, but that's his problem. I've also been downloading tons of shit illegally and secretly hoping they would catch on and blame him. I know that's not how it works but the thought of the feds showing up at his door accusing him of being a FILTHY PIRATE in a basso tone makes me grin like a retard every time.

We're looking into new services, because we're tired of Cumcast's bloated price and sleazy business practices. Of course, our city is little more than an insignificant shit stain on the corporate communications overhead, so the service options are extremely limited here. It's pretty much either Comcast, Verizon (which is basically the same thing), or a generic provider called Clear whose most affordable service package isn't even available in our area. Not sure how we're going to resolve that one. Rent comes first.

In addition to all of this, Mom's social security shot up by some outrageous margin like 35% in the last month. So now she's paying an extra twenty dollars in taxes that won't be refunded for another 15 years, now that the state has raised the retirement age to 67. It's obvious they're trying to do away with social security all together, as they bump up the age every two years now. Mark me, by the time I'm her age, I won't see one cent for my troubles until I'm too old to breathe without a machine hooked up to my lungs.

So yeah, all of that to basically say we're only doing marginally better. Mom's apathy is starting to worry me. I find I'm doing more and more things that she's supposed to be doing, things that I'm not sure I can really handle in addition to what I have to do already for my own sake.

She does a little less every day, too tired to keep pushing that boulder up the hill, knowing it will just roll back down. I don't blame her. I have to be strong for her, but I'm not very confident in myself.