Sunday, May 07, 2023

A shed on the side of the road

I had not been back to the Vancouver, Washington area in seven years. Was shocked at how fast and how big the hyper-gentrification of slope-shouldered "Fort" has been.

 

When I moved here in early January 2015, I experienced a) a "no cause" eviction, b) a psychotic drunk who pissed on my Toyota because he hated having a roommate and c) a power-mad little Hipster all within the first five months. My housing situation in Vancouver was like a Stephen King-inspired nightmare I couldn't wake up from.

In May, I rented a room in a basement from a Millennial for $700/month. I thought I would only be there for a few months. Instead, it was almost ten months. I was so happy when I moved out of that over-rated 'burg I practically kissed the stained carpet of the $550/month one bedroom I found.

No surprise, it's now even more expensive then it was back then.

In June 2015, in a fit of desperation I stopped at a weird weekly motel on NE Hazel Dell Ave with a FOR RENT sign. There were five tiny motel rooms planted flush to the gravel driveway. It looked like a place where junkies went to die in in the 1980s. The "unit" I was shown was a "studio" with a tiny bathroom and no kitchen, maybe 200 square feet. They wanted $600 first, last, plus a $400 no-refund deposit. And I would have had to put down a $300 deposit with the utility company for electric, gas and water. That was $1,900 just to move in. And there was a $35 application fee. I was making $12 an hour.

And everybody wonders why the homeless situation in Portland and in Washington state is so bad.

The FOR RENT sign in front of that creepy weekly motel was gone a week after I looked at it.


Friday, January 20, 2023

The Big Lie (since 1983)




 At about the 11 minute mark ...

The U.S. will hit debt limit January 26, 2023.

What’s really creepy is (the Republicans) are going to start threatening Medicare and Social Security. They will do that by saying mandatory spending – there are two kinds of spending: discretionary and mandatory. Social Security and Medicare are mandatory. (The Republicans) want to put that in the discretionary column. This is exactly what Ronald Reagan did. Reagan decided to tell you a lie, he told you the same lie in 1983 (the GOP) are telling you now. He said “Social Security and Medicare they’re gonna default, they’re going bankrupt!” None of that is true.

What is true is we need to raise the cap on salaries because up to $110,000 a year, you pay into Social Security and Medicare. After that, people who make more than $110,000 and one cent are un-taxed for Social Security and Medicare. If you make a million dollars, you only pay into Social Security and Medicare on your first paycheck, that's it!

Reagan told the same lie. He said Social Security and Medicare would be bankrupt because of the Baby Boomers by 2010. So he raised the Social Security tax by $2.7 trillion. Social Security now is short about $49 to $50 billion every year. Where did this $2.7 trillion go? It didn’t go to the Social Security trust or the Medicare trust fund, no, no. Reagan put that $2.7 trillion he raised into the General Fund. They did this so they could use the money for tax cuts for the wealthy. Now, we who are ready to collect Social Security realize that we raised $2.7 trillion not for our Social Security, but for tax cuts for the wealthy. Anything in the General Fund can be used for any damn thing that Congress wants.

Friday, November 04, 2022

A real journalist

 I've never met Bart Jansen but I'd like to thank him for just doing his job. There's so many lies and fabricated stories out there, especially with the right-wing media, it's nice to see a journalist just doing his job and reporting the facts. Fifty bucks says he got access to the police report and then called several SFPD contacts and put the story together of what really happened. This is what journalism actually looks like.

Paul Pelosi Attack Details

 

Monday, August 29, 2022

Student loans

 "I was a money-dumb trailer baby." Gawd, I love Trae Crowder.


Don't worry, I'm a Gen-Xer and none of these student loan forgiveness funds can touch the made-up, bullshit about SallieMae claims I owe.

Friday, August 26, 2022

Go away and die

 

Me on my first day in Australia. I was about
20 years younger and 70 pounds lighter.
 

It's been almost 20 years since I spent four months in Australia having the time of my life. I loved that country and I wanted to stay. But a couple years post-9/11 Australia's version of Immigration, the IMMI, was cracking down on all backpackers overstaying their welcome.

Six weeks after this picture was taken, when I was on the other side of the county in Perth, I passed a group of retirees with some tables and signs set up. They were very nice aging Hippie types and they told me they were protesting then Prime Minister Howard's cuts to their version of Medicare.

In 2003, the entire welfare system in Australia, the "dole" seemed pretty robust. They had work programs, universal healthcare, some equivalent to food stamps, etc. Nobody was hungry and the rule was 'only those lay abouts who don't want to take yaka don't work.'

Discarded: Australian Women Over 50

The global Recession in 2009 changed everything and it changed it everywhere. As usual, women over 50 are getting the shit end of the stick.

Monday, May 16, 2022

My Left Tit: Part 1

 

The appendage in question. The
receding nipple is "very bad". There's
also a weird dimple in the lower part --
all things I didn't notice until January.


On Friday night, May 6th, at about 2am I was trapped on the Hamster Wheel of Terror. 

I kept pondering the fact my Mom had been a heavy smoker. From about age five until age 19, I was bathed in a continuous cloud of second-hand smoke from her Pall Mall reds. She smoked a half a pack a night and was hopelessly addicted to nicotine. Half of our teenager/parent arguments were about me opening the windows in our apartment to air it out in winter when the temp averaged 15F (-9C). I was on antihistamines continuously from age 11 to 16. At age 15, I couldn't jog half a lap around the high school track. Take that Penn & Teller.

Weirdly, my Mom never got breast cancer despite the eternal toxin bath. She died of pneumonia and was "emphysemic as hell" as one relative put it. But still, I think her mother had gone a round with breast cancer back in the draconian 1940s. And she made it to age 67, dying seven years before I was born.

My Dad had been a smoker as well. He didn't smoke as much as my Mom and he usually smoked a pipe but there were more than a few times he drove my brother and me out of the room with his exuberant tobacco puffing. Still, summers at his house were a lot less toxic as my Dad and step-mother usually smoked outside in their expansive backyard.

Growing up in Nevada, I spent half my adolescence walking through casinos where the air was blue with second-hand smoke.

Next up on the Fear Hit List: was it some vitamin or herbal supplement I took in the past? I have friends younger and older than me -- svelte distance runners scarfing obscure herbal supplements and sedentary Millennials who never say no to hamburgers -- and none have cancer.

How about that time I worked on a Forest Service timber-marking crew in 2003? I was coated in marking paint mist for four months. One of my coworkers dumped an entire plastic bottle of DEET on his hard hat because the mosquitos were indescribable in southern Colorado. On hot days at 8,200 ft above sea level, if we didn't wear long-sleeved shirts and dowse ourselves in DEET twice a day we'd be covered in bites.

Or what about the fact I lived in a basement apartment from early 1989 until May 1991? My former hometown, Reno, sits on the east edge of the Sierra Nevadas, an area full of radon gas. And again in 2015 I rented a basement room in a tiny house in Vancouver, Washington. Was I getting exposed to radon gas then?

Anti-vaxxers just fuck right off because my left breast was put on a "watch out" situation after a slightly abnormal mammogram in March 2015. This was six years before Covid and seven years before any vaccine.

What about all the toxins I've been exposed to in all the crap, minimum-wage jobs I've worked? I remember standing ankle deep in photographic processing chemicals in 1990. Or the first time I worked for the Forest Service in 1996 and had to cut pressure-treated lumber with a chainsaw for two days? No dust masks, nothing to protect my airways or face. 

From 2019 to mid-2020, during the middle of the pandemic, I worked in an electrical engineering lab that tests aerospace parts. They were nonchalant about possible beryllium particles drifting through the sealed building. I am now the forth former employee who has developed cancer.

Or maybe it was way back, growing up in rural northeastern Nevada downwind of the covert sub-critical testing the military did outside of Fallon?

It could have been any of these things, some of them, or none. Okay that's enough Hamster Wheel of Terror.

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