Somehow I have lost my cell phone between the driveway (where I pulled it out of my pocket because it was taking pocket pictures) and my house. I have no phone numbers, no way to call anyone, no way to find out if the land lady has decided that some human kindness + money is a better way to go than eviction.

I am fucked kids. I can;t even call any of my friends to ask help moving or for a place to sleep. Oh fuck fuck fuck

So details details.

I told you all that shit around here was about to get much worse, and so they are. About 2 weeks ago I got an eviction notice, one of the respond either with money or a legal reason why you aren’t paying your rent by a certain date kind.

So after thankfully minimal begging, my brother wrote a check to cover all my back rent, late fees, plus September’s rent.I took a deep breath and thought I was in the clear for a wee bit, at least on the rent. Two days ago I got a notice of eviction posted on my door that says I have till midnight of the 26th to get out or the police will be helping me move. Numerous calls to the owner have gone unanswered and I was a dumb ass and didn’t get a return receipt when I dropped the check off at the post office.

I have no idea idea where we are going and the Kid comes home on the same day we have to be out. I don’t have the money to rent a truck or to put my stuff in storage. I don’t know where we are going to sleep.

But I grew up in house where packing in the middle of the night and running away was pretty common. I went to 17 different schools. We moved probably 3 times a year. I’ve been in my current home for 5 years. That’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere.

Moving that many times has made me a phenom at packing and chucking. I’m sitting around my house making the mental list of the must keeps, keep if you can, and the just fucking leave its. It’s easier than I thought it would be. These walls have been closing in around me and I am almost feeling peaceful at the moment. Like zen even. Perhaps all this sadness and fear comes from trying to hold too tight to certain ideals. I wanted my kid to stay in the same schools and not always be the new kid. But his school is crap and I am seriously considering home(less) schooling him. Our neighborhood has become a scary place. We’re not going to be tied to it anymore.

I have absolutely no idea what we are going to do, but I do know what I have to do right now. Perhaps it’s adrenaline. Maybe my overtaxed fight or flight response is finally kicking in with flight instead of fight. I’m so tired of fighting. Kid and I have done this before. We spent almost 2 years couch surfing and living in our car. That is probably my biggest regret right now. I wish I could just pack up my old red corolla and drive off into the sunset for a bit. But I gave up the car when we became stable and moved in here. Oh god I love road trips. I always feel a million times lighter when I can get behind the wheel and push to see how far away I can get before I have to sleep.

So kids, I’ll be packing. But not a lot. I think it’s time to travel light.

From Kevin at Republic of Dogs (First quoting the fab RKMK at Shakes)

RKMK

What kills me is that Joe Biden is a longtime “Washington insider” (like HIllary*) who voted for AUMF (like Hillary), who dared to criticize Obama for his lack of experience (like Hillary), and is a pitbull (like HIllary), but Hillary was an evil monster who was undeserving of the Presidential nomination, or even the VP shortlist, and Biden is an awesome pick, even though she got 18 million votes, and he flamed out early.

Kevin:

WTF?

Here’s WTF, in three words or less: “Bros before hos.”

And that my little chikadees is the heart of the New Democratic party.

Thanks much to raj who posted a video in comments on the Loss of Belief post. While I don;t know that electric shock is my cup of tea (I had electric shock therapy done on my knee to help heal a torn meniscus (sp) that saved me from surgery but was horrible to sit through) it did give me a little hope. I think the hardest thing about this particular episode is that ever since the first one I have worked my ass off to keep it from getting this bad again. I’ve seen the doctors and the therapists and the shrinks. I’ve taken the pills. And I understand that it will never go away forever, I thought I was doing everything to keep it from getting really bad. It pisses me off that I’d been doing everything i was supposed to do and still got the shit kicked out of me. It turns out the chronic depression is just like any other long term illness. You can do all the things the doctors tell you and still get bad flare ups.

In other news- there seems to be a blogging for universal healthcare thing going on in random places about the intertubes. I’m done arguing with idiots about how it’s a better, cheaper, healthier way for our country. In the future i am just going to ask non- believers if they have a mother fucking Costco card. If they do, then they understand the idea behind the power of bulk buying. Universal healthcare is like Costco. You pay your membership fee to get access to the purchasing power of many people who can drive the costs done by sheer numbers. And the entire American populace is the club.

And in more news- what do you get when you mix a classist, sexist, free market blowhard with a racist, sexist, free market blowhard? The Democratic Party Presidential ticket of course. Now riddle me this my little pooh bears. If Hillary was the anti-christ for voting yay on the Iraq war and was a big bad racist, how exactly is Joe ” articulate” Biden a better choice?

Oh wait, I know this one. Biden and Obama share the core belief that women exist for ownership reasons only and that only giving money to the rich in a free market will save our tanking economy. Remember ladies and gents, it’s all about power, penis, and pussy control for the Hope and Unity crew.

Obama picks old white dude as Veep.

Oh wait. Not a surprise really.

In other news that isn’t really news- water is wet.

I have lost as much hope for the politics and politicians of this country as I have for my personal economic well being.

Wake me in 2012.

8 years ago, in the middle of my first major depression/ agoraphobia episode, I figured out that God has very little to do with how events play out in the world. I had spent my early 20s doing everything i could possibly do to be good. I worked impossible hours at 3 different jobs. I gave up friends my own age because I was a mommy, and fun wasn’t something mommies were supposed to have. I lived a miserable small existence hoping my sacrifices were enough to spare us from the horrors of poverty.

Fat lot of good that did. And as the failures kept piling up, I found it harder and harder to understand why God hated me so much. I was near suicidal. But back then I still believed there was a better place somewhere. Thoughts about slicing my wrists open were almost comforting. I had elaborate suicide fantasies concocted in my head. In the end, it was the Kid that kept me from following through. I knew that if i were gone he would always be a bit more broken inside than if i was there.

Now I am in the same dark place. But this time there is a bit of a difference. I gave up on my Santa Claus ideas about god. There is no jolly fat man in the sky who doles out rewards to good children and poverty to bad ones. I keep trying to remember that this is cyclical, that it will get better eventually. The problem is that it doesn’t have to get better and there is a 100 percent chance that it is about to get much much worse. Just like those other things we tell ourselves that aren’t actually true. There is no perfect person for everyone, people don’t get what they deserve. There is no secret divine plan or purpose for everyone. Not everything happens for a reason. Things don’t always get better. And sometimes they don’t get better fast enough.

But with this elimination of fairy tale beliefs came one other problem. I can’t think of suicide as a way out. I suppose this is actually a good thing, but it really is adding to the hopelessness right now. If there is nothing on the other side of death, then suicide becomes much less appealing. So I am stuck in this place with no out. I either get horrible awfulness that may or may not improve or I get nothingness for all eternity. Might as well stick with what you know then.

I know this is a horribly depressing post. But I also know that a large number of you faithful readers have been in the dark pit of depression yourselves. Not talking or writing about it in such gory detail hasn’t helped so far, so I haven’t got much to lose by explaining my little existential crisis. Besides, every time I try to talk to my real life friends about this they just get too sad and uncomfortable. I don’t have to look at your faces when you read this.

So I have been trying to find tiny ways to make awfulness more palatable than nothingness. Happy girl movies help some, I watched both the Sisterhood of the traveling Pants and Bend It Like Beckham today. In the next few days the shit is seriously going to hit the fan here and how I get through it is entirely a matter of luck. Wish me luck. I need it now more than ever.

ETA: I once heard someone describe people like this- depressed people aren’t overly pessimistic, they are realists. Their problem is that they see the world exactly how it is, flaws, hopelessness, randomness and all. Happy people are the ones who live in a fantasy of overly optimistic creation. Now if only I could create my own little optimistic paradise. But I’m way to much of a realist for all that shit.

I’ve had a raging migraine for about 4 days straight now. I blame barometric pressure. We’re having real storms here, not our usual drizzle. That’s a giant reason for my migraines. When I lived in the south I could tell when thunderstorms were coming long before they ever appeared. I think a hurricane could give me an aneurysm.

Moving on……….

I’ve been thinking much about the role of government vs. charity. And I may be about to shoot myself in the ass since I have been so reliant on the kindness of stranger’s paypal donations these last few months, but I believe that charity makes government non-responsive to the needs of the people. I mean why have a non-discriminatory system of services available to everyone when you can pawn the the work off onto non-profits. For example, would it be better to give money on a case by case basis to the American Red Cross for disasters or to fully fund a decent FEMA program? Is it better to have various patchwork childcare scholarships provided by churches, etc or to have universal preschool? Better to have hospitals such as St. Judes that help sick children regardless of their ability to pay, or universal healthcare that covers everyone?

That is your deep thought for the day.

Oh and rhythmic gymnasts have no bones. Those women are the most bendy people I have ever seen. More bendy than ballerinas even.

You are fucking awesome. No doubt about it.

But in further proof of my ginormous rant that gets certain sections of mommies all pissy- I am immensely fucking tired of every damn story about having a line about how your real most important job is not swimming, but mommying.

Seriously, you are an incredible human science experiment on what the wonders of proper care and training can do to the body. But we women of the world who might look up to you can never ever be allowed for one fucking second to forget that what sprung from your loins is more important than how you perform (excellently, incredibly, awesomely) in your chosen profession.

Now I am 100% sure that you are not the only Olympic athlete to have kids. Why look at our men’s basketball team. How many of them have children? But no one would ever say to Kobe Bryant that his most important job is being a dad. Nooooooooooooooooooooo. He’s not supposed to hide his desires and talent under the parenting umbrella.

So forgive me, Ms. Torres, if every time I see a profile of you I want to stab out my eyes when they get to mushy mommy crap. It’s not you. And I know that you are worth so much more than that.

Soopermouse and I are having a little youtube video battle over hiphop.
So she sent me this:

And I sent her this: Dead Prez- Propaganda

I’ve wanted to write about this story since I first saw it, but the gods of late payments intervened. So if it has already been written about in the blogosphere, forgive me.

Rhonda Tavey, a white woman from Houston, took in the kids of a Katrina survivor while their mother tried to get her life back on track. When the mother, Erica Alphonse, decided that she wanted to go home to New Orleans instead of staying in Houston, Tavey kidnapped the children. See, Tavey is a good white lady who had enough sense not to lose everything in a giant natural disaster. She obviously knows better than their poor black mother what is good for these kids. Can’t you see that? I mean their mother is black after all, and she has 5 kids. And she’s poor. Obviously a middle class white lady would be a better mother than a poor black one. Obviously she has more right to claim these children as her property, she’s white after all.

Since the dawn of colonization, white people have been stealing the children of black or brown women on the basis of “improving” the lives of the children. In this country we sent Native kids to schools far from home where any sense of their own history and value was beaten out of them. And now women of color are much more likely to have their kids placed in state custody than white women are. For the good of the children, you know.

The extremes are shocking. I was a foster kid. And I had been trying to get out of my mother’s house for years before anything was done about it. Abuse didn’t get me out of her clutches. Neglect didn’t do it. I wasn’t taken out of the house until she spent a good 6 months threatening to commit suicide while I hid the kitchen knives. I only escaped because she was hospitalized. But she was white, as long as she was physically in the house then she must not be that bad, right? If she had been brown, I probably would have been taken away much sooner for much smaller offenses. The first time she left me at school and didn’t pick me up might have done it. The first time she threw me out of the house might have done it. Any number of horrible things might have done it. But in the end it was the locking doors of a mental hospital that got me out, but only for a little while.

We take the children of WOC when all they really need to be a successful family is financial help, a safe house, an education, medical treatment for the crushing depression that comes from a life of poverty, transportation and a good job. We leave white children in places where they are kept in closets full of filth and excrement. Think about that the next time someone says we are in a post racial society. The white is right attitude that still permeates our country does actual physical damage to fragile kids of all colors.It leaves white children in dangerous situations and crushes families of black children that could be fixed with a little money and help.