Yeah, ok, I am depressed. I know that and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. My mother just died, business and my income are dead, and I am about to become homeless and, from the way it sounds, unemployed to boot. Yeah, I'm depressed. When I am depressed I am cranky. Very, very cranky.
But I swear, if one more person wishes me a Happy New Year I am not going to have to worry about a place to live because I'll be going to prison for choking the life out of them! What an inane thing to say when the economy is in the toilet, unemployment is rising, and pretty much everything everywhere is totally fucked up.
Happy New Year? You have got to be kidding me. How about I hope we all survive the new year? That would be more appropriate. Or, I hope we all get to keep our homes and jobs in the coming year. That would be good. Or I hope we can eat every day for the next 12 months. That would work. But happy? Not likely.
I decided that the best thing that I could do right now is just spend the remainder of this evening secluded away in my truck away from the babbling idiots and their "Happy New Year" bullshit. I bought a six pack in the truckstop, which I can't afford and will have to skip a meal tomorrow to cover, and will sit here and watch the crappy new year come in with a whimper while I consider the alternatives to this shithole called a life.
Don't feel sorry for me as it could be your turn next. The way things are going most of us may well be in for a very rough coming year.
The thing that bothers me most is the timing of all of this. The car wreck wiped out what savings and other assets I had as I spent over a year recouperating. I pretty much lost everything I had from that, but I was able to work again and felt good about that. I figured that as long as I could work I could always get back the things I had lost. But now, just as I was starting to get caught up a bit to the point that I just might start making a little forward progress the economy goes to shit and I am now back where I started.
That's the part that really smarts. I have been working my ass off since I was able to return to work and it seems that at every turn something has happened to set me back. As soon as I start saving a little money something comes up that forces me to deplete that. As soon as it looks like I finally have a place of my own again and can work towards paying it off quickly and can call it mine, the shit hits the fan and I can't be sure what's going to happen with it. As soon as I feel like I can comfortably count on eating every day the rug gets pulled out from under me and I can't be sure when I'll see my next meal.
The term 'working poor" never made a lot of sense to me until now. Now I understand exactly what that means because I am living it. I always prided myself on never being out of work (unless injury or illness prevented my working) and always being able to provide for myself. It seems that ever since that accident took me down I have never been able to fully recover from it no matter how hard I have tried.
I have sometimes pondered about that accident and wondered if I hadn't actually died in it and just didn't know it yet. I know I sure as hell don't have anything one could call a life, so maybe I did. Maybe it's time to accept that fact as it seems doing otherwise is proving to be futile.