I’m trying to get back into writing something every day, as opposed to cowering in existential despair, so here is your daily dose, LIVE from the cave.

More like semi-dormant and chilled.  The lovely ice crystals were on the inside of the thin windows this morning!  This building is almost like a cardboard box, but I’m grateful for that much.  The snow is still on the outside of it, so that’s something.  Cave dwellers can’t be choosers.

My fellow dweller is busy making chili to take the chilly edge off.  I’m busily trying to ignore that Neanderthal Pres.-elect and his alt-right mouth-breathers.  It’s hard to do.  He talks loud and carries a big stick.  And all those peasants with pitchforks and torches, in lockstep, heiling and hollering, are worrisome.  But we carry on.

For a cheery change of subject, it’s my oldest granddaughter’s birthday tomorrow, so here is a picture I made for her.  It’s supposed to convey hope for the future.  Something we could all use right about now.  Whatever form your secure retreat takes, may it shield you and keep you warm and safe from an uncertain future.  Cheers!

There’s this definition of caving that I encountered while caregiving for my demented mother.  Her psychiatrist (whom she had to see regularly only to have her meds prescriptions renewed, not for any actual therapy) described her bizarre behavior of shutting down and literally shutting herself up in the bathroom to just sit there like a zombie, as “caving”.  It seemed like an accurate description.  He’d be like, “So, is she caving lately?” and we’d figuratively wink at each other, while she’d be sitting right there, clueless.  Then he’d prescribe more drugs.

This post isn’t about that sort of caving, although lately I can almost relate to it.  Between the insanity happening around us, and the bleak cold setting in, sometimes I just want to shut down myself.  Also, our tiny cavelike bathroom is the warmest place in the apartment.  It has the “bear necessities”!  I’ve already got all the blubber I need to winter over in there.

Outside, snow has been coming down for hours, covering everything.  Inside, I baked this old-fashioned skillet buttermilk cornbread, and am seriously considering just hunkering down and hibernating for the winter.  It’s in my nature.  I don’t do cold, especially after working in it for decades.  I really should have been a bat or hedgehog or something.  Maybe a frog.

I’m even–the horror, the sacrilege–considering not composting anymore for the duration of our stay in Ohio, because what’s the point?  This so goes against my grain, but here’s the thing.  I dump a pile of garbage in the yard and leave the state, then they pave it over with a junkyard or toxic waste dump, or whatever.  The environment won’t improve, and ignorant Trumpsters won’t give a shit.

Starting right downstairs with the neighbors from hell.  They’re like ignorant peasants from the hills of Peasantville.  Just the safety, security, and health issues they present alone are enough to fear for our wellbeing.  Never mind the constant loud pandemonium and nastiness, day and night.  It’s like the last straw for us, trying so hard to sustain ourselves while we sit out our remaining time.  Even our peace and quiet is gone.  We feel bad for their little children, who at least have an excuse for being infantile.

But not to sound like a shrew myself [note, I didn’t say Bitch]…just trying to keep it together until we have a place of our own, with some privacy.  Just a small retreat from a world spinning out of control.  Our family and select friends will be welcome there.  That’s our humble dream of sorts.

OK, back in the cave with my bad self.

Mad World

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere

Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I wanna drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you,
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world

Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy birthday, happy birthday
And to feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen

Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me, what’s my lesson?
Look right through me, look right through me

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you,
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world, enlarging your world, mad world

Written by Roland Orzabal • Copyright © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc, BMG Rights Management US, LLC

This song seems to sum up, better than I could, how it feels, looking around me at the friends and family who have struggled much of their lives, and will suffer even more going into the coming years.  It’s hard to be positive and cheery, but I’m trying to extract glimmers of hope from the current madness surrounding us in this country.

I used to take so much for granted, but not anymore.  I realize how insulated I’ve been from the real world of real people scrounging just to have basic necessities, never mind functional, caring families.  Maybe it’s just a conceit of privileged elites to think there’s more to life than just some grueling job that pays for a roof over your family’s head, then you die.  For millions, that’s a dream that is more fleeting all the time.  Higher learning and a profession you believe in are out of reach, not even an option.  Literature, history, the arts are for rich snobs who hire technicians to do all their dirty work.  The people I live amongst now are those technicians, if they’re lucky enough to even find such a job.  I see a lot of drug and alcohol abuse, AIDS and disease.  I see dysfunction, apathy, and despair.

Now, from this different vantage point, I feel like one of the more fortunate ones.  Though my friend and I were forced to retire early due to circumstances beyond our control, we have a roof over our heads, a tiny but adequate fixed income, food to eat, and modest prospects of moving out of this depressed place into a small home of our own, near family.  Many people I know are not this fortunate.

One good friend of mine (you know who you are) keeps having to downgrade to even lower income HUD housing as the rents keep increasing, and fears she’ll end up in a slum.  Her family cares, but are unable or unwilling to realize the gravity of the situation.  It’s the fate of many aging, disabled people in our country, who worked hard, were caregivers for their own aging parents, then were forgotten and fell in a crack in the system.  Affordable healthcare is also a real concern.  This state of affairs will only get worse under this new administration.

But trying to keep it positive… I’m fortunate to have found a fellow survivor to team up with, pool resources, and keep a tiny dream alive.  Most low-income people my age are screwed.  My family has been kind enough to accept us as we are, make my partner feel welcome and part of our family, and help us feel not so isolated.  But as long as I have breath and a sound mind, I will never ask my family to take on even more burden and cost to their wellbeing and livelihood, the way my parents did to me.

I suspect this will be the face of the new reality—unlikely, unconventional cooperative alliances forming between individuals with mutual needs that can’t be met by their own families or government any more.  So many more people will be at increasing risk of marginalization, persecution, deportation, poverty, and health issues, without the former constitutional protections and safety nets in place.  It’s up to us ordinary people now to band together for mutual support and advocacy.  I see this trend starting to happen in places like Knoxville, TN, and it’s encouraging.  Whether it will build, or just fizzle out, time will tell.

Well, that’s just me trying to hold onto a ray of idealism in a bleak world.  I don’t mean to be a downer at this time of year; lord knows we have enough of that.  We all share human losses and struggles in common.  Now is especially a time to hunker down together for warmth and mutual encouragement, not suckiness.  We can’t know what tomorrows we have or don’t have, so we need to make this moment, with the loved ones we do have, count.  Tomorrow is a bonus.

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” (Danish: Kejserens nye Klæder) is a short tale by Hans Christian Andersen about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, no one dares to say that they don’t see any suit of clothes on him for fear that they will be seen as “unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent”. Finally, a child cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!” The tale has been translated into over 100 languages.[1]”

Wikipedia

Help, I think we’re stuck in a political nightmare scenario from which we can’t escape, in…The Twilight Zone.  Doesn’t the above sound familiar?  Yet many citizens appear unable or afraid to come out and state the obvious.  I think I’ve lived too long, to witness insanity on such a grand scale repeating itself, and sheep being hypnotized by it.

I have no effective say in the matter, other than to vote, and to voice my bafflement.  I hear people attempting to contact their Congresspeople just get shunted aside or ignored.  In a sane world, all the corrupt criminal stuff Trump has engaged in would never be tolerated.  Repubs would be screaming bloody murder if Dems did a fraction of same.  But we appear to have regressed into medieval times, where the feudal lord and Goldman Sachs reign supreme.

We oldsters may or may not survive the cuts to our safety nets and healthcare, but our kids and grandkids are screwed.  Any progress on human rights, the environment, etc. will be set back centuries.  I just hope one of those kids will have the courage to stand up and declare, “The emperor has no clothes!”  He and his cronies are the ones who are unfit for their positions, stupid, and incompetent.

Yesterday I had the dubious pleasure of having to visit my local Social Security and Ohio Medicaid offices in Xenia to find out if I qualify (i.e. if I’m poor enough) for help covering my Medicare expenses when they kick in next year.  I don’t make enough SS income to even pay for routine Medicare and drug plans, once my Medicaid coverage kicks out.

Great timing, eh–just in time for an a–hole Pres. who wants to screw old, poor people out of even more of the few services we paid into and depend upon to survive.  To add insult to injury, the shrew behind the bullet-proof glass in the stark prison-like waiting room was very nasty and dismissive, as if I had the nerve to politely ask questions about the confusing paperwork I had to decipher.  I slunk out of there with not much more information than I arrived with, feeling very demeaned.

I imagine that’s how how many poor people are used to being treated on this side of the figurative tracks.  It’s a real eye-opener.  And I’m one of the fortunate ones, for now.  Next year I’ll be going from the frying pan of Ohio into the fire of TN.  You just can’t beat the timing!

The best thing we can hope for the next four years is that nothing will get accomplished, because it’s all so insane and wrong.  Then hopefully people will wake up to the lunacy they’ve brought upon themselves, and vote these clowns out.  Meanwhile, we rewatch the utopian fantasy series “West Wing” as an escape–how wacky is that!

Here is a shot whizzing through Dayton recently to visit friends.  Behind the façade of festive lights were street after street of abandoned, derelict buildings, the true side of post-industrial Ohio cities.  The bleakness and poverty are depressing, like one of those dystopian scifi movies, only real.  It’s not quite Detroit, but close.  When you witness and experience this side of America after being somewhat insulated from it, it’s disturbing.  I can only imagine what four years of extreme regression will look like.

You can see why I hesitate to write lately.  But writing is one of my few outlets, so please bear with me.  I promise I’ll keep my demoralization to myself during the holidays.