Just had a cup of coffee, which makes sense since it's 4:00 a.m.
My brother is leaving for Portland, OR in a few hours, after visiting my mother for her 80th birthday.
My anxiety over what I want to write is curdling the words inside me as I try to put them on the screen.
In my inner perceptions, there are numbers of people ("too many") who are making me feel bad. I recognize that in fact this feeling has come down from? to? me from years past.
Hope changes people. Life is incommensurate with bigotry.
The smarter I get (which lately has been on a definite plateau or even in a slight recession) the more I know that I'm not equipped for struggle. Some struggles I don't have a choice about. The great uncertainty lies with the degree of material struggle that I must face as opposed to choose to face. I've lived with mixed degrees of voluntary poverty and episodes of scarcity enough to fear an involuntary return to deprivation. I really wish to acknowledge that no one deserves to be poor. Not drug addicts. Not the mentally ill. Not the unemployed or the unemployable. Not racial, sexual or gender oppressed peoples. Not sex workers or other kinds of marginalized people. One should never have to feel they're at the bottom of a well with steep sides presenting the future as a doom from which one must but cannot escape.
The fact that I have refused to help some people who were in bad circumstances weighs on me. There have been homeless people who sought my help, drug addicts, prostitutes, poor people, and while I have occasionally made a gesture towards assistance, the only sustained effort I have made has been an inner one, a preparation to help through understanding the needs of people who are suffering at a material level and possibly otherwise.
In the course of this "preparation" I have occasionally placed myself in danger of being remanded to the margins permanently or semi-permanently. People have used me for what money I do receive from the government on disability (currently $860/mo.). I have caused many disruptions and worries to other people as a result.
What I want to say before I may or may not say anything else is that needs for help are always concrete, and always in the moment, and always present themselves as such. Because of this, needs must always be met by individuals who are sensitive to others, who are kind and who are willing to be there for others. The great social disorder of our time is that such individuals almost never have any more access to wealth and resources than those whose needs they are trying to address, and probably have nearly or just as much need themselves. In fact they are the same people. The poor are the ones helping each other.
Society I believe deliberately deprives those who help and those who need help of its largesse as a means to isolate and defeat any impulse to change either their own lives, the lives of those they care about, the nature of society "at large", or the ways that you and I live with and through the other. The fact is that those who benefit from society's norms know through historical self-consciousness, philosophical and religious tradition and scientific and social scientific study that caring and poverty have a common root in the state of primitive or original societies in which there is not yet the existence of rigid social distinctions, in which each care for each, in which the survival of the whole depends on the survival of each. This appearance of plain, basic humanity is the face they have been trying to obliterate for millennia because it reminds them of who they are themselves and it threatens their interests in remaining distinct, unreachable and in the driver's seat. In other words, they want to attach so many strings to caring that the community of the poor is eliminated and all benefits flow from a source they control. They'll never be able to accomplish that because of the resistance of poor people and also because it's the universe that's in charge and within that universe their privileges, constructions and beliefs amount to change that doesn't add up to mother. They come from the same place as all the rest of us did, and will have to recognize that.
I say that I greet hopes as freeing all of us from inhumanity, which is related to, if not identical with, a lack of commonality.
I write this conclusion ambiguously because I know for myself that I am, to the sensitive, just one more insensitive person hoping to hear that everything is okay so that I don't have to worry about it, and further, so I don't have to confront the terrifying limitations on my humanity inherent in my personality. I know this from years of hospitalizations and of being otherwise marginalized, and from the very fact that I have not yet actually brought anyone out of dire straits.
Fucking pants.
Bosses feel like they need change. And failure makes life prostituted.
Maybe I can love a woman.
I don't like paying to know what I think about.
I hope you will love me. I hope you will care for yourself. I hope that change doesn't make life costly. There, that's the real me.
Pain, undue terrorism.
Home is far. I am hopeful. Goddesses find hope in teaching.
A beth plied my costs.
A knowledge of boring.
Enjoy home.
I love you.
I will tears.
The only reason the writing above may appear inscrutable or cryptic is that I need to treat myself like I'm doing what I love. I like making my money by being a part of it.
And I am contrite.
Doth change make boys? Do I know?
As you say, deal with it, I say mighty is trying love.
Money crawls out of cruelty.
Ask me, go have fun.
It's being here that I tried.
Bees hope for honey.
I treat my mother with pain and with cruelty.
I change.
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