Hey everyone, welcome to another AfterParty, I’m your suave and debonair host, let’s chat a bit!
In my last AP I talked about having been quite “up” mentally for a sustained period, which was nice, but it had sort of leveled off a bit. The day after that dropped. I had a few things hit me that brought me down pretty hard for a bit – primarily, the absolutely undeniable evidence that my long-held (and long-confirmed, but not concretely) suspicions about where so much of the ongoing pressure against me – which dates long before Facebook or this site, back to the late 90s for the most part – was coming from.
I’d have rather been wrong, frankly, and the ensuing mental conversation really dragged me down for a few days, back in the ol’ depression soup of wondering whether any of this is worth doing in the first place, the usual drill. I was hoping it wouldn’t get that far at all, but as anyone who’s struggled with mental illness will testify you’re not always in as much control as you’d like to believe you are.
The good news is I’m slowly pulling back up – in the end there’s nothing I can do about any of it anyway, all I can do is keep being me and moving forward as best as possible with the tools I’ve got. I figure if I was gonna be out for “revenge,” that’d be about the best version of it anyway. I’ve written elsewhere about this in more detail, and don’t want to get deeply into again, just offering it out as a way of apologizing for being rather unproductive over the last week, including being a day late on this newsletter.
On the up side I got the renamed “Morning Message” out with proper video & podcast today, and hopefully my sleep schedule will start working backwards a bit so the whole “morning” thing doesn’t get too ironic. I suspect it will, but right now I’m still in that “I might just get caught up in something an then suddenly realize it’s 3am” mode so I don’t want to make too many promises, but I think I’m on the road back to at least baseline productivity.
Also dropped a pretty significant Medium article a few days ago. I tripped over a huge botnet/psyop nest on facebook – because they kept shoveling it in front of me so I couldn’t ignore it! – and started trying to ignore it only to find it was EVERYWHERE. Millions of people following hundreds of pages spamming from dozens of websites, etc., all of it either anti-democratic propaganda of some kind or glurgey sappy nostaligia and “aww cute” and ‘WE LUV DA SOJERS’ stuff crafted to catch folks who maybe aren’t caught up on the way the world’s information has shifted in the last ten or twenty years, get ’em following, and then start pushing them a little at a time.
“The good old days!” That pulls a bunch of people. “When women knew their place and other people weren’t so uppity!” that loses a bunch…but you know the ones who are left are well-primed to be receptive to manipulation through bigotry and ignorance and fear, and we’re off to the races and pretty soon we’re reposting leftist satire as right-wing news and people are falling for it like autumn leaves, working themselves up into a torches-and-pitchforks froth of xenophobia and bitterness, and pretty soon it’s that damned gub’mint and we oughta. So that whole story’s at Medium and needs daylight, it’s an obviously coordinated foreign influence op being given a rocket-fuel boost by our buddy Da Zuck.
So.
A few months ago I was living in a hotel room, day to day, all my stuff in bins, no vehicle, no escape, and little hope. Now I’m in a home with a room and a desk and a computer connection and at least a rudimentary work environment. How that happened is another one of those “holy crap, is this my life?” moments that have so famously followed me around over the years.
I’ve told the story in the past of why I was never a Jack Daniels’ drinker, but it’s been a minute. One night when I was fifteen, I went out with some friends and laid hands on a fifth of jack and a three-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and proceeded to slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it 1985 rock star style until I was absolutely beyond drunk. Only a couple of memories of the night at all – one of tooling down the road in front of Upjohn’s world HQ in my buddy’s Pinto wagon, one of continually trying to unbutton another friend’s shirt, but other than that the night is and has always been a blank.
Since then I’ve not been able to stand the taste of any kind of whiskey or bourbon or scotch.
Naturally as tends to happen that group of friends drifted apart, life went on, and so forth, and now I’m living in a hotel just one bare fingernail from falling off the cliff forever. I had at least had the presence of mind to join the chain’s rewards program, so I was building up loyalty points good for rewards like free or discounted room prices.
It’s like a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m out of money with no sign of any coming in soon. I’d already had a miraculous amount of help – I stayed in that hotel for a month! – and the proverbial well appeared to be dry for the moment.
I walk down to the hotel office to start the process of cashing in my points, and as I’m standing there talking to the hotel clerk I thought I barely heard someone say my name.
There’s zero reason for this to happen. Nobody in this place even knows my name except the desk help, and they’ve likely not even noticed it. I glanced around, didn’t see anyone I recognized, and turned back to the clerk, set my arrangements, and started walking out…and I heard my name again.
I turn around…and it’s the girl whose shirt I’d been trying to take off thirty-seven years ago. Hadn’t seen or talked to her since probably early 1987 at the latest.
We get to talking, “what are you doing here” “what are YOU doing here” etc. Long story short: she was working on the side because she’s on disability with a terminal cancer diagnosis, stage four in lungs and brain. Super sad. But also, she lives alone and has a spare room and pretty much needs someone to be around to call 911 in case she collapses unexpectedly or something, and heck yeah it’d be a favor to me if you’d move in. Don’t even worry about rent, don’t worry about getting a job or any of the rest of that crap, do what you can, but I just need someone around like right now and it sounds like you’re a perfect candidate.
Here’s the kicker. You hear “stage four terminal” and think oh, wow, that’s tragedy, aren’t you worried you’re like, taking advantage or something? Thing is, in terms of health she’s ridiculously fine. She had collapsed back in August and at that time the ER docs gave her like…weeks. I ran into her in March and wouldn’t have known any of that to look at her. Still don’t. And she’s one of those types that’s not gonna just sit around waiting to die just because someone said she was gonna.
So now I’m living here, helping out around the house, being a friend, and finally being allowed, in good faith, to have the time and space I need to actually work, rather than the series of bad-faith attempts to exploit and leverage my powerlessness in one situation to gain further power over my in the guise of “helping” (but now you owe me). We’re not in any kind of relationship or any of that stuff, but our past history definitely helps overcome the gap between in terms of “knowing each other,” we’re both still the same people just older, so it’s a sort of neat combination of being friends and strangers.
And that, assembled guests, is the deus ex machina that probably saved me from being on the streets. I had another day and that was it – no money, nowhere to go, no way to get there.
That is why you’re seeing such a sharp spike in my work lately. Took some weeks to get my head adjusted and out of the horrible farce of existence I’d been in for two and a half years in that damn boarding house, but once that started lifting things started flowing and other than the bump last week really have been ever since.
I’m still not by any means affluent, but I have a stable roof over my head (she owns the house), and her day gig (which she went back to out of boredom) is in industrial food service so even though I have almost no money I still eat. This is extra bonus because it allows me to focus on putting support from folks like you toward my work, rather than just toward trying to keep my dumb ass alive for another day! It’s still a struggle to keep up just the bills associated with the low level or work I’m doing now – Adobe, Microsoft Office, the autoposter for the websites, various other little bits and pieces. And of course my roommate’s diet is pretty limited so I’m eating a whole lot of chemo patient safe food, but on the bright side I’ve also lost almost forty pounds since I’ve been here, from the last time I weighed in at the doctor when I was at the old place. I was 253 there, I think, and right now I’m around 215. Supposedly 197 is optimal; we’ll see if I get that far and what it looks like.
So that’s my little story for the week about how life’s going backstage here at JH Central I’m going to go ahead and set this public at the normal Tuesday Noon next week. For now as always my many thanks and unspeakable gratitude for your ongoing support, and keep an eye on the website and other platforms for ongoing new content including the newsletters plus more on the multi-part content I’ve already started and whatever comes up between now and next time!
Oh, hey. Check out this old song that has absolutely no right being as awesome as it is! You can’t imagine how much this was my favorite song when I was like…three.
Love y’all, see you soon.
