One Thing Leads To Another

I hit a rough patch and stopped paying my phone bill, which included payments on three devices. After a while Sprint cut me off. I got by fine for six months or so with Google Voice, meaning my phone functions were good so long as I was in wifi. But Mom grew tired of not being able to reach me and once I felt I was crawling out of the desert a little bit, I decided to get a real live phone line again, but from another carrier. I owed serious money to Sprint but decided they could wait a while longer while I paid for stupid shit like a real phone and utilities and car insurance.

T-Mobile paid for the new device and let me save five bucks a month by going with autopay. I hate autopay but decided it was worth it. What I did not know was that Sprint and T-Mobile were merging. What I further did not know was that Sprint was now able to autopay themselves what I owed them. They took my entire mid-December paycheck and I still owe them more.

That’s no big if you have credit cards but I abandoned that shit a year ago. Other than the cash I had been paid for rent of a downstairs room, I was Flat Ass Broke.

So far so good. I had a few more bills coming so I figured I’d be proactive and use that cash to buy cashier’s checks to send off. One of those bills was also set for autopay but I figured better safe than sorry. Came back from a trip away from town to find that the autopay had been attempted anyhow and successfully paid with help from my savings, for which the bank helpfully levied a thirty dollar service charge. This is one of the many poor taxes. Banks rake in $34B per year in overdraft fees, which basically means $34B dollars taken away from people who are struggling with having enough money. Anyway, I paid the solar bill twice and lost another thirty bucks for it. That puts my bank balance in the negative, just to punish me for letting Sprint take my money.

Still, so far so good. I’m a lucky motherfucker, and I’m reminded of this every day. Tonight, Christmas Eve, I was stuck in a funk triggered in part by finding my house empty from the tenants moving out. Their move was expected, but it was the first time I’d seen the house so empty, and since I have not yet truly converted it to a place that is emotionally just mine, this seemed to add up to a relentless depression. There were a bunch of other factors too, that’s just the one I wound up typing down. Long story long, my lady love was very patiently helping me crawl out of the shit when the remaining tenant, the youngest son of the artist I once tried to live with and who is scheduled to move out at year’s end, invited her to go out for some homeless outreach.

This is what she does. She was quite impressed that this eighteen year old was preparing food to give to the homeless on Christmas Eve and touched that he invited her. So of course she offered assistance as only she can offer and I saw the obvious path out of my depression and an hour later, after picking up his friend, four of us were walking around the back side of City Hall handing out cups of homemade turkey vegetable soup.

People were bedded down in their tents and wraps and there wasn’t much conversation. But one gentleman informed us he served aboard a Navy vessel from ’92 to ’95 and tries to live on a hundred forty two dollars and twenty six cents sent every month by the government, and another allowed that he’d been sleeping rough for going on ten years, after losing his place in a home when his roommate tried to make him into the sexual being he was not and after some not unexpected argument the judge, biased by an old prison sentence, signed the eviction. I expect there are at least as many unique stories as there are people out there. None of these people are victims – no one is a victim – but they deserve better than going to sleep hungry out in the weather on Christmas Eve. There are ways to solve this and other problems. Those ways just violate the American rule against paying taxes or otherwise threatening that amorphous fantasy we call “liberty.” Funny how age and experience, by making me a caring human being, have also made me a “liberal.” I’m a liberal who wants everyone to be free to be their true selves and to return America to a country with a strong middle class and who sees liberty, as many people see it, to be an overrated myth. Interesting. Not sure where that is leading.

So, as said above, I’m a lucky motherfucker that I can be thirty dollars in the negative because I have a working phone and the lights are on. I’ll work out all this stupid money shit a step at a time. One thing, after all, leads to another.