Crise Du Jour; Shoot My Dog Please
Dec. 6th, 2011 07:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraCrise du jour dernier soir: My computer stopped holding a charge. I’m fairly conscientious about backing it up on a regular basis and we live in the Age of Redundancy so there’s a battered old iBook lying around somewhere that if worst came to worst, I could always promote to Numbah One but you know, what a drag. I really can’t afford to purchase another computer what with Xena’s death duties hanging over me. Other people celebrate the holiday season with gifts for loved ones; I plot ways to euthanize dogs inexpensively.
Turned out to be the DI-in board which is a fix I’ve done before, so here we are up and merrily running again after 12 hours of taking the damn thing apart, misplacing several of the tiny, itty-bitty screws for several hours, and visiting ravages of hysterical despair upon myself until I took myself bluntly in hand – Ubermind to Id: THIS IS NOT PRODUCTIVE BEHAVIOR – but dear God, what a drag. Of course, the computer is my livelihood. But more than that, it’s my connection to a social universe since all my pals live far so far away.
I’d given B my old iBook G4 which had conveniently died thus allowing me to ravage it for parts. He also had the tools. He also volunteered to do it for me, which I probably should have taken him up on since he’s a much better mechanic than I am, but you know pride, pride, pride.
Anyway, it was not a fun experience. And I don’t particularly feel pride in the accomplishment. Think I would have felt far more pride if I’d been able to toss the damn thing and buy a shiny new toy, done my part for the consumer economy.
###
Did you know 40 percent of New York City residents get foodstamps now? Forty percent! And they’re living in the most expensive real estate in the world. And the stock market keeps going up and up and up. There’s a serious dysfunction at some very basic level right now. Same as it always was, I suppose, and yet, and yet, and yet…
###
The Xena stuff is making me very sad. Turns out it will cost upwards of $150 to euthanize her humanely and cremate her tiny body since I really don’t want to bury her in the back yard. True, there’ve been no frosts so the ground is still fairly diggable. People are complaining that there won’t be a white Christmas this year. Fuck ‘em.
But I really don’t want to spend $150 on killing Xena when I have so many other bills that take precedent, like auto insurance, like auto repairs if it comes to that. I’m tempted to take out an ad on Craigslist: Are you a sadist? Come shoot my dog!
And just looking at her, knowing what I have in mind, makes me very sad. Look deep into my eyes, little creature! Do you see your own mortality there? You should.
“I’m afraid that anything I do to Xena will be done to me!” I blurted out to B. “I suppose it’s a crazy superstition. But I can’t get my head off it.”
“Well, it will,” he laughs.
“They don’t euthanize people. Yet.”
“Oh, sure they do. Just look at that place where Robin works. They euthanize them with boredom. And bad food.”
So true. Last time I picked Robin up, he was late and I had to hang out in the empty auditorium for ten minutes or so. During that time, two or three Shortview residents came shuffling by with their attendants. The attendants were all bored lowlifes from Groton, their elderly charges all people who’d had lives, at least part of those lives interesting or at least so one assumes. And those people walking with them couldn’t have been less interested. And all I could do watching was think, Dear God! Let me live forever or kill me before it comes to this.
There’s lots more to write but I must scuttle off and teach the Tibetans how to apply for unemployment.
In Heaven, a little blind Jack Russell will be barking furiously to keep me from entering its Pearly Gates.
Turned out to be the DI-in board which is a fix I’ve done before, so here we are up and merrily running again after 12 hours of taking the damn thing apart, misplacing several of the tiny, itty-bitty screws for several hours, and visiting ravages of hysterical despair upon myself until I took myself bluntly in hand – Ubermind to Id: THIS IS NOT PRODUCTIVE BEHAVIOR – but dear God, what a drag. Of course, the computer is my livelihood. But more than that, it’s my connection to a social universe since all my pals live far so far away.
I’d given B my old iBook G4 which had conveniently died thus allowing me to ravage it for parts. He also had the tools. He also volunteered to do it for me, which I probably should have taken him up on since he’s a much better mechanic than I am, but you know pride, pride, pride.
Anyway, it was not a fun experience. And I don’t particularly feel pride in the accomplishment. Think I would have felt far more pride if I’d been able to toss the damn thing and buy a shiny new toy, done my part for the consumer economy.
Did you know 40 percent of New York City residents get foodstamps now? Forty percent! And they’re living in the most expensive real estate in the world. And the stock market keeps going up and up and up. There’s a serious dysfunction at some very basic level right now. Same as it always was, I suppose, and yet, and yet, and yet…
The Xena stuff is making me very sad. Turns out it will cost upwards of $150 to euthanize her humanely and cremate her tiny body since I really don’t want to bury her in the back yard. True, there’ve been no frosts so the ground is still fairly diggable. People are complaining that there won’t be a white Christmas this year. Fuck ‘em.
But I really don’t want to spend $150 on killing Xena when I have so many other bills that take precedent, like auto insurance, like auto repairs if it comes to that. I’m tempted to take out an ad on Craigslist: Are you a sadist? Come shoot my dog!
And just looking at her, knowing what I have in mind, makes me very sad. Look deep into my eyes, little creature! Do you see your own mortality there? You should.
“I’m afraid that anything I do to Xena will be done to me!” I blurted out to B. “I suppose it’s a crazy superstition. But I can’t get my head off it.”
“Well, it will,” he laughs.
“They don’t euthanize people. Yet.”
“Oh, sure they do. Just look at that place where Robin works. They euthanize them with boredom. And bad food.”
So true. Last time I picked Robin up, he was late and I had to hang out in the empty auditorium for ten minutes or so. During that time, two or three Shortview residents came shuffling by with their attendants. The attendants were all bored lowlifes from Groton, their elderly charges all people who’d had lives, at least part of those lives interesting or at least so one assumes. And those people walking with them couldn’t have been less interested. And all I could do watching was think, Dear God! Let me live forever or kill me before it comes to this.
There’s lots more to write but I must scuttle off and teach the Tibetans how to apply for unemployment.
In Heaven, a little blind Jack Russell will be barking furiously to keep me from entering its Pearly Gates.
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40% on foodstamps.
Date: 2011-12-06 04:16 pm (UTC)http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/food-stamps/
My cousin valerie works for the city crunching numbers (she was instrumental, back in the 80s, in creating databases to correlate employment and ID numbers to minimize welfare fraud) and she confirmed something I've long suspected. Project housing, far from being a repository of welfare layabouts (and "welfare" as you and I knew it really doesn't exist anymore anyway, since the Clinton "reforms" of the 90s) are in fact a massive government subsidizing of labor costs for low-wage businesses like the service industry. The only way the beds get made and the coffee served in NYC when you're paying people minimum wage is if you subsidize their rent.
Re: 40% on foodstamps.
Date: 2011-12-07 01:46 pm (UTC)Re: 40% on foodstamps.
Date: 2011-12-07 03:02 pm (UTC)Really? I didn't know that.
My perspective in this is probably monumentally skewed, since it's largely informed by post-Katrina discourse, which absolutely was about cleaning out the thugs and welfare chisellers. I won't bother with the links, because I don't want to read all that stuff again either. It was some of the ugliest stuff I've ever seen in public discourse.
I don't know if this got much press outside of NOLA or not, but HUD (which had taken over management of public housing from HANO in 2003) closed every project in the city after Katrina, including the thousands of units that received no damage (this is referrenced in the plot to a couple of episodes of Treme, if you've seen it). There was some tear-gas/riot-shield action to clear out squatters who'd broken in, and residents were not even allowed back in to retrieve their belongings. When they started tearing all that stuff down, you could see people's furniture and clothing falling out the sides of buildings as the walls came down. Thinking about this makes my blood boil, five years later.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-06 11:56 pm (UTC)And 40%? Oh man, I really want to move there, but I'm scared hearing stuff like that.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 01:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 10:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 01:49 pm (UTC)