Here we go again.
Watch out, anyone who reads this, I'm cutting loose my rage.
PTSD runs deep in me. Starting from when my father attempted to murder me at 16 years old because he found out I am gay. I'd put up with extraordinary bullying for two years previous to my dad's horrible act, and I ended up 1000 miles from my home dumpster diving, hustling, anything I could do to survive. And sleeping in a big cardboard box I found to stay warm and dry in a hiding place in the city. I can only thank some kind people who are long dead now for helping me with a hand up.
It's been a long struggle, I've never known a "conventional" home. I live in a travel trailer now and and took blood, sweat and more agonizing times scraping and scrimping to even afford this. And I have absolute rage towards every Republican asshole who made it harder to get myself even into a modest home 40 years later.
I got badly hurt in another anti-gay hate crime in 2009. My insurance kicked me off their plan. I had several surgeries I had to pay for on Care Credit and cash. It wiped out all my retirement savings. I've started a plan again, but still have largely nothing to depend on when the time comes beyond social security retirement to scrape by on to my grave.
Every time these favor-the-rich and screw-the-poor bastards gain power, I've ended up unemployed and homeless again. End of the Bush II era my dog and I were sleeping in my car at the hot springs till I could finally get a contract, few and far between at the time.
With the last 8 years of President Obama, things finally, really, did "get better" for me. I'm finally considered an equal to the straights, finally not facing the prospect of getting thrown out of another job or another place to park my home because of some holier than thou fucker who hates LGBT.
Now I see an incoming administration that threatens to reverse all that and bring back the "good ol days" of fucking the poor in the holy name of Jeebus all over again. And it makes me sick. Literally. I'm on BP meds again, and although I'm fairly secure in my job now, I've seen changes of management that turned that security on it's head for me.
The odd part is, I often dream of how I actually felt safe, for the first time in years, hiding in a cardboard box under a freeway bridge. I knew, being far from the bullies, far from my father who would have tried again to put me in a grave, far from the same motherfuckers who I have little doubt have put the orange clown in office. The same who think it would be "christian" for me to be tortured and killed. The same who are just fucking Nazis, deep down inside their rotten souls.
I've adopted, inadvertently, some Buddhist philosophy in my life: in that the times I had nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep, and no one who cared, I had to learn to love and accept myself, as I am.
But for once in my metal box I live in now, I felt confident that things had changed for the better. I felt I finally had a place in the world and a stake in my future once again.
And then the Donald. He lied, as he constantly does, saying there is no better friend to the gays, turned right around and appointed the most greedy, homophobic, racist, unprincipled, selfish, self-righteous set of cabinet ever a nightmare could assemble.
It's never failed. Every time republicans get power, after a few years I'm homeless again.
Fuck this austerity shit.
|