Poor, Forsaken ’96 Hondas

Poor, Forsaken ’96 Hondas

               Things aren’t going so great in my hometown.  There were fires and some people died and a bunch of people lost their homes.  I thought the homeless problem was bad toward the end of the Bush years what with the housing crisis.  Things got steadily and increasingly worse as Obama sat back and did absolutely nothing productive to help anyone, at least not in my hometown.  Fuck man, you’d think bombing the shit out of the Libyan people to keep Gaddafi from going off the dollar standard and investing in gold would’ve helped out a bit but no dice.  And now what with the combination of things basically staying the same (aside from the price increase in canned goods and other food under Trump, the fuckin’ prick) and the fires, there are more homeless people than ever before.  Gentrification and natural disasters are a recipe for, well . . . disaster.  I can’t tell you how many homeless people I’ve recently shared kind words with, thrown a couple bucks to, or given the hug they so desperately need.

               But as with any tragedy, things are much, much worse than they appear.  I was just noticing it as I drove down to the liquor store today.  I had to go to the South end of town to avoid seeing this girl who I think might slit my throat at any second.  This psychopath assaulted me the other day and I’m not in the mood to die just yet, fortunately or unfortunately.

               So there I am, approaching one of those lights that take for fuckin’ forever to change that all the dickweeds run when they’re making left hand turns and I stop for the yellow – I don’t want to take the risk of some desperate mid-50’s loser or some over-privileged, rich, half-white kid who’s still going to school majoring in fucking sociology at the fucking JC to come slamming into me at 28 miles an hour so he or she can try to tell me that it’s my fault.  I could’ve made the yellow light, but who gives a shit?  I was feelin’ alright today.  I wasn’t in the mood to lose it all a week away from the Super Bowl (go Eagles – I know you can do it, Nick!) just because no one in this town has the patience to act as a witness or the moral courage to stand up and do the right thing.

               Right.  So I’m sitting there at the light and I just notice this person in a ’96 Honda waiting in the left hand turn lane opposite from me with the paint peeling off.  And I start to scratch my head and wonder why the hell it is that I see all these goddamn late 90’s Hondas all rusted out with the paint peeling off?  The guy pulls away, and I continue to wait at the light (these fuckin’ stoplights take forever in this town man, I’m telling you) and I start to think about what that poor sucker’s life might be like.

               He’s probably living paycheck to paycheck, working some shitty customer service job.  He stands there and gets treated like shit by his boss, the other employees, and the customers don’t notice or give a shit about him.  Even if he had the strength, the fortitude or the smarts to work in some manufacturing job, all that shit was thrown overboard, literally overseas by Reagan-Bush-Clinton with their fucking free trade policies and union-breaking bullshit back in the 80’s and 90’s.  No wonder fourth-wave feminism exists as it exists today – all the women of my generation have no idea what it’s like for some drunken, violent father to come home and beat them because he just had 6 drinks at the bar in two hours because he’s literally breaking his back for his cheating wife who’s fucking the mailman and making him raise children who aren’t his own, this imaginary father figure who doesn’t exist anymore who was hit by his parents in an era when everyone thought that horrible shit was okay.  I’m not saying the old days were great or even good.  But I guess back in those days that drunken father working a manufacturing job was distracted and tired enough at the end of the day to hopefully pass out before he beat his kids so his wife could go fuck the mild-mannered milk man with the big cock.  Or big balls, take your pick.  And at least that drunken asshole working the manufacturing job had some dignity in the lie he was living, and so he could afford to pay the way of his whore of a wife and feed his kids so the boys could grow up and beat the kids who they didn’t actually father and so the girls could grow up as empowered young women, fuck whoever they want, commit paternity fraud and have free access to birth control and abortions in case anything went wrong or looked somewhat . . . hazy.  And at least back then, if you were the cheating housewife, you got to have a good time.  Society has never been good to men, but now, now!  Now it’s about to get worse, really bad for women, and I’m going to explain why.  And I lament the coming of this societal collapse here.  Society has always been gynocentric but now everyone is fucked, and I mean everyone.

               But first, here’s a symptom of the problem that’s coming for women in this country, in my hometown.  You can see it because of the fires.  There are more homeless women than ever before.  That’s bad.  I think women and men alike should live dignified lives and I feel really bad when I see a poor homeless woman shuffling along with her grocery cart and her bags full of clothes and trash.  There isn’t even some drunken fat guy who wants to take her in anymore.  Because literally what with the lack of good paying jobs anymore, there is no drunken asshole who can afford to take her off the streets.  That douchebag is just gonna sit back right easy and pound a Lagunitas IPA (or six) to his dome while he sits on the couch and watches Jimmy Garoppolo add some meaning to his meaningless life.  Why the fuck should he take in some chick who’s bound to be a squatter and treat him like a slave or falsely accuse him of something he didn’t do?  Even this fat slob pounding beer after beer from a company who used to give away free beer to their racist forklift mechanic has a Twitter account.  He knows what’s going on.  As soon as you don’t act as a woman’s slave, she’s going to say you did something that you didn’t do and everyone knows it.  So men, even the good ones, even the hot ones are just giving up on women, and you can tell now that there are all these homeless women out on the street.  It’s the poor, the homeless, the people driving ’96 Hondas with broken CD players forced to listen to fucking Drake on the radio and can’t even pop in their scratched up Matchbox 20 album – that’s where you’ll see the degradation of society appear first.  Yeah, we’re seeing, and rightfully so, the exposure and illumination of powerful men who have mistreated Hollywood women and others as the scum-sucking slimeballs that these asshole men truly are.  But nothing is really happening to these guys because half of those accusations on Twitter are false, and the rich guys who are guilty just get a slap on the wrist or pay off their victims.  It’s at the bottom of society, that’s where the pain is really felt.

               So finally the arrow turns from red to green and I cut across the intersection, find the liquor store and turn in.  I see another rusted out, late 90’s Honda with the paint peeling off the hood.  And I look around at the people, the old white dude with his truck with a million miles on it but knows how to fix it.  He’s a survivor.  He’ll make it until he collapses in the hospital under the weight of all the beer and processed food and meat loaded with antibiotics and hormones after some dipshit feeds the IV incorrectly.  At least he’ll have lived a somewhat full life.  He raised a couple kids, one of which wasn’t his own, but who’s counting?  They grew up, went to college, got jobs in the tech industry, blamed him for their parents’ divorce and he cruised off into the sunset in ’89 Ford with the rebuilt engine.

               I see a bunch of Hispanics, families of them.  They’re listening to mariachi music, eating, waiting for their laundry to get done spinning.  Their kids all went to school on the poor side of town.  They never had much of a chance at education because W’s No Child Left Behind program cut all of the funding to the West Side schools and encouraged all the kids who could speak English to go to school on the East Side where they were pampered and sent off to other places, other states and other towns with lower costs of living and a chance to live a life of dignity.  But the kids who can’t speak English, the families who can’t, some of them in this shopping center will do okay.  They’ll eat great Mexican food in a community that cares about them and supports their own.  Some of them will get deported by our fucked up evil President and all of his jealous, white, racist toadies – his supporters, however.  A lot of them will be doomed to a life of poverty.  But, like many of the Oakies from FDR’s bullshit economic recovery, some of these people will be happy in their government-imposed impoverishment, and will enjoy passing the time putting in an honest day’s work with the manual labor rich, white people don’t want to do, listening to the local music created by the people in their community, and generally celebrating the culture that this backwards, gentrified, racist, inbred corporate town can never take away.  No matter how much Donald Trump bitches and moans on Twitter, he’s never rounding up all these people, he’s never building his wall.  It’s not politically possible.

               But the other people in this shopping center – the homeless.  They’re going to sleep on the streets until they die, either by overdosing (voluntarily or involuntarily), starving, finally giving in and stabbing themselves with a blunt object, or freezing to death somewhere, here or elsewhere in the winter time.  And now there are women in my hometown doomed to this fate.  And it sucks, man.  It sucks.