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.
