If we didn't need assistance we wouldn't be living here
If they’re on their knees in surrender, then you accept their surrender
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It was a week after Halloween when two young children named Julie and Will left their home in Arkansas for the last time. Be back before dark their father said and they promised they would so they set out on their bikes to the park just kidding that’s the new True Detective which is not bad not bad at all so far Mahershala Ali is a treasure but here’s something that is actually happening in Arkansas this week and probably all around the country which is that thousands of people who rely on federal subsidies to pay their rent are being threatened with eviction. The threat which was reported by KFSM arrived as the federal government and the Department of Housing and Urban Development headed up by Celestial Mind Pilot Ben Carson were still partially shut down.
A letter sent out by Annette Cowen the property manager of the Linenwood Apartments in Alma explained to tenants that the government shut down was not her fucking problem so pay up or hit the bricks.
“Due to the shutdown of the federal government, your rental assistance portion of your rent is not being paid,” a letter left in each residence explained. “Until the government opens again, you are responsible for ALL of your rental amount. Your complex is not in the business of furnishing free rent.”
The apartment complex has bills of their own to pay she explained which to be fair is probably true but you’d imagine they have a little bit to fall back on in case of emergency unlike a lot of the tenants.
“As of now, you have no rental assistance and your rent must be paid prior to January 20th or eviction procedures may began [sic] against you….I would suggest you personally contact your Senators and Representatives in Washington D.C. if you want your rental assistance to be paid. You must pay all your rent immediately.”
Tom Cotton is one of those Senators she mentioned in the letter and he spoke this week about his thoughts on the shutdown which were these:
"I wish the government wasn't shutdown, I'd like to see it re-open but at the same time I would like to make sure that our border is secure," he said in Little Rock at an American Legion conference.
If the border is not secure then Mexicans will come into the country and they will bring their terrorists friends from the Middle East which they all have and they’ll get together and cause all manner of suffering to the citizens who currently are doing fine everywhere with no suffering to speak of.
"We face a crisis on our southern border with our border patrol being overwhelmed with families showing up with small children for whom we cannot care,” Cotton went on. “We don't have the physical infrastructure, we don't have the legal authorities in place. I think it's really important that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer sit down with the president and negotiate an end to this problem as the president has requested."
In other words not his fucking problem.
Speaking of True Detective here’s the room they had me waiting in at the hospital yesterday to talk about my pain. There are ghosts in this room man. That’s a motel crime scene which I guess is probably pretty convenient because when you get murdered there you’re already in the hospital.
Another thing Tom Cotton has said was that his only problem with our illegal torture prison at Guantanamo Bay was that “there are too many empty beds.”
“Islamic terrorists do not need an excuse to attack the United States, to attack us is what they do, they attack us for what we are,” he said during a hearing questioning Obama Department of Defense officials on the prospect of closing the site.
“In my opinion the only problem with Guantanamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now. We should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep this country safe. As far as I'm concerned every last one of them can rot in Hell, but as long as they don't do that they can rot in Guantanamo Bay.”
Another thing he said is that we don’t use drones enough to bomb people and another thing he said is that bombing in general “makes us safer” and another thing he said was that we need to be stricter with who we provide food stamps to because many of them may be drug addicts and another thing he said while he was serving in Iraq was that some New York Times journalists should be thrown in jail for their work in exposing a Bush-era effort to track terrorist finances.
With the death of John McCain (lol) Cotton may now be the most hawkish member of the Senate and like McCain he also wants very very much for us to go to war with Iran. Here is one thing he said when speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in regards to sanctions on Iran’s economy:
“One thing I learned in the Army is that when your opponent is on his knees, you drive him to the ground and choke him out,” he said. “If they’re on their knees in surrender, then you accept their surrender.”
Here’s what one of the residents of the subsidized housing in his state said this week but keep in mind unlike Cotton this person most likely does not have two degrees from Harvard.
"It's right after Christmas, everybody spent after Christmas, it's the winter, utilities are high so the electric is high...we all have our own bills… We don't have [the rent] or we wouldn't be living here. If we didn't need assistance we wouldn't be living here."
"I don't have anything else to do,” the woman went on. “I don't have a truck, we don't have any family to move in with here," she said. "I have a daughter but she lives here. We personally could live in our cars but what's gonna happen to our furniture...so I guess we will just wait and see."
Last week Trump was was asked if he thought landlords and bill collectors should cut federal employees who aren’t currently being paid a little slack.
"I think they will,” he said. “I've been a landlord for a long time… they work with people," Trump said.
"I would encourage them to be nice and easy,” he said. If that’s the level of empathy the Republicans have for the government workers who are going without pay right now in the fourth week of the shutdown you can imagine they wouldn’t have much more for people who are simply recipients of government benefits.
A cool thing about this type of HUD housing in question is that under Carson’s stewardship federally subsidized multi-family homes failed inspection at a 30% higher rate than in 2016 according to an NBC News study. That means black mold, roaches, bed bugs, lead paint, rodents and all manner of fucking nightmares. I’ve never had black mold but I had a friend who did and it nearly drove them insane. Literally insane.
Earlier this year Carson and Trump outlined a series of efforts to reduce the scope of the federal safety net many of these people require to survive including imposing work requirements for food stamps and other types of assistance. Carson wanted to triple the rent for the poorest families receiving housing aid.
Another thing you should know about Ben Carson the famous brain surgeon is that he literally believes God is guiding his hand and perhaps not as important as all the other stuff but no less amazing is that also he has a Bible quotation chiseled into ornate stone with gold trim in his palatial home with a typo in it.
One more thing Carson did not too long ago was blame his wife when he got in trouble for trying to buy a $31,000 dining set for his office.
Here’s what I wrote about that at the time:
That came after earlier denials from HUD spokespeople that Carson and his wife had anything to do with the purchase, or knew anything about the price, blaming it on a “career staffer,” which in this administration is code for “Obama did it.” That was before emails uncovered by CNN showed they had, in fact, discussed ways to get around spending limits and were aware of the price. Receipts for the outrageous expenditures came through.
In the grand scheme of things, Carson using his wife as cover is by no means the worst thing he’s ever done. Removing protections for transgender persons, his ignorance of how much he proposed to cut from HUD spending, and comments about not wanting to make subsidized housing too comfortable or people would never leave, to name just a few, are orders of magnitude worse. His stances on Obamacare being akin to slavery, homosexuality being a choice, and that the Big Bang is a fairy tale invented by Satan also qualify as Grade A bonkers.
But this? What do you say to a guy who can’t take the blame for his own screw-up and instead sends his wife to absorb the heat? That’s before we even get into the ethical morass of what his wife is doing making decisions about how taxpayer money is spent in the first place.
Tom Cotton is a combat veteran so you can presume he’s seen first hand the ravages of war and what it does to a person and Ben Carson is a doctor and as he often points out he grew up impoverished himself so you can presume he’s seen first hand the ravages of failing health and knows a thing or two about how poverty can exacerbate it so here’s a question I have and I don’t honestly know the answer. What do you say about a man who has seen the worst of the human condition and yet wants to not only keep it going but also enriches themselves in the process? What is that? What words do we have for that?
Ben Carson believes in evil as in actual IRL Satan and Tom Cotton believes in evil as in Muslim terrorists hiding around every corner and I believe in evil too but not the kind they’re talking about I believe in a different kind of evil.
Here’s a picture of the nice lab tech lady drawing some blood out of my arm today. I like to watch the thing fill up with blood due to being very normal.
I published this essay below last week on a site called the small bow which is a site dedicated to writing about addiction and sobriety and all manner of things I imagine a lot of you will be interested in at least those of you who appreciate my writing on those topics here. It’s very much a Hell World piece but a lot better because there was a good editor who made it better so please feel free to enjoy it here via this format and then go read some of the other stuff over there it’s not the usual type of bad program writing you might have seen elsewhere.
My sister who doesn’t drink anymore wrote a story a few years back about our grandmother all of which was true. Shirley Madden had grown up vacationing in a little lobster town called Round Pond, ME, and she and my grandfather bought a cottage there after they were married. My grandfather died relatively young like most everyone who came before me so I don’t have too many memories of him but when I try to think about him I remember a day when I was sick as a boy. He’d gotten me a can of ginger ale to settle my stomach and I fell asleep on the couch in their old sprawling farmhouse near the fireplace where the crows flew in. I woke to take a sip and the can was filled with ants. It took me a minute to realize what was happening and I spit out as many as I could but it was too late for some of them they were inside me now.
I think my grandfather was the second man she ever loved. She would tell us about the first guy that she didn’t marry sometimes until she was like 80 and she died on a hospital bed in our house near where she’d spent the past decade drinking gin. I think she wondered her whole life how things might have been different. I don’t have a picture of my grandfather on me but I have one of my grandmother and her old boyfriend right here in a little frame she sent me which feels like a sort of betrayal so sorry about that. They’re both holding ukuleles and she’s got a flower in her hair. I don’t think she ever got the chance to travel much but I think she went to California one time and maybe this was it. That was how far she made it.
On the back of the frame there’s a piece of paper attached that she must have cut from Reader’s Digest or something and it reads “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, totally worn out and proclaiming: Wow, what a ride!”
She always sent me horse shit like that, positive affirmation magical thinking type stuff and I never paid attention to it because I never appreciate anyone in my life until they’re gone.
Sometimes I talk to people who’ve lived to a ripe old age the same way you would when someone has just finished a marathon or climbed a mountain. Oh wow that sounds like a lot of work. And then they tell you how hard but rewarding it is and you say how you think you’re going to handle it the same way some day but you know probably you won’t but you say it anyway.
We’d visit Maine in the summers when we were young and I’d go there throughout most of the rest of my life. I haven’t been in years though and my mother and aunt tell me every time I see them how my wife and I simply must go it’s so different now and I say we will but we don’t and I don’t have a particularly good reason for that.
One year they filmed a movie there called “Message In a Bottle” starring Kevin Costner which was very exciting for them you can imagine because they had no stoplights in town and now they had a guy who knew Julia Roberts. My grandmother would encourage my sister for years after that to try writing a message in a bottle with her own kids like they did in the movie but she never did because no one listens to their grandparents until they’re gone.
I remember the first time I was ever scared in my life and it would have been around the time I was drinking the ants. I was at my other grandmother’s house and my cousins and I decided to watch the movie Poltergeist and I remember the sense of dread of everything inside the house coming alive and trying to drag you down into the graveyard below being the most horrifying thing I could imagine. Also the doll. The fucking doll.
I ran outside in a panic afterwards and the door slammed somehow on my foot and gashed it open and left a scar that may or may not be there right now I haven’t even thought to look at it in years it’s so much a part of my body now. That grandmother died relatively young from smoking I think and her husband was dead before I knew any better but apparently he was a real piece of shit so not my problem. Well, it is but you know what I mean. Three of her children including my father all died around age 60 from drinking and drugs and the various shit that accumulates after a life like that. One of her children the successful one we were all proud of died in his pool though so it’s not inevitable this shit will get you there’s also the possibility you could die in a tragic swimming accident. On my stepfather’s side of the family everyone tends to live into their 90s but a lot of them seem to get leukemia so sort of a mixed bag in terms of options were I offered the chance to choose my genes.
Sometimes I talk to my friends and family who’ve had cancer the same way you would when someone has just gotten back from someplace terrible and you don’t ask them too much about it because you’re not sure you want to know. Oh wow what was Hell like?
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I have gotten to travel to a handful of countries around the world for writing jobs and the appeal of it in theory is that it breaks you out of your routine. You get to see beautiful new places and experience different cultures and visit museums and geological marvels and all the other things the travel sites advertise and that is true to an extent, but mostly in my experience it’s been a series of chances to drink things I might not normally drink in slightly more exciting settings than I would have otherwise. Maybe that’s because I spent so many years writing about booze and trying to explain to readers what it tastes like and how it makes you feel but you already know. Everywhere is the same place when you’re drinking it’s the place where the drinking is.
Another thing I’d do whenever I’d travel is find a way to keep exercising compulsively no matter what I was missing out on. If I’m not careful I’m going to end up permanently hurting myself I said and then not too long after that I did ruining my back and abdominals to the point where I can’t really do anything but swim now. One thing that’s great for pain is drinking I can tell you that. You feel the ache in your body and you pour a pint of whiskey on it and it goes away until tomorrow.
When my grandmother died we went to Round Pond to spread her ashes out into the water that she loved along the craggy coast. My sister and her kids finally wrote the letter she was waiting for and tossed it into the ocean. Five years later on the anniversary of her death the bottle washed up about 200 miles away in Scituate, MA, where she had lived the rest of her life. Some dude found it and called my sister and we were all like what the fuck and things like that. A few years later on November 9 the same day they found the bottle we discovered an older sister we never knew we had that my grandmother had made my mother give away 40 years earlier because she was too young to have a child. She likes to drink just like me and our parents it turns out. It finds you.
I used to think that drinking and doing drugs was taking me somewhere else. Not in the tripping sense I never did like those sorts of drugs but in the way that it summoned some part of me that lived inside and sent it out into the world to handle the logistics for me. A sort of publicist or travel agent that brought me places I wouldn’t have typically gone and handled the schmoozing. But that doesn’t last for long eventually it does the exact opposite, it sits you in your place. I drink on my back porch at night now alone mostly and my wife sits inside and sometimes she drinks there on the couch and my mother sits in her room watching TV and drinking and my step father sits in the other room drinking and none of us go anywhere.
People love to talk about the plans they have to try something new. My comedian friends often talk about how many people tell them they’ve been thinking about trying standup some time. Music fans are fascinated about life on the road and want to know what it’s like playing shows. People have long told me that they’re going to start going to the gym or they’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo when they see one of mine. Do it I say. Stop thinking about it and do it. In a nicer way than that but still. But people don’t do it. They’re afraid of what they might find out about themselves if they travel from the exact same place where they’re standing right now.
What’s it like over there literally anywhere but here I want to know from anyone who’s ever done anything and maybe I’ll like it or maybe I won’t but as someone who’s written about travelling so many times I know that hearing about it from someone else doesn’t do it justice it’s not real until you’ve gone yourself.
Sometimes I talk to my friends who are sober the same way you would when someone has just gotten back from a vacation to somewhere cool you’ve always wanted to go. Oh wow what was Japan like? And they tell you how great it is and you say you definitely are going to go someday but you know you probably won’t but you say it anyway.