I'm the Welfare Queen Your Boomer Parents Bitch About

 I'm in a rage. I saw a bunch of YouTube nobodies crying in a comment section of a video about food stamps going up a whopping $8 for people who need food. Just the usual nastiness - get a job, stop being a leech, blah blah blah. So let me halfass apologize for the incoming wordvomit.

Your grandparents, maybe your great grandparents, wrote laws in my state so that creepy, predatory old men could marry 12, 13, 14 year old children. I was one of those children. I've told this story before, but in case you're new here, the quickie recap is -

• I was married to an actual pedo when I was 15
• I ran away the day before my 18th birthday
• I've struggled ever since

If you're from anywhere outside of a major city in the US, especially a red state, you're likely familiar with the lack of, well, pretty much everything. If you don't have a car, you're fucked. I didn't have parents who would take me to get a license, my abusive, gross husband certainly wasn't going to do it, and they don't have cars at the DDS to take your driver test in. As a result, I didn't get my license until I was almost 30. The only jobs I could do were ones within walking distance, and those were few and far between. Gas stations, the occasional hotel - the kind of places that'll fire you if you need to take the morning off to go enroll your kindergartener, or punish you by giving you the worst shifts/duties because they know you can't afford to say no. 

According to the court of public opinion, being a divorced, single, child bride mother is a crime worse than just about anything else out there. Notice how not one single creep from the Epstein files has been sent to prison, except the woman? Notice how there are no riots in the streets when toddlers with cancer are allowed to die because millionaire CEOs of every single insurance company out there decided that lifesaving medicine is bad for investors and shareholders? Notice how we allow private equity to buy up all our available homes, businesses, hospitals, prisons, schools, and price the average working stiff out of owning a home, affordable healthcare, an education, and no one is doing a single thing about it? Yeah, getting $8 a month, equivalent to maybe 2 boxes of store-brand cereal for an entire month, is worse than all of those other things put together. Kroger, Walmart, Publix, they can throw away a billion tons of food every single day, right into the big dumpsters out back and use it as a tax write-off, but if a homeless vet crawls back there and takes a day old donut from the top of the pile, that's a crime. 

I can't even be mad at the billionaire class about it. Of course they're going to pay off politicians to write laws in their favor. Of course they're disgusting, greedy leeches and murders and psychopaths who are out of touch with reality. You expect shit people to be shit. 

No, I fully blame the middle class, the working classes, the working poor, the ones who would quietly allow children to starve if it means they can get a $00.50 raise at work. Not even quietly. They're the ones on youtube and facebook and reddit bitching about 2 whole boxes of cereal. They're not mad at their boss's boss's boss for owning 60 homes investment properties and driving up costs 250% in 5 years - they're mad at an 8 year old for eating. 

Fuck off with that bullshit. 

I'm now leaving you with my beautiful Fuggler. I've been wanting one of these guys for 15+ years. I was gifted this one the other day, finally. 

Just a Teeny Revenge, as a Treat

 It's Mabon, the autumn equinox, and guess which lucky bitch has jury duty? Go on, guess. Grand jury, at that, so I get to hear all about the murders and neglects and rapes and elderly abuse and child abuse and domestic abuse and I fucking hate it. 70 indictments a day, and you get...not the goriest details but bad enough. 

 

But, my trash step brother is apparently a cop again. I don't know if his foray into evangelical extremism simply didn't work out, if it wasn't paying the bills, or what...I literally haven't seen him since he hijacked my dad's memorial service 3½ years ago and turned it into a "Trump is Our God" rally. For those of you (all zero of you!) who haven't kept up, my step-monsters kidnapped my dementia addled stepmom from the hospital, took control over my dad's house, his possessions, his cremains, yada yada. Daddy was Wiccan, and they got wannabe preacher stepbro to deliver a sermon on how Trump was appointed by God and all that jazz.

 

Long, terrible story, but I ran into that rat at the courthouse.  He had that deer-in-the-headlights look, but I smiled and said "oh mah gawd hiiiii, how's your mama 'n 'em?" in the sappiest, most southern belle accent I could muster. 

 

If you know, you know. 

 

It's nice to know he failed. 

 

Blessed Mabon, providing abundance and bounty in little, unexpected ways.  

Lughnasadh, Animism & Bread

 How is it already just a few short hours from August? Time is like a slow leak from a large urn or bowl or some other vessel. Those itty bitty drips? Meaningless. They can't quench your thirst, or put out a raging fire, but eventually, when you run out of water, you'll wish you had them back.

And so here we are, at the start of harvest season. This might mean very little to most of us now, who can walk into any number of supermarkets and grocery chains and convenience stores and walk out with a bag of oranges in the dead of winter without a second thought about where they came from. Bread, all day every day, of all different types. Most people alive today have never needed to worry about storing away for the winter or failed crops but for thousands upon thousands of years, this is how our species has survived. Lughnasadh, Lammas, whatever you might call it, was and still is an important part of our culture, our ancestry, our heritage, and our future. Even if you don't give a second thought to where your bread or oranges or even Dr. Pepper comes from because they're always just magically available, rest assured that those some processes our forebearers relied upon a thousand years ago are the very same you rely upon today. Try not to take it for granted. 

Writing about it makes me realize just how much of my spiritual practices/beliefs I owe to Japan. Throughout my blog I've mentioned several times that I grew up in a pagan household, but being in the American Deep South, the biblical god finds a way of infiltrating its way into your psyche. My god might have been a goddess, but that power structure - the all knowing, all seeing, ever presentness of it - spills over into your own thought processes. Like, remember in Disney's Pocahontas when the natives could speak english as their default language just because they sorta had to for the sake of simplicity? The abrahamic god is a bit like that. Default. You see it all the time in pagan spaces. Remove the name "jesus" and replace it with just about any other deity - "I think Aphrodite is calling me to be her high priestess!" - "I saw a black cat yesterday, is this a sign from Bastet?" So on and so forth. These poor children and some adults have no structure to their beliefs, so they default to the only one(s) they know. I'm not funning on them, because I get it. To make a long story short, I highly, HIGHLY, suggest anyone looking to expand their practice look into animism, and Shinto in particular. The practice is so varied and diverse and often comes down to regional and personal influences, so it's not really centralized the way most other religions are. The rivers may be gods. The trees may be spirits. There is a divine presence in the light of the sun and each drop of morning dew. There is a life in the remains of your broken coffee mug. Nothing demands worship, although you may seek the favor of - and give thanks to - any particular object or land or emotion or event as you see fit. Existence itself is divinity, whether it's a thought or a really nice rock. 

So tomorrow, for Lughnasadh, I'm baking a loaf of bread. The embodiment of the harvest, the culmination of thousands of years of agriculture and civilization, everything that has led you to there here and now and paves the way for every tomorrow we'll ever know. I love you, bread. I love the divine that exists within you and loans itself to me with its nourishment. I love the earth that grew the grain, the sun that gave its light, the rain that invigorated, the season that allowed these to come together. 

The world is so beautiful.

Blessed Be.

🌒🌕🌘

My Shitty Reading List: ACOTAR

 Hi. So here's the thing - I didn't actually read it. This was my first ever audiobook and hoooooboy. Let's just get this over with. A Court of Blah and Blahs. 

Why did someone rewrite Beauty & the Beast as...as what? It's not exactly pornography. Not quite hentai. Smut? Can I call it smut? I don't know. I've read smut before, and it generally tends to be less Disney Katniss Everdeen than this. Like, when you're reading actual smut, you're usually reading it for the smut. This was just smut with extra steps.

It tried to be smut, and failed. It tried to have a plot, and failed that, too. How many times did Feyre really need to have every bone in her body broken there at the end? You might almost feel tempted to feel bad for her or something like that, but it just keeps happening. Oh nuuu, her spine cracked. oh wow, her ribs cracked one at a time. Oh gosh, there go her kneecaps. Oh golly, her neck snapped. I'm devestated, truly. And her stupidly useless fairy boyfriend, Tamlin - I've never been more bored in my life by a love interest. She stabbed him. Woo. He didn't even really react She should have hooked up with Lucien, or that vampire fairy guy instead. At least he tried to fight for her dead body at the end while Tammy-boy just kind of cried about it until it was too late.

. . . . .

Okay but here's the thing. It's been a month since I wrote the sad little entry above. I wasn't going to post it, because there's literally nothing to post. It wasn't an enthusiastic read/listen and I couldn't be bothered to try to fill it in with anything worth writing about.

Then I listened/read the second one. I don't remember the name of it, because it's still not very good. In the beginning, it's literally just a lot of "puking my guts up" every other paragraph, lots of crying, lots of begging Tammy Lion Man not to leave her alone. Our once noble huntress who saved all of fairy land was just a boring ass damsel in distress. Now, don't get me wrong, Book 2 wasn't exactly great, but getting kidnapped at your own boring wedding? That's way less boring than being a prisoner in your pretty fairy castle for 30 chapters. I even tried to be happy about our heroine realizing she was in lubz with Vampire Fairy Man, but like...come on, did we really need to drag that out the way we did? These characters communicate the same way we did back in 5th or 6th grade, back when your parent told you that boy was just pulling your hair because he likes you. Oh really? Is that the lesson you wanna teach your chirrens, mom? And Feyra is so fucking dramatic. MY SOUL IS SO STAINED I'M A BAD PERSON FOR SAVING EVERYONE HOW CAN THEY STAND TO LOOK AT MEEEEE? NO NO NO DON"T PRETEND I'M THE GREATEST THAT'S EVER EXISTED, I KNOW I'M A TERRIBLE PERSON FOR SURVIVING INSTEAD OF THOSE INNOCENT PEOPLE WHO WERE TOTALLY IRRELEVANT TO THE STORY THIS BEAUTY I POSSESS IS A MOCKERY OF THE MONSTER I AM. She'd make a great addition to the moody Cullen clan in Twilight, actually, with that attitude. It draaaaaaags on and on, but I think I'm supposed to be impressed with the scene of the starfall glitterbomb rooftop scene. I think I'm supposed to fist pump the air during the soup scene. Because fairy mating rituals involves heating up cans of soup. Fairies eat canned soup. Somewhere in fairy land, there's a canned soup factory. It reminds me of that one scene from Lord of the Rings where the hobbits feast upon McDonald's before taking that Boeing 737 to Mordor.  At least they're memorable scenes, unlike anything at all in book one. I don't remember that shit at all except that I'd rather wash public toilets than listen again. 

Ugh.

 

The 4th of July is Just Christmas For Doomsday Preppers

 My YouTube feed has been inundated with economic calamity videos lately. Housing and groceries and gasoline and fertilizer and concert tickets and healthcare and fast food are all on fire. 

I won't say none of this affects me, but I didn't have the privilege of growing up middle class, where acknowledging the plight of the poor was optional. Having to choose between rent and lights, gas or bread, that's just another average Monday in the world I grew up in. So now as an adult, I prep. Not in the underground nuclear bunker way, I'm not rich enough for that mess. I live in an apartment, so gardening isn't really an option, either. What I have is just good, old fashioned beans and rice. Canned tomatoes and spices. Flour, sugar, and powdered milk. you know, basics. Lots of them. 

Remember a few months ago when the US government shut down, and several services were shut off? People weren't getting paid but were still expected to somehow make it to work blah blah blah. I was on reddit, and r/foodstamps kept popping up. All the NewPoors™ were in a full blown panic because all these working class folks, mostly moms, suddenly couldn't afford to feed their children. Everyone was suddenly hitting up their local food bank(s) to try to supplement their meals. I'm not blaming them, because gods know how difficult it is to feed a picky eater who's been used to on demand chicken nuggets and Hot Pockets as long as they've been old enough to handle a microwave. It's impossible to cook sometimes when you're working 10 hour shifts on top of a 2 hour commute and 1,000 chores, homework, bathtime, whatever before you finally get to bed. Plus, these folks are modern poor. They might be driving an older car, but it's not being held together with tape and twist ties. They might not be wearing designer brands, but their clothes haven't been sloppily mended so many times it's now a shapeless, colorless blob of unidentifiable fabrics. For most people living somewhere along the poverty line, they can still afford to not live and look like medieval peasants, and that's a good thing.

But they're so dependent on the system, none of them had stopped to think about what would happen if that system were no longer dependable, even if it was only for a week or two. A month, tops. Reddit was suddenly flooded with hundreds of clueless people who don't follow the news, don't do politics, don't vote, who had no idea why their EBT card was rejected when they stopped by their local supermarket freezer section to buy a frozen pizza after work.

I've been there, though. I come from a long line of elite poor. My entire adult life, I've always kept stores of dry goods, even if we didn't have to eat them everyday, because you never know when shit's gonna hit the fan. It's not paranoia, it's not crazy, this is literally how our species has survived for thousands of years - by squirreling away extras during times of abundance for the lean times that always come sooner or later. Communities survived winters by making sure they rationed their spring and summer harvests. They learned how to preserve, ferment, dehydrate. I don't know how to do any of that, but fucking hell, I can buy an extra 10lb bag of rice, just in case.

So, back to YouTube. I've watched a couple of these videos going off about how to survive the impending economic calamity, and it's absolutely ridiculous but apparently Youtube pays well if you've got even an ounce of common sense. "Buy matches, in case you have to start a fire in the winter!" Oh really, Captain Obvious? Except that video will have 1.9 million views so maybe it's only obvious to us elite poors. I don't know what it is about July 4th, but the closer we get, the more I see these videos. I think it's because people are too broke to afford fireworks and grilled hamburgers and hotdogs for 20 of their closest friends and family this year (have you seen the price of meat?), no beach vacation in an Air B&B condo with a $700 cleaning fee where YOU still have to do the cleaning. Something must be wrong! You know there's something wrong when the middle class is worried about it, when the IT guy earning $105,000/y is looking up easy taco recipes because 3 "street tacos" and a Corona at his favorite mexican bar costs $60 now. He's been watching videos on how to build a primitive hut in the woods because he heard a rumor his company might be replacing 80% of their staff with AI soon. His nurse wife has been watching videos about canning your own squash and swears she's gonna start her own garden next year, probably. Somewhere in the mix, the algorithm has started slipping in videos about Walmart dynamic pricing and flock cameras and how to pack a bag with essentials in case you have to escape the country overnight. Independence Day is a lie, we're just dependent on corporations and China and Saudi Arabia now instead of England.

It's not untrue, I suppose, but it's been like this for like 50 years. You were fine with it before because it was cheap. For you.  

Death of an Icon

 June fucking sucked. MawMaw died, And then Mikey died. You don't know who those people are and that's okay, just be aware that it fucking sucked. Hail the Traveler(s).

There was another, as well. Not nearly as heartbreaking - more a sign of the times. I'm talking about the death of Golden Flake cheese puffs. I swear to the gods, I'm not trying to be insensitive. I'm genuinely disappointed.

When I was a kid, I used to live next to this - barn thing? - they used to house Golden Flake potato chips and snacks. One of my fondest childhood dreams was breaking into it and pigging out on all the greasy goodness. Those chips were a proper southern tradition, kinda like how Coca Cola once was, only a little less known. Coke is global. Golden Flake was still our own wonderful little secret. Cheetos? Hell naw, that shit's for pansy little city dwellers. We like our cheese puffs greasy, airy, and crumbly as all fuck. 

Apparently they were bought out by that Utz trash  snack company back in 2016. I didn't know that, but I recently bought a bag of cheese puffs...and y'all. Y'all. I could have cried. They were stiff, dense, and itty bitty. They were like.....I don't know how to word this, like if sawdust had a one night stand with an old cheeto and left while cheeto was still sleeping, and when the cheeto woke up she cried on the dusty bits he left behind on the sheets. Then she combined those dusty cheeto tears and made a weird baby out of it. And it's 100% as gross as it sounds.

 I'm not comparing this to the death of real people, but fucking hell if I'm not feeling some type of way about it. As if June hasn't already been mean enough, this is just one more pebble on the mountain of stones piling up. Most of us will never own our own home, unless we steal it from our stepfamily. A lot of people can't afford to have babies that they want, people are putting McDonald's on credit card payments, the price of ground beef is higher than minimum wage. I saw a compilation video of people opening up grab-bag size Doritos or Cheez-Its with 2 chips and some crumbs inside. 

Everything is shit, but y'all keep buying it anyway. it's like you love getting ripped off and hurting people. You know Amazon is basically satan, but you're gonna spend at least $500 there this year because those new Nikes are sooooo comfortable! I mean sure, you've got 30 other pairs of shoes, but they're not made from the soft, luxurious fat of unbaptized babies like these new ones! You neeeeeeeed them! 

Sorry if I'm feeling a little bit self righteous. I've been getting really friendly with my instant pot and pinto beans and rice. I'm not making 4 easy monthly payments of only $19.99 for a Big Mac. I've deleted Facebook, Instagram, and a bunch of other social media spysites. I've deleted nearly all of my stored cloud photos, because fuck data centers. I'm doing all I can to minimize my impact and not be a hypocrite, so it's a bit frustrating to watch others complain about the cost of things when they're the ones who keep throwing money at these things. 

And now I'm super mega frustrated that in addition to all those things, I now have to give up Golden Flake cheese puffs because they fucking suck, too. We lost not just one, but TWO people this month, so I get a bag of junky salty trash food to make myself feel fractionally better about it, and I don't even get to enjoy it because everything is just awful, this is just another reminder. Thanks for ruining my childhood, Utz! 

/EndRant

Cosplaying Poverty: A Totally Jealous Rant

 Assuming you read my last couple of posts, you'll know that I'm happily gearing up for #VanLife #YOLO #HashTag, more out of a sense of crushing money-not-havingness than anything else, even though I'm actually really looking forward to it. The idea of not spending $602,469,327 every month on rent, bills, bills, and more bills, and instead getting to do things like, idk, going to the dentist or on vacation is sending shivers down my spine.

Naturally, I've been spending a lot of time on YouTube, finding out the best ways to keep food fresh, storage tips, bathroom stuff, et cetera, but it's a lot more difficult than you'd think it would be. I can't relate to 90% of these people.

Just as an example, earlier tonight I was watching a Tiny Home video - you know the type, where they're living in one of those Home Depot sheds or something along those lines - it's not quite the same as van life but they actually share a lot in common given the space issues and need for efficiency. Anyhoot, I found one that seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, the title was something along the lines of "how we went from homeless to housed in only 3 weeks!" Score.  It started off promising. It really did. They were living in an old beat up 70s style giant van that broke down, they were very sad because that was their whole entire existence....omg where were they gonna sleep? How were they gonna survive? Oh noooeeessss, So scary! 

But then, they film themselves designing blueprints on one of their 3 (!!!) Mac devices. I looked up the price of a Mac Book Pro, and the cheapest I found was $1,500. They had 2 of those, and some giant desktop Mac I couldn't name but every one I looked up was still a minimum of $1,000. Now, I'm not saying poor people can't have nice things. It is entirely possible these were thrifted, gifted, or were purchased during a more bountiful period of their lives. 

Totally possible, but obviously I wouldn't be here ranting if it had stopped there. No, this video was like a condensed version of days, weeks, or months' worth of work that involved lots of saws and drills and other shiny metal doohickeys that tend to cost a lot of money. Installing windows and doors, painting, lots of wood and glass and fabrics and such. Meanwhile, every 2 minutes there's a new clip of them exploring some new picturesque bookstore in a quaint little bicycle friendly town full of flowers and colonial ass aesthetics. Probably New Hampshire or Connecticut or some whack ass faerie tale land. Hubby is wearing thousands of dollars of tattoos and wifey is frolicking in some flowy cotton peasant dress and collecting wild berries in her foraging basket. Wut. 

Now, I have questions. Like, y'all are homeless, supposedly. Where are you sleeping while all this work is happening? Where are you building this tiny cottage core house? I know those fruit trees and cucumber vines you planted did not start bearing fruit in the 3 weeks you said it took you to build this house. That garden dinner party at the end, the one that looked like something straight out of Alice in Wonderland and everyone was eating soup out of a tiny pumpkin with homemade scones and foraged berry cobbler....how much did THAT cost?

I'm not saying these people didn't work hard. I'm not saying they didn't have to budget around this build. I AM saying you're out of your mind if you think I'm gonna believe for one second that they're struggling. The millions of views on their videos and various sponsors they subtly sprinkle in say otherwise. 

And honestly, I wouldn't even CARE, if not for the fact that they gotta cosplay as humble, salt-of-the-earth types who overcame incredible odds and obstacles to create their home. Bitch, you just spent $20k on a built in apothecary and koi pond. If I get everything I want on my wishlist, my van will setup cost me about $2,000 and will take me MONTHS to achieve, barring any emergencies. We are NOT the same.

But it makes for great television. 

Here; have a badass Scottish folk song; your reward for making it this far. luh yew bai.