Thanks, I Hate It
In the back of my mind after the past several days of course I knew it was possible but I was trying very hard not to think about it. The mood dive has hit, and all I can see right now is how completely shit is my future, because a tiny bit of it starts next month with my energy assistance running out. Even if appointments somehow open up in the coming months and I can get a re-up, this is just a small taste of everything eventually to come. Recently, I came across a bunch of technologists trying to spin-up a sort of privately-run Universal Basic Income scheme, and I can’t say I wasn’t tempted despite all my internal and instinctual alarm bells going off at once, and for the same reason I regularly play the lottery: I don’t have any way out of the absolute pit of my future except free money. Or, rather (and this is why something like Comingle, even if it functions well, wouldn’t work for me), an astoundingly large sum of free money, because when you’re receiving various forms of public assistance it’s very, very easy to receive just enough in mutual aid to reduce or lose those benefits but not enough to make up for those reductions or losses. I’m stuck on a trajectory that cannot be changed absent a lottery win, and the coming sixty-six dollar increase in out-of-pocket expenses is a glimpse of where that trajectory leads. When I am dead, you won’t find as the high-water mark of my life something in my current present or my current future; it’s clearly somewhere in my past. Local variations along the way aside, it’s all very much downhill from here. The only question left to answer is how steep will be the hill.