I’m living, as you’ve probably deduced if you’ve listened to my last few episodes, in an untenable situation.  The cheapest place to rent where I live is $1500 a month, unless I want to rent a room from someone.  Those run around $600.  I won’t survive that experience.  I do very poorly around others.  I need to be alone. 

My Disability, after having taught Elementary School for 29 years, is $1363 a month.  I can’t possibly get another job.  My body simply won’t tolerate it.  I was on the precipice of another trip to the hospital this week with Diabetic Ketoacidosis.  I didn’t do anything outrageous.  I spent some time getting up and down from the floor trying to make my monitors work with the beautiful new desktop on which I’m writing this.  That exhausted me.  At 4 PM I woke up when my alarm went off.  It’s to remind me to take my Lantus, which is a long-acting form of insulin, and to call my mother.  I felt like I had been run over by a steamroller.  Everything hurt.  I was nauseous.  I called Mom and faked my way through it so she wouldn’t know I was sick.  I took my Lantus.  I checked my blood sugar.  It was 521. 

For those who don’t know, doctors want your blood sugar to be between 80 and 120.  Anything over 400 is almost always going to turn into DKA.  I’ve been in the hospital with that condition 15 times in the last several years.  My doctor described it to me as my blood turning into acid and trying to kill me from the inside.  It generally requires a minimum of 3 days in the hospital.  The first two are usually spent in Intensive Care.  Statistically, most people don’t survive more than 4 incidents of DKA.  Had I gotten any sicker and survived, I would have made it 4 times as long as science expects me to live.

There was a physical aspect to my flirtation with death.  There was also an emotional aspect.  My PTSD was in full force, set off by someone being incredibly kind to me.  I’m going to refer to her as Lady Dalrymple.  (Read some Jane Austen.)  She has bought me incredibly expensive groceries I could never possibly afford.  She bought me a crock pot in which to cook the spareribs I can’t cook in my oven because it doesn’t work.  She sent Speedy Shine 40 pounds of kibble and more than a dozen cans of fancy food.  How could anyone be any kinder than that?  She found a way.

She’s heard my show.  She’s read my work.  She doesn’t believe I should have to live this way.  She offered me the downstairs portion of her house, rent-free, for as long as I want.  It’s a beautiful home.  It has a fenced backyard for Speedy Shine.  It’s everything I could want.  It’s Paradise.  So, how could this be a problem for me?

Those who have been around a while will recall that just a little over a year ago, someone else made me the same offer. I was properly skeptical. When something seems too good to be true… Nevertheless, after much discussion, I accepted the offer. I haven’t been in a position to decline a place to live for more than a decade. The results were disastrous. The rent-free home with a fenced backyard turned into a $750 a month trailer with water that needed to be changed twice weekly. The privacy I had been promised turned into thrice daily assaults on my character. I spent 64 days hearing about my faults. I spent a lot of money to get there, and when the gun came out and the only friend who had the audacity to visit was threatened, I spent what was left of my Disability backpay to escape. Without the help of my friend, I would certainly have died there. I arrived here broke, and I promptly went to the hospital for 3 days because I went into Diabetic Ketoacidosis.

I’ve been safely installed here for just shy of a year.

I told my best friend I wanted to talk to her last night because she is the only person with whom I can discuss something this huge. It went poorly to say the least. She was repeatedly interrupted while I was experiencing a low-level panic attack, and my Rejection Sensitivity kicked me in the teeth. She and I have discussed that at length. She is well aware of my condition.  All I had time to get from her was that it would be better for both her and her ex-boyfriend, who is being kind enough to rent me this place at a price I can afford and that, thankfully, covers the internet and all the utilities, if I left.

This underlined in flashing neon lights that I am a liability.  She can’t get married with her ex-boyfriend living with her since few men feel good about such an arrangement.  He can’t sell this place and move on with his life if I’m here.  I live on their charity.  This has been discussed at greater length in earlier episodes.  I won’t go any deeper into it here.

That night, Speedy Shine held me together, and only barely.

We finally had an opportunity the next night to discuss it without interruption. We’re thinking of trying to find me something called Section 8 Housing. All I know about Section 8 comes from M*A*S*H, and I’m really not Klinger.

What was the problem?

The thought of moving somewhere far away and living for free obviously brought back my feelings of terror from a year ago. I flashed repeatedly on images of my cell phone vibrating and sounds of its beeping to tell me that another assault on my integrity was waiting to be read. If I ignored it, you could be sure the landlord would walk the 100 feet from his house to my trailer to tell me what was wrong with me. And he would yell. If I tried to defend myself, I would be called a “fucking liar,” and the yelling would increase. I learned to be quiet. I haven’t been confident talking to anyone beyond my best friend, my mother, and the man who pulled me out of there, since. I don’t believe I ever will be again.

When you hear me talking to you here, you may be sure every word was carefully written, proofread repeatedly and ineffectively, (I can’t tell you how many times I have to correct it during the recording, or, worse I find an error on my Word Press site.) and edited repeatedly. If you hear it on my show, I promise it’s gone through not fewer than 5 drafts. I communicate carefully because I want to be sure I’m saying it as honestly and accurately as I can. I can’t be sure to get it right in a conversation.

I’m perfectly comfortable at my keyboard. It allows me to make mistakes without any more complaint than the little red or blue lines it uses to show me where it thinks I’m wrong. It doesn’t tell me I’m The Scum of The Earth. It just suggests what it believes, often erroneously, is a better way to write something. I’m grateful when it catches typos. I won’t, just yet, substitute an algorithm’s judgment for 50 years of writing experience.

I am going to spend quite some time considering the offer, but first I have to remember that most people are genuinely kind. Most people are caring, compassionate, and empathetic. The evidence to back that claim is overflowing throughout the last 6 years of my life. My friends have saved me, in various ways, more times than I can count. I think someday I may make an Excel sheet in which I try to record them all. There would be at least 15 entries for saving my life by getting me to the hospital when I went into DKA. That doesn’t count the times they have given me money to save my car, to pay my rent, to put my dog to rest, to buy me groceries, or just because they wanted to help me out. At the same time, the memories of California keep haunting me and the Prosecutor Who Lives in My Head keeps taunting me, asking me how stupid I am. Am I really dumb enough to make the same mistake twice?

Prosecutor:        You’re blaming me for your problems… again?

Fred:                    I’m simply pointing out that you like to tell me what’s wrong with me.  It’s much less pleasant than one might think.

Prosecutor:       Without recognizing your flaws and faults, you can’t possibly hope to correct them.  I keep you from hiding from reality.  And the reality is that you’re a liability.  Your existence costs everyone around you money.  You are a pathetic dependent child.  I understand why you’re tempted by The Offer, but are you also going to be stupid?  Mr. Scott told you more than 40 years ago, “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”  You’re inviting shame… Again.

Fred:                Lady Dalrymple has already shown me she is capable of great kindness.  She’s not Anthony Tagonist.  There’s no reason to believe she’s lying to me.

Prosecutor:         She doesn’t need to be lying to you.  It’s a question of how much anyone can tolerate you.  History shows that it’s never long.  And then you will be stuck again.  You must find the means to be independent.  It’s your only chance of survival. 

Fred:                    I can’t imagine how I could do that.  There’s no job I can possibly do.  Someone offered me some proofreading work, but I still miss things in my own writing.  I couldn’t make that work, and I’ll embarrass myself.  It’s not like I can go work at a convenience store or something.  I wind up in DKA from nearly any physical exertion. 

Prosecutor:         We’re pursuing the means to do that at this very moment.  Your podcast.

Fred:                   After 3 years, I’m managing to put between 3 and 400 dollars a month into the bank.  I could stop supporting other artists, but the difference wouldn’t be enough to provide me with any sort of independence.  It would just allow me a few more days before I run out at the end of every month. 

Prosecutor:         Then there appears to be only one solution.

Fred:                   I tried that the other night.  I went into the bathroom and got my Humalog pen.  I took it into the bedroom so I could say goodbye to Speedy Shine.  He turned his back on me for the first time in his life.  He was obviously feeling angry and betrayed.  I told him my best friend would find him another family, but he jumped off of the bed. 

Speedy Shine:    I need your love, not someone else’s.  I give you all the loves and kisseses and cuddlers you ever needed, and you want to leave me.  That is not is a good Fred.  I need you.  Just my Smelly Old Man.  Nobody else for Speedy Shine.  That’s all.

So, I don’t know what to do.  I see only one reasonable alternative.  I don’t believe it will arrive in time to help me.  We need some form of Universal Basic Income.  We need to change our priorities from money to people.  The question, “Who’s going to pay for it?” has become offensive to me.  There’s no question that we have the resources to ensure everyone has their basic needs met.  I don’t even want a car.  I would just like to be able to live without depending on the kindness of strangers.  I contributed what I could to the world.  I continue to do that in the only way possible for me. 

This would be the solution for me.  It would be the solution for countless millions of others, as well.  Many people are in worse shape than I am, but you probably don’t know them.  The argument that this would cause runaway inflation has not only been disproven repeatedly, but it also says that money matters more than people.  It doesn’t.  Not on this Porch.

This country began in an effort to throw off the power of a King over the citizens of this country.  The first three words of the preamble are, “We The People,” and they’re written larger and prouder than all the rest.  The idea was to give freedom to all of us.  We wanted to end the idea of serfs and feudal lords.  We wanted everyone to be able to live their lives in freedom. 

We’ve certainly made progress, but we live with an economic system that makes meaningful freedom impossible for millions of people.  Unless I begin to earn $2000 a month from my podcast, I will be dependent on others just to live.  This is no sort of life.  And my life is better than many others.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  It shouldn’t be this way.

Change begins with imagination and conversation.  Perhaps we can get enough people talking about Universal Basic Income that it finally gets the attention it deserves.  This might prompt a politician to advocate it.  That might actually change the world. 

Absent that, I am doomed to live a precarious life, contingent entirely on the kindness of strangers. 

What could we do to help?  We can talk.  We can advocate.  We can vote.  We can try.  I’m begging you to do what you can.  I don’t want to live like this anymore.  I don’t know how much longer I can.  I’m not alone in this.  This world doesn’t work for far too many of us.  Please… please help to change this in whatever ways you can.

I love you.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2TSyk0wZJfRLnMpvwwRKgm?si=7353653d6e2240ec