That was an actual song I wrote, many years ago and I was on welfare at the time. We all were. Certified crazies - we only had to show up at DSHS and recount a true story from our real lives and they'd sign us up.Today, I came full circle, except now I'm seeking out social services because my landladies sort of leaned on me to do so, and it would never have occurred to me that something like this was even out there. This is a program to stave off homelessness and the indication is that they can help me, so it's kind of a doubly humbly thang. I was at the wrong end of downtown and 10 minutes from my appointment time, so I had to drive past cops making the driving circuitous with long waits, yelling 'Thanks for totally fucking me up!'. Oh, I'm on Prednisone right now, which makes me an uber-me when it comes to driving. My caseworker, Phillip, a large, and I'm assuming but it seems nothing's a given anymore - gay Samoan man, didn't throw me out on my ear when I showed up 10 minutes late. I parked in the first empty space I saw, regardless of any signage that would discourage me from doing so and of course got a $50 ticket. Three hours later, I took my grinding jaw out of there, got stuck in a traffic snaggle which required more profane spewing and then I was home, some kind of weird circle. Oh, and if I'd gone to the right address in the first place, it's about 15 minutes away, nestled amongst the projects. You drive quickly past it many times. Now: there you are.
I've been far away from this narcissistic endeavor, this writen accounting, but I find - for me, at least (see; narcissi - oh, you know) - it's also a helpful tether to life. When you've been unemployed for almost a year, things get a little amorphous. A year of lots of interviews and a feeling, at times, that you were finally going to get the fucking thing and then it falling through. And I can feel the pull of the rightness in the universe. It's telling me, don't do it, don't just spend the precious fucking little time you have left on this planet, in this life, killing time, getting by, paying the bills. Because that steady paycheck, that subsidised complacency - well, that's pretty seductive stuff. I resisted it when I first started doing office jobs - they kept wanting to convert me from temp to full time and I held out, because I thought my soul was at stake. Turns out, my instincts were good. Because that's what my 'career' has been: 20+ years of sitting on my ass, getting creative about killing 8 hours. I have ass muscle memory. I now just have to turn the computer off during the day, or I will return to it again and again to check D-Listed, or Go Fug Yourself or my Flickr site, which is really me at my most social these days, which is to say not, but you get the gist. But I was never good with money when I actually made a decent salary (my salary finally equalled my years in K's), so now that I don't have any, I'm not much better. Money. Like a shrink I saw for a while, but finally had to cut him off after he kept turning the conversation to Star Wars, said to me about my possible shadow self. "Maybe she's an accountant."
So, in case you're stumbling upon this for the first time, The Waggle Dance is the motions bees go through to communicate, primarily food sources, distances, and it also strikes me as another way of just trying to connect, to talk to the hive. Hive jive. So, come back - I'll try to write. And maybe Sad Pig will go away some day, too.
