I am America


Greetings. I am you. I am America. I live in a ditched truck-trailer parked next to my parents’ mobile home in a rural area. I am unemployed and receiving no benefits, without health insurance or savings, recently divorced of spouse and house, carless, chronically/clinically depressed and on medication, and generally wishing I had two ends to make meet. I have a funny feeling there’s a lot of us. This is an economically depressed area with little in the way of jobs, where empty storefronts and abandoned buildings pepper a landscape of cheaply built prefab housing, bunker-like taverns, and hollow-eyed men with their hoody-hoods pulled up, clutching plastic bags full of tallboys. The only business that seems to thrive in this area is antique shops, perhaps because there’s a growth industry here of estate sales hocking the sad belongings of retirees who’ve committed suicide. I’m remembering what it feels like to be set upon, whether it’s a delusion or not. I hate this disease. Anyway, one of the great things about being anonymous is not having to have people up in your business. Even though having people up in your business is what you actually secretly long for. What am I trying to say? I’m trying to say that sometimes I want to say “it’s not fucking worth it and I wish I had never been born” and not have a bunch of people, like, hovering and shit. Or to hover if they like but to keep fucking quiet about it. Which is what I dearly love about those of you who used to read this blog back when I actually wrote in it on a regular basis, rather than seeing it as one of a long list of things in my life I couldn’t sustain. So the short version is, I’m back. Hooray.