I can see the activity this post generated, but I'm here with an update anyway.. And ol' Muz who posted above this is an awesome stranger and everyone in this forum should give props..
But today we got our "vacate the premisis in 36 hours" letter.. I guess we have more than 36 hours, but in 3 days they'll be cleared to go to the courthouse and begin the (hopefully long) road to getting the judge to sign off on it so they can evict us.. I also like that three days from now = day before Thanksgiving. They also said they had twenty-eight more of those letters to deliver today, and after hearing that I could imagine boiling dark clouds of fear and worry foaming above twenty-eight other houses in my area..
I guess even if we came up with 33 thousand dollars and went up to their office and said "We're here to pay our land off, right now and in cash!", they'd say the paperwork has been filed and our agreement terminated, you got three days.".. (plus they get to take their land back, keep everything we paid, and finally resell their land for EVEN MORE than the original price we started buying it at) The odd and very lucky part here is that a local church bought the property next door to us to build a summer camp for kids and they wanted to expand, and told us they were interested in our property if we ever wanted to put it on the market (well, to pay off the rest of whats owed plus help us settle somewhere new, since we didn't/don't fully own it).
In my world experience they were supposed to sit back and wait on us to rot and then after three days roll our stinking corpse off this property, buy it and commence building their summer camp. Instead they're going to help us move our home (double-wide) and my middle brothers home too, and help us put a downpayment on land.. All this, in itself, is enough to convince me there is indeed some kind of God.
The only problem is that the only acceptable lot we can find (one that allows pets/multiple dwellings/mobile homes) is about forty miles from here.. I've lived all but the first two years of my life in this town, went to school K-12th here, and though it doesn't seem special in any way, this town means a lot more to me than I imagined.
The rest of my family is gone from here, either dead or moved away, but I can still draw a sense of connectivity from being able to say "That was the old K-Food's before it was a hardware store, "That lot used to be Grandma Lane's house and blueberry field, "Aunt Mary lived there til she lost her home basically the exact same way we're losing ours right now!". All true!
But we're ill-equipped to face moving.. My back is bad and worse than normal lately, Dad is dead, my brothers are both getting evicted too (we had three lots out here and all three are getting booted, and we'll all be moving into the same house when this is over: me, my two brothers, my sister, my cousin, Mom, both my brother's wives and two kids each for them, a total of eight people in our 4 bedroom trailer and my middle brother is also lucky enough to be getting his house moved too so they'll be in their own, at least). We have a 1930s Chevy Coupe (unrestored and in awful shape, its a moth hive) and my dad's Mercury Comet (Caliente!) that was his dream to restore, and Mom is trying to sell the Coupe even though it was HER Dads dream to restore it, the Mercury was my Dads and was also the same kind of car he was driving when my parents first met.. If they don't sell in three days they'll both just become Black Oak Estates property instead of dream projects (the real dream here is that we'll someday be financially able to buy car parts for a non-nescessary vechicle). We have a shed that we won't be able to move (unless the church folks pay for that too).. After Dad died we were both shellshocked and depressed, and were also without him to guide upkeep and cleanup missions, so the property went to hell. Overgrown, and some neighbor dogs shredded up some trash, plus the general accumulation of random junk that all poor folks seem to generate. We won't have time to clean the property up for the people that are helping us actually have somewhere to live..
I have the indiegogo page I posted the link to at the beginning of the forum, so this morning I decided to ignore my Mom's solid-brick-wall pride and posted the link on facebook for our family to see.. It was up for fifteen minutes before she started crying and I erased it. And then I cried some, which generally helped, and for all that I don't think anyone saw it. I did email my Aunt Melissa though and told her to spread the link around for me, if she would. She has always been involved in tons of forums (mostly ebay and thrifty type stuff), and posting the link in her forums won't break the "Don't tell anyone!" rule of my Mom's (The real rule is "Don't tell anyone that knows us because we have a couple of rich and condescending relatives that would make all this bs into our fault, and my last survivng grandparent, my dad's mom, who thinks the only help anyone really needs is 1. canned food, and 2. can opener).. Maybe some good will come of her spreading it around..
My aunt is a fine thing to ramble about. She owns a local small business repairing appliances and can afford to have multiple cars with full coverage insurance and take vacations to Vegas and Tunica every other week. She takes one of my cousins out and what she spends on him in one weekend is more than she's spent on me in the past fifteen years (birthdays and Christmas included). She tells you she's broke and then installs a majestic electric fireplace right in your face. When you dare ask her for a twenty dollar loan she spanks your ass with lectures about responsibility and saving money and NOT BLOWING G**DAMN MONEY.>LK@#:LIQHJWL>EKFM<N
I love her dearly.
Not quite
Around fifteen years ago her husband died of cancer even earlier than my dad. He didnt make it to 45, my dad got to 48.. But my uncle that died said that when the day came he wanted me to take co-ownership of the business. Har-de-har-harrrr.. Also when my dad moved here to Arkansas from Indiana when he was 18 it was my glorious aunt who gave him a job. When her employees were making well over ten an hour (in 1983), she decided my dad would be just fine accepting ten dollars a week plus room and board for working twice as much as her other employees. And then when my dad moved out he asked for a real job there and she said she didn't think it was the best idea (this was actually about ten years later) and then one of her asswipe employees waves around his 1-week check that was for 1400 bucks. She purposefully kept my father out of the family business and hired strangers instead of lending a damn hand. And if I don't go to her house on Thanksgiving then I'll go nowhere because shes the last relative we have thats down here.
So she's the one I draw my screwed-up perspective of life from. I've seen her be overly kind and generous with people but passively terrible to us, and I'm pretty sure if she saw us all huddled on the street she'd stop to lecture us about crushing cans for a living. One time when I was a baby she called my mom and told her to get ready, we're coming to pick you and Christopher up and we're going to go swimming!", and of course mom says "Great, we're basically ready now." and of course she never shows up, never calls, and afterward never even acknowledges that she's a human-shaped monster.
I despise saying nice/constructive things about myself, but I will say I am not a painful person to be around, for almost anyone. I generally live by one rule (outside of karma), and that is that if someone irritates/devastates/dissapoints you, then absorb that lesson and never inflict it onto another person, ever. This, of course, happened after high school let out. In high school I was a lying, blackmailing drama loving psychopath.
But now, I don't lie. I don't owe anyone money. I don't chew with my mouth open. I watch my language and consider everything I say before I say it. I feel sorry. I apologize. Every single thing that could be classified as negative or evil I've struck from the framework of my life completely. I haven't broken or subtracted anything on this planet for a long, long time, and continue to keep it up.
I made this change because I felt it'd be an awesome way to amass karma and buddies.
This is not advice you should follow; it has reaped generally no reward. I basically walk on eggshells while the suppressed angerself in my head rampages around spitting out awful one-line laser insults that never ever get vocalized. Even when they should really really really really be said :| My cousin has owed me twenty bucks for months and constantly talks about how broke he is while he hauls home new movies and toys (toys for himself, not his kid). And he's one of the fools living here thats weighing the whole boat down and, worse than not helping shovel any water out, instead laughs like a maniac and starts scooping more water in while simultaneouly pissing and shitting
Sadly, family or not, either me or mom should have told him to find a new place to stay after he lived here mooching and being irresponsible for months. At the very minimum I should tell him to give me my damn twenty before I take it in finished goods (and the only goods I'm really interested in aquiring currently are HUMAN SCALPS).
And through all this heavy bullshit I've been fighting tooth and nail to feed the animals around here when we humans are starving ourselves. We've got maybe ten cats, and we're comfortable with that many because in the past people would come around and fall in love with them and we'd let them take them if we knew that they'd be good pet owners.. Those people don't come around any more, espescially after dad :| But we had two antisocial, but friendly, kitties who hid back in the wood line instead of joining the cat commune up in front of the house, and one of those cats I named Barry (because its an awful name, sorry all you real-life Barrys). About three weeks ago he came up with a swollen neck and I figured he was as good as dead from a snake bite. Then the thing on his neck ruptures and he's got these ragged bloody flaps of popped skin hanging down and you can see all the necks inner workings in far too much detail. Some net research reveals that these big blister type things happen when cats fight and get infections in the claw wounds, that the swelling and rupturing is actually normal (how?) and that "your cat will be fine"... Unreal. And that was three weeks ago. Once since then he got into a fight and got some fresh damage done to it.. Earlier today I got a good close up look at it and now it looks like something is poking out through the center of the damaged area
I kind of expected him to disappear after a week of living like that, but he's still alive today. Every time I see him he reminds me. I've kind of made him a symbol of this whole situation, that he's in critical need of assistance but without cold bloody cash nothing will ever improve for him, even if it leads to death.
Today I fed them three cooked packages of Ramen noodles and half a loaf of bread. We can't afford the food, for us or for them.. Not sure how we're supposed to move all of our belongings with no gas money (and mom bought a junky Ford Ranger before this downward spiral began and its broke down out in the yard, bought it to have a furniture moving vehicle and it broke down before we could even employ it. Hell, won't even be able to take it with us)..
My girlfriend has two children from two different guys that ran like hell and never looked back, and then she did the single mother thing where no guy stays around for more than a month or two. We've been together five years now, and were together for a year in high school too.. I'm at her house every other day and here at home doing what I can for mom when I'm not with her. And both me and her and my mom are stuck in this sadness loop where my mom feels bad because I can't spend all my resources on my girlfriend and the kids (her little girl has just started toying with the idea of calling me "Daddy", which is awesome because she needs a dad, yet terrifying because I'm a deeply troubled loser stretched way too thin and handicapped to boot), and then my girlfriend feels bad because she's keeping me from fully helping my mom, and then I feel like hell because I equally can't abandon either of them and also can't provide for either of them. Dad died young and taught me very clearly that I'm not exempt from dying before I'm 50.. Which means I may have just 21 years left on me. My dad was a tough and hard-working man, and I'm a pale cripple. Him dying at 48 tells me I'll go at 44, get ready.. And I feel like I'm wasting both their times, and then I'll just die and drop a whole new load of bullshit problems and sadnesses on them just like my dad did.
If you've got a father you love, hug him. Your mom too, even though she'll live longer (don't hold me to that last statement).
Another thing I should share is that land deal we lucked into could fall out in a hundred different ways at any given time. We may not be able to buy the property we're looking at, even though its so far away. We may not be able to move my brother, or have room for my other brother to stay with us.. I don't know how I'd deal with knowing I have family living on the street. People do, though. Mom has been talking about a guy she sees sleeping on the bench in Conway every morning on her way to work. I could barely stand outside tonight long enough to finish a cigarette tonight because of the cold, and this guy has absolutely no relief from it whatsoever. He can't scream and say "I give up! Make it stop!", or rather I suppose he could say that, but nobody would hear.. That he doesn't know where his next meal will come from, that he has no place to go and no friend left to call, and that me and every person I care about may be right there shivering with him very soon.. Just talking about this makes me want to help the guy out, somehow, any possible way, but I can't help myself, or mom, or even damn Barry..
I'm kind of winding it down at this point. I'm not even spewing this out hoping for donations at this point, the damn page is virtually dead. Muz's money will hit the bank on November 30th, and when it does it'll raise the amount in my mom's bank from -500 to -370, so thats something.. Helps to have an open account to overdraft on, but each time its a thirty dollar fee and will eventually become unusable just from that. And as far as me buying headphones and rims, I've had the same cheap-ass pair of Philips headphones for maybe five years now and the only car I ever owned was from mid-2001 to early 2002 (Geo Prism I paid 500 for) before it broke down and since then I've whittled down my lifestyle and friends to where I have effectively nowhere to go, and for emergencies I rely on my mom's vehicle. I'd be broke and on the street just from keeping tags, insurance, upkeep and gas going on a vehicle.. My shoes are slowly falling apart and I'll wear them til they do, and then I'll put on the pair of Reeboks from 1999 I wore for at least seven years before I bought the ones I'm in now.. I've worn the same three pairs of pants for at least six years now, own maybe 10 shirts (cheap Hanes), and I own two towels.. My hair is as long as Jesus' because haircuts aren't free. I haven't seen a movie in theaters since 1998. I've never been "on a vacation" in my life, childhood or adult. I'd love more than anything to take that money and spend it on my mom for Christmas, but besides the fact that the bank will absorb it (would absorb double that amount, too), my mom would be angry that I spent money that wasn't put towards a bill. We're in a perpetual state of zero-luxury. We've gone without toilet paper and I've just had to wash my ass off in the sink and dry it with a towel, just like a clean face. I've brushed my teeth for weeks without toothpaste. I've had to go without showers or clean clothes entirely. Day after day of hotdog/bologna/ramen noodles, and the night we actually get a small microwavable pizza it seems like a damned steak. For any of you who haven't had to experience this shit firsthand let me at least inform and educate that nobody is safe from this, even the ultra-wealthy. Life has a way of chaining together purely evil kung fu and taking you to the dirt with it. And then once you're prone and retching and pale the kung fu will simply continue, until theres nothing left.
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Topic: Trying to get the word out about an indiegogo project I started for my mom.. (Read 1539 times)