All I Ever Wanted

 "..........all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her."

From Stone Mattress, by Margaret Atwood

This is all I ever wanted. But I never tried hard enough.

Money is the great liberator. 

When you have money, you don't have to cower in fear every month praying that your social security check hits. You don't have to worry that a major home repair will wipe out your savings, and that Fancy Feast Gourmet Cat Food will become the staple of your everyday diet. Thank God it's gourmet. You don't have to work a dehumanizing job into your seventies just to be able to pay the fucking rent. 

When you have money, you are nobody's fool - you are master of your own fate.

The position Carol and I are in is ridiculous. And humiliating. If I did nothing, if I changed nothing from here on out, we would eventually become a financial burden to our sons. And, finally, a medical burden.

I will never allow that. But the pressure is on.

What the fuck am I going to do? I am an ancient; the odds are stacked against me.

I'm working on it. You won't get the details until I actually do something about it.

Procrastination kills. 

Over the years, as I eked out an embarrassing "living", I would think to myself "You better figure out a way to save up some cash, shitboy, or you will end up broke, downtrodden, fucked and alone." I knew it. I was aware of it. That reality lurked in the dark corners of my mind like a killer with knife raised to strike.

But I never did anything about it. Whiskey is a decisive and efficient problem-solver. I never found a way to put by some extra cash. I never made the effort I was capable of, to improve our financial position. And now we pay the price.

Scrooge - "Are there no prisons? And the workhouses - are they still in operation?.........................I help to support the establishments I have mentioned......they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there."

Gentlemen: "Many can't go there; and many would rather die."

Scrooge: "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Sounds cold, but that is exactly how our society operates. Nobody is hungering to rescue me, nobody gives a damn if I die penniless and am buried in Potter's Field.

This is as it should be. Everybody has their own problems, and life is a motherfucker.

As my mother used to say to me, tenderly, every time life drove me to tears - "You made your own bed, motherfucker - now lie in it."

She was a sweet woman.