How to Survive
It’s hard to live and it’s only going to get harder. It’s hot outside and it’s only going to get hotter. Supermarket shelves are riddled with human sized gaps; oil barons are the only ones who can afford to fill their gas tanks; corporations are gobbling up defaulted homes; children are being murdered before they can be taught that life begins at conception.
It comes as no surprise, of course, that everyone is mad and they’re only getting madder. “Who’s the enemy today?” I ask myself when I log onto social media in the morning and check the trending tab to see which person or group is the current subject of our mass vitriol. Often, it is Joe Biden — lamest of all ducks, ineffectual as snake oil, an endless well of empty promises. Everyone, regardless of the social or political spectrum believes this to be true — he is the Lena Dunham of politics, unilaterally loathed. At the very least, it is nice to have something we all can agree on.
Side Note: For reasons I cannot ascertain, as I don’t recall signing up for it and I certainly would never pay for it, I get a copy of Harper's Bazaar in the mail every month. This month’s issue, which is currently sitting next to my toilet, features Jill Biden on the cover; in the editor’s note, we are told that in the 155 year history of the magazine, a First Lady never graced its cover. It is endlessly funny to me that they decided to start now — not with Michelle Obama, not with Jackie Kennedy, but with the long-suffering wife of a man who, if he ran a restaurant, would charge for tap water.
At 1:57PM this afternoon I stood in front of a nondescript house in Lakewood, California (former city motto: “Tomorrow’s City, Today”, current city motto: “Times Change, Values Don't"), where in the 1950s one could buy a tract home for eight to ten thousand dollars (no down payment required for veterans, mortgage payments $50/mo). The average price of a two-bedroom home in Lakewood is now $712,000.
I was not alone. The sidewalk was full of people pacing, hands on hips, necks craned. At the strike of 2:00 came the nod of the officiant, a drawling man with a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and the racers were off, running towards a home filled with the final possessions of a woman whose family either didn’t exist or didn’t care to protect her memory.
The entirety of the contents of the home were free — the furniture, the cutlery, the pots, the pans, the over the counter medications, still sealed and numbering in the dozens. The zealous horde threw open cabinets and rifled through their contents, shoveling things into garbage bags without a second glance. Photos were trampled upon, envelopes filled with decades-old tax forms spilled out of drawers. It was all rather depressing, but what isn’t?
The day before, I had wandered through two estate sales in the San Fernando Valley; I visited them because I was already out there picking up a box of CDs a woman on Nextdoor described as “her son’s high school CD collection” (she neglected to include in the listing that the CDs were, in fact, mostly burned copies of his mediocre high school jazz ensemble, and therefore trash — I was desperate to make my voyage in 90 degree heat at a time when gas was $6 a gallon at all worthwhile). Two homes, both alike in dignity (or lack thereof), both filled with decorative plates and non-functional electronics, closets packed with pilled polyester Dress Barn and Kasper brand slacks. Each sale included a cardboard box of decades-old undergarments wadded into balls, their elastics weathered by machine washing. It was as if the same person had died twice, a mile away from themselves. I neglected to buy anything, for obvious reasons, but made $30 when I stumbled upon a still-sealed Google Home Mini sitting amongst trash on the curb outside a neighboring home. (Target will take virtually everything they sell back without a receipt; just don’t make a habit of it.)
This is the modern world, in which there are few assets and mostly liabilities. My friends will never be able to afford to buy homes; I feel guilty technically being a landowner, having spent the $20k I made in unemployment after being laid off during a global pandemic by a multi-billion dollar corporation that was only paying me $500 a week (I, in fact, made more money not working for them than working for them) on two and a half acres of dirt and a powerless, waterless shack in a part of the desert in which daily temperatures are presently 109 degrees. The other day I got a letter in the mail from a corporation who must have found my address via public land records offering me $7000 for said land. I promptly shredded it.
It’s good that there’s no future, because we wouldn’t be able to afford it; we can hardly afford the present. I furnish my shack with things I find that other people no longer want — a mini fridge here, a cabinet there. I lay free linoleum atop its filthy slab, sweating so profusely in the heat it streams down my face and onto its checkerboard surface, leaving streaks of mud on the white squares. It looks like shit, but it’s better than walking on concrete.
When I was in high school, a kind author paid me $20 an hour to type a manuscript into Microsoft Word on a computer he had loaned me. It was very nice of him, both trusting and employing a child, and for such an ethical wage. It was a lot at the time and it’s still a lot now, over twenty years later. Isn’t that fucked?
I now know almost no one, child or adult, who is paid ethically — the people I know merely scrape by delivering food to and for venture capitalists, recording low-listenership podcasts, and doing customer support for corporations. It seems the only way one can be paid ethnically is to create “art” that is not, unnecessary content like television shows about the petty problems of the idle rich or instantly forgettable articles critically analyzing television shows about the petty problems of the idle rich (“What Bridgerton Teaches Us About Gender”). It seems the only way to survive now is to desire less and be satisfied with scraps, to dig through trash in the hopes of finding a dead woman’s expired migraine medication. It’s all rather depressing, but what isn’t?