chantelles

I grew up with boomer parents (one went to DJ school) who blasted only Beatles and yacht rock, explaining anything made after their youth was not even music. It spawned in me a lifelong curiosity and dedication to new music. I do on rare occasion reflect back, but never to The Who, who was my unfortunate childhood alarm clock and constant soundtrack as I played/gardened outside. (The DJ wired the yard for Who sound).

What if Jeff Bezos buys X game!

Or, to shift perspective, we are also in a class-war position of a general strike.

Do you have any money to apply for? I'm in Canada and my friends who've applied have all gotten it. This is the last time anyone should have to live cheap, it's the time when all the taxes you've paid do the job of taking care of you.

Yes well many wanted me to write a tips to retirement book and not an apocalypse memoir. I can't write some of it, or am not ready to. But, no one should do it. It's just total privation and lack of self care, or would be to someone coming from a healthy home. I started in stripping for seed money to start buying houses, but it's such boring work and dangerous too (I ended up being an activist and helping nurses immunize strippers from Hep B ) You obviously cannot drink or use drugs - I never tasted alcohol until I was 35 (retired - still don't like it). When I went out I never took money. Ever. I lived on powdered milk and horse cereals while I was making very good money. I worked constantly (various business from pools to landscaping, tenants, house flipping, production company, and went to university part time and had no hobbies except running and I started that by just running in what I had. I only buy cars with all cash and they are always old. I mean, feel free to ask questions. TL;DR: Be a hustler, but not like one from the movies. One that is really boring, hated by everyone for seemingly being aloof and judgey, eccentric and annoying.

I've spent multiple years in therapy trying to integrate just that - that this is wild. My normal prevents me having healthy relationships. Events like a plague are more dangerous to my ptsd work than my health (though I have asthma) because this stress feels like home to me. There is a relief of, like the shoe has dropped, because I've lived this. I've been waiting to say SEE I TOLD YOU ALL THIS IS NORMAL! My book is an apocalypse memoir not to be facetious but - everything is true. Every event and thought is me in the late 80s, how I perceived every non-grandparent age adult as a horrible threatening monster who could without warning rip you to shreds and then never explain why. And I was lucky. I was born white and in Canada and I met some really kind people who (because I look non threatening ) saved me - not with money or food - but by just being nice, opening up to me. Saying nice things and laughing at my painful jokes and forgiving me for being really fucking bizarre. That's really why I wrote it - so folks can empathize with marginalities and the struggles between class/race/gender/sexuality and education and identity and then see you don't need to donate money or time to make a revolution. Just like be there, emotionally. Listen and expect nothing. And, that easy, you healed part of my identity.

Totally. It's certainly why I never had kids, I can't stand all the responsibility of that.

That's wild! I learned about it from a friend from Jamaica and I was able to source it so cheaply. How weird that a rural Canadian girl from a town with a Jamaican mayor (who was the only West Indian family in town ) ended up living off Australian meal supplement.

That's true. I mean, I mean the best dumpster diving is in rich neighbourhoods. Food banks also dry up in hard times. I lived in Nelson BC for a time when most people there were on welfare (it was at about 80%) and the food bank only had apples from the harvest and those decorative gourds so I got them and tried to cook them ( I was house sitting a Doukabor cabin for a Buddhist couple ) and even ate a few bowls of what was THE MOST BITTER thing I ever had even with a zillion sugar packets. But lets be real, what happens when the dumpsters dry out is folks steal. That's why it's safer to have a social net, for everyone.

Yes vans are a luxury! My first 'home' was a tent with no zipper and then a VW rabbit for a year and so when I got a '64 Ford Econoline it was my mcmansion! I find that having a home is stressful, like stuff owning is a huge responsibility because I see each item as hours of my life sacrificed from thinking and working on relationships.

What's funny is I've been living in St Petersburg Russia for 4 months a year for the past 3 years. It's wild to live there now, where the stylish and beautiful youth are extremely enthusiastically embracing capitalism. I am not sure how capitalism is not gendered or any other economic system, but I agree, I'm very sure the failure of every economic theory is one of imagination and disciplinarity.

Thanks for the search - it's on amazon too. It's translated into Chinese and sells very well there, especially right now.

I'm a daily runner now for 26 years ( five miles a day currently) and an asthmatic who always has gunky lungs, but, as per my lung test last year, I have the lung health of someone 20 years younger instead of 20 years older, which is what my doctor expected given the severity of my allergies and asthma. I grew up in the 80s when I was forbidden from all activity because of my asthma, but running is my bulwark of breath, my mental/physical/meditation on how to breath healthy instead of in a diseased asthmatic way.

I left home at 15 and some adults who worked together let me move in with them and be their maid. I paid $150 a month in rent and got $10 a month to live on. I worked out how to live off Milo (a Jamaican malt supplement), Chips Ahoy cookies (1/2 a cookie a day for a treat) and dumpster dived vegetables (mostly cabbages and carrots). I lived like this for years, when I got my first real jobs I made sure to save at least 80% of every paycheck. I retired at 35 and now I write about the apocalypse (one feature film, various shorts, one book, graduate degree in Equity Studies/lots of essays and conferences). I know live a very easy comfortable life, but most see me as bizarre because i have no furniture and do not buy any beauty products (I've never purchased shampoo or paid for a hair cut - I am female). There is an equal proportion of happy memories scattered throughout my life, some of my happiest were when I had literally nothing but one dress and 4 pairs of stolen Zellers underwear and was sleeping in a car. The form of our lives impoverishes experience of reality as much, if not more, as the content. It's a whole we do not see for the misplaced desire for displays of wealth over relationships with everything and everyone.