MONEY, BUGS, and a SLOW SLIDE DOWN

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Our home is just a few steps above a squat, in fact there are people squatting in buildings nearby. There is a bedbug epidemic all over the central part of L.A. now as well, they're in the walls. It’s not necessarily because of dirtiness, more because of too high a concentration of people living in a small area.

The bugs just arrive there, just burst out of thin air it seems, and once they're in the building it’s near impossible to get rid of them. Add to that the fact these buildings are owned by absentee investors, not even landlords, just people who own buildings, and spend as little on them as they can while deriving maximum profit. If this were a luxury building and their profit came from the difference between high ceilings and a loft or a normal living room, I can see where cutting corners for profit would be okay.

But these owners are people from third world countries who’ve come to America to spread third worldism. So they're cutting corners on things like toilet pipes that leak and make your bathroom floor brown. They treat that kind of leaking sewage by occasionally removing the toilet. Well they hire Mexicans to do it, the owners never come near this neighborhood.

They just arrange to have Mexicans scrub out the accumulated feces, then rescrew the old toilet into the aging pipes, and carry the sewage out in a plastic bag. Then the day laborers replace the same brown stained floor pieces. It is less costly for the Korean or Middle Eastern or Central European owners to hire Mexicans to do this work than it is to hire plumbers and replace the pipes, put in a new toilet and then replace the flooring. So that's why this entire part of town is slowly becoming overrun with vermin, and I'm beginning to feel like I shouldn't go into other neighborhoods, it’s irresponsible, I might spread germs.

A lot of people come to L.A. and learn Spanish before they learn English for the very purpose of being able to order around the Mexicans.

The USA is now a third world country. You hear it today a little bit more in mainstream, I’ve been saying it for five years or so, but it’s been obvious for maybe decades.

America is becoming a third world nation.

Has already become, indeed, while we were all looking the other way.

It’s not just my mid-city block. It’s Los Angeles from the center downtown, through the acreage of Skid Row, then spreading out into the town, in buildings and in people sleeping in tents they carry on their backs, as they walk- walk- walk through town throughout the day.

Some pockets of town are dark and more dangerous than others, but there is still a neighborhood full of mansions in the midst of it. Mansions with encroaching bedbugs, but the residents probably don't even know.

My daughter’s friends are going to be the ones to bring in the bedbugs to our house, I'm afraid they may have already to her room, and then she comes and sleeps on my bed, it's just a matter of time. So far all I have biting me at night is spiders. But her friends live in nearby buildings where the bedbugs have taken up commands in the walls.

So even if you scrub your rugs and change your linens every day and spray the mattress with Lysol, you're going to go to bed and in the middle of the night they jump out from the wall onto the beds. They don't live in the beds, they just come to bed for feedings at night- on the humans.

I know about bedbugs now. I’ve studied up on them.

Money.

For the past 3 years I’ve been thinking, well maybe I’ll get a settlement from the Catholic Church too, since I'm one of the 70 thousand or so Americans with claims against the Church for their pedophile epidemic, and it looked like it could happen, until last month. Then in Illinois where my rapes took place, the State Supreme Court said, too bad, if you were born before 1964, you can’t file a lawsuit against a corporate entity that allowed sexual molestation to take place, which is the charge most people make when they file lawsuits against the Catholic Church. Not in Illinois.

I probly won’t ever get a settlement.

Even though I can document that I lost every job in my life because of skewered sexual behavior. I'd always get fired within the first year, I never held a job longer than one year, except NASA, because it took the U.S. Government three years to fire me.

I have to watch as all over the country, people my age get settlements for crimes that took place around the same time as mine. But I don't, because I was raped by a priest in Illinois, where laws are made in back offices and other covert places where the Catholic Church operates best.

I even had to watch, since I live in Los Angeles today, as people in my own town with crime victim experiences similar to mine got settlements, 500 of them at once in 2007. They got settlements because they were in the state of California when it happened to them, but since I was in Illinois at age five when I got priest-raped, I don't get my life fixed.

What's worse? I know I could produce a pilot webcast with $50 thousand dollars. And from stories I hear $50K is about the same size as the bar bill some of the L.A. plaintiffs ran up after the settlements, or as was lost in Las Vegas or squandered on cruises and aimless trips. Others made investments with shady people, went on shopping sprees, finding themselves still damaged and unsatisfied in a room full of plastic and boxes from all the new products.

A lot of them lost more than $50 thousand since the settlement, and imagine what City of Angels could have accomplished with a budget like that, to travel and cover trials and report more stories. I didn't realize that in 2007, or I would have asked ...

Money

All those Los Angeles plaintiffs got to move away, and I get to stay in L.A., as the vermin closes in.

I’ll be sitting at this little table in my Midnight Cowboy style decorated flat, cranking transcripts out on the computer every day to keep the rent paid for another decade. I'm working as a typist so the multi lingual people in Babel who own this building can keep their cars and vacation homes, probably be doing this job until 2018 or so when I'm seventy years old and the Government finally frees up some Social Security for me.

Money

It doesn't matter how sick you are, you will be treated badly in this city, and probly the rest of the country, over and over again.

There is a nonprofit that I use to get rides to doctors’ offices and other appointments, it’s through Department of Aging. They get grants to help people my age get where we need to go, I need the help a little early because I have this weird nerve disease and often can't walk. It's a result of PTSD from being raped by a priest at age five, or so that's what MD's tell me.

Last week the Department of Aging left me stranded. Something went wrong and the driver never came back and picked me up after I went to an appointment in Burbank. I waited for them in the heat and smog a good hour, the one day I didn't bring my cell phone, finally realized I’d have to find my way home.

I was wearing shoes that were more like slippers, not walking shoes. And I was already in a lot of pain. Now I was going to have to walk God knows how far to find transit in Burbank.

When I went a few blocks, I got to a bus stop, and a guy was sitting there.

As I groaned by, he said, "Hey, do you know when the next bus is supposed to come."

I said, "I saw one go by about 10 minutes ago when I was waiting for the senior center driver who never showed up."

The man scowled and said, “Shoot, that must have been the bus I heard go by then. Now I’ll have to walk to Hollywood Way to make my connection. It just went right past me about ten minutes ago, and it was early.”

He got out a white cane and used it to find his way into the crosswalk and go off as fast as he could on foot.

So I'm not the only one in L.A. feeling like it's third world. First thing that disappears from civilization as we know it is aide for the disabled. What a pipe dream that is to think a society could take care of its disabled.

I pulled out my pipe and inhaled my allotment of medicine for the rest of the day, pretended my legs weren’t hurting, and walked about six blocks to catch a different bus. Then for 30 minutes I stared at the entrance to Warner Brothers Studios at a bus stop where no other person ever joined me, there was just masses of cars driving by, endlessly.

Three hours after the driver from the senior center was supposed to pick me up, I was back home from Burbank, which is really just over one hill from here.

So, I've canceled any more appointments where I have to rely on the Department of Aging to get there. Maybe after Obama has been president a few more years... My legs did not hurt that bad when I got home. But now two days later I'm crippled and demobilized in pain.

But I have my computer and TV set right next to me on the table and a kitchen nearby, a refrigerator and the senior center does deliver Meals on Wheels, not always the best, but there is food in there.

I think the meat is Soylent Green, but what can you do ...

I'm better off than a crippled old woman in Calcutta, so I should be more grateful. But isn't it pathetic that we have to compare ourselves to Calcutta to convince ourselves things aren't that bad?

Los Angeles in 2009 is already third world, where a blind man gets passed right by as he tries to use the bus to make it to an appointment. He then has to try to run with his white cane to make a connection blocks down the street. This is a city where a sick old lady can be left stranded in Burbank using crippled legs to walk miles back home instead, where no one from the senior center called later to see if I was okay.

And whatever you sleep on - Midnight Cowboy style - push it into the middle of the floor so the bedbugs can't get to you from the walls, and sweet dreams.