No clean clothes, no chance

WelHappy Dixonl... I've been out of clean clothes for about a week now. Last time did it at the laundromat, I spent work$30. And my laundromat is cheap.

So this morning, I have to put on 100% dirty, stinking moldy clothes.

I'm also gonna be totally starving in like an hour or something. And then I have a full work day, for which I may never get paid.

So! I can go to the Caribbean catholic church, spend two hours and get a ton of food, or I could go to the meeting place and st Felix and get my laundry done and a breakfast, and then I'd have to grab lunch and dinner somewhere... right at crunch time at work... so, not an easy decision. And not a great way to start a work day.

I wish there were more laundry services. CONC makes you schedule your laundry use. Hey, that'd work well if I weren't mentally ill!

Sketch Studios used to have laundry, but the one of the machines broke and that was the end of that.

Oh yeah. Thanks, by the way, for the shitty, hungry Easter. Thanks for making it so you can't call #311/#211 from a pay phone anymore. Quarter or no quarter. Nice. No point in making those particular numbers payphone accessible, on no.

Oh yeah and to all the meal program co-ordinators who would never use a mailing list to inform people of holiday stuff, and make sure not to include a list of Easter meals next to the sign they put up: please believe me when I say, you can't provide free internet to your visitors and claim that we don't use the internet to stay in touch. And you can't claim that a mailing list is difficult to set up. Just have a sign-up sheet somewhere, or have a sign with a link to your website and a sign-up thing on there. It is so easy, and I'll keep volunteering to do it 'till someone has the common sense to say "ok, you know what, let's try this." We love you, staff and volunteers. You can do this. You stubborn, obstinate, presumptuous hosers.

So, of course I should have known I'd have to deal with that, and solve the problem, and do the research, or just not use these services unless it's going to be really frequent so I notice their signs or get told by their greeting people... they make someone put up signs but they won't send out emails.

And to all the folks who put together services as window dressing, not to be used but just to exist to be pointed at like "see all the stuff we're doing?":  someday  that gravy train of endless exploitation is going to get derailed by one of us, the poor, and some of you are gonna be crushed under the wreck.

And to all the folks who avoid getting into politics, avoid getting into government, avoid getting into public service, because you think politics is dirty and bad, because you think government is shitty work, because you think public service is deadsville: Go into that governance course you were gonna give up for a business degree. Pursue your dream of becoming a lawyer, even though you know every time you say what you do, eyes are gonna roll, you're gonna have to deal with lawyer jokes all your life, etc. Follow your dreams. It's politicians who were warned, vast numbers of Canadians would starve because of their decisions. They got their spots because all the people who'd do good job are avoiding the career. For real, check out some of the municipal and ward debates. Not many of the candidates can string together a coherent sentence unscripted. There's just no interest. The mayoral race is full of people who remind me of the crowd at the soup kitchens. Some of them are actually from the soup kitchens!

Anyone considering being a personal support worker though? Just get out now. Go travel or something. PSU work  will flatten you. It's another excuse to pay you to help them compensate for how light their benefits packages. So you can earn a hundred bucks by figuring out how to hook up your client with twenty bucks worth of transit tokens or some shit.

Just some hungry easter thoughts.

If you don't want to be starving on a holiday...

...make sure you go to all your favorite meal programs in the days leading up to the holiday!

They will not inform you by e-mail or text message of any changes in their program or any special holiday programming.

They might offer any sort of helpful list of alternate meal programs on the door, but the information may not be correct.

They think that their clients don't have internet access, even though they provide it and recognize it as a need.

They think that their clients don't have cellphones, even though they have several of their clients' cellphone numbers.

They will not put even their regular program schedule on their website, and where they do, it's probably inaccurate, and they don't necessarily update it, and they make sure not to note when updates were last made.

They think that setting up an email mailing list is something that they don't have the time, technology or budget for. They actually think it takes time, technology and a budget to set up an email mailing list. They actually, factually think that. They have said that to me.

So. I am an absolutely starving, housed, very internet-connected person. I am starving on a holiday because this is the first day in a few weeks where I have desperately needed free food. Somebody decided to skip work early at the beginning of this long weekend, so I couldn't get paid then, and they arranged to pay me today, but then took the day off, and didn't tell me.

So, of course I am totally responsible for spending all my money on food already. I guess I should have rationed it. I guess I should have bought cheaper food. I guess I should have combined soup kitchens with groceries. But I didn't want to combine them, because I didn't think I'd have to go back to that at all, and I didn't want to, because, ok, I've changed my attitude about these places. The food is often really, really terrible. Even when it's not, it's a sad, '50s Christian approach to food: half of it is red meat. Vegetables are tomatoes, potatoes, and lettuce. This is a good way to make sick people sicker and mentally ill people turn crazy.

So... if someone were to say, let's make a recipe, a blueprint, for a perfect social disintegration, this would definitely be a good piece of the puzzle.

Happy fucking Easter Monday, Government of Canada, you filthy slime. I'm fucking starving. My stomach hurts like crazy and I am coming closer and closer to committing burglary of food. Fuck you. Fuck your assumptions about what makes someone unable to afford food, what their lives are like, their opportunities, how close they are to success and danger, their needs, their fucking innocence!!!


I am not going to condemn the volunteers who work at these places. They are ignorant, not irresponsible. I point the finger straight at the government, because it is specifically their responsibility to not let their ignorance get in the way of good governance. It's up to them to identify and ameliorate any ignorance or assumptions they make. They screw up all the time, of course, but it's their responsibility to deal with that too.

I have spent, I don't know, 100 hours on this site. Maybe. I should have cataloged it. I was working on it quickly here and there, on resource center computers which will probably be gone by this time next year. Hopefully my hunger doesn't get me into an angry state, which I fall for and alienate my employers, and I won't have to go and see all those resource centers closed down with no notification or anything. That would break my heart.

I'm gonna restate this one thing: if someone were to invest a lot of time and money developing a strategy for the disintegration of society, this problem would fit well into that plan. It's a small piece, but they all count. They all disintegrate us.