For the past six years I have related stories of a lady friend named Megan, who has been in love with me for almost twice that long. Countless times she has asked that we homestead together, knowing that we would—if we both stayed in decent health, which is unlikely—be able to barely scrape by and pay rent on a room somewhere, and that I could protect her from what skulked in the streets and alleys in that somewhere. However, I want to be a writer and I’m not going to have a woman in bad health paying the rent for the roof over my head, which means, that if I settled down with Megan to die, I would have to go get a minimum wage job and stop writing. And, since writing is the only reason I bother staying alive at all and do anything to maintain my health, that would be pointless. I’d let the first bout of bronchitis turn into pneumonia and refuse care. Of course, caring so much for a bastard like me is the least of her worries.

She is “looking at sixty,” after having he first heart attack at 30, living with stents in her arteries. Recently, I recounted her nightmare life at yet another retail food store, where criminals are treated like kangs and queens and the employees like slaves. A reader suggested various options for her to live well above her minimum wage hell, and in the comment section I informed him that she had already been fired for talking back yet again to a kang who called her a “white bitch.” For us tail-end boomers, who failed to thrive, who had to give up our houses after decades of making payments to the bank because real estate interests pumped criminals into the areas we could afford to buy in, below is our plight. Hers is worse than mine because her health is worse and she never acquired a computer.

One suggestion was babysitting.

Megan only has a place to live because she babysits for her granddaughter, Emma and cleans her daughter’s townhouse. I call her Cinderella, because she is treated like shit. Her lot was better when her daughter was single and hiding from the drug addict X-boyfriend and father and needed me to come around to keep him away. Just the knowledge that I’d be there would keep the dope fiend at bay. Now daughter has a well-set fiancé, who pays rent in a suburban sprawl location. This necessitated Megan giving up the only quality job she has had in ten years, to move along as the unpaid babysitter and house cleaner, out of the small waterfront community they had been in before, to an area where almost everything is too far to walk, where there are two bus lines a mile distant used by virulent hoodrats being pumped into five new high rise housing projects.

Megan is not allowed to babysit in her daughter’s house, anyone but her granddaughter. When Megan does get outside employment she is told to buy the groceries. When she loses this outside employment her daughter takes the remaining savings towards her “rent,” keeping her perpetually available as free day care and house cleaner.

Megan has no car, and no way to get to a sitting location.

Another suggestion, made by Megan’s daughter, was working for a housecleaning service, who will pick Megan up in a van.

These services are staffed by teenage and 20-something Latinas who Megan can’t keep up with, who are being paid low wages as it is. The one lady who was willing to consider her, expressed interest in Megan as a supervisor, only if she spoke Spanish. In Maryland, even supervisory jobs in janitorial, retail, food service and housekeeping are being barred to English-speakers. If Megan had her own car she might be able to get some private sitting or cleaning jobs under the table. But, as she puts it, “I’m a broke-ass bitch, looking at sixty without two pennies to rub together, who had my house and my car repoed the first time I got fired for not letting some cооn put his hands on me—so how am I supposed to get a car? I have no credit, no money, no job?”

Another suggestion was placing online ads for services.

Well, Megan does not have a smart phone or a computer. How is that going to work?

Theoretically she could travel 4 miles by foot to the local public library and wait for homeless guys to finish masturbating to porn so that she could post some adds, but, she has a hard time walking around the block with her granddaughter and she confided in me that she feels like she’s losing it, that she’s getting the message that the world has no place for whites who aren’t privileged.

She is currently undergoing the repeated humiliation of spending her little bit of money sent by her brother and me to get to the social services office so she can get a medical checkup, which means standing meekly before an ebon queen, “smacking her lips, rolling her eyes and wagging her finger at you” for not cashing in on your privilege. She is soldiering through the humiliation, which is more than I can say.

When I failed to navigate this past year’s Obamacare induction, despite setting aside two writing days and making an earnest effort, I declined to cancel my trip west and spend a month going back and forth to social services in Maryland on the buses, begging for help from the gatekeepers, hoping to qualify for health insurance. I’m now happily uninsured, kept alive by one doctor friend who writes me perscriptions.

I don’t know if you caught the context above, but Megan’s commitment to her daughter and granddaughter, and her daughter’s keeping of her as an unpaid housekeeper and babysitter, taking her to a place where one needs a car just to do the simplest things and leaving her stranded in a basement, not even invited upstairs to the dinner the fiancé brings home, is just one aspect of being a failed boomer.

When I’m in town, and willing to stop by and spend some quality time with her and her granddaughter, I’m only permitted if the daughter or fiancé think there is need for security, if there has been violence in the area recently, if he will be out of town, if the X is out of prison and on the prowl, etc. The reason is simple, it is embarrassing for aspirational class suburbanites, even if a mere mile from the soaring ghetto of next year, to have a loser carrying a backpack of homeless proportions, to be seen coming and going.

Megan is not alone. I couldn’t get my son to help me file the health care requests he had previously taken care of for me—it being his idea and all. So, while I might be able to write books, my inability to navigate civic web spaces, has put me in a better place, closer to an exit from this sad stage. I will not consent to being a welfare healthcare case again.

Megan though is more of a fighter than I, why she’s been fired for talking back to kangs and queens who put their hands on her three jobs gone now, and is doing what she can to try and stay alive to be there for Emma. Once she gets her “bum ticker” checked out she hopes to get a job at the 7-11 across the street that gets robbed every month. She just can’t imagine it being worse than being “scolded” by her “uppity up” daughter or screamed at by grocery store customers. “Hell, having a gun stuck in my face once a month would be a treat by comparison!”

She still dreams of making enough money to save up and buy an old junker car and then maybe start cleaning houses. Knowing this is unlikely, and that if she lands the dream 7-11 job, she’d probably end up getting fired for talking back to a customer who threated to “beat her white ass,” before saving enough money to buy a car [money that has to be concealed from the landlord daughter] and then when she got fired and couldn’t buy the groceries for her granddaughter anymore, that her daughter would demand her remaining savings [as she did this time] for “rent,” and keep her starving in the basement, Megan has a backup plan. Every day she’s going to buy a lotto ticket. Maybe that will work.

Hope springs eternal.

Postscript:

Of course, the baseline dynamic here is the socially engineered death of the American Family, a necessary recondition for the welfare state to thrive and bring us back to Plantation America conditions.