The Bubble Bursts Eternally

Here from scratch we start anew
e-i-e-i-o
i can't even sleep i'm so mired moreover in the resolution of this especial humor game, almost all contingent upon the diffident sadism as emanating from the hood of corporate persons.

here i shall detail the perversity of this cascading mangle:

it starts with a (sort-of) good thing: as i was diagnosed with mutiple sclerosis during my last semester of grad school (even though i'd had it for more than a decade prior to that), i was eligible for student loan forgiveness. i was psyched, as it was all on me to pay them (having insisted from the first upon responsibility for funding my education--mostly so that i could exercise poor study and attendance habits [i.e., spending beautiful days being youthful and chastely enamored of everything] without risking subsumption by the colic of guilt).

all well and good, but the lender reported me, without notification, as being in DEFAULT on my credit report. when i attempted, years later, to purchase a house, a co-signer was needed because of the resultant drubbing exacted upon my credit score. my brother volunteered, gladly. this was a huge deal, because he had a security clearance (the very existence of which depends upon its holder having a "good" credit score).

anyway, this was all in august of 2008, just as the economy was sounding its death rattle. i found myself unemployed. i have since applied for over 1,400 jobs with little-or-less luck (maudlin tales of same are all over this blog). i would've just walked away from an ever-moribund maine, but i couldn't do that to my brother. everything that has occurred since has featured an undercurrent of agonized fretting. i have done odd jobs wherever possible, but have had to borrow a preposterous amount of money from my parents (the total of which is almost exactly as much as i owed in student loans).

anyway, when our current president took office in 2009, i was thrilled at the prospect that he might initiate some home-financing improvements. if i could refinance my home, then i could free my brother from any responsibility pertaining to the mortgage. i wanted to be first in line. i kinda was, and you will see now a long story abridged deftly into a list of events:

* i wrote wells fargo (my lender) in march for information about mortgage modification.

* in may, received a phone call from wells fargo; i was told about a "trial period" of 3 months (to start that july), during which i'd be obliged to pay only 50% of my mortgage. i was asked to inform them if i was still without lucrative employment before the end of 3-month period. i agreed to this only with the guarantee that my brother's credit would not suffer.

* everything seemed to be okay.

* come october, finding work seemed even less possible than it had before. i wrote to wells fargo well before the trial period ended. minutes later, i received (justly) irate communications from my brother, whose credit had been destroyed. now, he had to change career fields on account of his clearance being jeopardized.

* i fought this development with both vigor and rigor, through my congressperson and all sorts of pompy others, until i reached someone way up high in wells fargo that coud help. he said that he would rectify the fallout from the misleading entreaty that i had been given over the phone, and that he would remove all late-payment history from our credit reports.

* there was no evidence of his having done such a thing, but i was unable to reach him in the 2.5 YEARS that followed (although i tried rabidly to do so).

* meanwhile, my student-loan errors were removed (so i didn't need a co-signer after all?), only for me to be ensnared in this situation that not only was derailing my relationship with my brother, but also was instilling a perpetual panic within me that precluded my "getting it together."

* the car that i had to purchase in vermont (when our brakes failed as we descended a mountain) was almost denied us (because i was such a "high risk"). the ONLY company that would finance us? wells fargo, with a hulking interest rate because that's what they do with "us types".

* on several occasions (and at considerable expense), efforts were made to refinance our home, but the owners of the property adjacent to ours walked away and have allowed their house to sit vacant, thereby extinguishing the equity that we have been building slowly in our residence.

* last week, in the deepening pit of yet-another refinance attempt that remains in process, i called wells fargo. this time, i got that guy! and he remenbered our case! and, looking at wells fargo's credit reportings, i heard him say, beneath his breath, Ohhh my God. six late payments stared back at him from our payment history. we discovered, eventually, that a clerical error had prevented his order of december 1, 2009 from being realized. all of that. my goodness. and my poor brother all this time had thought that i didn't care.

* they appointed a new, shiny person to my case, and i told her that "wells fargo, in no uncertain terms, drank the bongwater." also, "y'all really stepped on it." and, finally, "you're lucky that i'm nice."

* they erased the negative information from our credit reports (HOORAY!), but it's up to the bureaus, i guess, when they decide to give you props. this world is vile sometimes.

* so, now i wait another few minuteshoursdays to see if they'll finally let this refinance go through.

one more (or maybeven less than one) mistake of this magnitude and i might have the fortitude to say, "no more. i will live life, and i can find beauty everywhere that you're not, and eff you forever." and then be with my family and my friends in the enormous present moment, and we probably won't even die in any real way.

Now I'm All Serious

Humans need to have some work done on their stupefying human brains.

Here in Brunswick, Maine, we are out of oil, with perhaps a thimbleful remaining.

Anyhow, I've just adjusted the thermostat upwards by 20% to 60°, so that my wife and children don’t feel like they’re hostages on an involuntary sojourn to a distinctly frostful hinterland. It’ll definitely drain what remains in our tank, which had been relatively plentiful prior to a polar yestereve. But, consequences be damned, say I, when it comes to my family knowing at least a semblance of comfort in their shared slumber. I’m staying awake in preparation of the emergency-refill call that I know that I’ll have to place sooner than later, even though I’ve no means of paying for a delivery (due to a succession of foibles that is keeping the money that I’ve earned at arm’s length). People say that compensation is forthcoming, and I hope that it is.

Granted, the party (where’s the party?) line is that a person should lie in the bed that they made, which is perfectly aligned with the puritanical and punitive notions that founded this intermittently great land. “Serve the heavens with your deprivation.”

This is all well and good, but why do we live in a country that appears to be allergic to alternatives, even as it is ruled by profiteering? It is actually, legitimately preposterous. To fill our oil tank would cost—and this is no joke—$974.00! Without the $50 in fees that we’d be obliged to pay. Per month, at this rate. How on earth can a person afford that in addition to everything else? There is assistance available, but Governor Paul LePage has decided to cut the amount by 70% so that he can provide tax cuts for wealthy people. He says that this spurs job creation, but it does no such thing. What is does do is let people be cold. We won’t freeze to death (I am, as I've stated before, famously exothermic), but there are heaps of impoverished people in the middle of nowhere. Many of them are ancient and proud, and what will become of them in all of this? What will happen? We’ll have a sudden onslaught of AARPsicles, that’s what.

Research into alternative heating has proven to be a fruitless enterprise; a summer visit from a Solar-Power consultant confirmed that a switch away from oil is, more or less, cost-prohibitive ($20,000) for people like us; we could finance it, and there are (rather piddly) tax credits, but they don’t outweigh a bleak employment and income scenario, and they won’t defray initial costs to any appreciable extent. So, in this very nasty meanwhile, we have to continue to “shell” out for heat, which mandates that we’ll accrue no savings.

And this is how the Great, Big “Them” works. I don’t think that it was ever really possible for me to appreciate before this cardboard-salad sector of my life, just what a joke the notion of class mobility is for most people. I would not be writing this post had I not been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis during my final semester of graduate school, only to be shunned on multiple occasions by Social Security and others like them when I sought assistance regarding my disabilities.

It happens to people all the time—gradually, momentum is lost, and you’re suddenly embalmed in the formaldehyde of class rigidity. It’s assumed that you have nothing to contribute, or that you’re cognitively incapable, or that you’re unable to manage adult life. The people that think thus, and strive to impress that upon you so that your limitations are bandied about constantly, don’t see the OTHER, more pernicious, set of limitations—borne of the fact that this culture is fueled by judgment and hierarchy, and that that's the default that every one of us is beholden to examining. 

With a chronic and (supposedly) terminal disease like MS, it’s so often the case that nobody believes in any chance of your improvement, but they’ll placate you when you talk about it by refraining from yawning when you speak. But then, when you are experiencing wellness, expectations of you are frightfully unrealistic, like your health is a bank account that you MUST empty whenever possible—usually by way of exposing yourself to the same stress-filled nonsense that begot this whole cycle in the first place.

And now, there are my wonderful, wonderful children and my stunningly excellent wife, who is my best-ever friend. They’re so, so important to me. And, truly, the love that we have for each other serves as a barometer for a life that is lived harmoniously with my self. That is precisely why all of this tedium has got to, and (I hereby declare) is going to, STOP.

hooray for readers!

2/1/2011, 12:26 AM

THE PRETEXT: Does anybody have any old blog posts from "good ideas on paper"? I deleted a ton of them by mistake. You could ask why or how this happened, but you'd get the same unsatisfying answer that I've already gotten.

I refer you now to "Comments." Love, Benb xoinfinity