Well, ok.

Ok. $25 buys 200 miles of driving.

I ran that tank just about dry, but it didn’t run out.

(running dry in a fuel-injected car opens a can of worms and you may overheat the fuel pump (cooled by gasoline) and have to replace it, and that is omg hundreds of dollars to repair)

It’s taking a long time to get to work, to get anything out of it. Having done the OIT class, maybe things will start happening. If I passed…. We are to avoid completely, or as much as possible, hurting our clients. The last part of the class was avoiding or deflecting violence to ourselves while not hurting the clients. We are not expected to be punching bags, exactly, but the training conflicts with other training I have had, as a security officer and as Shore Patrol on Navy bases. Then, the point was to avoid any injury to ourselves and to put down our attackers as quickly as possible. And we weren’t supposed to be overly concerned about whether they got hurt or not.  I need to be gentle (gentler) with my clients, many of whom are DD, Developmentally Disabled. I’m working with the Children’s Program – an adult beating up a child is a NO NO and is a serious breach of standards, better I take it than they do, I guess.

Oh joy. I’ve spent most of my life NOT having to deal with physical threats, but I have been trained to do so. Wrongly, it turns out, for this job, and that’s the only reason they might "fail" me from the Oregon Intervention Training class. I am a tiny bit worried.

In all likelihood, with kids, I probably won’t have to deal with any of that.

I’ve been working with a Job Developer this year; I wasn’t doing very well on my own, and they found me this job, mentoring DD kids. It sounds like, reading the company literature, that THIS is the job for me, so…

Let’s get this party started!

My job developer emailed me yesterday regarding an interview I did in May; that outfit, who runs Group Homes, may need someone on-call, and she encouraged me to call them, the Human Resource Director, and talk to him again. I slept late, having stayed up much later than I thought I would, and had to do first things first: get some gas for my car. Actually, I drove more than a mile farther than my gas estimate, so that last half mile was "an adventure" – will it make it or not?

The last time I did anything that close to empty was in 1983, driving back to North Chicago, to the Navy base there, from California, in the winter, in the snow, without chains. I was a day late, but had called from New Mexico, where I got snowed in over New Years, and the car (going through Chicago was thrilling, eh?) had 8 tenths of a gallon of gas in it when I refilled it on base later that week. I had a dollar sixty-two in my pocket when I got back to Great Lakes NTC, and the car was almost totally empty, and, oh boy, it was an adventure for sure.

(tone is important here. Imagine that I said that with an ironic tone and a smile that tells you it wasn’t really an adventure)

Maybe maybe maybe the mail will bring something tomorrow; nothing at all today, but maybe tomorrow. My oldest, er um, longest held friend is going to put fifty on the insurance tonight or tomorrow – I forwarded the insurance email to her, and money is in the mail, my friends tell me.

I have some good friends, some long-held and beloved friends. My ex wife does not hate me. I’m not a bad guy (which is sorta too bad – the women like bad guys) and as a cat, I don’t tear up the furniture or make a mess; no one that I know of hates me.

I’m not the brightest bulb in the fixture, I don’t think, but I have a good excuse: Brain injury and utter poverty.

That poverty is galling; I feel like such a loser, by the standards that I grew up with. Like many other people, I am just one unexpected expense away from destitution, which is what I meant when I wrote awhile back that I was standing on the edge of the cliff, heels in the air and toes holding on. I am fortunate; my car is relatively new, there’s no wondering "what’s gonna break next", unlike 9 of the cars I’ve had before.

That’s why I bought a new car when I could; I can take care of it RIGHT from mile one (mile 7, really) and it will last me a good long time. If I can keep it. Payments go back to normal next month, so instead of just $90, it will be $363, to just keep it. Gas and oil are extra. Insurance too, but I gotta have insurance, it’s the law, and it will pay for the car if I get in an accident, and me too.

I drive much more cautiously than I used to, when I was younger, had more money, a used car that wasn’t worth much, and didn’t comprehend that accidents can and do have long-term consequences. Of course, if you never have an accident or make a claim, you feel like that’s money down a rat hole, but IF you don’t have insurance, it can wreck your life.

I didn’t have car insurance when I wrecked the car on the Morrison Bridge, but I did have insurance through my employer, the Scottish Rite Temple of the Masons. "Gold-Plated" insurance, they told me, and what if I didn’t have that when I crashed my car and got heavily injured?

I might be a vegetable, somewhere, hooked up to machines but not so much alive. My former wife was prepared to fly from Japan at a moment’s notice to unplug me, if that happened because she KNEW I would not want that kind of "life". It’s fortunate for me I had such good insurance; the bills, in 1998, came to over a quarter-million dollars.  I myself got bills upwards of $40,000 and was flat busted broke; it got written off, as it was "uncollectable"

***

Yeah.  Things could be worse.  I’ve said that all my life, since 15, and it’s been mostly true, but…

Things could be much better too.

Whatever.  I’ll deal with what happens as well as I can.

Onwards.

 

*****