From.txt
written Febuary 8th, 2021
It's 3:25pm on the eighth of February 2021 and it snowed a lot yesterday in Cutchogue and
My hands are shaking a little bit, but only from using the vaccuum cleaner.
Nationality is the nation you belong to, that's what Google told me.
I'm a woman, so I don't have a draft card.
I am a white American from Long Island. From. From from from from from from from. From. If I type it enough times it stops meaning anything. In the song "the end is here" the woman says she can pick a new place to be from. I want to do that too.
In the United States, you always have to be from somewhere else. Ideally, one place. Somewhere proud and far away like Italy or
you know what I mean. I spent a long time on Ancestry.com and learned that I'm white with a lowercase w. There is no noticable difference between a Polish-American and a
I don't know how racism works in Europe, but I've heard it's more complicated than a wet paper bag.
I am not Polish, but Karolina Zebrowska is hot.
Every single day I think about clawing my way across the Atlantic Ocean to grab hold of something that I have to shout is worse. I have to say it's worse. Is it? no no no it can't be but I have to say it is or else someone else will tell me and I'll feel like an idiot I'll feel like
every self-improvement has the undercurrent of not wanting to be just another American
there used to be a word for this. teaboo. but i don't like tea.
Yesterday I read a book about the tower of london, and at the end of it, as a sort of consolation it said that the UK had come a long way from [some nicer word for savagry] to the modern
Welfare State
no two words had ever
like God's breath in my ear
but I'd heard the term before. as a little kid. before obama. it was the kind of thing sneered at on national television. i vaguely understood it to mean communism-the-slang-word-not-the-legal-definition. i understood it to mean food stamps and nothing more.
that's not what it means over there
it means
i once read an article on the NHS complaining that the free prostate exam was unneccessary. complaining that they were receiving too
much healthcare
that their time was being wasted while
i was in bed sobbing at this dinky little article because
well partly because i had suddenly remembered a very unpleasant illness from childhood but mostly because
free?
FREE?
in elementary school there was a nurse's office that stocked a very specific type of cough drop. it was the kind that tastes like poison. because they didn't want any of the children to take the drops unless absolutely necessary
Tremont Elementary had reoccuring (more like nonstop) lice infestations and was later found to have horrifically high PPM of Lead, specifically in samples of the water from fountains that had been built at kindergartener-accessable height. 600x the legal limit. sweet little children drinking leaded water but god forbid they take your precious cough drops
i'm extremely bitter but i also hope to God i can be a little old lady some day with a story that starts with "i came here for a better life," thick with irony, and followed by an offer of hard candies for that tickle in the throat
for every single line of this, i have to keep myself from saying "its not free its taxes and they have lead in the water there too and there was the flouride thing and what about dental and the censorship laws" because i taught myself to be quick on the draw before another American could pop my balloon i'd pop it myself and wear the pieces like a crown
and i've learned sometimes that what i'm beating them to the jump on is being wrong. i used to say "yes the wait times are a little longer but-" because no, they're a little shorter.
mind you, this is all free.
i want to
sometimes i want to scream please help us we're dying
sometimes Remote Area Medical hears the ones that are already screaming, comes in like something out of a recalled children's book from the 1950s, a thin old british man wearing khakis, lands like an archangel and sets up shop in a run-down aluminum shed and Americans will flock from hundreds of miles, thousands of miles, in minivans and pickup trucks and pyjamas because they're between a toothache and the barrel of a gun--
AND WHEN I WAS YOUNGER MY MOTHER TOLD ME IN COUNTRIES LIKE THE UNITED KINGDOM, THE PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES BECAUSE THEY'VE WAITED TEN YEARS FOR A DENTIST APPOINTMENT AND COULDN'T TAKE THE PAIN ANY MORE
and from the day my mother was born she had strabismus so bad she couldn't read an analogue clock and so the nuns would shout at her with the voice of God saying LOOK ME IN THE EYE WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOU but that little girl couldn't because her eyes didn't point in the same direction. She didn't get the surgery to fix it until after she was married. She was the 10th of 12 children, and did not under any circumstances deserve to suffer like that.
--these people journey so far because they need all 9 of their remaining teeth extracted and it's either RAM or a remington. i watched a documentary and it's seared into my head that the end of it was set to "You gotta walk that lonely valley, you gotta walk it by yourself," and isn't that the rub? Remote Area Medical does more than God's work, it does the work of an absent welfare state. It helps people. and then it goes to some other state of the US. It used to go to other places in the world, but then they realized there are over 300,000,000 of us, and quietly went to work.
I want to get out of here. I would like to have a little home in northern england. maybe i could work as a janitor in a hospital or something. a suitcase full of blue jeans and peanut butter rotting in the back of the closet. a phone disconnected and thrown into the sea.