I'll Do Anything For the Health Insurance

Week 50
Don’t want to write. It’s work and I’ve been working all week. I want to rebel. Having sold my mind and soul all week long now I want my mind and soul for me but I don’t remember what for. I want only to rebel.
I’ve failed. If Woody Allen gives himself a B then I get an F or I’m off the chart curve altogether. I don’t count. I’m not an artist.
I rebel against that thought. I am an artist. It’s work. A kind of work. An oppressed artist. These are the things that keep me away from my work, that I have to sell my mind. That I don’t get to remember life is good.
So I don’t want to write. I feel fuzzy headed and can’t think. The next thing I need to do is make a chart of how the law has affected my life, our lives, those of us who work in welfare reform, those of us who rely on welfare for our livelihood. Buffeted by legislation and administration of the laws that we don’t ever read, can’t influence, drafted by people some of us may have voted for who have nothing to do with our real lives, whose job it is to draft laws to benefit those who paid for their campaigns.
What are we all doing? Set ticking, wound up, buzzing along.
For transcendence we have addictions.
So boring. So bored.
I went with Solly to the M museum. We never once talked about Machi. I didn’t tell her about Adolfo. We didn’t actually much look directly at the art. We were bathed in it. It was a better water. We were bathed in the art and the closeness between us, effortless. It might have been better if we’d talked straight about Machi. But we were both tired. Battered by oppression. Xiomara wanting to fire Lucha (we didn’t talk about that). My son refuses to come home and I know, someplace my mind knows, that it’s a god send he has Solly to go stay with. It’s not a bad thing but a good thing. In the old days, in the extended family days back in Ventura, he might have had his madrina or his tia. Solly is the closest to that we’ve got. Like the tia solterona.
I just remembered being in the park with Machi not long after Ori went away, at a salsa concert with Solly and three other women friends, on blankets, eating sandwiches, after sunset, in a hot summer breeze and Machi leaning over to me and catching my eyes and saying, “Ma, don’t be a lez.” What was he thinking? And now he’s staying with her, Solly, who is a lez.
When I start to write I get sad for all the writing I haven’ done, because I can’t get the big picture, don’t know what’s happening next. Much like my life. Don’t know what I’m making. I feel lonely. I should be writing Ori but to write him I’d have to remember him, picture his life inside. I can’t.
So I live this tiny life, this little life, this lonely life. Husband gone. Son gone. It’s come to this. I am a burocrat. I am someone who has work because others don’t. A poverty manager. That is the acid that eats away my brain.
And lucky to have a job.
Solly showed me y’s email. She's begging for a lead to a job, any job. I’ll do anything for the health insurance.