Morning word: Adult Protective Services in Tucson spent two hours talking to Helen, then upset my sister in Los Angeles by calling about all the same bullshit: Helen told them she has five kids, but no one will help her. No one will help her? Oh, please. I expect they’ll be calling me too. The [...]

When last I typed that title, I told how I’d decided to let Helen do whatever she wanted…
The old woman wouldn’t budge and wasn’t so far gone she couldn’t fool a social worker. Never mind “the voices” and losing $2,500 in cash. Never mind paying too much for an awful trailer she didn’t need with [...]

Now there’s a title you don’t see every day, and the guys who made it possible aren’t everyday fellows, either.
How it turned out that in my advanced decreptitude I’ve finally found friends who not only share many of my own predilections and cultural underpinnings but also take care of each other is mildly astounding to [...]

I think it’s always been there, though rarely mentioned, this cold, black thing that kills all love and joy. Always! Though in my memory the first remembered taste of it came in Abilene, Texas when I was barely 13 years old.
This would be during the early years of rock & roll, 1958, when Buddy Holly [...]

Helen was always good at nest-building, as I recall.
This came in handy, because as I once figured out, we went through over 40 moves before I graduated from high school. Many of those were within the same community, of course. Arriving in Abilene, Texas for instance, we lived for a time in a motel with [...]

I hardly know how to begin, but I have to try, in order to save myself.
Those of you who have gone through something similar will understand at least a little, or maybe a lot. We’re all the same and yet so different. It’s one thing to say, “My mother has been diagnosed with advanced [...]

I don’t need to write about this stuff because, well, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but Barry Ritholtz does. Check out Idiots Fiddle While Rome Burns:
This is financial incompetence writ on a scale far grander than anything seen for centuries… something beyond cognitive dissonance is occurring — this is full blown case of [...]

Now this could be fun, especially if you have a family:
Your Heimatssicherheitsabteilung — sorry, DHS — is considering having airlines issue shock bracelets instead of boarding passes. You’d put these on, they’d have all your travel and personal info encoded into them, and if there was any trouble, they’d work like a taser: just push [...]

We’re still looking for a rental with more solar gain and a better woodstove. I’m feeling lucky, too.
I like heating with wood, athough it won’t do for the studio my wife needs for her glossy-black baby grand piano. In the long run, I think we’ll have to buy some land and build a couple of [...]

We all hope this isn’t a sign of things to come, except that it’s already here.
I picked this up from a post by Dave Neiwert at Firedoglake. (You need to read the whole story at CNN.) It’s about homeless middle class women [Note: see comments] in Santa Barbara, California, sleeping in their cars:
Harvey [...]