#ghost poverty

[clatterbane]

New plan that I'm intending to get going, with the excuse of a Christmas treat: finally getting a small, relatively easy to maintain planted tank set up here, for some shrimp and most likely a betta. Because my cheap ass evidently needs some excuse beyond "I just think they're neat." 🙄

Considering one of these setups:

https://aquaremedyireland.com/product/shrimp-set-smart-2-30l-black/

(Not from this place; that was just a handy link in English.)

The model name is pretty coincidental. I was just looking for a tank of around that size, which happens to be a popular setup for mini shrimp. Currently going back and forth between the idea of also getting a matching stand (which is pricier than the tank itself), and just picking up a reasonably sturdy small table from IKEA. I could get, say, a Skruvby--which looks functionally very similar minus a cabinet door--for less than half the price.

It's both exciting and sort of intimidating to be starting over completely from scratch with aquarium stuff. All of it basically ended up getting abandoned back in Romford. Including the multiple tanks of various sizes.

I don't have 15+ years of accumulated equipment/supplies to dip into now and set up another small tank on the cheap, or really the means to get out looking for bargains or picking stuff up from the local Craigslist equivalent--and pretty much everything aquarium (or most other hobby) related is spendy as shit here, compared to when I was feeding my aquatic habit in the UK.

But yeah, it is what it is. And we can afford to get a damn shrimp tank up and running, even at full Swedish retail prices. Better just pretend it's Monopoly money, and pick up what I need.

(Also, gotta say that my tiny dyscalculic brain is also still more prone to sticker shock, seeing as it's around 100kr to $10 or £7.50. Gotta shift that decimal point one space over for those quick mental conversions! Otherwise you're gasping at a $25 loaf of bread. Could be worse, it could be either yen or, say, Jamaican dollars for the extra denomination mindfuck. Just remembering hearing one guy bitching about spending J$200 for a head of cabbage after some bad growing weather. 😱)

But yeah, besides just really looking forward to some new little water buddies? I'm enjoying mentally planning out the aquascaping and looking at some potential options. Also looking forward to the prospect of planning around something as polite as these little guys.

They couldn't really tear/gobble up their plants or root around in the tank substrate if they even wanted to, so you don't need to plan around that. (Yes, I am looking at you, messy carp beasts goldfish. 😒) Easier to get things looking nice with tiny guys who actually like to help by grazing on algae.

[pariahfox]

Having probably more pork roast than I can gobble down somewhat tangentially reminds me that it's a shame I haven't been getting out more, partly to check out what deals some halal butcher shops near us are running. 🥴

Pretty obviously not because I am specifically looking for halal meats. We just live in an immigrant-heavy part of town where there is plenty of demand for at least semi-affordable halal meat. So, that's most of the butcher shops I've been seeing. Should be a good source for some decent deals.

Cost of living has been going up pretty much everywhere, but supermarket meats have been running high enough here that I haven't been buying and eating as much as I am used to. (Even coming here via freaking London, with a firmly middle class household income for a good while now. Where I also liked to hit all kinds of stores aimed at different immigrants.)

It's more refreshing than it should be to have my fill of roast again, maybe especially while trying to feed myself back up from malnutrition--with a side of restrictive ED tendencies plus Ghost Poverty Brain already complicating matters. Since I am eating meat now, probably trying to get hold of more at least semi-affordably is a good idea. Same with a better variety of less expensive fresh produce, which should hopefully also be findable enough if I can manage to drag my sorry ass out more in search of it.

[trans-xianxian]

I'VE BEEN IN POVERTY MY WHOLE LIFE AND YOU'RE TELLING ME MY GRANDPA JUST HAS A CASUAL 49 THOUSAND IN MY NAME. WHAT.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

I can't express to you how much I adore Weaver Márquez. The ghost in the static. A mystery not a puzzle. A person gone but still taking up space. A thing still leaving marks after it's gone.

[quotesfrommyreading]

It is August 1854, and London is a city of scavengers. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen. These were the London underclasses, at least a hundred thousand strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scavengers broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth-largest in all of England. But the diversity and precision of their routines were more remarkable than their sheer number. Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water's edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river's edge for magic coins. Beside them fluttered the mud-larks, often children, dressed in tatters and content to scavenge all the waste that the toshers rejected as below their standards: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope.

Above the river, in the streets of the city, the pure-finders eked out a living by collecting dog shit (colloquially called “pure”) while the bone-pickers foraged for carcasses of any stripe. Below ground, in the cramped but growing network of tunnels beneath London's streets, the sewer-hunters slogged through the flowing waste of the metropolis. Every few months, an unusually dense pocket of methane gas would be ignited by one of their kerosene lamps and the hapless soul would be incinerated twenty feet below ground, in a river of raw sewage.

The scavengers, in other words, lived in a world of excrement and death. Dickens began his last great novel, Our Mutual Friend, with a father-daughter team of toshers stumbling across a corpse floating in the Thames, whose coins they solemnly pocket. “What world does a dead man belong to?” the father asks rhetorically, when chided by a fellow tosher for stealing from a corpse. “'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world.” Dickens' unspoken point is that the two worlds, the dead and the living, have begun to coexist in these marginal spaces. The bustling commerce of the great city has conjured up its opposite, a ghost class that somehow mimics the status markers and value calculations of the material world.  Consider the haunting precision of the bone-pickers' daily routine, as captured in Henry Mayhew's pioneering 1844 work, London Labour and the London Poor:

It usually takes the bone-picker from seven to nine hours to go over his rounds, during which time he travels from 20 to 30 miles with a quarter to a half hundredweight on his back. In the summer he usually reaches home about eleven of the day, and in the winter about one or two. On his return home he proceeds to sort the contents of his bag. He separates the rags from the bones, and these again from the old metal (if he be luckly enough to have found any). He divides the rags into various lots, according as they are white or coloured; and if he have picked up any pieces of canvas or sacking, he makes these also into a separate parcel. When he has finished the sorting he takes his several lots to the ragshop or the marine-store dealers, and realizes upon them whatever they may be worth. For the white rags he gets from 2d. to 3d. per pound, according as they are clean or soiled. The white rags are very difficult to be found; they are mostly very dirty, and are therefore sold with the coloured ones at the rate of about 5 lbs. for 2d.

The homeless continue to haunt today's postindustrial cities, but they rarely display the professional clarity of the bone-picker's impromptu trade, for two primary reasons. First, minimum wages and government assistance are now substantial enough that it no longer makes economic sense to eke out a living as a scavenger. (Where wages remain depressed, scavenging remains a vital occupation; witness the perpendadores of Mexico City). The bone collector's trade has also declined because most modern cities possess elaborate systems for managing the waste generated by their inhabitants. (In fact, the closest American equivalent to the Victorian scavengers – the aluminium-can collectors you sometimes see hovering outside supermarkets – rely on precisely those waste-management systems for their paycheck.) But London in 1854 was a Victorian metropolis trying to make do with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. The city was vast even by today's standards, with two and a half million people crammed inside a thirty-mile circumference. But most of the techniques for managing that kind of population density that we now take for granted – recycling centers, public-health departments, safe sewage removal – hadn't been invented yet.

And so the city itself improvised a response – an unplanned, organic response, to be sure, but at the same time a response that was precisely contoured to the community's waste-removal needs. As the garbage and excrement grew, an underground market for refuse developed, with hooks into established trades. Specialists emerged, each dutifully carting goods to the appropriate site in the official market: the bone collectors selling their goods to the bone-boilers, the pure-finders selling their dog shit to tanners, who used the “pure” to rid their leather goods of the lime they had soaked in for weeks to remove animal hair. (A process widely considered to be, as one tanner put it, “the most disagreeable in the whole range of manufacture.”)

We're naturally inclined to consider these scavengers tragic figures, and to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste. In many ways, this is the correct response. (It was, to be sure, the response of the great crusaders of the age, among them Dickens and Mayhew.) But such social outrage should be accompanied by a measure of wonder and respect: without any central planner coordinating their actions, without any education at all, this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people. The great contribution usually ascribed to Mayhew's London Labour is simply his willingness to see and record the details of these impoverished lives. But just as valuable was the insight that came out of that bookkeeping, once he had run the numbers: far from being unproductive vagabonds, Mayhew discovered, these people were actually performing an essential function for their community. “The removal of the refuse of a large town,” he wrote, “is, perhaps, one of the most important of social operations.” And the scavengers of Victorian London weren't just getting rid of that refuse – they were recycling it.

  —  The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (Steven Johnson)

[benbamboozled]

It pisses me off that Batman frequently tries to run Jason out of Gotham.

He’s more Gotham than you, motherfucker!

You leave, you’re the one who sucks!

[andthebeanstalk]

I am deep in my anger about the ignorance/apathy that the majority of abled Americans have about how deeply fucked up this country's treatment of disabled people is. Not only am I ENRAGED by it, but also it doesn't make logical sense! Don't they know they will become us? Don't they know that it is only the unlucky who die too young to develop a disability? Don't they understand what's coming for them??

I want to be legally allowed to save money! I want to be allowed to marry my wife legally! I want to be able to buy nice things and go on vacations, instead of being trapped at home with no wheelchair and no ramp! And I am only 29! Everyone knows when you get old here, you get locked away in a sad understaffed facility, and folks are out here acting like they'll never grow old!

The only thing keeping my grief and my feelings of helplessness against a massive enemy from overwhelming me is this project I've been working on with some new friends.

There's this piece of land, you see. It's huge and beautiful and being sold way WAY under market price. And there's a chance - not a guarantee but a real chance - that I will have the opportunity to live in this beautiful green place and to build a community and a free medical treatment center there that will change and save lives.

I see before me a path to create a bright spot of rest and love in the darkness, where I can prove to person after person - and to myself - that a better life IS possible, right here in America, where most of can't afford to leave. In America, we are meant to believe a life of poverty is just something some people deserve. They don't. No one does. And I have a chance to make sure as many people as possible know they do not deserve to be left behind.

The world does not need more heroes. The world needs more care. The world needs places to rest. People need to be told that they are valued even if they cannot labor - and THEN they need to be treated like they deserve help and have value beyond their labor.

I spend a large part of my life trying to prove to the government and doctors that I am poor enough/sick enough/disabled enough (in the exact ways they approve of) to receive help. - Without this constant, intricate song and dance of evil banality and arbitrary denial and cruel loopholes, I can be denied what I need to live. (I am only alive because I have the privilege of having rich relatives, who paid for my college education and currently pay my rent.) If I was not able to afford an assistant, I would already have lost all of my benefits. Currently, I am at risk of losing my Medicaid because I missed an unexpected "prove to a doctor you are still disabled" deadline. There is a massive and ongoing burden of proof in this country placed on disabled people and subject to the whims of rich white abled judges and the minutiae of paperwork.

That's why it's so important that I have this opportunity to help people. I cannot tell you what it will mean to me the day I get to look someone in the face and tell them that their housing and medical treatment will be free as long as they need it and with nothing expected in return. I wanna meet someone who has been trying their hardest for as long as they can remember to build a stable life, and I want to be able to tell them to please try their softest. To prove to me nothing. To take their time. I will tell them that I need neither justification nor evidence to believe them when they say they need help. I want to be living proof that people deserve help just by being alive on this planet. I want to be included as part of that. I deserve a soft place to land too.

Also this property has a wheelchair ramp, meaning I could finally get a wheelchair after 2 years of needing and not having one!

One of the other members of the team has already brought up building a system of elder care on the property that would allow people to receive comprehensive health care as they age and to remain part of a vibrant community!

There's Hope. There's Real Hope. I can hardly believe it.

And if this particular opportunity doesn't work out, well, I'm never going to stop pursuing that dream. Never. I will either get there or die having journeyed towards it my whole life, and in doing so, I will have made this world a little softer in a million other ways, and I will have made the path a little easier to walk for whoever comes after me. I used to want to leave destruction in my wake or die trying. But in this, I will leave creation in my wake, and I will live trying. (And if doing so allows people to grow strong enough to destroy evil institutions... good.)

I am going to look at every cruelty of this system that nearly killed me, and I'm going to foster the right conditions to do the exact opposite. I will take the ableism of my family who wouldn't believe that I couldn't work even when I was dying, and I will do the opposite. Oh, the people I will believe! The people I will help feed! The people I will protect and build strong houses and long tables with! The people I will learn from! - I haven't even met most of them yet! How exciting that my life may still yet be long and full of wonders!!

I hope anyone reading this who has also at some point felt like a long life would be a curse, especially if they feel like that right now... I wanted to say that me and my friends and people like us - and opportunities like the one I've been blessed with - will only be able to help you if you stay alive long enough to be found. Or to find us, as the case may be.

If you can't live long enough, it's not your fault. Truly, it's not; and your death would be a tragic loss to yourself and to this world that I cannot begin to describe because it would make me so sad my literal heart would start to hurt and I'd never get to bed tonight.

But please, please, hold on with everything you have, for as long as you possibly can. Please handle your heart with the gentlest hands you can muster. I need you to live long enough to sit at our table because nothing is guaranteed except that you must be alive to do it. And I'm saving you a seat that only you can have, and without you it will remain forever empty and our table forever incomplete. You are invited to this party, and it just won't be as good without you. I'm a lousy cook, but I'm making friends with chefs, and I promise I will make sure you have enough food. There will be music and laughter and dancing. Some of us will dance in our wheelchairs. Some of us will hug and cry and plant flowers. All of us will stare in amazement of the better days we once thought impossible.

And I for one will be so fucking happy to see you there. I will take you by your hand, look you in the eye, and with the greatest, warmest relief in my heart, I will thank you for living to share this day with me. Because I know damn well that it was stupid fucking hard, and that it is not okay how hard it was.

But, look, now the sunset is warm upon our faces and the children are laughing with the community elders, and we can sleep knowing we are not alone. We made it. We really made it.

And maybe it's not specifically me and it's not specifically you - the metaphor has its limits. But there are so many people like me who want a better world, and there are so many people like you who deserve to live to see it.

And if we never see better days, then I will count each day we survive as a victory and a rebellion, because that's what they will be. I will cherish and live for each little bit of love and joy we carve out of the darkness.

But a better life does not become impossible until we are dead. Which means as long as we still live, there is Hope.

Have courage and be kind, friend. Be kind to yourself especially - even if you can only do so a little bit at a time, it's worth the practice. Turns out it is harder to live than to die. But I care that you are found.

---

Optional musical accompaniment to this post bc I've never had any chill and I don't see why I should start now:

A practical song about managing anxiety with the line "i care that you breathe" in it

Brian David Gilbert's beautiful song "See the Day"

A song about surviving while sick in America, and which I am told once saved a life

A lovely nerdy song called "Critical Hit" that inspires me on the days I have a little more energy

[aesthetics-core]

Kentucky + Southern Gothic

[thrythlind]

Real life ghost-believer

Full specter appears walking down the hall.

"Can you just not right now? I'm tired."

"Paranormal Investigators" on Reality TV Shows

Random house settling noise

"Ackkkk!! There's a demon coming to get us!"

[pda-blog]

Breakthrough - I think I finally kinda get money. It's taken a lot of hard work to figure it out, but I think the problem was that I fundamentally could not focus on money. Like it made sense, but how it motivated people just made no sense.

But I had a moment of clarity today, that my financial situation is bad(??) And I should probably make more choices that result in me obtaining money.

One problem, fuck it's hard to focus on money. Like I'm happy as can be to make a little budgeting sheet, track my spending, record my savings it's a walk in the park, I fucking love paperwork. But that's not actually Getting Me more money. Even if I write it all out, the problem is that I'm struggling to react to money.

The moment of clarity came to me, when I wrote down all of my little online stores I made over the years in a list. I have a goal of making a certain amount of money this year (I've calculated it and everything). So I made a goal for each online store: how much do I want each store to make this year so I reach my financial goal?

Guess what I wrote down? $5. $10. $50. $100.

I was fucking happy the whole time to just sell One. Thing. A. Year. And that would be a success to me! In my brain that would flip the switch that goes "Yep I made money. Don't need any more!" And I would be satisfied with those amounts and not even THINK about making more.

SO, those whole time working on these online stores, I thought I was setting up something financially stable, because it FELT stable. If I sold a few things in one day and made $10, I was like "hell yeah". But, that doesn't fit with my financial goal. But it seriously felt like it was. I know intellectually this makes no sense because it's simple math, but basically I had a freaky moment where I could tell my perspective was warped somehow. Like, until I wrote it down, I SERIOUSLY thought those stores would make enough money to reach my goal. Because it FELT like they would, everything felt fine! Nothing felt stressful or 'not enough'! I never felt the need for more, even though factually I need more!

That really, REALLY gave me some pause.

It made me realise, "Wait, I am not processing the concept of money like most people... I think"

[clatterbane]

That said, I am just as glad that I hadn't gotten any further along in my current tattoo schemes before we ended up facing this unexpected $2000+ household expense.

The work I was in the middle of plotting would most likely run at least as much as the smaller type of fridge we've got now, and ouch. 😬 Poverty Brain has already been making me drag my feet on this for years, even now that I am in fine physical shape to heal more body art no problem.

[rotzaprachim]

the thing one realises trying to do something like crowpernatural. is that soc ’muricas ’murica better then supernatural often murica’s murica by being willing to let unhinged free market capitalism and religious fundamentalism stand properly on their own as major villains

[lupismaris]

A Christmas Carol was first published on December 19, 1843, exactly 150 years before i was born to the day I was destined to be an anti-capitalist cryptic bastard obsessed with ghosts, death, and a damn good narrative

[quotesfrommyreading]

But in one crucial sense Dickens and Engels had it wrong. However gruesome the sight of the burial ground was, the corpses themselves were not likely spreading “malignant diseases”. The stench was offensive enough, but it was not “infecting” anyone. A mass grave of decomposing bodies was an affront to both the senses and to personal dignity, but the smell it emitted was not a public-health risk. No one died of stench in Victorian London. But tens of thousands died because the fear of stench blinded them to the true perils of the city, and drove them to implement a series of wrongheaded reforms that only made the crisis worse. Dickens and Engels were not alone; practically the entire medical and political establishment fell into the same deadly error: everyone from Florence Nightingale to the pioneering reformer Edwin Chadwick to the editor of The Lancet to Queen Victoria herself. The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well. How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline – the sociology of error.

 —  The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (Steven Johnson)

[thursdayg1rl]

walking into English w extreme levels of confidence for someone who doesnt know any quotes, doesnt have any ideas abt the texts and is a slow writer

[trans-xianxian]

looking through job postings is so dystopian I rlly sit here and think things like "no that job pays too much money and I'd lose my healthcare" what the fuck