Poor as hell

How poverty affects you mind, body, and soul

I just turned 37 the other day, and something clicked in my head. I’m pushing 40 and never really accomplished much with my life. Yeah I got a roof over my head and a job and some other markers of a safe middle class life but I dont’t feel like I’ve really done anything in my adult years save for keeping my head barely above water. It could be worse, that’s what I tell myself when I’m lying on my futon after taking my Trazodone™ and trying to drift off to sleep even though I was pounding energy drinks at work all day. I don’t hate my job, which is something I can rarely say throughout my life; I don’t want to get into my struggles with employment over the last few years but suffice to say work used to be a major stressor. But even with a job, and with the good paying jobs I’ve had in the past, I struggled with saving money. I read that your average millennial has $50,000 in savings, but one in seven don’t have any savings at all, I know which category I fit into. I have enough to live but when I look at my past due bills, or negative balances in my checking accounts, or the credit cards I’ve maxed out because I was unemployed for a month and needed to pay bills or buy groceries, I get acid building up in my throat.

But I’m not writing this to rehash how miserable I am, things have improved for me in some aspects. I think it has to do with letting go of a lot of the dreams I had throughout my childhood and teenage years. I couldn’t just recede into some fantasy of a life I felt I deserved while my personal wellbeing kept taking hits. I put off improving my life for so long because I felt my effort wouldn’t pay off and I was too proud to ask for help, I can’t afford to do that anymore and it’s better I realize that now then let another decade go by where nothing changes. If a younger version of me could see what I ended up as they might be dissapointed, but I can’t dwell with my regrets forever. Like I said, I’m not going on some tangent about my personal issues, I’ve written plenty about them. But living around other struggling people has been an illuminating experience; I’d like to share my thoughts and observations.

I see people weighed down by their mistakes, you can see it on their faces and their body language, they look like walking corpses. Bags under their eyes, slumped postures, blemishes on their faces, cigarettes perpetually dangling from their mouths. You see them in machine shops and warehouses hurting their backs performing labor that people with degrees can’t be bothered to do. In the break room they’re slugging energy drinks, complaining about their exes, going off on tangents about how they lost $50 betting on a football game. You see them buying liqour, packs of smokes, and scratch offs at party stores. Sometimes they’re arguing with the Arab behind the counter about EBT, or they’re talking the poor guys ear off because it’s the only human contact they’ve had for days. You see them waiting for buses when it’s 30 degrees out, or blowing a significanty chunk of their paycheck getting carted around by another poor person in an Uber. They’re also wearing slippers and pajama bottoms at the supermarket. I don’t know about you but if one of my slippers fell off while I was pushing a cart and my bare foot came into contact with the grime streaked floor of a Walmart I’d have to amputate it.

Nobody cops to being low status, they could be living in a trailer or a shelter subsisting on foodstamps but if anyone called them broke they’d flip out. Some people can claw their way to lower middle or middle class if they get in at a job that doesn’t do pre employment drug screens and background checks. Maybe even afford some status symbols like a big TV or gaming laptop but they’d better be planning on holding onto those pricey electronics for a while and if they break, too bad! You see people carrying around old phones with cracked screens and driving cars with dents, scrapes and busted lights. But there’s always the one guy that was somehow able to finance a new truck with a cratered credit score. It’s decked out in chrome and he’s got it lifted 6 inches with bogger tires and he always drives 50 in a 25 and complains when he has to show up in court over traffic tickets. He doesn’t care that his car note eats up more of his paycheck than his rent, it’s all about status, or at least making people think you have money.

Poverty has a smell, it sounds cruel to say but if you spend enough time around these people you can pick up a certain…odor. I mean yeah there’s the obvious stench of cigarettes on people, but there’s also the aroma of weed. People would walk past me at work with a cloud of skunky stench wafting off of them; some were aware of it and doused themselves in cheap cologne to mask it but you can still see how red their eyes are. If you’ve ever taken public transport you pick up on all sorts of smells; being in close proximity to people on a bus exposes you to a mixture of ethnic food, incense, machine shop grease, body odor, various bodily fluids, and the aforementioned weed and cigarettes of course. You feel the smell permeate your skin, you have to take a shower afterwards. Poor men smell of microwaved food and Marlboro reds; poor women smell like flaming hot cheetos and vape juice.

Of course poverty and crime go hand in hand. I overhear people talking about their arrest records and court dates usually stemming from public intoxication or a DUI or possession with intent to distribute, granted those law are more lax now in my state. People have to take work off to meet with their parole officers, or they miss work because they were picked up on a warrant. They just can’t stop themselves from engaging in fucked up behavior and in a lot of cases poverty is a driving cause. But people don’t seem to be stealing food for their families so much as they’re ripping of cell phones to sell for whatever illicit substance they can get their hands on. I’ve had people with suspended licenses tell me they’d rather walk miles to work than get their cars back because they know they’ll just get more points on their licenses. When talking with my coworkers about their criminal records they’re shocked to learn I’ve never been arrested, it’s almost like you need to have had cuffs on you to prove yourself to them.

These people were born behind the curve, so to speak, they don’t know how to earn an honest living because their parents never instilled it in them, if their parents were even around in the first place. Being poor exposes you to a lot of shittier elements of society, things middle class strivers can’t conceive of, so of course it’s going to have an affect on how you interpret right from wrong because you’ve never had a good moral foundation to begin with. You don’t care as much if you get loaded and get behind the wheel of a car because what do you really have to lose? You don’t see the problem in ripping off someone’s purse or helping youself to electronics in the Apple store because you need the money. Libs tend to romanticize crime as being some language of the oppressed or whatever other prog agitprop but in most cases people just like stealing shit because they want the cred and the money. It’s not a statement against racism when a future doctor breaks open a display case in a Target during a riot and fills a shopping cart full of Playstations, he’s just trying to get paid and if he has fun while doing it, so much the better.

Still, you see people trying to save money when they can. People will buy 99 cent packs of swisher blunts, smoke half during a break and then stamp out the ember and save half of it for their next break. They do the same thing with cigarettes they made from a bag of pipe tobacco they injected into filter tubes. Nobody goes to the theater anymore, they either torrent or watch movies on shady foreign streaming sites that download malware onto your computer. People either buy clothes at goodwill or hold onto their old clothes longer, I see people wearing shirts with holes and faded colors all the time, I have a few shirts I should throw out myself. I mentioned people driving damaged cars earlier, you see bags duct taped over broken windows and shitty bondo jobs on rusted fenders. Living in a state that uses a huge amount of rock salt on icy roads means everyones rocker panels are rotting off; people can’t afford to go to the body shop and pay upwards of $500 to fix said panels espescially if their spending a good chunk of their check just on keeping their car on the road. Exhausts hang from broken brackets and you can hear the whine of worn out fan belts on cars that pass you on the street.

One thing people don’t have an issue spending money on is drugs. Recreational dispensaries are filled with people buying pre rolls, edibles, THC vapes, and eigths of either sativa or indica blends. Sure you’ve eaten nothing but ramen and peanut butter sandwiches for three weeks but you can always fit weed into your budget. If you don’t smoke it you’ll be totally depressed bro! And if weed puts you on edge you can always take some Xanax or mix some Adderall in and let the depressants and stimulants wage war in your bloodstream. If it’s not weed it’s pills, you hear the bottles jangling in women’s purses and if you were to ask them if they had a prescription they’d laugh in your face. Some people have stories of their friends and family dying from Fentanyl overdoses but you still see them popping pills themselves. Oxycontin? Yep. Vicodin? Oh yeah. Diazepam? Fuck yes. Mixing Codeine or Promethazine with Sprite and spacing out on the couch? Definitely. If Sizzurp ain’t your game just chase a handful of Unisom with some whiskey; It’s the weekend bitch, you can do whatever you want! Sobreity sucks and having to go about your daily routine without adding chemicals into the mix just isn’t on the table for these people.

Being poor and white leads to to adopting the mannerisms of traditonally poor non whites, specifically blacks. I could think of some non-PC ways to describe this phenomenon but for now I’ll refer to it as racial transmogrification. It occurs when people have their sense of identity repressed to a point they don’t know how to express themselves in any other way. White girls with face tattoos speak in ghetto jargon and throw up gang signs, white men in sideways flatbrim hats roll down the street in leased SUVs blaring shitty rap from their subwoofers. Speaking of rap music, it’s as ubiquitous as single white mothers with frizzy haired babies. Everyone listens to rap, you hear it from coworkers headsets, from bluetooth speakers, you can hear the panels of cars in parking lots rattling with the bassline from some Travis Scott song. People you meet don’t remember their kids birthdays but they can name every track on the latest Post Malone EP. A coworker recommended me a few artists and I spent some time listening to them to see if I could dispell my reluctance to embrace rap music, it didn’t work. I can’t identify with dude mumbling about being gangster and slinging drugs and driving Bugattis; I can’t LARP as something I’m not. And that’s what rap culture is, a LARP for directionless white kids who can’t cope with their unsatisfying lives.

Most people wear a mask, so to speak, to hide their true selves. There’s the mask we show to friends and family and coworkers but we take it off when we’re alone. Poor people don’t wear masks at all, what they present to the world and who they are in their private life are one in the same. What do they have to hide? Why feel ashamed if you’ve been convinced by progressive dogma to be proud of yourself no matter what, and the haters can suck it! I wear a mask to hide my disgust at the various shit I’m exposed to on a daily basis both in real life and when I scroll twitter on my phone. Of course I’m used to wearing a mask from years of hiding my true political beliefs, when you’re surronded by lib-leaning normies and know the consequences of speaking your mind about sodomy, abortion, and foreigners, you get used to concealing yourself. But sometimes it’s difficult to not let the mask slip and let your true beliefs be known. I want to grab people and shake them and demand they stop breaking the law, stop getting high at work, stop drinking while they’re pregnant, stop subsisting on government handouts when it’s damn obvious they can work, stop acting like the people you saw in Worldstar videos in years past. But I know they won’t listen, and even if they did they’re too immured in the poverty mindset to change their behavior. So I keep the mask on, laughing and joking with people who can’t be helped, people who are doomed to repeate the cycle of their reprobate parents until they’re dead or in prison. I wear my mask around these doomed people and hope their attitudes don’t rub off on me.

I mentioned in my earlier posts about how living around certain people in certain environments can lead to to being drawn into their sleaze and how difficult it can be to extricate yourself from it. In the 16 months I’ve lived in my new surroundings it’s been difficult for me to make new friends, most of my social contacts outside of my family have been my coworkers and people I get into conversations with at bars. I’m careful around them, I don’t want to get too close, even if it means I have to persist in my lonely state I can’t take the risk of involving myself in their bullshit. Now that I’m pushing 40 I have to make a concerted effort of bettering myself and trying to secure a future beyond breaking my back at some factory job where I’m just another disposable worker drone. I’m in a better position now than a lot of people I live and work around, but I have to keep my inhibitions at the forefront lest the niche I’ve carved out for myself is ruined. So, for the time being, I am forced to wear the mask. I know this world is fucked and I’ve seen the affect it’s had on people and I would be lying if I said it didn’t affect me, but either I shape the world for myself or I let others shape it for me, and I know what choice I’m going to make.