Scratch that last sentence. The question is will we be gone tomorrow? And not to a house, but to wherever they’d bury us. Yeah, God’s really having a field day torturing us. The other question is, is it to compensate us for something good to come at work? To prevent us from something good at work? Or just to punish us simply for breathing, as usual?

See, yesterday at work they came out and asked him how soon he could start working second shift. Even though he had come to doubt there was any real future at the place, and still isn’t sure there is, he told them he could start right away. He’s been wanting second or 3rd shift all along so he could have time during business hours for other things. Once he got asked this, he said he knew something bad was going to happen.

Then there was my nasty dream premonition come true. Just like he sometimes gets solutions to problems in his sleep, I have dream premonitions. I dreamt the money wasn’t on the card, and I sent Tom a text message to let him know because I didn’t “feel” it was just a dream brought on by stress. As it turns out, the money’s there, but the card expired. They sent the new card to the old place right when we moved, and when it was returned to them, they didn’t even have the decency to let us know. So Tom called them and they said a new card was sent out Monday via 1st class mail, yet when he checked the mail place on Thursday, it wasn’t there. 1st class takes 3 days, so maybe it didn’t get picked up till Tuesday?

He then ran out of gas a mile away from here and had to park in the parking lot of a Jack-n-the-Box, the fast food place that’s all over the west except for K-Falls, Oregon. He walked back and we went hungry for the rest of the night since we were virtually out of food and living check to check until next week when we estimated we could finally start saving. But then we had to have some wonderful divine interference throw us this curveball just like I knew it would.

The stress has been a killer! I don’t know how many more of these security threats I can take, and having our lives be on the line every few days to a few weeks like it has been. The poster spirit I call Susie said the card would arrive today and that things would now start gradually improving just like they gradually went downhill. Tom said that made sense since we’ve now gotten over the major hurdles that could cause us to end up on the streets, thus killing ourselves to get out of having to suffer that kind of life. He pointed out that he was wrong about the truck having an internal engine problem (it would’ve broken down by now), and that of all the things that go out on vehicles, it’s fine, and that the new card will be good for 3 years if we can ever get it in time.

But I’m not convinced. If there’s one thing I’ve learned lately it’s that it doesn’t take much to really turn a person’s life upside down, if not destroy their life completely. I’m sick to death of having my very existence threatened and struggling for the simplest fucking things in life! Why are the barest of necessities such a struggle to get lately?! Why can’t God or whatever evil that’s trying to drive me crazy and maybe even to our deaths just leave us the fuck alone and go pick on someone else?! I just want a decent place to live, but we can’t even have that. Not anytime soon, if ever at all. I’m thoroughly convinced there’s no place for us. There really isn’t. A simple, peaceful house is just a dream. Just a total dream that can never happen. It’s either settle or die. If we’re not willing to live in misery, our only other choice is to die. And we’ll have to die if the card isn’t there tomorrow for damn sure because we wouldn’t be able to stay anywhere, and he couldn’t get to work anyway.

On Thursday evening I gave him the couple of bucks I had in my purse and he walked back to the truck to put gas in it to drive it back here. He didn’t feel it was worth risking running out of gas by going to the mail place today since we don’t have to check out till tomorrow. Instead, today he walked a total of 6 miles to and from Walmart and got us some food with the remaining few bucks he had. When he got back he called the mail place and the guy said I had a Mary letter and “two pieces of junk mail.” Well, what gave us a slight bit of hope was knowing that the envelope the card was in would look like junk mail. Most cash and credit card envelopes have the address of the person it’s going to in a window, then usually just a PO Box for a return. Logically speaking, if they sent it to the right address, which Tom verified online, and if God didn’t make sure it got lost or went to someone else, and it was sent 1st class on Monday or even Tuesday as they said, then there’s no reason it shouldn’t be there by tomorrow if it isn’t already.

We would still rather not find it’s not there when he goes to check tomorrow and be forced to kill ourselves, especially since Tom wouldn’t want to do that as much as I would. I’m honored that someone could love me enough to not want me to die alone, but I would feel more like I was murdering him, than that it was a mutual thing, not that he doesn’t get fed up with life enough of the time himself.

So tomorrow he’s going to see if we can check out an hour later, which he thinks they’ll let us do. He said he’s been in the office when others have asked to check out an hour or two later and were told they could. Also, Michelle works weekends, and she’s turned out to be the nicest so far. So he’s going to explain the problem with the card to her, hopefully get us a little extension, then go out and see if the card’s there. If it isn’t, we have stuff to pawn so there’s enough gas for killing ourselves tomorrow night. The last thing we want to do is botch things up and make our lives even worse. According to Tom’s research, he thinks we’d be able to go quicker and less painfully in the truck as opposed to the bathroom here. We’d also have the truck’s exhaust, too. Many have killed themselves by putting a hose extension on their exhausts which they piped into an enclosed area.

The stress is really getting to me! We’ve now had half a dozen or so crises and it’s scary as hell, but mostly I’m depressed, and even more so I’m angry. I’m sick of being picked on like this! What have Tom and I ever done that was so bad to deserve a life of hell like this? I just want to thumb my nose at society and live a sheltered life in a nice peaceful little house and only go out once every week or two, but no. I can’t even have that much. The more I try to avoid people, the more I get stuck with them and thrown into where there are plenty of them. God would just love me for settling for an apartment with tons of people and chaos, but He’s not getting His way on that one! He will have to drive us to our deaths first because we’re through settling!

I feel the same as I would if some trigger-happy psycho were breaking in here every so often and teasing me with my life, holding a gun to my head, making it as if he was going to shoot me, then pulling the gun away, and back and forth and back and forth.

I’m torn between wanting to live and wanting to die, but am perfectly ready to go if the card’s not there. Anything’s better than the streets, even death. However, a part of me wants to live to see if we ever do make it out of here, even if we still have to live on someone else’s driveway and with their dogs and music, too. I also want to listen to my stereo again, sleep in my own bed, and enjoy the rest of my belongings that’s been in storage. I miss high-speed internet without all the damn crashing and hang-ups.

But I’m also so damn tired of life. Totally, honestly tired of it! A part of me hopes the card’s not there so I can die and miss out on a lot of shitty things. Our lives can never be what we want them to be, I don’t like the idea of growing older, fatter, and maybe arthritic or developing cancer, diabetes, and whatever other health problems. I don’t want to live to have to deal with another stress-filled, scary crisis. Sooner or later it’s not going to be just a “close call.” I don’t want to live to deal with my teeth, even though they’ve been amazingly good to me since we moved. I don’t want to deal with my ear, even though that’s been better since we started oiling it. I don’t want to live here long enough to find out what my new health problems will be that I seem to get whenever I move. I don’t want to listen to people’s shit and struggle financially.

If the card is there, however, then we’ll at least have a choice. We’ll probably pay for another week here, see what happens at work, which we’re both curious about and then who knows? We talked about him working part-time either at night or during the daytime if they really do put him on second shift, and also selling plasma. Tom’s done it before and says it’s boring because you have to sit hooked up to machines for a couple of hours, but they’ll pay around $15 and you can do it up to twice a week. If the price was right, I wouldn’t mind doing this when my schedule permitted it. I could read or listen to my iPod while I was doing it.

A part of me wishes people didn’t need to piss, shit and take showers, and that I wasn’t such a light sleeper. Then we could live in the truck and really get into a place fast. We could park at Walmart when he wasn’t working, and at his job, of course, when he was.

I don’t know what to make of the dream I had recently of winning big. Tom said if I can have dream premonitions like I did about the card, then why not that?

Because God doesn’t usually want us having much money, that’s why, is all I can think of. And if He’s decided He wants us to die now, the card won’t be there tomorrow, and this will be the last entry I ever write, just one day after my 10th quit-smoking anniversary.

So many we-should-haves run through my mind, even though I know it’s pointless. We “should have” stayed in Phoenix and taken the safer misery. Yes, it would be noisy as hell, but the house would’ve been all paid for years ago. Noise is annoying, but can’t usually hurt us. Or maybe we “should have” stayed in the Oregon dump. Yes, it was too cold, I hated the snow, he hated his job, it could be noisy, the insurance and tax laws were fucked up, we hated the house and the restrictive hours and lack of stores and restaurants, but the rent was cheap, he made a lot of money, and we had so few bad days during the two years we were there. We had fun with Tinkerbell and the shopping sprees we’d go on.

Tom had been curious to check online obituaries. I thought you had to pay for those, but while most don’t tell you the cause of death or who they’re survived by, there was a 2005 obit in Phoenix for a Raymond which Tom thinks is his brother. Ray, who would’ve been 57 in ‘05, had health problems caused by a fall he had many years ago. Then he contracted hepatitis C before they knew it even existed from a blood transfusion.

The guy on the end broke his peaceful record for an hour or so yesterday before Tom got in by having a couple of chicks visit him that was loud. Every 10 minutes or so they’d come out of the room and hang out close to our door. I finally got curious enough to see what the hell they were doing, and they were smoking since they have a non-smoking room too, and can’t smoke in there. He said he was sorry if they were too noisy, then they took off. I later knocked on his door to see if he’d buy the gunsight for $20, which I’d have let him know was worth $250 and that he could sell it for more if he wanted to, yet he wasn’t there.

They did the inspection thing today and that went quickly and quieter than I thought it would. I had been up an hour before they came, too.

Since Mary’s in jail and Paula wouldn’t know what to do with the damn thing, I left a note in my address file, as well as on my desktop calendar, just in case someone searches this thing for clues as to why we killed ourselves if we do, to ship it to Jessie.