Today’s the day Tom gets his iMac back – yay! Who said Friday the 13th can’t be a lucky day? I know the real evil number is 4. Maybe being born on the 4th is part of why I’ve had such a shitty life at times.

Anyway, all has been good except for the barking. Every morning for anywhere from a half-hour to 3 hours, the fucking dogs go crazy. I know I could go out and yell at them and they’d stop, but I haven’t for a few reasons. For one, I’m sick of having to take responsibility for other people’s dogs. Secondly, I know it wouldn’t do me any good for more than 10 minutes. Lastly, I keep hoping someone will complain. I don’t know what good that would do them, but it’s a nice thought. It sucks that we have to live this way everywhere we go, but that’s just how it’s gonna be for the next 5 months, so I keep the air cleaner running and fans on to drown out the noise.

If I could snap my fingers and make myself like cold weather I’d do it in a heartbeat and get us up to Canada as soon as we could. Canada’s a wonderful country. Most of the people are white, so there are less gang activity and welfare bums. Its residents are also insured and they don’t discriminate against gays. Yet sadly, I’ve got 21 years to go before I’m insured.

Been selling short stories and making money on them. Finally! It’s not much money, but the point is that I’m being paid for my work, period. Like I said before, sharing my life for free is one thing, but sharing my stories is another. I’m going to have to go around at some point and delete some online excerpts that I’ve sold because technically they’re no longer mine to publish.

Hey, I may be one of God’s chosen ones to be trailer trash, but at least I’m a professional writer now – hahahaha!

Meanwhile, while God’s busy blessing the rich (or at least the comfortable) with even more money, I sit here and worry about the future. The here and now look great. It’s the future I’m worried about. Tom insists that as long as the unemployment rate is as monumentally high as it is here in Cali at 12%, they’ll keep sending checks. But I fear that they’ll cut those checks a little too soon. Even once we have a few grand saved up, it couldn’t last forever without the checks. So I just hope to hell the jobs come around before the checks go away. I want us to die because we’re too old to live anymore. Not because we had to kill ourselves to escape the streets. Tom’s not worried because that’s just how he is. He doesn’t worry about much until and if something actually does go wrong. I wish I could be like him, but that’s just another one of those things we can’t always control – our fears and emotions. They are what they are and there’s no magic switch we can reach in and flick on and off. Sure wish there was, though!