You don’t realize how much air rules until you don’t have it anymore
Between the ages of 12 and 22 I took maybe three breaths and I was fine. I was thriving even. In my book, air was for the weak and I was the strongest motherfucker around. If not in muscles (tiny!) or bones (fragile!) or general somatic robustness (bad!), then in sheer will. The universe said “this one shall not breathe” and I said, “I don’t need to.”
But millions of dollars worth of medications have rendered me a frail little cotton ball of a man, begging the “Mother Earth” for just the faintest whiff of clean air. I disgust myself.
What can I say? The universe loves a punchline.
I work from home and I’m pretty busy at the beginning of the month, so I was running late on the dog’s 4pm walk. She was very excited when I got the leash out. Less so when it turned out her walk was from the door to the road then right back to the door.
I felt it before I smelt it. Not quite a tightness in my chest, but more of a tiredness, as if my lungs had found a way to do crunches without alerting the rest of my body. Like the world’s worst detective, I connected the haze on the horizon, the red sun and the smell of someone burning the world’s largest Wicker Man with the various “air gonna be bad!” headlines I’d seen over the last week and determined the air was indeed bad.
Turns out I was actually the world’s second worst detective.
The next day, an anonymized family member stopped by to print something and we bullshitted a bit as the Brother printer everyone has fired up. I was explaining that I felt bad because I couldn’t take Lila out for a walk and this person said “Oh really? It’s not that hot out.” I explained that “no, the air smells like burning”. This was news to them. They were incredulous that smoke from Canada would even make it this far and they didn’t notice anything on their walk, but resolved to sniff the air when they went back out.
As noted above, the fucking sun was red.
A younger me, probably would have made a big deal out of this, especially since this family member holds the world record for cigarettes smoked in front of me, but in my middle age, I’m content to write about it here. If anything, I’m envious, because it must be nice to be so thoroughly unaffected by what’s happening around you.
An Awe Inspiring Piece of Mail
I won’t say that my co-pays are out of control, but they’re getting there. I’m on the hook for $4k a year, which is above what the average US employee paid in 2022, but I’ve seen worse. However, I’d love to spend that money on literally anything other than drugs, so I applied for assistance through a charitable foundation.
I’m not going to name them here, because I still need them to send me some checks, but I’ve mentioned the deal before: I applied and qualified for a $15,000 grant, which would essentially make most of my financial issues disappear. Of course, I don’t just get a check for $15,000, I have to submit receipts from my prescriptions. And even then I don’t get the full $4,000, they’ll only reimburse medications from companies that have contributed to the fund, so at the end of the day, assuming everything gets approved, I’ll probably clear just over a grand. Still, I’ll take it!
I will, of course, get it slowly. I have paid medical bills very slowly in the past and let me tell you they don’t take kindly to that shit. Funny how their attitude changes when the payee becomes the payer.
So in a rare show of optimism, I was very excited when I received an envelope from this mysterious foundation last week. Thinking it was a check, I excitedly ripped it open. What I found inside was truly awe inspiring.
It was a solicitation for a donation.
This is a company that I got in contact with because medical costs were juicing my grapes a little too hard. In the course of that process, they got both my address AND my adjusted gross income. Taking a look at the sum total of this information and deciding “maybe it’s time this guy gives a little back” is truly awe inspiring, especially since it’s been about 40 days since I asked them to send me a $120 rebate for drugs that my insurance was billed $43,500 for. It’s very possible that we’re just going to keep sending each other “give me money” messages until the wildfire smoke finally takes me out, which they probably think is a tremendous business model, but I believe my death would drop the stock price of at least 3 of their contributing companies, so maybe their math is off on that one.
Speaking of Asking for Money
I’ve been reluctant to mention this for a few different reasons, but I have been chosen as one of CT’s Finest by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. It’s “an event honoring Connecticut’s best and brightest outstanding professionals” which is very funny to me because an astounding portion of my work is done while I’m wearing a bootleg Tiamat “Clouds” shirt and the line between casual and business attire for me is “sleeves”. Also, I give myself 4:1 odds that I’ll need a GoFundMe at some point, so I don’t want to run the well dry before that.
In any case, I’m supposed to raise $2,000 for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, so I’m going to put a link here in case you feel like using it.
Things I Like
I bought the new In the Line of Duty boxset for “Yes, Madam!”—this is a Cynthia Rothrock household—but holy shit was Royal Warriors incredible. I’m fairly new to Hong Kong action, so it’s very surprising to me that filmmakers are more likely to “go there’ with story beats that most American films back away from. Main characters die and don’t pull a surprise resurrection like LL Cool J at the end of Halloween H20. They’re fucking dead and it affects the rest of the movie. In that spirit, the final act of Royal Warriors contains one of the very best revenge schemes I’ve ever seen. The villain is ice fucking cold for that one. Highly recommended.