I Live In Appalachia

I took this photograph of this little kid who has AIDS because I am no longer able to articulate my astonishment that children still have HIV. It’s personal. It hurts. It’s stunning. It’s overwhelming. It’s not about some rich asshole who greases the gears and the wheels in Silicon Valley. It’s about a kid in the mountains of Appalachia who will never have an iPhone, an iPad, or even know what Google is.

The tech world is not a world. It’s an astigmatism. It is about one thing, and one thing only. Pure, unadulterated, let loose upon humanity, greed, greed, greed.

My use of language is an affront. I get it. But my use of language or my misuse of language doesn’t buy Brady food.

You should see this kid eat.

It’s like the most ravenous dog who is ready to jump on the table and shovel all the food down his throat. He can’t even breathe when he eats.

He used to sleep on the floor in a house where the holes in the house were stuffed with magazines so when the wind came through, it didn’t turn your balls into ball bearings.

What is wrong with sleeping on the floor.

One word: rats.

Rat bites in kids with HIV means sepsis.

Sepsis: The presence of bacteria (bacteremia), other infectious organisms, or toxins created by infectious organisms in the bloodstream with spread throughout the body. Sepsis may be associated with clinical symptoms of systemic illness, such as fever, chills, malaise, low blood pressure, and mental-status changes.

This kid is going to die. He will be buried in a pine box. His dad has the box already made.

Brady wants to know what the box is for.

“You are going to die. We will bury you in the box.”

“Under the ground.”

“Under the ground.”

Brady is afraid to be under the ground. He’s tired. And he does not understand what death is. He’s seen the dogs kill mice and eat them. But he doesn’t understand what it means.

I think there might be one last shot for Brady. I don’t know if I can pull it off. But I am trying.

It means subverting a lot of federal rules and regulations written by people who live in DC and who work in places like the Department of Education who, trust me, all have iPhone and attend a lot of meetings where nothing gets done. Your culture is a scam and one that is corrupt in and of itself. I would use the concern over my use of language as a position to change the subject.

But attention must be paid.

I was once one of those people in the meeting and that reality makes me sick.

I am trying to get Brady into either Home Start or Head Start. He’s too sick to really be in Head Start but maybe we can all pretend and look the other way. It will take a lot of subversion, but I think we stand at least a small chance.

When Obamacare was instituted in Appalachia, hordes of people lost whatever inadequate insurance they had which means they had to turn to public health. The insurance companies raised their rates to such an extent, health insurance costs more for these people than the land they live on. Histoically, these marginalized people have always felt that the land will save them. Romanticisms abound. It’s a respect of the past (their parents believed it, too), and stupidity. These people have no food.

Public health for Brady is not available because the county he lives in does not have anything to offer children with HIV.

They refuse to let him in the door.

Equality in the States is a sick, psychotic joke.

And you’re complaining about my use of language.

Get real.

You should hear the language in Appalachia. It is based in the rhetoric of hate.

Hate that gets directed at Brady.

Hate on the part of people who have given up.

Beautiful hills of hate and ignorance. People look old at forty. They die by sixty.

Obamacare is a disaster, a tragedy, and I supported it. I was lied to. Still, there is no excuse. I believed the people who told us all that Obamacare would make things better.

It made things so bad, it’s breathtaking. People are dead.

The only place Brady can be treated is over a hundred miles away because Obamacare as a cost-saving measure, was centralized with the support of associations such as the State Health Director’s Association who I have screamed at for a long time. The excuses are always the same mantra. We have no money.

Local health care institutions are now able to turn you away.

In the hollow I live in, there are no doctors who will take an HIV-infected individual.

They can legally do that now.

If you have HIV, you are quite literally forced to use public health. That is ALL there is. The rules and regulations change capriciously in the middle of the night, and it’s the kind of rationing we were told could never happen. It happened immediately.

But public health for HIV is now a long, long way for these people. It’s not like the subway can take you there.

Their pickup was repossessed last year. Their shoes are not shoes and they stink.

These people know one thing that we do not know and never will.

They know how to forage in the woods.

I can’t say that their old time medicines work. Not with HIV.

But what does work is that they know how to find food.

They’re not unlike the rats who torment them. Don’t ask me how they got HIV. It’s none of my fucking business, and HOW would it change anything. We would all be sitting here with shit on our face.

Sometimes Brady sleeps with his parents if the rats seem particularly hungry.

This is a Big Girl BAD idea.

They set up mouse traps on the bed. The mouse traps snap all night. Mostly, the rats escape because the traps are too small to kill them, but they’re cheap.

How do these people do things like pay property tax, buy Brady clothes (the parents have newspapers in their shoes, but they dote on Brady because he is all they have). In the winter, inside that hovel, you can see your breath, and everyone wears coats or three of them.

I bought them some down sleeping bags on the condition that Brady not sleep with the parental units.

People who take their privacy for granted, do not understand that people who live like this have no experience with privacy at all. Sex with children in the room is no big deal.

Sex with children in the bed is no big deal.

I find it alarming.

They have no water.

No water is a deal breaker.

Social services will take Brady if they can find him (it has not come to that) because no water is the one thing they are allowed to use as an excuse to remove children from the home.

But no one can find Brady.

The real problem has nothing to do with where Brady is.

The real problem is that social services puts kids like Brady into foster homes that are not much better than the home Brady has lived his life in.

The real problem is that fully three quarters of the children in these homes are raped.

I used to call it sexual assault.

Fuck sexual assault.

Rape is rape.

And you’re concerned about my use of language.

I have no language. All I have is outrage.

How is it that I am supposed to be surrounded by death that stalks this sad and disgusting place, but I am not allowed to be so outraged and pissed off that this kind of a thing is common, common, common. I respectfully argue that I would be totally so insane that I am rendered inarticulate, and I am rarely rendered inarticulate, in such a way that my bad words become the focus.

Not Brady.

His growth has been stunted and he likes corn flakes.

How would I know this.

It came to me in a Sustiva dream. Eat me.

Let me put it this way: I would bet the ranch that Brady will not be put in a foster home where his chances for being raped (with or without HIV, do they care, no) hoover at eighty percent.

The places where he will not be raped because the people who manage them care, are spilling out with children.

The places where Brady will be raped are spilling out with children.

Foster homes are played in a vast game of vacancy, no vacancy.

I know these woods as well as Brady’s family does. I know where all the stills are.

All the neighbors kicked in corn.

Brady’s family did not know how to make mash.

Everyone makes mash. I love it. It’s delicious. It’s a clear liquid as opposed to the colors of most burboun.

Whiskey is cash.

But this is the dead of winter, and cooking mash in a house is a bad idea.

One more department of the federal government come to fuck you in the ass.

Rich around here means you have a pickup and a car. Both from 1974.

In the spring, they can build a hootch.

You can always tell the people who do not know how to make whiskey.

You could learn hootch in a few easy lessons and Mitchell can brand it and sell it in Apple Liquor Stores. Better than Jack Daniels.

Tommy Perkins can buy the stock on the stock market as soon as Brady’s family goes public.

Gooo, Tommy. I’m rootin’ for ya.

Brady says thumbs up.

I think Head Start is going to be a bit too difficult. But I am not entirely sure just yet. We are playing phone tag. I am going to characterize the HIV as disability. People say: don’t step on toes.

It’s what I fucking do

What I tell the Language Queens is get out of my way, girlfriend. No one has time for your shit.

I have an iPhone. Mainly because land lines blow down in mountain wind all the time. Tech is a vicious lot.

Head Start has a great Health Unit. One that will be compelled to act in Brady’s interest. One whose feet can be held to the fire.

I was a Head Start administrator for eight counties, and tens of thousands of children. Most people assume I have lived as a writer.

How patently absurd.

How do you presume to treat the individual when you can’t treat the community he lives in. Oh. The Wizard is out to luch, and he’s a thirsty wizard.

I don’t know how I could sue all the people (they refer to themselves as journalists), but like me, they are merely bloggers who claim to know me intimately, but I have never heard of them.

They don’t know me.

I do know for a fact I can document in court, that many of these are people with pseudonyms (a pseudonym is what I did, it’s not original). In fact, they’re other writers. This may say nothing to you, but it says a lot to me.

If I sue all of them, and I know exactly what slander is, I have to, for instance — satire is protected speech as is poetic license — so this is not exactly new territory for me.

I know how the system works. That’s the problem.

It doesn’t work.

You know me as a writer. Even if you only stumbled on some work which I probably conceived as a rant.

So.

With all the unsubstantiated bullshit that has been written about me — the Esquire magazine nonsense 4 days of interviews was a disconnected purposeless piece of tripe. I have no idea who that fuck was writing about.

Not me.

I am not the issue. But I get focused on, and hopefully deflect some of it back on the attacker. As attackeree, I’m allowed.

Writing is not unlike a still. Sometimes, you make the hootch. Sometimes, the hootch makes you.

Publishing doesn’t mean hootch to me. How could it. I write dystopian sex novels. I throw shit at institutions.

And…

HIV breaks the camel’s back.

How is it that we can prevent HIV infection in new-borns, but as soon as the kid goes home, he’s at risk. It’s just stupid.

I have worked for many nonprofits from hearing and speech centers, to Community Mental Health, and children’s rights organizations. I have worked under a Ford Foundation grant where I consulted with the United Nations during the International Year of the Child. I have worked to teach local communities how to write grants for school breakfast programs especially for children whose only food that day will be those Rice Krispies he is literally attacking. I have done teacher training for Migrant Head Start. I have worked in Special Education. I have worked in university psychiatric hospital ICU units. I have managed transitional housing programs for previously institutionalized people with documented disability. I am not a fool. I don’t suffer them, either. There is no time to be foolish.

Brady in Head Start might solve a lot of problems. Not make them. In home start, the teacher comes into the home.

It might be more than most Americans can take because this is endemic poverty, the kind Bill Gates wants to run to the exit doors for because they scare him. “AIDS is too intractable.”

Bill, we are all being asked to cut back.

Welcome to charity.

Maybe I should serve only half of those Rice Krispies.

Bill, we want Macs.

I know, honey. I know.

“Why do you want to see the Wizard the Wizard doesn’t see people go away.”

I know of no witches with great shoes. The witches I know won’t be headed for cannery row in California because Cannery Row is a tourist trap, and the the witches I know can only afford to get to Memphis on the fucking bus.

It’s too much work, and there’s vine videos to make.

Bill, honey, I get to make the vine videos. You go back to work. And I doin’t give a flying fuck if it’s hard.

Tell. Me. About. It.

These tech people don’t know hard. I’ve known hard all my life, and, you, senator, are not hard.

The hate and the stigma that is part and parcel with public health, another cultural institution, totally failed, can only be described in the same way you would describe let us say as not unlike a village in Zimbabwe devastated, still, where health care is only beginning to arrive in Volkswagen Vans. All of this kind of thing because people like Desmond Tutu, and Bill Clinton gave and give a fuck.

Then, you travel the world, and you begin to develop another point of view that argues with your voices that speak to things are not what Americans think.

The vans will not treat that many people. Hundreds. But not hundreds of thousands.

The kind of poverty that exists in Zimbabwe exists here. Right under the nose of America. Where people want me to shut the fuck up.

Watch my language.

It’s a little late for that.

I love those little yellow buses that carry all those stinky Head Start kids. Don’t even talk to me about agencies like the Department of Education. The one thing you can count on with these people is that they never leave the office.

These are cultural institutions. They don’t work. Why are we expecting better results from organizations who have not in all this time done a goddamn thing. Isn’t that the very definition of insanity.

They talk a great line. Some actually have public relations departments who handle things like the press.

They employ the Media.

It’s all a backscratching set of, oh, daddy do me, and I’ll so do you. Reciprocity. It’s a padigm that cannot work. There is no evidence of it working beyond the interests of the old white men in the room. Who is crazy enough to defend the status quo. Excuse me, but I have shut entire agencies down. By writing about them. Now, I only want to do photography. Video kinda bores me. I have managed all kinds of publishing entities, and I can write a news release. If I wanted to, and fucking do not want to. I’m over it. AllrightAllready, I will if I have to.

It’s no sweat from my balls.

But it’s a waste of my time.

The only thing I am good at is pushing these boys.

Part of the reason they’re not on their blog much is because they’re too fucking busy. There are things to do, and things that have to be done.

We have to prepare now for spring planting. I am buying an old, used wringer washing machine. We can do laundry in it and make our own art paper. I never kid.

There is a loft in the closest real city where people sell stuff made in Appalachia. Pottery does nothing for me.

I like the art. Kinda corny.

The prices people are getting almost never goes to a hundred dollars. Rich people drive here and rip everyone off. Simple. I like the workspace though. But it was winter when I looked at it, and it was freezing cold in there. But I hear the public does arrive there to buy crafts.

Meth and HIV is a double hitter.

Kids here almost never graduate from fucking high school.

They know about the tech toys. They have seen them on TV. They also know it does not mean them.

There are casinos around.

Sex work.

Ho fucking hum.

Some of the highest rates of HIV in the country.

And. Now. Heroin.

Fuck me.

I do not know anything of the above. I did not write it. I hired a type-A tech guy and he wrote it.

He needs a job…

Mitchell…

The people like the megarich such as Tommy Perkins suck all the oxygen out of the economic room.

Tommy’s having champagne out by the pool with Daniel and they’re both reading her book on Vietnam.

NAM by Danielle Steel. No, Danielle, no.

I have mocked this bullshit so many times, it’s ridiculous.

I get how it works.

I know how to get the cameras, and I know how to make a still, and I know how to make a garden that actually feeds people, and I know how to deal with very difficult kids who are difficult for a reason.

It’s hard being marginalized. It’s hard to be forgotten. It’s hard to be sick. It’s hard to endure stigma actually created by what else, public health. It’s hard to learn when your belly aches, and all you want to do is sleep because you are exhausted, depleted, and at risk for everything in the fucking goddamn book.

Attention must be paid.

Real people are fucking dying up here, and you want me to watch my enraged language.

I love your purse, butcher dress is on fire.