I Quit 11-28-07

11/28/07
11:59P

I quit.

When I was a kid, probably 5th or 6th grade, maybe younger, I was invited by a “friend,” not a real friend but one of those girls whose parents knew mine and with whom I was “supposed” to be friends, invited me to her church one Sunday. I stole five bucks out of the donation plate. She never invited me anywhere ever again, but that was something of a relief, considering that all of the girls in that almost-middle-class, blue-collar-but-pretending-they’re-not echelon never liked me anyway. I was a freak, they were cheerleaders and election winners, even if they didn’t have the sense to pour piss out of a boot with the toe & heel cut out and instructions printed on the sole.

My first real “charity venture” was to benefit the YWCA’s Battered Women’s Program in New Orleans, because they gave me the information and the means to pursue justice against the crack whore who tried to kill me, where the District Attorney and City Attorney’s offices had done everything to the contrary. So I wanted to pay these good people back for how they had helped me. Because of what I named the multi-media benefit show that I produced, they distanced themselves as much as possible from the actual event and despite the fact that I stapled fliers to every fucking telephone pole in Orleans Parish, we couldn’t get any decent media coverage to save my fat, sweaty ass. All of that aside, I raised $1,400 for the YWCA’s Battered Women’s Program. A girl who had volunteered to help me, and who provided me with a slide projector that didn’t work, wound-up getting a job WITH the YWCA as a grant writer. After the cash was handed over and the show wrapped, none of them knew my name.

It took me a long time to admit to being and to “come out,” in a manner of speaking, as an atheist. Not so much because my grandfather was a baptist preacher and my Nannie a minister’s widow, but because of the emotional, verbal, and fiscal blackmail of having grown up in a state where “gawd” is supposed to be the end-all, be-all answer to uppity women, where we all must splay ourselves before HIS almighty authority, upon HIS altar of ultimate power, otherwise, well, fuck, we’d just have to take responsibility for ourselves, well, OURSELVES! You do not disrupt the familial “traditions” (rituals) that comfort the ignorant and fearful, the fake emotional baggage that is the wrapping-paper and bows of fake holidays that are somehow rendered “sacred” by affiliation with whatever cults. You could get your ass kicked for daring to usurp the all-encompassing, suffocating tent of “gawd’s” love-as-domination, sometimes by your own relatives.

Maybe it’s just my contrarian nature, but I always wanted to prove to the pitchfork-and-torch-wielding villagers that, despite their very limited knowledge and experience of different outlooks and life paths, an ATHIEST could be a “good person.” That, and I’ve always seen all of the work that needed doing that somehow, despite the thousands of overly-compensated bureaucratic bumpkins in this state, NEVER GOT THE FUCK DONE. Oh, sure, you hear about welfare queens in cadillacs and how gubmint social programs are the very root of all evil in Murka, because ALLLLLL of YOUR TAX MONEY (well, that part’s true, it’s not like the billionaires who pay for that propaganda pay THEIR share) is going to help junkies and whores and lazy good-for-nothins (like myself) who, though crippled, are just too fucking lazy/ornery/inept to keep a job and dammit, they just need to try harder! At any rate, no matter what percentage of your tax dollars actually goes to “help people,” down here on dirt level, you just don’t see that shit GETTING THE FUCK DONE.

When Katrina hit, I was trapped up here on the 3rd floor of L’Hotel du Fucktards, barred from heading to Orleans by the State Police and the National Guard --- they didn’t want to help anybody get out, but they wouldn’t let anybody else go in to do that very fucking job. Marc Morial Junior, the dumbassed republicunt puppet known as Ray “Chocolate City” Nagin, had already hied his family and prized possessions to San Antonio, and despite the fact that a huge percentage of “his” city relied SOLELY upon public transportation and had no system or form of egress from the city save for RTA buses --- they were all locked-up inside of the main garage and maintenance barns, along with the streetcars and the public school buses. Ray hauls ass, leaves a couple hundred thousand people flat-out fucking STRANDED in Orleans Parish, and yet, if you ask any ignorant-ass motherfucker in this country, it’s their OWN FAULTS for not “getting out in time.” Yeah, that makes sense, doesn’t it, Mister Murdoch?

So Liz sends $200 down here ‘cause I was still going to try to bust through the barricades and get down there and load-up the back of my pickup like a non-union construction foreman down at the Cuban sandwich shop. Then Terrible sent money. Then more and more people kept sending money down here and I wanted to get in my damned truck and GO!!

Couldn’t go. But eventually, as tens of thousands of their kinfolk and neighbors were being interred in the Superdome and the Convention Center, some of the luckier ones started to trickle north, what people could hitch a ride and grab the clothes on their backs and just hope to hell that there’d be room at the inn when they got here.

And allllllll up and down the Hurricane Evacuation Corridor, be it Interstate 10, 310, 610, or U.S. Hightway 61, alllll up and down that federally-mandated escape route, exits started slamming shut. Barricades, armed by militia-minded deputies and town cops, popped-up faster than mushrooms at every fucking exit off of the interstates and 61. Wide-spot-in-the-road places that only existed alongside 61, suddenly were shut up tighter than a virgin at a tri-state rodeo. NO GAS HERE. NO ICE. DON’T STOP. NO ROOMS. NO POWER. DON’T STOP. The signs were everywhere, but I’d give both of my tits for an inch of archival tape of the local “news” coverage of it at the time --- that shit disappeared faster than John McCain’s birthday cake. It happened. Ask anybody who got out before the death and heat and willful government genocide floated across the fetid flood waters --- there was no room for them, any fucking where. They weren’t allowed to stop anywhere south or southeast of Baton Rouge. Every little mighty-white township in southeastern Louisiana shut up tighter than a rector’s asshole.

So north and west and east they came, those who got out within the first three days, before the borders were clamped-down, something that didn’t apply when “laborers” were needed for the half-assed, unlicensed Reconstruction was to begin. When they got up here to Hillbilly HellHole, these rednecks, these republicunts, didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. INVADING COLOREDS!!! NIGRAS TO THE LEFT!!! NIGRAS TO THE RIGHT!!! LOCK UP YER DAUGHTERS AND UNLOCK YER GUNS!!! Every handgun in every parish even remotely near Baton Rouge sold out in a matter of TWO FUCKING DAYS. Wonder what happened to that waiting period?

At any rate, the money kept coming down here and we had to do SOMETHING (Dullard McDumbass was at least useful for SOME of the heavy lifting, just not his fair fucking share, by a long shot), so we went shopping. Diapers, maxipads, tampons, baby food, formula, underwear, socks, t-shirts, sweatpants, shoes, slippers, groceries, first-aid and diabetic needs, bandages, neosporin, condoms, tylenol, baby cough syrup, every fucking thing that we could think of, we were hauling out of Wally World by the ton. I’ve still got the pictures, but they’re not hosted online anywhere anymore. I never set out to play rescuer, though I did post on Craig’s List that I wanted to go get my ass down there and haul people out in the back of my truck. If I’d known how my people were going to be treated by their fellow citizens, the imported cracker guardsmen, the losing-their-minds cops --- I’d have said fuck it and blasted through those fucking barricades. All I had to go on was broadcast news and CNN, I didn’t have any friends in New Orleans anymore, nobody was calling me, asking for my help or calling me period. I listened to the “authorities,” fool that I was. So as the people filtered up here and were man-handled by the self-appointed “emergency authorities” around here, we brought them stuff. We took stuff to the New Orleans food bank, while they were waiting for the help from the corporates (who would, soon enough, shuffle us off to the side like the amateurs that we were, unneeded and mocked by those altruistic yankee saviors), we hit every shelter that we could find (preferably non-denominational) and we asked them what they needed. We took cold hard cash to the LSU Vet School because FEMA had commandeered all of their resources and cocked the entire process up severely (LSU can’t do much, but they damned well know some fucking veterinary science and animal husbandry, eons beyond the capabilities of the volunteer scientologists or any motherfucker who has EVER worked for FEMA), along with every bag of cat litter, food, dog food, hay, treats, toys, you name it, we RAVISHED that PetSmart. We did every fucking thing that we could and I re-broke my back in the fucking process. And y’know what? The only people who believed that we were doing this BECAUSE IT FUCKING NEEDED DOING, the only ones who weren’t asking us if we were TAKING A NICE CUT OFF OF THE TOP, the only ones who actually THANKED US for the back-breaking, knee-grinding, sleep-depriving, hump-that-shit-into-the-truck and go back and do it again work --- were my online friends. The people who funded the entire enterprise in the first fucking place. I wasn’t looking for fame or a fucking halo or even so much as a pat on the back --- but the only ones that I got, aside from one remarkable woman at the LSU emergency pet shelter --- were from y’all. It meant the world to me, but it would’ve been nice if the republicunts who’ve taken over this state could have at least ADMITTED that there were people like us, on the fucking ground, DOING THE FUCKING WORK THAT OUR OWN STATE, THAT THE FEDERAL FUCKING GOVERNMENT, WOULDN’T. The Salvation Army was in there, the very DAY that Katrina hit, with blankets and sandwiches and the best forms of shelter that they could provide, before the floodwater ever breached the levees. And what credit did THEY get for it, while the fucking Red Cross sat on their precious asses in hotel rooms in LaPlace, afraid to go in to that “gangland” where the crackers made up lies about all of the rescue copters being fired upon by “gang-bangers with machine guns”? Who thanked the Salvation Army and the New Orleans Food Bank, for hauling ass in and out of there every fucking day, while the crooked-ass motherfucking Red Cross SAT ON THEIR ASSES AND WATCHED THE MUCH-HYPED “MAYHEM” ON THE FUCKING FUX NEWS?!?!?! Nobody. Nobody even admitted that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people like us, like Andrea in the 8th Ward, on the ground, putting food into people’s hands, putting clothes onto their backs, giving it our all, while our “government” fucked around and pretended to play the git-tar over in fucking Crawford. Six fucking days, it took for that cocksucker to ADMIT that 1,500+ people were being murdered in the streets of New Orleans, along the Gulf Coast. That’s how I got into the “rescue” bidness. Because the people whom we had “trusted,” the bureaucrats whose jobs it was to KEEP THIS SHIT FROM HAPPENING IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE --- didn’t do their fucking jobs. That’s why I wound-up batting clean-up, again.

Then came Lee. Susan came to me, tears in her eyes (a skill that would have served her well in the early days of talkies), telling me that Lee was going to die. Shocked, horrified, still drowning in pain from my nephew’s murder, I couldn’t bear to lose anybody else, even though she was only a casual acquaintance, she was the only person in this town who would actually talk to me. People from around the world responded to my online pleas, my heartfelt fear of watching a young girl die needlessly, when we DO possess the technology and the surgical skill to prevent it. Over ten grand, I helped raise, along with some of the big-wigs around here who don’t want me to know them, but then I was shut out. I could raise the money, I could set up the blog, I could shift the money from PayPal to the bank, but I couldn’t know how much money we had raised. I couldn’t know to whom I should send thank-you cards. I should’ve taken that as a hint.

All that I know now is that Lee didn’t qualify for her Medicaid this year, and somehow, Susan sees that as my fault. She had the names and phone numbers of the people who RUN THE STATE MEDICAID OFFICE, but for some reason, she lost her Medicaid this year. With over ten grand in the bank, maybe Susan should’ve gotten off of her ass and TAKEN HER TO THE TULANE MEDICAL SCHOOL CLINIC FOR NEUROFIBROMATOSIS, OR TO THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA AT BIRMINGHAM, where they wanted to get her into a groundbreaking FDA study on brain tumors from neurofibromatosis. But they didn’t. She’s still working at Fred’s, she’s not dead, she’s not “falling out” in the aisles, but neither of them speak to me. That’s what I get. I have overextended the goodwill of everyone online who had a heart and a few bucks to share, and I don’t even get to make a real-live, in-person friend out of it. Selfish me. No wonder nobody online wants anything to do with my fundraisers for cats or myself or teeth or whatever anymore --- that whole Lee thing, if it had gone the way that the scum around here thought that it was going, I’d have had a whole mouth-full of fresh dental implants by now, not rotting stumps and jagged shards and still haven’t smiled since 2004. If I’d have skimmed even 10% off of the top, the way that professional fundraisers do, I’d have at least front teeth now, if not all of the broken/shattered/rotting lower teeth fixed.

I spent 3 years at the mercy of Charity Hospital residents, medical students and interns because of a scumbag ambulance-chaser corporation named Morris Bart and his hack-ass chiropractors. I’ve had four spine surgeries in 9 years of no life, no career, can’t-keep-a-job HELL because I made the mistake of calling Morris Bart because I was too ignorant of our legal system to know better. College education and no common sense, eh? Just a cock-eyed optimism that our legal system and our country actually worked the way that they told us it did in American History classes.

After the first repair & its hardware collapse in the wake of Katrina, it took me another year to find a surgeon who’d actually DISCUSS the process of what needed to be done with me, instead of just barking, “FUSION!” and charging out of the room to service somebody on PRIVATE INSURANCE. Little did I know that Mister Sensitive, this first private orthopedic surgeon that I’d ever had, was going to stick it to me worse than even Charity Hospital sadists ever could. Yeah, put me back onto the lortabs and valium and keep blowing smoke up my ass to run out that malpractice clock --- “Oh, yeah, those giant screws are SUPPOSED TO BREAK, they’re really “UNNECESSARY” after the fusion takes place, and everything looks GREAT, you’ve just REALLY got to QUIT SMOKING, or it’ll be YOUR FAULT IF IT DOESN’T TAKE!”

I shit y’all not.

And me, being once again chemically-altered, like the 3 years of narcotics at Charity that cost me the last 3 years of my Nannie’s life, dumbass that I am, I listened to that idiot.

Up to a point.

Then it finally dawned on me, when I realized that I wasn’t going to get any more treatment than a big plastic brace and more narcotics, that maaaayyyyyybe this guy was fullashit. And, thankfully, I found Good Doctor. Simple guy, no bullshit, sometimes a little too perky, but he TOLD ME THE TRUTH. He showed me the x-rays and MRIs and CTs and all of the films and information that Dr. Jackass never would. He’d print-out black and blurry paper copies of my films, where even the most astute layman couldn’t tell that it was even a SPINE, let alone wherein the flaws and fault lay. Good Doctor told me, straight out, what needed to be done to fix it. Granted, I’d have preferred that he’d have done it all from the back, because I never ever EVER want to go through anything even remotely similar to what that second surgery was like, being vivisectioned and having my guts splayed out on the table like William Wallace’s. But he did what had to be done to DO IT RIGHT. PERIOD. He didn’t blow smoke up my ass, though the gut doctor sure as hell did, pompous poufy-haired peckerhead that he was. But that’s a whole other martyrdom.

And despite the fact that no lawyer, reputable or otherwise, out of the three lawyers that I interviewed, not a one of the fucks would take a liability case against Dr. Jackass, I still believed that I had been treated unfairly, that he had done his job incompletely and shoddily, to put it lightly, and that I deserved SOME sort of justice out of this, dammit. Never mind that I’ve been the patron saint target of The Fuck Joanna Society, a long line of perpetrators, dating back to my conception. Nevermind that only twice in my life has anyone ever been on MY side when I’ve been fucked-over or done grave injustices. Never mind that I have always stood alone, facing my assaulters, without so much as a prosecutor to fight for me in courts of criminal justice. Never mind that my own mother has spent the past 20 years punishing me for exposing the fact that I was pimped-out to her son at the ripe old age of TWENTY MONTHS OLD --- I’m sick of being the fucking VICTIM of perpetrators who ALWAYS GET THE FUCK AWAY WITH IT. I was not put on this earth to be the born loser, the perpetual victim, the one who can never fucking win at anything, even when it’s fighting for my own fucking LIFE.

I was right, and Dr. Jackass and his staff were wrong. Thusly I pursued that myth of justice through the Louisiana State Board Of Medical Examiners. I sent them my narrative, I sent them my medical records and films, I sent them every piece of evidence that I could beg, borrow, or buy.

And then I never heard from them again. Not once did they ask me for any clarification, further information, or more evidence. Not once was I ever allowed to testify before a board or even present my case to anyone, sole for the investigator who then decided that my case warranted “no further examination or investigation.”

In other words, yet another form of “FUCK YOU, YOU USELESS POOR BITCH!!!” from the great state of Louisiana, through another class-warrior rich bitch whose job, obviously, is to watch the asses of the license-purchasers. Just like the ADA is there to promote their own agenda and to protect “medical professionals” and the insurance industry, not to mention those corporate hospitals, apparently, the Louisiana State Board Of Medical Examiners exists not to serve or protect the public from malfeasant practitioners, but to cover the asses of those whose moral/political bents allows them to editorialize upon the bodies of their patients. Privately-insured, wage-earning patients deserve to be healed and fixed and to go on and live productive lives. Welfare queens like me, on Medicare & Medicaid and disability, well, it’s pretty fucking obvious, via the behavior of the majority of doctors, nurses, and aides who have crossed my path, deserve nothing but more suffering, mockery, torment and pain.

Thus cometh the decree from on high. If you get lucky, you get a human being like Good Doctor (and I will happily provide his number and address to anyone who needs the best spine surgeon in Louisiana), who doesn’t care that you’re on “welfare” (like I didn’t earn any of the money that I’m getting back from Social Security), who doesn’t care that you don’t come from a moneyed family, who doesn’t care that you aren’t there from a sports injury in pursuit of an LSU jock scholarship. If you get lucky, you get a doctor who only cares about doing his/her job well, and about making sure that her/his patients HEAL. It only took 9 years and innumerable nightmares of the public health system for me to finally get “lucky” enough to find Good Doctor. It only took 9 weeks for the state of Louisiana to tell me that my suffering, my needless further crippling, an entire other wasted year of my life, meant NOTHING. That I, because of who and what I am, MEAN NOTHING.

So why fucking try anymore? Why fucking care? Why even make an effort to be a “good” person anymore, what the fuck good has it done me? I give and I give and I lose blood and sleep and money and years off of my life, and for what? So that fucking FEMA can take the credit? So that some parasitic little rich bitch from Uptown can piggyback on my hard work and get a CAREER out of MY fundraiser? So that I can be accused of SKIMMING OF OFF THE TOP when I was wanting to give everything I had away to MY PEOPLE who were being dragged, barely living, from that toxic scum-water and then dumped into redneck hell-holes where they are automatically treated as ESCAPED CONVICTS? So that I can raise money for a girl who’s not dying and never know where the money went or why and then be treated by a fucking LEPER? So that I can be the “crazy cat lady” for trapping and rescuing and neutering SEVENTY-FIVE fucking cats about whom NOBODY ELSE IN THIS ENTIRE FUCKING PARISH CARED, even though it’s THEIR FUCKING FAULT THAT THESE ANIMALS WERE BREEDING LIKE RATS AND STARVING AND SUFFERING? So that I can be mocked and treated like the illegally-imported yard help, for caring about these animals, when nobody else does? So that I can be the same fucking leper that I was when I was dragged here four years ago, except that I am now a MARKED leper, a leper who has been deemed “dangerous” or “crazy” for MAKING THEM LOOK BAD, YET AGAIN, BECAUSE THEY’RE TOO FUCKING STUCK-UP AND SELFISH TO DO THE RIGHT THING, EVER?!?!??!

Fuck it.

Maybe if I can ever get back to something resembling “civilization,” if I can ever get my two cats and escape this hillbilly hell-hole, maybe then, I might be able to believe again. Nothing has really meant anything to me, nothing has been funny to me, nothing has really mattered to me, since Tater was murdered, and these same scumbag nouveau-riche white-trash redneck republicunts COVERED IT UP and let drug-dealing white-trash-from-money GET AWAY WITH IT, WITHOUT EVER SERVING A DAY IN JAIL. I’ve always been a cynic, but I’ve always wanted to believe that somehow, someday, I would finally get justice, if not for myself, at least for Tater, and it’s never going to happen. I am no hero, and I can’t fix shit. I couldn’t fix Tater, I couldn’t save him, and all that I’ve done since then has been transcendental masturbation.

There’s no fucking point in trying to be a “good person,” in trying to prove that an atheist matters, that an atheist CONTRIBUTES to what’s left of our society, there’s just no fucking point. The motherfuckers always get away with it. Money always wins. Poor motherfuckers will never count. And no matter how hard I torture myself in the pursuit of progress, truth, justice… It will never matter. None of it ever really has made a dent, compared to the amount of evil out in this world, compared to the evil billionaires like Dick Cheney who continue to perpetrate class warfare, who continue to create ways to further legalize slavery and outright theft. A drop in the bucket isn’t good enough for me anymore. It’s not worth it to me anymore.

The predators always win, that’s why Discovery Channel’s republicunt owners love Shark Week and all of those predator/prey shows. That gazelle never had a chance. They make billions off of the meerkats, but they let them be murdered willy-nilly, as if they couldn’t have intervened.

I should’ve saved myself the money and the postage and I shouldn’t have even tried to fight for myself, when no one else would. I’ve spent my life trying to fight for myself, because there was no one there to stand up for me, I’ve always been expected, despite never once understanding how human beings justify their behavior or their selfishness, I’ve always been expected to handle this shit and fight for myself, and I never win. Somebody decided that I’d never amount to a fucking thing, long before I was born, and their prophecy hasn’t just been borne out, it’s been expanded-upon to make me into a human target. Free shot! Fuck Joanna and no repercussions! Take another shot! Nothing will happen to you, buddy, ‘cause EVERYBODY fucks Joanna, so you might as well get your jollies by ripping off another piece of her soul!

So fuck it. There ain’t no fucking justice. Our government doesn’t work for us, if indeed it ever did. Only way that the government would ever be on my side is if I entered that upper tier of the tax brackets and “contributed to society” in the only way that really matters. So why in the fuck should I even care anymore, about anyone? Yes, there are quite a few people online who do truly love me, who truly care about me, who truly help me as much as they can. None of this blathering essay negates them or their contributions to my life. About them, I will always care and do my damnedest to help them in any way that I can. But the rest of the world can go get fucked.

I wish that I could say that I have, somehow, somewhere, served as a “good example” to somebody, to some kid who feels hopeless because she’s broke and isn’t given the same opportunities to get out, to succeed, to excel, as the rich, popular, connected kids are --- I wish that something that I had done in my life had meant shit to a tree and helped somebody, somewhere. I wish that I had taught someone, anyone, something good, that made them want to be a better person.

But I can’t say that, because I haven’t accomplished any of it. I haven’t accomplished shit. So why give a fuck about any of it anymore? The selfish, self-satisfied, self-centered, yuppie-scum republicunt fuckwad sheeple don’t give a fuck about anybody but themselves and their spawn, and THEY’RE STILL WINNING. Maybe we’ve had it wrong all along. Maybe there is no better side to the human nature, maybe we’re all doomed to turn out as venal and craven and predatory as THEM. Who the fuck cares anymore.