Cascading Catastrophes

[Update, Wed., Oct. 15: My deep thanks to those of you who have been very kind and generous. I'm afraid my gratitude must remain very general for now; it takes a series of miracles to get this computer to do anything. Unfortunately, I'm much more concerned about my terrible health at the moment. It's the worst it's ever been, and I'm not at all hopeful about where this is leading. Until and unless I feel at least a little bit better physically, it's not possible for me to publish anything substantive here. So computer problems and everything else will have to wait. I'll be back with further news when I'm able and when there is some. Many thanks again.]

I suppose that headline could describe the current economic situation. But I'm using it much more narrowly, to describe my own life. When you're very poor and very sick, any specific individual problem is likely to lead to a series of increasingly worse problems.

Until yesterday, the weather in Los Angeles has been very hot again this week. As I mentioned recently, hot weather wipes me out at this point. I can barely function at all. And then, a couple of weeks ago, my computer sort of blew up. I've done everything I can myself to try to fix it. It still crashes five or six times a day. Just as bad is the fact that it often takes a single page two, three, four and even five minutes to load. Since it takes all the energy I have to sit in front of the computer for a couple of hours, this is, as you might say, a problem. It makes writing essays of the kind I tend to write impossible.

I can't do anything about any of it. So I don't know why I'm telling you this. Yes, I do: some of you were very generous over the last few weeks, helping me to pay rent for another month, buy food, and take care of some basic bills. Many thanks to all of you who have been so kind. I'm terribly sorry I can't write anything more than this for the moment. And even this is causing me a lot of anxiety; I keep expecting the computer to crash again at any moment. And most days now, I feel worse than shit physically. I don't even know if this ridiculously simple post is coherent.

So I have no plans at the moment, not about any of this. I'll see if any brilliant ideas occur to me in the next week or so. If they don't, well, they don't.

Very sorry again for another interruption. Now I'll see if this crappy computer manages to actually publish this...