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Today is day 202 of 2020

Here's a picture.

I'm afraid it's going to get a bit negative here..

Just for a change.

It's raining, and very cold for July, especially in this rapidly burning up earth. I'm feeling kind of chilled, after coming home earlier from a completely pointless jaunt to the bank to try and find out where my originally sent to the wrong location bank card had been returned to. I still don't know after mang phone calls, attempted phone calls, email and facebook message. That was the irritating part of the day.

The truly awful part of the day started later. Our landlords have been truly awful of late..

and YES WE OWE BACK RENT BUT FOR FUCKS SAKE THERE WAS/IS A GLOBAL PANDEMIC WHICH SHUT THE COUNTRY DOWN!!!! Both residents of this abode depend on industries that are particularly affected by this i.e the tourist industry, and we have been paying along the way just not enough to catch up yet. 

Oh and my company has resumed operations, just on the weekends with a skeleton staff... which I found out when I saw the big red buses and our guys with our red umbrellas with my own eyes... they don't have work for me, only 2 tours a day done by one person (I mean I'm one fucking person aren't I?) and they don't have money to pay us for the last week we worked in March. Well they have money but they need it for investment. I mean I just need money for rent and food, and the other things that us plebs squander it all on, so it's all understandable.

So we owe rent. I did some work for them, not well received but I did it, and we've been paying a daily amount that she calculated, and trying to scrounge for money every day. Not a convenient system nor one conducive to letting someone get an actual job which actually pays weekly or monthly after you've been working for a while but such things don't bother her. 

Today we don't have the money. And she had no interest in giving a few days before the next payment, no, money today or we're out.

Well that didn't happen. At least I think it didn't. We may have been saved by someone she respects slightly reasoning with her, her own disclination to be bothered in the night and the rain or.. I think that's it.

So safe for now. Tomorrow is another day. And days start very early around here.

A Square

The back and forth between imminent doom and just scraping by continues. As that rumbles along in the background, here's a picture I took today.

Get Me Outta Here

2020, despite the elegant symmetry of the date, has not been good to me. It started poorly, went downhill from there and the rest is a strange time in history which we all, everywhere on this earth have experienced together. 

The pandemic has been hard on me, as I've explained enough for to be nearing "ad nauseum" levels and it isn't getting better. 

My life has been a mediocre catastrophe, that is deeply stressful, always on the edge of destitution, but in a really boring way that's not worthy of writing a novel about. And it's not getting better.

July decided to slap me in the face, with me being roped into servitude for my landlord, doing jobs that were not properly explained, that the tools were not provided for and that I didn't feel confident doing. So I did a poor job which I was reminded of repeatedly, nevertheless I was expected to be on call for this work I was not (apparently) capable of barely getting done.

I did that until the showdown. Not with me, I'm a pathetic appeaser who lets people treat me like that, but I'm not the only one who lives here. Not everyone puts up with shit like that. And that was it, we were more fucked than before. 

So I spent the night talking on the phone, fielding intrusive questions (how much do you think your work is worth? Zero apparently) and how much do you think you owe (well no more than half of what you claim fuck face) and generally panicking. 

Then everything got saved, some friends talked to her, helped out a bit, and danger was averted. For now.

What I really want is a miracle. Some (realistic) good fortune or help is not going to get rid of this shit now, and once and for all.. so I'm afraid only a miracle will do. How exactly do I get one of those?

July 2020

Six months in already, time sure flies when a pandemic strikes, the country shuts down and you're in quarantine watching your measly funds dwindle away, occasionally taking a walk to the shop amongst the masked population, restrictions ease a bit and you don't have to use a mask all the time, funds keep dwindling, most businesses open up but yours doesn't because it's in tourism, you've pretty much run out of money but the landlord still wants rent, of course, they hold a huge dinner on a historical bridge to celebrate the end of coronavirus restrictions and then it's July.

I for one am looking forward to the plague of poisonous frogs. Here's a kind of pretty picture of ducks on a river before they're all dried up in August's fire storms.