Let’s dredge up that second footnote. It was brief, and it was the most honest piece of writing I’ve done in a long time.

I still haven’t got there yet, and another full week is beginning. I’m not mad. At myself. I’m actually kind of proud of the overall job I’m doing. I mean the wage slave job tangentially, but really I’m talking about making things better well beyond just coping through that shit day on day.

A lot of that dredge post will eventually consist of an exploration of what I’ve always been, and still am. From the start that’s included two things–a belletrist first. Second is … I’m not sure what to call it neatly. An anarkhos and an antifascist, an anticapitalist and an unfundamentalist. I stand against the ‘way things’ were then and are now; I reject the societal consensus. It needs a pretty name and I will invent one eventually.

Maria on LatinoUSA asked Bernie more or less the same question and he said his parents left Europe at the right time and the rest of his family died in the fascist camps. But that even despite that luck, his family was always poor, and that shaped him.

So yeah, resonance, and I think I can easily add ‘working class’ to my own list.

I should have seen it sooner, except … I’m coming down off the high of thinking of myself as a working-class escapee.

I mean that for a few years I was successful and comfortable and I just wanted to keep thinking of myself as those things, even as the needle dipped and I sunk back into discomfort and … not failure, but just living paycheck to paycheck. “Things have been ramen-y.”

I’m struggling. I’m rearranging debt chairs titanically, trying to make a hole in the fog, and it’s brutal in the psychic sense.

I’m going to succeed again, but I am very much scaling back my expectations of what success means, and being very sure to save the things that really and truly matter.