WT the F

This food pantry smells awful. The fucking line stretches all the way down to Eastern Parkway and it's fucking cold and rainy and it's more clear than ever that everything is fucked.

How did things get so fucked so fast?

I first realized things were getting bad when I ran into my dad's fourth ex-wife and she told me the annual ski trip to Aspen was switched to Vermont because it's within driving distance of the city and the lift tickets are like half the price. But I never thought things would get this fucked.

I asked the lady who checked my FEMA i.d. card at the door if there were any meat alternatives available.

"Like canned food?"

"No. Like tofu."

This lady, her name tag says Aisatou, whatever the fuck that is, she has this crazy weave in her hair, like she used to get it done all the time but now it's all fucked up because she's fucked like the rest of us and there's no chance of getting your weave done.

"They stopped sending non-essentials months ago, sir."

"Who did your braids? They look good."

I figure if sweet talk whatever the fuck her name is she'd let me in on the secret stash of Newman Os and seitan jerky that I know don't exist but "Ritz style" crackers fucking suck so what the fuck.

"Once I wrote a story about this woman in Flatbush who was walking home from KFC with her kids late at night and they got hit by a car and the little boy died and the mom was in a coma. I asked her brother what she did for work and he said she did braids. So I went to the place where she rented a chair and talked to her friends and I saw a lot of braiding."

I don't remember when that was exactly. It's when I used to pop Xanax like candy. Man I wish I had some Xanax. Fuck the tofu.

My paper was one of the last three in the country before it went under. I worked for two meals a day in the months before they let me go. I got got when the four papers in town folded into one to take on USA Today and Bloomberg News-AP. Those fuckers at Gannett liquidated every asset they had outside Virginia. Everybody got fired. They kept all the pensions and matching retirement funds and sold all the buildings and equipment and put it all into that fucking awful paper that I used to wipe my ass for three straight weeks. Those pricks didn't even cover the President's funeral.

What's her name told me to pick whatever I want from the canned goods and take one each of the proteins, fruits, vegetables and grains. What a fucking waste of time college was. The girl with the bad weave doesn't give a fuck what school I went to and she's the only person I need to impress these days.

When I got laid off, when my 401 k was frozen by the government, when the Wall Street was bombed, when my house was foreclosed, when credit lines dried up, I stopped having that dream where I was still in high school and I couldn't get out even though I was an adult and I'd been to college and grad school. I figured, what the fuck. Things always seem to get worked out.

Then I got shot.