Surviving The Fall, 47

Soon, in less than three years, I will be on my full retirement pension. I don't know how much it's going to be but the research I have done indicates that I will be okay if I decide not to work again, and that likely I will be getting even a little bit more. I expect to be staying in government subsidized housing for the rest of my life, if I am going to live out the rest of my years here in Vancouver, and that is not an absolute certainty, just as there is nothing in life that is an absolute certainty. Not even this blog, Gentle Reader, is an absolute certainty, but I will continue trying to entertain, inform, scandalize and inspire you (but hopefully never bore you!) every day for as long as I am able to get my fingers to work. I don't expect that I shall ever run out of things to say. I could remain working full time, though I no longer actually work full time, but four days a week, but I will likely shrink my work week down to two days in order to devote more time to writing, art, and creative indulgence (you'll have to guess!). I am tempted, once I hit sixty-five, as a lovely birthday present to myself, to simply tell all my supervisors and bosses to take this job and shove it, but in rather more colourful and less nice language. But I don't know. There is the possibility that I will remain so attached to my work and the idea of being useful that I will simply just ignore the details that piss me off at my employment providers, and continue with my clients and coworkers, smiling all the way through and instead of swallowing my bile, simply barf it up every day on these blessed pages. Some of our homeless people are seniors. This is a scandal and it looks like it won't be changing much by the time I'm officially old, so I sometimes feel like I'm walking in a graveyard at night. The housing and services available for us simply do not match the need or the demand. There isn't a lack of housing in this city. Every day, it seems, there is a new condo tower or townhouse development going up, but almost none of it is affordable to people of ordinary means, much less for the poor, so naturally the new housing gets offloaded onto the offshore wealthy or to real estate scum who shadow flip. This white collar crime is coming more to public attention and some measures are being taken against it, but really, unless all levels of government move assertively and aggressively against the greedy swine who are taking over the housing in this city, things are only going to keep getting worse, and we will be seeing more people like ourselves ending up begging on the sidewalks and, who knows, we might end up there ourselves. I am confident that as the public outcry becomes louder and more strident that our elected officials will be so ready to pee themselves that they are going to have to start obeying the will and need of the people. I am hopeful. In the meantime, I have only to imagine what it must have been like to be a senior citizen some one hundred or two hundred years ago. There wouldn't be that many, since people were usually considered old after forty, and generally anyone who wasn't already well off and well provided for wasn't going to see much more than sixty. Ageing, as we know it, is really a phenomenon of modern and postmodern times. Our diets are better, our knowledge of health and wellbeing is incredible and most of us have the means and resources for taking proper care of ourselves, plus our huge advances in medical care and technology and publicly accessible universal healthcare. I am optimistic and I believe that the public outcry will eventually gain enough ground to take over the reins of power that have been high jacked by the interests of greed and selfishness. It has taken us a while to wake up, and if we can put down our smart phones long enough then we might be able to get something done. Or, if we simply skip Amazon and our Facebook status and start tweeting and emailing one another and people in positions of influence, then actually doing something about it...It could be a tall order. It's almost summer, the silly season, but right now it's unseasonably hot and the resulting irritability might be just enough to turn more of us from delicate snowflakes into fire-breathing monsters, and just maybe we can constructively channel our wrath for change.