My Journey to a Low Waste life

Prologue

For many of us, it started when the Covid pandemic hit. As for me, it started in the dawn of the summer of 2021. I'm talking about our personal Great Depressions, our eras of poverty & strife. Many of us have had brief eras of prosperity in the past that we look back on with rose glasses, eras where we could buy stuff we wanted & could afford to travel out of city for fun events. I had it in 2015 after leaving my job at Walmart & had my car paid off & several thousand saved up, that year I probably went to the most conventions. Even early 2021 feels like my own Roaring 20s compared to now, when I got a big pandemic payment & got to work for Postmates before they got bought out by Uber. 

Age of Strife

I feel the event that thrust me into this abyss was my final trip to Hippy Hollow in May of 2021 when I lost my wallet at Bucees on my journey back to Houston. I never found it in my car & I called the Bucees & they didn't have any lost wallets. I believe either it fell into the trash somehow or was picked up by the wrong person, despite not having any unauthorized charges on any of the cards or hearing of my ID being misused. This cost me not only the 30-50 in cash the wallet had but I had to pay for a new drivers license & spend time reclaiming the other lost cards the hard way. 

Just weeks after I lost my wallet, I got into a small car accident. After picking up an important car part for my dad up in Houston, I hit the back of a stranger's car on one of Houston's highways. I was only driving in 2nd gear & was not on my phone, I was partially distracted eating a quesadilla when over a hill was a hard stop I had to make. I hadn't expected traffic to come to such a hard stop & sadly the back of the line was just over a hill so I couldn't see it until the final moments. Even in Gear 2 I could not slow down in time before I hit the car in front of me, causing minor damage to them but significantly denting in the front of my own car. 

There was a police scene & though my car was still functional, it was too damaged to drive home so I had to be picked up & the car was towed. And my financial situation all went down hill from there. Mom had to pay hundreds to get the car out of the impound with the help of a tow company the next day. It caused undetectable damage to my already old radiator, which would cause me much trouble for the next year.

I had to buy new headlights online for a hundred.

2022 was my most impoverished year I can even recall. My car's radiator was fucked, & I could not drive the car for more than 20-30 minutes before the radiator would overheat & I'd have to pull over to pour gallons of water into it. It was very stressful driving to the store or plasma center in this. I could fill it to the top with water, bleed out the engine, & by the time I'd leave the place I'd have to pour much more water into it. I believe the constant overheating may have caused other parts to age faster. In May of 2022 I had a very stressful incident when my car battery died completely & even Thor or Zeus wouldn't be able to recharge it. (I needed the combined efforts of my dad & 2 separate strangers to get the car started without the battery, had to drive it straight home without turning it off, & this was when I had the broken radiator) 

My dad had to pay 200 for a new battery (thanks to the Putin price hikes) & although it was not my money, it was still a setback for the household's money.

Fortunately I was able to buy a new radiator for my car in August & my brother put it in, ending my car's Yellowstone geyser phase.

In 2022 I had to replace so many parts on my car (at my own expense except for the battery at my dad's expense) it became a Ship of Theseus. Despite that, my car still does not have the ability to produce a single gust of heat when it's cold.

Around the same time, Planet Fitness delivered another blow to my net worth as I was charged a monthly fee, a yearly fee, & a late fee all at once in June & despite canceling my membership as soon as I could, they refused to refund a single dollar. Many ex-PF customers have reported similar experiences, PF requires you to cancel your membership IN PERSON & at the same location where you signed up. The previous day I tried to cancel at another location.

Last summer my family had several Marineford level blows to our finances too, in May or June our outdoor AC unit fucking broke, leaving the house without any AC (it also gets moist as a sauna when we don't have AC, I had a bowl of C.J. Cheetos go soggy within 30 minutes of an AC outage). They had to pay $7,000 dollars for the new unit! (Thanks to Putin's price hikes & demented price gougers)

We also had to take a hit for a new pump for our water well.

But that's enough about that situation.

Since then I've felt like I was experiencing plagues brought on by a curse, rather than any form of karma. There's the saying 'play stupid games win stupid prizes' which leads characters like the trailer park boys or Beavis & Butthead to stay in perpetual poverty. But in this world, even if you do everything right, you can still end up on the bottom. 

Since then I've found myself having to stay home alot more, unable to afford conventions, unable to afford 4 hour trips to Hippy Hollow nudist resort, & staying in motels is unthinkable nowdays. (Kamehacon said due to the pandemic all the hotels/motels have jacked up prices to make up for lost revenue but that's never going away)

Couchsurfing helped me to stay at places for free in the pre-Covid era but Covid killed that app & it's never coming back. Now everyone expects me to buy my own hotel room, full price, at my own expense otherwise I'm an entitled manchild.

Now I haven't had an actual job since I left Goodwill in 2020 & even now I don't feel I'm fit to work a salaried job. I've gone to bed at 5 am on average, have lots of sore muscles & too many days where my body feels like I was run over by a train, have too much work to do around the house, & last year I had a car I couldn't drive for more than 20 minutes. 

Covid lung

In Sept of 2021 I had my first experience with Covid, or rather my body was finally weak enough for Covid to infect me & make me feel the symptoms everyone else felt. I got the fever, brain fog, weakness, & all the rest of it. Before that I was just too healthy & nourished to get sick from it, making me an asymptomatic carrier. I made a number of mistakes to combat the symptoms, some which took months to recover from, I had alot of trial & error since then. I had covid lung since then, getting a lower supply of oxygen to my body as if I was a smoker, inflammation on & off, & I only recently cured it thanks to some salsa & fresh turmeric. 

Anyways that alone made me unfit to work any salaried/regular job. 

The plasma center has it's inconveniences but at least it's a low-stress income where I don't have to do much or be stuck to a strict schedule. All I have to do is wait in line, get the routine testing, & donate. I can listen to my headphones & play on my phone during most of the process, something that I can't do at any 9-5 job. 

Adapt

With the job stuff out of the way, I realized last year I had to adapt. I can't realistically bring in a new income & would have to stick to Social Security & Plasma donations for the time being. Until my body was fully healed from the muscle knots, covid damages, nutritional deficiencies, & all else my body has been put through over the years.

If I can't go out & make more money, then I've gotta be alot less wasteful with what I have. I've always been frugal compared to the stereotypical American, I never became a tobacco smoker, I've never been an alcoholic, I stopped drinking sodas years ago, I don't gamble, & always look for ways to save. But avoiding the big vices isn't enough. 

Welcome to my journey to a low waste low effort lifestyle