When "Exceedingly Difficult" Has to be Good Enough

Painting your money black, then setting it on fire is indicative of poor financial habits.

If I remember correctly, on my second day in Los Angeles for my big West Coast trip to promote my new book The Weird Accordion to Al and attend Juggalo Weekend I woke up to something like negative two hundred and sixty one dollars in my checking account and something in the area of 60 to 80 dollars worth of credit left on my thirteen or fourteen credit cards. 

This was not good. I was in a city that was not my own and while I lucked out in being able to crash for free in a spare room of very kind, generous friends just getting from one place to another required a combination of careful, meticulous planning, strategy and dumb luck. 

I lucked out, for example, in that Lyft did not seem to realize that my debit card’s balance was decidedly in the negative column and consequently something that should be declined, and instead let me keep charging rides. I lucked out even more when I got my tax refund early in my trip to Los Angeles. 

I do not know what I would have done without that influx of cash. I suppose I would have been screwed, with literally less than no money and nearly nothing left on my credit cards. I’ve been in that position before, and it had led me to some dark and regrettable places. I signed on with a debt consolidation company, for example, that promised to free me from the burden of onerous debt and lead me to the financial promised land but instead bled me so dry in exchange for so little that the company was later charged with all manner of crimes and had to pay out a sizable settlement to all the broke suckers they’d fleeced, myself included. 

What led me to be in such a desperate predicament, financially? There’s no great mystery to it, really. I am a father of two in a dying industry with a preschool teacher for a wife whose expenses are forever increasing, and in what can feel like terrifyingly unpredictable and arbitrary ways, and whose income keeps slipping, who has paid both a profound emotional and financial price for being unable to work his way out of debt. 

Living with the kind of debt that I have lived with over the course of the last eight years or so is like being a tightrope walker with no grace or agility or aptitude for tightrope walking, who is continually falling down and breaking their bones and needing to get back on that tightrope all the same, because they have no other option and they somehow managed to make it all the way across without falling once, or twice, and consequently should be able to do it again. 

Trying to get out of massive, overwhelming debt is like being asked to perform a magic trick when you don’t know magic and also the world makes no sense to you. Finally, it is like being suffocated with a blanket so slowly and so gently that you don’t even realize you’re being suffocated until you’re nearly dead. 

But living with that kind of debt also teaches you about gratitude and perspective. I am pleased to announce that thanks to a tax refund and book money I’m hopefully going to start receiving on April 1st, 2020 I will be able to officially upgrade my financial status from “overwhelming and impossible” to “exceedingly difficult.” 

Now you might argue that exceedingly difficult is not great. You’re right! Exceedingly difficult is exceedingly difficult but I can work with it. Exceedingly difficult I’ve been able to handle before. “Exceedingly difficult” is a difficulty level that I am probably more comfortable with than I really should be because I have come to accept that life in Donald Trump’s America is inherently going to be exceedingly difficult for a whole lot of people for a whole lot of reasons. 

A LOT of those reasons have to do with money. That’s one of the things that’s been so frustrating about the last four years: I’ve been working feverishly just to keep my head above water financially, and keep from drowning, while being told constantly that the economy has never been better, and we’re winning with the stock market and everyone’s getting rich, even the loser obstructionist Democrats. 

There has been no economic revival for me, needless to say. I’m not getting rich off this stock market; I’m trying desperately not to lose everything, to somehow work my way back to a place of semi-stability and semi-security through hard-work, discipline, guile and that most wondrous and most volatile and undependable of entities: book money. 

So if you’re struggling with money and debt and it feels overwhelming, know that you are not alone, despite what the news might lead you to believe.

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