This morning, at the ungodly hour of 5:30 am, as I sat on the throne contemplating the day ahead, a large spider crawled within a couple of inches of my foot. Anyone who knows how much I like spiders knows how joyfully freaked out this made me. Not exactly a great start to a tough day ahead.

As my life implodes on me today I need to decide whether I can spare the few dollars to buy my special lady friend a small birthday gift or a card. I know she’ll understand if I don’t get her anything. She asks for nothing, but it sucks to let someone’s special day go unnoticed. Puts a lump in my throat.

The sum total of all the hard work of my life, but one also filled with a lot of costly mistakes, being taken advantage of and just plain bad luck, is that I have about forty-one dollars to my name. And that’s what’s left from selling off some personal stuff. The electric bill is due today or they shut-off the power. The SKY TV is due today or they shut it off, which my one and only tenant won’t be thrilled about. I need more meds for my diabetes. I have very little food left to eat. With all the stress I started smoking again, yes, not a bright move, but even at two bucks a pack I can’t afford to smoke, which only adds even more stress.

As per usual, things went badly at the personeria (our court) yesterday and I have to go again today to follow-up on what’s happening with my fraud complaint against Verushka for ripping me off. Even more time for my lawyer, dear sweet man that he is. Hasn’t charged me a dime for all his time so far. Four precious dollars I don’t have for cab fare.

It’s the choice of two evils. Do I just die a slow and painful death without my meds, or do I simply die a slow and painful death from starvation? Not exactly what you call good choices.

It’s time to make a most difficult decision. Do I sell everything I possibly can, which is a gamble in this horrible economy, and try to hang on here in Panama for a few more months, praying that my year of work on my website, HelloBoquete.com, will start to earn some money, or do I sell everything and head back to Canada? I have nothing to go back to in BC, as much as I love it there. My dear cousin, Joan, back in Toronto, darling soul that she is, has offered to put me up for a bit until I can get back on my feet.

Toronto is not my first choice, having made the decision years ago to leave there, but I have no other options. The eternal optimist in me says I may at least get an opportunity to see my kids and grandkids (many of whom I have not met), but I don’t know, after sixteen long years, if they’ll give me the time of day. If I am fortunate enough and they’ll see me, what do I tell them? No father wants to admit to his kids that he totally screwed up and his life is destroyed. I guess the only thing I can hope for is that I can share my experience with them so that they might avoid what happened to me. Small consolation.

Nothing crystalizes your life better than the very real possibility of not eating. Only one time in my entire life did I ever face such a prospect before. I was working at Dominion Glass and they went out on strike. There was no strike pay coming from the union and the fact that I was on strike, although I didn’t agree with it, meant I could not get unemployment insurance. I remember all too vividly having potatoes and onions for dinner for two nights in a row so that my son could have his formula. It was a scary time and thankfully the strike ended just in time. I never thought I would ever be in that situation ever again. I was obviously wrong.

It’s a sign of my sheer desperation that I hoped I would get some response from the on-air personalities at the Fox network. In the midst of all the insanity of “octamom”, who set-up her own website to solicit donations and apparently is getting thousands of dollars in donations, I had hoped that Fox might see my story and help me to just get the price of a cup of coffee to help me survive, and then go on to help others in a similar situation. I guess unless I set my webcam up and committed suicide live, my plight is not newsworthy enough.

With the meldown of the economy in the US, no doubt there are plenty of other people in dire straits like me, but at least there are social support networks to help them eat. There’s nothing like that here in Panama. You are on your own. I wonder if, like me, these people burn to their very guts when they see all these fat-cat criminal executives stealing millions of dollars from the very companies they destroyed? It’s like the captain of the Titanic auctioning off the deck chairs to the passengers who are about to go down with the ship. Incredibly callous!

It’s been therapudic to write my thoughts, not that anyone cares. I will soon lose both my website hosting and my internet, so I guess I’ll be back to pen and paper until life consumes me.

Please have a better day than me!