Everything feels tenuous in 2025 because it is. Everyone is on the chopping block.
The month of May was served undercooked and soaked in daily rains with temperatures that felt more suited for early April rather than mid Spring. Everywhere else in North America seemed to be on fire. But here on the shores of Lake Ontario, these past 30 days have had a Belfast quality, where socks, sodden from cheap footwear, dry on oil heaters, and a cup of steaming black tea warms my hand as if it was November.
My psoriasis has been worse this month too. It's not the Singing Detective quality, but still, there is a flaky, angry vengeance to the vast patches of skin it occupies across my arms and legs. I'd like to see a dermatologist but that will be a while. First, I must request it through my GP who is in another city. After that, there will be a wait of at least 6 months. So, I use coal tar soap and steroid cream that gives my affected skin a look of parchment found in an archaeological dig that scientists fear will crumble to dust in sunlight. My grandmother, I was told, had psoriasis too. Hers was also caused by being exposed daily to a harsh economic environment rather than other triggers. As long, as there is angst in my life there will be psoriasis.
Poverty is insidious because it debilitates self-worth and stifles ambition, outside of an animalistic fight for survival. Everything feels tenuous because it is. A wrong move, a missed payment or just one more illness, and you are out on your arse living with rough sleepers.
The cost of living crisis is a weapon used by the 1% to harness ordinary people into ideological compliance with fascism. The cost of living crisis enriches the few but enslaves the many. Societal poverty is more efficient than any tyrant's secret police as long as it is combined with the politics of hate that targets outsiders, different faiths, refugees, migrants and those on subsistence state benefits.
My financial situation is unlikely to change much because of age and declining health, which are reasons to be culled in today’s economy. A full old age pension in three years will help- along with expanding the substack subscriber base, which now sits at 3400 with 218 paid members. For me there was purpose found in me penury. As long as I am able to finish the work I started with my father, I have played an admirable role with my dance to the music of time.
The Green and Pleasant Land is now more or less complete, save for the final coat of polish. It will find a publisher and pay me a bit of cash.
This summer, I will complete another of his works. In that book, life in post-war England from 1948-1953 and his emigration to Canada are portrayed in marvellous working-class colours.
Along with Love Among the Ruins, the three books make a beautiful history of the working class from 1923 to the rise of the Welfare State in 1953, which allowed every citizen to enjoy the fruits of a nation’s prosperity. After that, I will write more books myself until I can’t. It’s all about legacy now and not living. Poverty will be my constant companion for the allotted time I have left. It’s not that I am not bright or industrious. It is just that I have illnesses and am now sixty-one. Outside of writing, I have few employment opportunities. Besides my lungs are fibrotic, which in the world of 2019 would have been life-shortening. But in this new Covid world, a bad infection from that virus will kill me in a matter of days or leave me so incapacitated I'd be better off dead.
So, I write because it gives me the sense, whether true or not, that I am defiant against my fate. I think, at least unlike my ancestors who died in horrible poverty. I can bang the side of my prison walls with words and say, "I am mad as hell and I will not go quietly."
Yet, the times are bleak for you and me. I am up against the wall with my rent. I am shy a few hundred Canadian dollars of making it. I feel nervous about what happens next should I not find the cash. Still, until I no longer can, I will continue to thrash about in these deep, treacherous waters of neoliberalism.
36 hours before rent day and it’s a small SOS because 5 new subscribers will put me over the line.
Your support keeps me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. Your subscriptions are crucial to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living crisis times. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it is all good too because we are in the same boat. Take Care, John
