Depression

Lost my license about two months ago due to a $5500 bill from the Department of Transportation that went unpaid because it's fucking fifty five hundred dollars for some tolls. I'd rather set money on fire, at least then I have something fun to look at. They slapped a non-renewal on me and that was that. Turns out the actual toll amount was in the neighborhood of $1500 and was from a car I haven't had since 2019. The rest was tacked-on late fees. I offered to pay the original amount without the late fees, I offered to do a payment plan, the DoT just rejected everything. I filed appeals citing medical hardship, with my doctor writing a letter than I have health conditions that prevent me from paying an exorbitant amount of this nature, they rejected those appeals too.

Now, I could have gone and taken out a loan, or otherwise made the money and paid them. I should have done that. However, thought I could just appeal my way out of it with doctor support. The DoT doesn't want to get sued, and from everything I've heard, they handwave through medical appeals. I started filing appeals the minute I started getting these notices about non-renewal, about four months before the license actually lapsed. Well, every time you file an appeal with the DoT, they make you wait about 60 days for a result. So every two months they reject another appeal, with no reason given. Actually, one of the rejection letters said it was due to my EZ Pass account currently not being up to date, which is a technicality for an appeal to be considered. It was at -$4 at that particular time, on that particular week. I put a hundred on it every two weeks or so and that's plenty 95% of the time, so they caught me during a rare time where it wasn't quite enough.

Getting a medical hardship appeal letter from a doctor stating that I'm basically handicapped (he may have overstated a bit on my behalf, shhhh) and rejecting it over $4 is pretty low, even for a government agency. I've never been treated worse by ANY bank or corporation than I've been by the government this year. It is actually shocking how bad it is. I tried to get a hearing to speak to an actual person who could override everything, and they're like "we'll call you some time in the next 90 days, and if you don't answer then we will send a letter informing you that you have to resubmit your request". Some time in the next 90 days? I can't just make an appointment for 30 days from now or something?

So all of this reached a head two months ago when I lost my license and couldn't get to work anymore. Was about to take two weeks off anyway (for the first time in years) so I rolled with it. Figured I'd lose the license and it'd take more time to work things out. Spent weeks on the phone working on this. Didn't have much of a vacation at all. Still haven't been able to get back to work. After about a month my bills started falling behind. At the month and a half mark I had a bank threatening to repo my car if I didn't give them $1100 (one month's payment plus a huge fucking property tax bill for the government, further increasing my hate for the government). So I gave up on that point and took out a massive, predatory loan for $7500 to pay the toll bill and get everything else caught up. 31% APR. WTF.

The loan company then took $800 off the top as an "origination fee" or something to that effect, which sucks because I needed every penny of that. So more stuff fell behind because they stole $800 off the top that I have to pay back. Was a 31% APR not enough? Holy fuck. They have to take more right from the get go on top of that? I borrow $6800 and have to pay back $7500 even if I paid it back immediately.

And yet I'd rather deal with a predatory loan company than deal with the Department of Transportation any more. I'm still waiting on a hearing I requested in early May.

I basically have to get back to work before the end of June or I lose everything, and will need to essentially be doing something money-generating 24/7 for that month just to get caught up. So I paid the damn tolls. This was two weeks ago. It took two weeks for the DoT to process the payment and let me renew my license. TWO WEEKS. They said it can take up to three weeks. Now that the hold is lifted, I go to renew the license and they tell me I have to make an appointment for that. All of their appointments are booked seven days in advance. So I book an appointment for seven days from now (WE ARE HERE) and the fucking waiting continues. Even once I GET an appointment it'll take another week for the license to arrive in the mail, though I might be able to get a temporary license while I'm there. All things considered it looks like I won't get back to work until at least June 20th or so, possibly even the last week of June. And will be in a ridiculous time crunch to pay my July bills, much less even get started on the extremely predatory loan I have to pay back, that will probably have me enslaved for large payments every month forever (I made the mistake of picking the "3 year option" and paying 300/mo instead of the "5 year option" and paying 230/mo...as if it's gonna be fucking paid off in either of those timeframes at that APR).

My plan is to get everything caught up and then just start throwing money at the loan until I get rid of it, while also continuing to work on getting a reimbursement from the DoT using medical appeals (the reimbursement will entirely go straight back to the loan, which will pay off about two thirds of it at that point). However, I'm tired. I'm very tired. I barely have anything in me at this point. I've got some sort of PTSD going on from this whole thing, I can barely have conversations with people, and I got back on the drugs when everything went south. That last one is a real problem. I can't get off of them. It's like fucking fly paper. All I can do is try to replace them with more benign/weaker pharmaceutical drugs. Tramadol has been the go-to for that, but it's so weak that I pretty much feel withdrawal-sick all the time even on that. It's tolerable sick, at least. Eventually stress gets to me and I go back on hard stuff.

On top of all this, my cat is old and rickety. He's 17. He should have probably been put down by now. I was trimming a fur clump off of him and accidentally cut some skin off. Didn't even know I was hurting him because he didn't make any noise, just his usual squirming that he was doing the whole time. Actually, not entirely sure about that. He might have already had an injury there and that's why there was a fur clump, it was dried blood or something. I don't know. All I know is that after I trimmed off the fur clump, I found a cut underneath that looked like it might have been from me. It still has a giant scab on it a month later. Definitely gonna be a scar. So I feel terrible about that.

He keeps peeing on things he isn't supposed to. Happens about twice a week. That started the last month. So I get home to an apartment that smells like a homeless man has been peeing in it. Sometimes I catch him in the act and can either stop him or clean up after him. Other times I don't, and can't even isolate where the pee is because the whole place smells like it. At least he hasn't peed on my $1200 Purple mattress, which would be ruined and which I can't replace. I ordered a pee-proof bed covering as soon as he started doing this, so I can put that on it when I'm not around. And no, closing off the bedroom isn't an option, the bathroom/litter box comes off of it and I'm sure as fuck not putting that into the kitchen or living room. He turns everything around the litter box into a disaster area every day.

So I ordered the pee-proof blanket thing a month ago and it still hasn't arrived. It's stuck in customs or something. I'm so fucking sick of ordering things and then finding out they're coming from overseas and then they always take weeks. Especially Canada. The tracking shows no progress on that and I'm gonna need it in a week when I go back to work. It cost me $48 and is useless to me if it doesn't get here by then because I'll need to go to Petco or something and buy another one, which is what I should have done in the first place - but, you know, no car. The customer support email (to cancel the order) is defunct and bounces emails. LOL. I guess I'll have to eat that $48 or put it on ebay whenever it gets here in August or whatever the fuck.

Every time the cat pees on something, I weigh taking him to be put down. He's managed to avoid rolling a 6 on the 1d6 I mentally roll every time. That's the chance he has of being put down. The problem with that is it costs $300 and I can't afford that right now with everything else going on. So I have a peeing cat, a bed I can't protect from him, no money to put him down, no desire to put him down as I've had him since he was a tiny baby.

My mom basically turned her back on me in early April because she kept saying Trump rapes children on Epstein Island, and wouldn't listen to any of my corrections. It's alright to disagree on policy and so forth but when someone is accusing him of being a literal demon, there isn't really much reason to have any further discussion on the matter at that point. Weird thing is, he's constantly doing things that she's been saying we needed to do for DECADES, like get rid of illegal migrants. She's basically a republican and wants abortion banned outright. She's further to the right than I am, but she hates Trump. Weirder still is that she wanted him back when Biden was around, and in early 2025 she was all "lets give him a chance" and whatnot. Now she's like "HE DRINKS BLOOD OF CHILDREN IN OCCULT RITUALS"

I used to teach martial arts, for many years in fact, mostly to women and kids. So I spent a lot of time teaching them how to defend themselves (get a gun or run away, respectively, is their best option, but yeah). Teaching kids how to fight off / get away from predators is probably the one good thing I've ever done in my life. So when my own mom tells me "you support a child predator" it's a bridge way too fucking far. I told her she better not tell me something like that ever again, or tell me that the guy rapes children. Like I pointed at her, finger right in her face, and told her to never do that again. She then freaked out and accused me of being violent, and didn't want to see me again. So this happened shortly before I lost the license. She was supposed to help me out with that whole situation if the worst case scenario happened, which it did, and she didn't.

She has a therapist who used to be my therapist, this Jewish guy who is a major cheerleader so I stopped seeing him. Well, he's totally in the tank with her, except he's far left. He also thinks that the president rapes kids on islands and totally backs up everything she says. At one point I asked if we could both meet with her therapist so he could maybe get across to her why I have a problem with her behavior, and she was like "he doesn't want to speak to you". What the fuck?

Anyway we started talking again in the past month, but it's only like once a week if that. I'm super depressed about not having her around. There were two people I really relied on in life to be sane and be there for me, my longtime on and off girlfriend/best friend and my mom. The first one killed herself a couple years ago due to alcoholism and the second one got body-snatched by fucking bolsheviks. In a real dark place now.