Month: February 2010

Looser

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Just came back from another session with my massage therapist. Every week, I see noticeable improvement in myself – less pain, more function. Now, it’s accelerating. I can walk down the street at something approaching my normal gait. I can get up from a chair without having to lean on something. My knees actually work!

I’m very grateful I found someone who actually knows what he’s doing. I have to say, I’m pretty disgusted with what mainstream medicine has by way of treating musculoskeletal injuries. (I mean, should I have been the one to explain to doctors that a sprained ankle would also affect the function in my knee and hip?)

Living In A Car

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I’ve never lived in a car, but I’ve had friends who did. It’s a very bad sign that the numbers are growing:

Tim Barker never thought he’d have to live in his truck. Four months ago, the plumber was in a one-bedroom apartment in California’s San Fernando Valley, with a pool and a Jacuzzi. Then, on his birthday in October, he and 199 other plumbers were laid off by their union, Local 761 in Burbank. Now Barker’s son sleeps on the sofa of his cousin’s one-bedroom Hollywood apartment, and Barker sleeps on the roof of the apartment building – or in his 2003 Ford Ranger pickup. “I’m 47, and I’ve never lived in my car,” says Barker, a husky 220-lb. single father with sandy hair and a rapid-fire voice. In January, as torrential rains pelted the streets of Southern California, father and son were sleeping in the truck in San Pedro, next to the Los Angeles Harbor. “We were able to spend four nights in the Vagabond Motel, but for two nights we slept in the car,” says Barker. “It was raining, cold, and the cat was jumping on us. We both got sick.”

For people who cannot afford rent, a car is the last rung of dignity and sanity above the despair of the streets. A home on wheels is a classic American affair, from the wagon train to the RV. Now, for some formerly upwardly mobile Americans, the economic storm has turned the backseat or the rear of the van into the bedroom. “We found six people sleeping in their cars on an overnight police ride-along in December,” says John Edmund, chief of staff to Long Beach councilman Dee Andrews. “One was a widow living in a four-door sedan. She and her husband had been Air Force veterans. She did not know about the agencies that could help her. I had tears in my eyes afterwards.”

“Cars are the new homeless shelters,” says Joel John Roberts, CEO of PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) Partners, the largest provider of services for the homeless in Los Angeles County, which had nearly 50,000 people homeless in 2009. Of these, experts estimate that up to 10% live in vehicles – even though doing so is illegal in most of the county. A similar situation is true for many other regions across the nation, especially in the Sun Belt. A woman lives in her BMW in Marina Del Rey, a swank L.A. address on the coast. PATH outreach workers Jorge Guzman and Tomasz Babiszkiewicz say she was an executive recruiter until the Great Recession. “She was self-employed for 36 years,” says Guzman. “Now she sits in the car with a blanket and reads. She has not told her daughter.”

Silent Bob Vs. Southwest

~ susie ~ 10 Comments

You may have already heard that “Clerks” director Kevin Smith was thrown off a Southwest Airlines flight yesterday for being too fat – after he was buckled in.

So take the mistreatment of a geek cult hero, add his Twitter feed with over a million and half followers (ThatKevinSmith), and you have a well-deserved public relations nightmare. In a stunning display of the power of new media vs. old, Kevin (who’s famous for his colorful language on Twitter) is not holding back on this one. He’s got up a podcast, too:

Director Kevin Smith was ejected from a plane after being deemed “too fat to fly,” he says on his Twitter account.

After delivering a speech in San Francisco, he boarded a Southwest Airlines flight to Burbank and was seated on the plane but then was thrown off the flight Saturday evening. The director of Clerks and other movies, who is also known for playing the movie character Silent Bob in many films, fired off a round of Twitter messages aimed at Southwest. Among them, “Fair warning folks: If you look like me, you may be ejected from Southwest Air.” A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines wrote an apology on the company’s Twitter account. The message, from an unnamed representative, says “Hey Kevin! I’m so sorry for your experience tonight! Hopefully we can make things right.”

Have any of you ever had a similar experience?