NPO #18: An Arm and A Lake and the Inn on Third

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

Home again, home again, jiggety-gigawatt,

and Happy Valentine's Day, Ticketholders!

I did not plan for this particular post to be the Valentine's Day release, nor for it to be the subject of my 420th post on Blogger (not that I had a Valentine's Day or 420 special in mind), but here we are!

Last Monday, my mother had rotator cuff surgery. I took three days off from work and the entire week off from blogging so that I could be there for her to provide moral support and keep my father from doing something stupid, like detract from my mother getting her health needs met by inducing himself into another seizure because he isn't getting enough attention.

So, we reserved a room at the Inn On Third in Moses Lake, WA, using Expedia, packed up all necessities, including my peach-front conure, Doodle (at left, hanging on to the bars of his travel cage for dear life and enjoying every minute of the journey with enthusiastic trills, yips, and kissing noises), and stopped at Jack In the Box for our first fast food meal since the Year Of COVID.

The food itself hadn't changed much; a Jumbo Jack was still a solid burger, the tacos still hit all the same sensory beats I remembered...but the prices were almost enough to send my mother to the hospital for a different reason.

A lot of people (especially the fixed income population of my current town of residence--which insists on being called a city despite only having one major intersection with the bare minimum of traffic lighting) spout nonsense about being screwed over because the Government "never lets a crisis go to waste" (which is their least crazy way of saying they believe the U.S. Government orchestrates crises so they can inflate prices and financially choke out the elderly, but what do you expect from people in 2023? Rational thought? That's cute...).

Inflation isn't some recent government invention to torment the citizens of our "illusory" free country; it's a long-established part of how money works, regardless of what country you live in or the reality of the freedoms it provides or denies. In a crisis, the Government can choose to maintain an economic status quo by printing more money, or they can choose not to print more money, and find some way to end the crisis more quickly to lessen the economic impact of said crisis.

Printing more money to stimulate the present economy makes it easier for people to buy the things they need (or think they need) in a crisis that limits or halts their ability to earn that money for themselves. But a bigger supply of money not only leads to people panic-buying things (increasingly demanding products that have drastically reduced in supply), it also devalues the money itself when the crisis passes and the economy recovers (increased money supply, decreased unit value), the combination of which inflates prices.

And as I've said before in another Blogger post, it wasn't the U.S. Government who demanded that their rights be respected and a status quo be upheld. It wasn't the U.S. Government (entirely, Mr. Trump) who prolonged the COVID pandemic and cost millions of lives and billions-to-trillions of dollars by letting "free Americans" do whatever acts of mental bat guano they wanted. It was us. It was We the People, who, in order to form a more perfect union, decided that we had lives to live and no coping skills for anything that might deviate from the routine. We dragged out the insanity. We convinced ourselves that freedom and free money were absolute. We conflated the issue and distracted ourselves with nitpicking and social cancellation and label-hating. We refused to wear masks and acted like oversized, asshole children towards people with sense. We brought inflation upon ourselves. And that, dear Ticketholders, is Word Life, Basic Economics.

So if you can't afford something and don't feel comfortable blaming yourself for contributing to its exhorbitant pricetag, don't shout, "Conspiracy!" Don't even mutter or think the word. Just buy something else that has better long-term value for your budget. It's that simple. You might even say it's Basic.

Also remember that you don't always get to pay for what you want; you get what you pay for.

I and my family learned that the hard way on this trip, when we arrived at the Inn On Third in Moses Lake. We chose it because it was affordable, closest to the hospital where my mother was having her surgery, and the second-highest reviewed hospitality establishment in the city. If only I had bothered to read some of the one-star and three-star (out of five) reviews....

There were little inconveniences like having a TV with over 500 channels and free Hulu, but a remote with no number pad, the beds being walled off from each other in tight spaces, and the shower being small. But then you look around and see things like a Keurig that doesn't work because it's clogged with hard water buildup,

beds that have been turned down to hide holes in the sheets,

food particles, hair, and splinters,

and mysterious stains.

A poorly installed air conditioner with an inch of airspace above it so the room feels like you might be better off sleeping outside at night,

electrical outlets that look like they were installed by blind, drug-addled toddlers with no hands,

and cabinets that are growing black mold.

I didn't take a picture of it, but the floor in our room was sticky, the building also had large rat traps surrounding it that were visible from the street, people were dealing drugs behind the building next door to the Inn, and we had several unwanted visitors, including the owners who demanded we pay before completing our stay, and some creepy rando knocking on our door at four in the morning. When I finally did get around to reading the bad reviews, one person said his room door had been hacked through with an axe, another had similar criticisms to my own, and several more said they were made to wait for hours to check in because the owners had gone to lunch.

We paid for two nights, but one was enough.

When the time came for my mother's surgery, we packed everything and everyone back into the car and drove to the hospital, only returning to the parking lot of the Inn to turn in our room key afterward. I have since negatively reviewed the Inn On Third on Google Maps, Expedia, the Inn's own website, and two other review aggregators that escape me at the moment.

My mother is a champion.

I helped her remove her bandages on Wednesday, and there were five incisions: the four you can see in the picture at the left, plus a small injection site at the base of her neck in the front. The purple marks are just leftover surgical indicators that the medical team drew on her, but you can see there's some bruising on her chest.

I couldn't tell you the purpose of any of the incisions. But the doctor described the procedure as "drilling a hole in the shoulder, grabbing that detached muscle"--the torn rotator muscle--"and shoving it in the hole," which sounds inelegant and brutal, and feel free to make your own juvenile quip about shoving detached muscles into holes.

What the surgeon didn't tell us about the procedure is that now, she has a metal rod in her shoulder.

She isn't moving her arm very much, though it's okay to do so as long as she assists it with the other arm. The pain is less and less each day, such that her main complaint now is the itching sensation of healing tissue and the irritation of her bandages catching on her clothing, and her mobility is showing incremental, but marked improvement.

I've gotten pretty good at helping her change her clothes and put on her sling (a complicated, annoying device with multiple parts and seven points of Velcro contact that is near impossible to get right the same way more than once), and I've probably cooked more breakfasts of actual quality in the last week than I ever have when serving the public. I'm terrible at knowing how long to let things cook because I get impatient and insecure waiting for them, but just as I enjoy the rigors of sticking to a weekly content schedule while also working in a hectic food service environment and studying Marketing, cooking makes me feel good.

She has a post-op followup today, where we'll hopefully get better, more coherent information about what we've been doing right and wrong and what comes next.

I need to wrap this up so I can get some meaningful sleep tonight. Like, comment, and subscribe, stay away from the Inn on Third, and

Ticketmaster,

Out.