I know it’s been a minute since anything new showed up on the website, and for those of you who were starting to wonder if I’d died, been abducted by ICE, or sold for parts by a Medicaid subcontractor, let me set the record straight: I’m alive, unharvested, and only mildly traumatized.

The last few weeks have been one long game of “Where the hell is Lucas living now?” and I genuinely thought I was going to be back in Madison for at least a year. I was crashing with friends while trying to nail down housing, but apartment hunting in Madison turned into a sick joke pretty fast. I couldn’t find a single place under three grand a month unless I wanted to live in somebody’s pantry. Even public housing was a dead end—because I applied while I was out of state, I got slapped with a four-year wait list. And before anyone says, “Well, once you were back in town it probably would’ve moved faster,” sure—maybe they would’ve bumped me down to a year. But that still meant living indefinitely in someone else’s spare room, and no matter how cool your friends are, that setup always has an expiration date before things get weird.

So here’s what actually happened: I went up to Eau Claire to spend a few days with somebody very important to me and tie up some loose ends. Instead, the universe shrugged and said, “Yeah, you live here now.” An apartment opened up right downtown—wheelchair accessible (or close enough), decent location, and no one trying to charge me Madison ransom prices. So I took it.

But of course, nothing with me is ever that simple.

All my computer and radio gear was still in Madison, packed into a single overstuffed suitcase like a nerdy organ transplant on wheels. I figured no problem—I’d run back down there, grab everything, and be back in Eau Claire in time to get my keys. The plan was: leave on Saturday, grab everything, come back Tuesday, move in Wednesday. Easy, right?

Yeah. About that.

Tuesday morning rolls around. I get dropped off at the bus station with the suitcase full of gear. My ride takes off. The bus shows up. The driver steps out, looks at me, looks at his clipboard, and goes, “You’re not on my list.”

I said, “Well that’s weird, because I bought my ticket four days ago and the receipt literally screams WHEELCHAIR all over it.” He scans it, stares at the screen like it’s trying to teach him calculus, then opens the side door where the lift is.

He starts electronically ejecting the lift, and it comes halfway out before it just gives up. So he pulls out the manual tool, gets the rest of the lift out, drops it down, and then can’t get the handle into the hole to pump it back up. Now nothing works—electric or manual. Lucky for him, I’ve ridden this bus so much I actually know some of the drivers, and one of them—Scotty—shows up and helps him get the handle attached so they can crank the lift. That should’ve taken 45 seconds. It took about an hour.

So I get on the lift, and they jack me up a good ten feet in the air on the side of the bus. And then the lift won’t lower so I can actually roll inside.

And here’s the part that really sets the tone: I’m stuck up there on the side of the damn bus for close to an hour while the driver is on the phone with customer service, poking at buttons and smacking things like that’s going to fix it. That’s when customer service tells him my chair is “too heavy for the lift” and I “can’t get on the bus.”

Excuse me? I’ve done this a bunch of times. The chair is fine. Your lift is a piece of shit.

So he lowers me back down and tells me I’ll have to find “another way to get home.” And yes, I did hear myself think, “Huh. Funny calling Eau Claire home,” but rock and roll, I guess.

At this point, Scotty has to leave—he’s on the Chicago run and can’t stick around. The driver still can’t get the lift back into the bus, so the whole rig is just sitting there, half disassembled and now about two and a half hours behind schedule. And I’m stranded at the Dutch Mill park-and-ride—easily one of the last places in Madison you want to be stuck with a suitcase full of electronics and no plan.

So I picked up the phone and called my buddy Alpha. Now, Alpha has this philosophy: his friends are his pack, and if his pack needs help, he’s there. I told him what was going on and without even hesitating he goes, “You need to get home—we’ll figure it out.”

He couldn’t scoop me up himself right that second, so my buddy Scott—not to be confused with Scotty the bus guy—came and got me and took me back to where I’d been crashing for a few days.

Once I got there, Alpha showed up and said, “Okay, let’s get you the hell out of Madison.” I jumped into my manual chair and we headed to U-Haul, thinking I’d just rent a van. That’s when we found out they didn’t have ramps to rent, and the only option with a ramp was a 15-foot truck that cost six hundred bucks plus ninety-nine cents a mile. Total disaster.

Alpha was right there with me doing the math and going, “Okay, no. Plan B.”

Somebody finally said, “Why don’t you call the people who do wheelchair conversion vans and see if they rent them?” And shockingly, they did. I was able to get a proper wheelchair-accessible van for $100 a day, 130 miles included, thirty cents a mile after that—WAY more reasonable.

And this part is important: Alpha is the one who drove that van all the way up to Eau Claire with me and all my gear. No way in hell I’d have made it back without him.

Fast forward: I’m back in Eau Claire. I’ve got a solid place. I’ve got friends up here. No, it’s not all you Madison people, but I’m only about three hours away. And if Greyhound wants to be stupid, there’s another bus line with actual working lifts, so I can come down to Madison whenever I damn well feel like it.

Now let’s talk about the apartment. It’s actually pretty cool—they’ve got mesh Wi-Fi throughout the whole building and everyone gets access. But you know me: if there’s an ethernet jack, I’m going to use it because wired is king. So I plug my gear into the wall jack—nothing. Dead port.

I call Spectrum and they tell me, “No problem, we’ll activate it.” They try. Still nothing. So on Friday a tech comes out, takes one look, and figures out the idiot who wired the building ran one end of the cable in A configuration and the other end in B. If you know ethernet, you know that’s like trying to charge a Tesla with a garden hose. So he had to rewire the whole jack just to get it working.

Then I ask about hooking up my own Wi-Fi router and the guy tells me I can’t, because the building’s mesh network would freak out and everything would break. So no personal router for me—but at least the wired connection works now, the internet is live, and the studio is back online.

Which means: Rolling with Scissors is back this week. And to make things extra fun, we’re rolling straight into a pledge drive—so if you support community radio and want to keep shows like mine on the air, now’s the time to show it.

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