"Ladybugs" inspired story idea

Patreon recently added a collections feature, and one of the two collections I've made so far is "Just Transbian Stories" so --since I have that collection available to me, for restarting posting here I'm grabbing a few from that collection.

On that note, this was originally posted on Patreon on April 28, 2024 but behind a paywall, so it's easier to just read it here.

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[If you don't want a summary of what Ladybugs was/is, and just want the story idea, skip to the first or second break. (Either should work, the difference is two short paragraphs.)]

For some reason the memory of the 1992 Rodney Dangerfield movie Ladybugs popped into my head about a week ago, it's been there ever since, and . . . the movie is bad.

Morally bad.

Like, if you wanted TERF propaganda in a family-friendly package, and were thus prohibited from making your own version of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs (whom TERFs cite all the fucking time to the point you'd think the movie had been a documentary) Ladybugs is basically what you'd make.

A cis boy pretends to be a girl to join a girls' soccer team for two reasons.

First, his mother's fiancée (Dangerfield's character) is the coach, and he wants the underperforming team to win, and what better way to do that than to get an athletic but unremarkable boy to secretly play on the team?  So it plays straight into TERF shit about trans girls just being cheaters using their alleged male advantage to beat their real, true, "biologically female" competitors.

Second, the cis boy in question has a crush on one of the players, and joining the team as a girl lets him get closer to her, so it plays straight into shit TERFs imagine and say about teenage boys pretending to be girls so they can invade female only groups and/or spaces to get closer to the teenage girls that turn them on.

While the cis boy crossdressing his way onto the team is presented as a sympathetic character, it's notable that a) they cast Jonathan Brandis (Lucas Wolenczak from SeaQuest) instead of Leonardo DiCaprio (he's been in too much to have a signature roll) because teenage-DiCaprio passed as a girl too well, and they felt that would kill the humor, and b) the film ends with . . . I'll just quote Wikipedia:

[Dangerfield's character] is now managing the company's girls softball team, where the entire team are boys dressed as girls.  After his boss congratulates him on his success, [Dangerfield's character] says to the audience, "I finally got some respect!"

So it's not just Brandis' character; having one boy (and remember that conservative propaganda says all trans girls are boys) on one team has paved the way to have all the girls on an entire other girls-only team replaced by boys, and while the film ends there, in TERF fever dreams, that's just the beginning.

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The part that originally popped into my head wasn't actually terrible, and indeed Dangerfield's character was being nice, albeit in a way that upheld sexist standards of beauty, but the idea that set things off wasn't related to that specific bit, but instead general concept of the movie.

The idea was basically, "What if you did this and it weren't a comedy? What if you did this and it were a serious drama instead?"

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So we start with a sexist coach of a girls' soccer team, and he's convinced if he could just sneak a boy onto the team they'd instantly be the best girls' team in whatever league they're in.

Then we introduce a "boy" he has power over, leverage against, or both.  So say an uncle that's blackmailing "him".

Being an uncle puts the coach as an adult in the family, which gives him a degree of power, even more so if the closeted trans girl who will be our main character is a latchkey kid because of parents who are never around, and uncle-coach has become the adult relative who's around the kid most often, possibly with the parents trusting him to check in on the kid and do the adulting when they're not around.

As for the blackmail, originally I was thinking an uncle-coach caught the trans girl dressed as a girl, which he took for crossdressing instead of a sign of transness (he probably doesn't believe there is such a thing as an actual trans girl) which has the benefit of explaining where the uncle-coach got the whole, "I could get a boy pretending to be a girl to join the team," idea from, but - by the lights of toxic masculinity - crossdressing would discount "his" value as a "male", and thus make trans girl a poor candidate.  So maybe something else.

It could still be something trans-related.  In fact, it could still be something clothing related.  Maybe uncle came across one of trans girl's bras one time he was checking in on trans girl and assumed that "he" was secretly sneaking girls over for sex.  The blackmail becomes a carrot and a stick, "If you do this for me, I'll let you keep doing that and pretend I never noticed anything; if you don't, I'll tell your parents exactly what you've been doing behind their backs," or something to the same effect.

Uncle thinks he's sneaking a virile young man onto the girls' soccer team he coaches; trans girl main character doesn't know which would be worse, her parents believing she's secretly sexually active, or her parents discovering the truth after uncle tells them she's sexually active.

Thus we get a closeted trans girl being forced onto the soccer team.

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And her emotions are all over the place.

On the one hand, she likes how she looks, she likes the new friends she's making, she likes that they just accept her as female.  On the other hand, this isn't something she's doing of her own free will, coercion can turn wonderful things into terrible things, and she feels that.  Any time thoughts of why this is happening in general or thoughts about her uncle in particular come to mind, it makes her feel like shit.

On Zaphod Beeblebrox's third hand, she's terrified.

Terrified of how the new friends she's made will react when they learn the truth, terrified of what might happen to her if the truth becomes public, terrified that if she does well on the field she'll become conservative propaganda that adds fuel to the fire of banning girls like her from girls' sports, terrified that if she doesn't perform well her uncle will think she's intentionally doing badly to weasel out of upholding her end of the deal, terrified of damn near everything.

And with all that in her head she's not performing at her best, and even if she didn't have that going on she wouldn't magically become the best player on the team, and certainly not the best player in the league, via her "maleness".

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Her basic strategy for dealing with some of that is to find ways to prevent her from participating in actual games.  Practice, she's there, friendly matches where it doesn't have an effect on the team's standing in the league, she's probably there.  A game that actually counts?  She tries to use the fact that her participation is secret to get double booked.

After all, she can't very well tell people, "I'm not available at such and such a time because I'm secretly leading a double life in which other-me is a soccer player who has a game then," so it's not her fault if someone schedules her to do something else at game time.

A watershed moment is probably when she privately begs a teacher she trusts to give her detention at a certain time, and while she doesn't tell the teacher exactly what's going on, the encounter does lead to her beginning to go to therapy.

At some point she comes out first to her closest friends on the team, and eventually the whole team.

Of course, at the same time she's edging toward better mental health and an increasing circle of supportive people who know she's trans, her "It's not my fault I can't play, [so and so] is making me [whatever] at game time," is getting rather less convincing.

She did have steps to obfuscate that she was intentionally missing games (like making sure she was forced to be unavailable for the same reasons at non-game times, and having multiple things that seemed unrelated prevent her from playing) but that can only go so far.

And since she's being blackmailed, "I don't care what else is going on, play in the next game or I'll ruin your life," is a thing her uncle-coach can and does say (though exact wording might differ because this is so much of a first draft that I only put it into words right this moment.)

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Also there is a teen romance plot, but very much not the trans girl joining the team to get closer to the girl she has a crush on.  It develops starting from nothing, through friendship to romance over the course of the story.

Trans girl is pretty oblivious, in part because she's got so much going on in her head, and in part just because.  At one point a third party has to take her aside and explain that she'd just been flirting with best friend/love interest because she totally failed to notice that that's what she and best friend/love interest were doing.

And here's something I've kind of been going back and forth on because on the one hand there's a gender critical talking point about trans girls and women being . . . sex crazed perverts who want to boink all the females, and even though the concept for this story is entirely sex-free (none of them feel like they're ready) having the main character end up with more than one girlfriend kind of plays into that talking point, but on the other hand why shouldn't a story feature a teenage poly relationship?

Also on the second of those two hands, pretty much the only dialogue I thought up is about that.

Though I never wrote it down, and it might be trying to flee my head right now.

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At the first official game trans girl is successfully forced to play in she manages to pull the other coach aside beforehand and have an incredibly awkward coming out because she is, again, terrified that she'll be used as "boys in girls' sports" propaganda, and she figures having the other coach demand she sit the game out is better for everyone (including the world at large) than having the truth come out after she plays in the game.

The other coach is actually fine with having a pre-hormones (pre-everything) trans girl playing on the other team, and keeps the fact trans girl is trans to her(?)self, because she's not just gonna out a random teenager.

Trans girl, meanwhile, spends the entire game really self-conscious because she just came out to a complete stranger and doesn't know who that stranger might have told. In spite of that worry, she ultimately doesn't think the other coach outed her, but her self-consciousness based hyper-alertness means she does notice that one player on the other team has been looking at her in particular, and she thinks that girl can tell she's trans/"a boy" (depending on how bad the trans girl's imposter syndrome is at that particular moment.)

Since she's scared, she confides in her best friend after the game who then (to her horror) walks over and asks the girl on the other team about it.

After Best Friend gets the other girl to agree to talk to her at enough of a distance from other people that they won't be overheard, this happens:

Best Friend: So, my friend over there is really shy.  Kinda insecure, even.  *pause*  She thinks you were staring at her.

Other Girl: I wasn't--  I don't--  *looks away, blushes*  Was it that obvious?

Best Friend: Apparently.

Other Girl: (back to looking at Best Friend)  I was trying not to.

Best Friend: That's nice.  *beat*  Why were you staring at her?

*silence*

Best Friend: If I can't give her an answer, she's gonna go nuts thinking--

Other Girl: (blurted out)  Because I think she's cute.

Best Friend: Right there with you.

*Other Girl gives confused look*

Best Friend: *Looks at ground, looks at sky, looks back at other girl*  (possibly says something to herself under her breath to get courage up)  Hey, how would you feel about a date with three people?

Other Girl: (shades of, "I must have heard you wrong")  What?

Best Friend: You, me, her, going on a date together.

Other Girl: (shades of, "Ok, I heard you right, but now I'm even more confused")  What?

Best Friend: Like I said, I think she's cute too.

Other Girl: (knitted brow, fresh out of emotion to put into her voice) So *beat* like *another beat* you and I compete to see who she likes more?

Best Friend: No.  *pause*  You think she's cute, I think she's cute,  *briefly looks off to the side*  I think you're cute,  *Other Girl blushes slightly*  I'd like to think I'm not ugly so . . .  *pause during which she glances up, down, and off to the side*  So  *beat*  So you go on a date with her at the same time she goes on a date with me while I go on a date with you.

*pause*

Best Friend: Yes, this is me asking you out.

Other Girl: Uh . . .

Best Friend: (losing confidence with every word she speaks)  Of course this is contig-- contingent on her agreeing to this, and - like I said - she's shy, and this is probably a stupid idea and--

Other Girl: Yes.  *pause*  (flustered)  Wait, you didn't ask a yes or no question.  I mean--  What I mean to say--  That is--  *closes her eyes, takes a deep breath*  (after opening her eyes)  I'd love to go on a three person date.  *pause*  I think.  *beat*  And if I wouldn't I won't know until I try, so just  *makes a circular gesture with one of her hands as she tries to find the words*  (having not found the words) Yes.

Best Friend: (playfully, having regained some confidence and even more snark)  I didn't ask a yes or no question.

Contact info is exchanged, Best Friend returns to trans girl.  While walking back she probably says something like, "Jesus Christ, did I really just do that?" to herself.

Anyway:

Trans Girl: Does . . . does she know?

Best Friend: No idea; I didn't ask.

*Trans Girl looks at Best Friend in utter confusion*

Best Friend: She was staring at you, but only because she thinks you're cute.

Trans Girl: She...  but . . . What?  *beat*  How?

Best Friend: She probably thinks that because you are cute.

*Trans girl is frozen, transfixed like a deer in headlights*

Best Friend: She also agreed to go on a date with us.

Trans Girl: (shocked into being able to move and speak again) Uh, what?

Best Friend: The three of us go on a date together--I suggested it, she's up for it, so now the only question is if you're interested.

*Trans Girl goes right back to being akin to a deer in headlights*

*silence*

Best Friend: You don't actually have to use words, you know?  You could just nod for "yes", shake your head for "no", and, like, shrug your shoulders if you need more--

*Trans Girl nods*

*Best Friend texts Other Girl to let her know Trans Girl's response and start the process of figuring out a time that works for all three of them*

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Something else I considered but am not sure on is an older sister who's at college, and as Trans Girl sees that things are going to fall apart and uncle-coach may soon be outing her,* she takes a bus to the college to confess, because she'd stolen clothes from older sister when she was too afraid to go out and buy her own, and she wanted to admit to that and apologize in person before Uncle could out her.

This then opens the door to older sister potentially taking trans girl in if the parents kick her out when they find out she's a trans girl instead of the son they think they should have.

The parents accepting the trans girl as she is might be a more heartwarming ending, but I think it works better if the trans girl is right that her parents finding out she's trans would basically be the end of the world for her, and then it's the relationships forged or (in the sister's case) renewed/strengthened in the story that make it not be the end of the world.

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Not completely sure how uncle-coach should be brought down, but it should definitely happen, and the seeds of it are probably the opposing coach trans girl came out to mentioning Uncle's niece, him being all, "I don't have a niece," and then opposing coach realizing that there's more going on than she was originally told.

[Added]

I originally meant this as, "I don't have a niece (on the team)," but depending on the relationship between the uncle and the older sister (if she exists) it could work as literally "I don't have a niece" since she's far enough out of sight and mind that he sees no reason to acknowledge her existence.

The next sentence picks up from other coach "then opposing coach realizing that there's more going on than she was originally told."

[/added]

(Which wasn't much; just that uncle-coach had an attitude of, "What they don't know can't hurt them," but trans girl was more worried about if people found out and objected after the fact, and would rather be benched in advance than have that happen.)

Or crime.  I am totally up for characters doing crime for great justice, so if some combination of likable characters con uncle-coach out of everything he owns, that works too.

Or it could work from both ends, with the opposing coach getting him barred from coaching because blackmailing a kid into participating probably breaks some league rule or other, while the kids (and possibly big sister) bankrupt him to pay for . . . any number of things.

No longer being able to count on parental support paying for college for big sister and trans girl, never having it in the first place for a poorer member of the team, getting an entirely new wardrobe because your old one screams, "I'm a boy!" isn't cheap, big sister might want to get a place closer to home so moving in with her doesn't mean trans girl is moving away from her friends (though it would saddle her with a daily commute to get to classes), any money they can't come up with a pressing use for they can donate to a teen homeless shelter or soup kitchen or some such.

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Best friend might be non-binary, and they come out to trans girl as non-binary at the same time trans girl admits she's trans to them. Sort of:

Trans Girl: I . . . I'm not a real . . . I'm trans.

*Trans Girl braces herself for rejection*

*Best friend blinks their eyes and takes a moment to think*

Best Friend: I'm non-binary.  *pause*  I wasn't actually planning on telling anyone, but *beat* you trusted me, so . . .

That would make the above off because of pronouns and because "Other Girl" would in fact be the only girl in the conversion between her and Best Friend I shared.

Regardless, keeping terminology consistent for the moment, if Best Friend is non-binary (and maybe even they aren't) Other Girl goes off on a rant at some point about how people saying they're grammatically incapable of using singular "they" are liars and hypocrites, because "you" is every bit as plural as "they" and those selfsame people use singular "you" without batting an eyelash.

I'm also totally up for a side story where trans girl coming out as trans to the soccer team is the catalyst that leads one of the members to realize they're actually a dude, and by the end this trans boy has started on his transition.

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And that's as much as I've thought up.

. . .

Well, it was at the time of posting on Patreon, something popped into my head last night, but as is often the case, the details become fleeting when I try to actually write it out, regardless:

[Older sister is not in good standing with the parents & uncle because she's never been in a relationship with a boy. This is because she's aro ace, but none of the bigots involved would understand what that means anyway.]

*Older sister stops by, forgot to call ahead*
*she walks in on Trans Girl and Best Friend kissing on the living room couch*

Older Sister: And our parents thought I was the lesbian.

*Trans Girl and Best Friend react with a sort of, "It looks like they almost had heart attacks" shock*

Older Sister: Sorry, I just felt like it'd be way more creepy if I didn't say something to let you know you weren't alone.

*Other Girl, walks into living room carrying a bowl of popcorn*

Other Girl: (while looking at Older Sister in confusion) . . . who?

Trans Girl: Uh, my sister.

Older Sister: (to Trans Girl) I think we need more/better introductions than that.  (To Other Girl)  I'm [name], her older sister, and I'm usually not around because I'm a student at [university].

Other Girl: I'm [Trans Girl]'s girlfriend, [name].  ... um ... I actually go to [other high school], not [trans girl's high school]; we met at a soccer match.

Best Friend: In which [Other Girl]'s team kicked our asses.

Other Girl: (softly, while smiling a bit) Yeah, we did.

Best Friend: I'm [name], [Trans Girl]'s enbyfriend, we met because I'm on the soccer team [Uncle] blackmailed her into playing on.

=Older Sister: Cool.  (too herself, getting used to the sound of the name) [Trans Girl].  (to Trans Girl) You know, you forgot to tell me your name--your real name--when you came to visit.

Trans Girl: I did?

Older Sister: Yup.  *beat*  Don't worry about it, I forgot to ask.

Or something like that.

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* It doesn't actually matter if he's figured out she's a trans girl, not a cis boy. All of the time spent presenting as a girl would have given him ample opportunity to replace his original blackmail, which was based on his word alone and lacked any proof, with photos and/or videos of trans girl "pretending" to be a girl.

A Genie, True Love, and Transness (story idea and some bare dialogue)

(Released on Patreon 22 months and 5 days earlier, because: depression.)
(As mentioned, I have a some already written stuff I can start sharing.  Not much prose, though, mostly story ideas like this instead of actual stories.)

The premise is simple enough: Dude frees Genie from a bottle or lamp or whatever.

It's an old school genie: grants wishes as thanks for being released from confinement, so there's no worries about getting screwed over by the wording of the wish being off, and there's no limit on the number of wishes, but there's also no magical obligation, genie can just say, "Fuck you," and walk off.  The problem is that it's deep-seated ingrained cultural belief for the genie that the scales need to be balanced and payment to the one who set them free must be made.

Things start off pretty simple, wealth, power, every gaming system on earth, improvements to housing, that sort of thing.  Then dude gets his eyes set on a potential romantic interest, and genie's all, "Look, there's shit we don't do, and making someone fall in love is one of them.  I'm not gonna magic roofie someone for you."

Dude is persistent with, "Well, can't you do something?"  And genie's like, "Fine, I owe you, I'll do something.  I can make you more desirable to her, but first I have to know what she's into, and I can't read minds either, so I'm gonna have to get to know her, and that's gonna take some fucking time."

Dude's impatient and makes no secret of that, and he's constantly asking for updates and pushing for results, but getting to know someone takes time, and he's forced to wait around all the while getting more snippy and less kind toward the genie.

And I keep flip flopping on the genie's sex, because what first put this into my head was coming across a description of some old movie where the dude was lusting after one woman while a hot female genie who was enamored with him was right fucking there, and that female genie setup could work just fine, and I'm sure you can see where it would go, but at the same time, I'm me, and I put trans stuff everywhere, and the genie realizing she's trans would work fine too.

Genie's been locked in a bottle/lamp/mystery box/jar/whatever for a long time, depending on the culture they were in beforehand, the entire concept of being trans might be unknown to the genie.

So you could have:

Object of affection: Hey, thanks for standing up for [name] back there, she gets a lot of flack for being trans, and she deserves better.

Genie: Trans?

Object of affection: Oh, you didn't know?   Well, thanks anyway.

Genie: What's trans?

Object of affection: Wow, you don't . . . sorry, that sounds condescending, I just . . . it's like . . . ok, so, when you're born the doctor looks at you and says, "It's a boy," or, "It's a girl," but some people, when they grow up, they realize the doctor was wrong.

Genie: So, what, they just decide, "I'm a girl now," and...

Object of affection: Something like that.

Genie: That's an option?

Object of affection: I wouldn't call it "an option" per se, you either are trans or you're not, but it is something some people realize.

*genie stares blankly into space*

Object of affection: Are you . . . ok?

Genie: How . . . how do you know if you're trans?

Object of affection: Um, well, I'm not really the best person to describe this because I'm--

Genie: It's ok, I'm not . . . I'm not gonna get mad at you for not being the most knowledgeable, and I'm not gonna hate you if you say something wrong, but . . . but . . .  please . . . how do you know if you're trans?

Object of affection: Well, I think you . . . just . . . try out other genders, like, try out a new name, or a new haircut, get some gender coded clothes and see how you feel when you wear them, take . . . take like a test drive of being another gender, and if it feels right, if it feels like you're more your true self while you're trying that than you are normally, then you're probably trans.  *pause* Or at least gender non-conforming.  I . . . like, stuff is complicated, and I'm not an expert, but just . . . try.  Preferably with friends you can trust, but even just at home on your own, you can just . . . experiment, I guess.  I'm . . . I'm really not the best person to ask.

Genie: (mostly to self) I don't really have any friends.

Object of affection: I'm your friend.

*genie blinks*

Genie: We barely know each other.

Object of affection: I mean, true, but I like talking to you, and I think you like talking to me, and we've had fun hanging out right?

Genie: (somewhat weak/disbelieving) I guess.  (normal)  I honestly thought I was bothering you.

Object of affection: (cheerfully) Well you thought wrong; I've had a great time.

Genie: (doubtful) Really?

Object of affection: Really.  *pause*  "And if you're really thinking . . . wondering . . . uh . . . if you're really that, why don't we go clothes shopping together?

Genie: I . . . um . . . but . . .

Object of affection: You can say no.  It's fine to say no.  This is . . . a lot to spring on you all at once, and it's not like I . . . I mean, I thought you already knew, so it was an incredibly rough introduction, but . . . I don't know; you've been really nice to me, and if I can help you figure yourself out, I'd like to, and it's . . . (expression changes, shoulders drop) it's probably a stupid idea, but (rambling) I just got it into my head that there was this thing that I could do for you that might help you a lot, and then I'd be like . . . I don't know, a hero or something, but really what I'm trying to do is convince you to do something you're clearly not comfortable with, and that's not nice, and I should probably be ashamed of--

Genie: Where would we shop?

Object of affection: (completely lost) What?

Genie: If we went clothes shopping, where would we go?

Object of affection: I . . . um . . . so the thing is *beat* I have no plan.  I'm just saying whatever comes to mind because I don't know what I'm doing, but . . . I think that would probably depend on how much money you have to spend.

Genie: (half serious, half playful) Money is no object for me, it's a complex and convoluted story full of lies intrigue and and things man is not meant to know--

Object of affection: Not a man.

Genie: (smiling) Things beyond one's mortal ken.

Object of affection: I love seeing you smile.

*genie blushes*

*pause*

Genie: Uh . . . you pick the place.

And then genie transitions, and the story eventually ends with the two of them becoming lovers while dude is left on his own.

He doesn't manage his wealth the best, his power crumbles with it, and he probably somehow ends up losing his gaming systems too, because by the end of the story you realize he's a misogynistic, homophobic, transphobe, so no happy ending for him.

That's where this originally ended but I'm gonna spitball some more stuff.

Definite happy endings for the genie and love interest.  In a world with magic beings like genies there's probably some force that's a limiting factor on how much one can do to change the world with one's magic, but whatever the uncrossable line is, genie would routinely go right up to it, with her probably-anarchist definitely social justice conscious girlfriend (and eventual wife) helping her figure out the most good she could do with her power.

Also, they probably have every gaming system on earth, running on magic with a negative carbon footprint, because why should the jerk be the only one to have that going for them?

Food, water, shelter, medical care, education, and videogames for the underclasses of whatever place they happen to live in.  Videogames mostly just because I said that that the dude used a wish to get every gaming system, but also because entertainment is important in itself.

The local library may end up bigger on the inside with an impossibly comprehensive collection.  People who don't want poor people in the library will find their fortunes suddenly take a turn for the crap end of the spectrum, and all will know, especially children, that if you need a safe, warm, and dry place to be during the day, you can go to the library and read all day.

[You can stop reading here, things are about to go off the rails hard.]

[Hard enough for me to go back after I finished writing and add this note before posting.]

The genie and love interest may end up with an impossible pet, just because.  An adorable little velociraptor, a dodo--

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Ok, I just did a search for "coolest extinct animals" to find something to put after "dodo" as an option, and the top of the list google decided to pick as its definitive list was "Neanderthals", and yes, fucking yes, they deserve so much credit for being awesome.

The oldest surviving art on earth (that we've discovered) is a Neanderthal hand stencil.  You know, hand stencils being the thing that children do to this day.  These people were so much like us, and one of the few things we know about them is that they cared for the sick and injured.  People who required more work done to keep them alive and healthy than they could ever do in return, but Neanderthals did that work because fuck capitalism and fuck the idea that someone needs to earn their right to be alive.

"Neanderthal" needs to stop being an insult and start being something we recognize as sadly departed family.

If we'd understood the dangers of habitat fragmentation and the resulting inbreeding a hundred thousand years ago, they might still be with us, but back then no one knew that staying in an isolated village for untold generations would spell your doom.  If they'd known they had travel to other villages and interbreed to survive, they were more than capable.  It sucks that we lost an entire branch of our family tree just because, when they didn't have a compelling reason to migrate, they preferred to stay home instead of chase the horizon.

That search result is obviously useless for picking an impossibly cool genie-summoned pet, because I should have been searching for "coolest extinct non-human animals", but I am none the less glad I saw it, because fuck do we need to be less racist and give more credit.

Pretty much every new result about Neanderthals says that we've been unfairly maligning them.  (Also, the fact that we're only willing to consider the possibility that a tool was their doing if we know for a fact that anatomically modern humans weren't in the region when it was made is just fucky.  We know there are tools they made, their teeth show evidence of them creating cords, so on, so forth.  We just want all the credit for ourselves.)

-

Anyway, that's a long tangent completely unrelated to the rest of the post, but this is actually important to me because they're not just our family, they're also, for all of us who have heritage outside of sub-Saharan Africa, our ancestors.  They're part of us (for the value of "us" in the previous sentence.)  They deserve our respect, and also we should be proud of that heritage, because they figured out shit that had never been figured out before.

(Unless new research has changed our understanding...) The only reason they're not a larger part of us is that the Neanderthal Y chromosome doesn't seem to mix well with something in modern human genetics.  The modern human X chromosome would be my first guess, but given that any half-breed also would have one each of all the modern human non-sex chromosomes, it could have been anywhere in our genetic code.

. . .

I don't know, it just pisses me off when people disrespect Neanderthals, because what precious little we know about the kind of people they were says they were altruistic, and for people like me, they're part of us.  Not distant cousins; distant ancestors.

Also, while there are other things we may de-extinct, I think they're gone for good.  Even if we did bring them back, their culture would be lost, but I don't think we can ethically bring them back regardless, because we can't even treat other modern humans with dignity and respect, so if there were another species of human, we'd label them subhuman and curtail all their rights.

-

Back on point, Tasmanian tigers are smaller than I realized, and with magic involved to keep it from eating your face, it could be a viable impossible pet, and for a larger option . . .

Wait, Quagga aren't extinct anymore?

. . .

Oh, they still are, but there's a project to breed something Quagga-like from their closest surviving relatives.  Anyway, I was thinking something smaller, hence velociraptor being at the front of the list, but I do love equines.

And rather than go on further unrelated tangents, I'm gonna end there.

-

It was suggested in a comment that microraptor could be an impossible pet.  I approve of this.

If you've never heard of a microraptor, look them up.  We know a surprisingly large amount about them given how long they've been gone; like the fact their feathers were iridescent which is not something I would have expected to be determinable based on fossils.

I still exist

Added short version:

I never intended to have this place go dark, and after it did, I always intended to come back to it.  I was actually planning on putting it off a bit longer, though, because I didn't want it to seem like I only remember this place when I'm in dire financial straights and need money.  And I'm in dire financial straights and need money.

Then TRiG reached out to me, and - honestly - if I put it off I might never get around to coming back, so I decided to post now.  This is long because I'm long winded, because I'm tired, and because I don't actually remember what relevant context I've shared here before.

/addded

-

I never meant to disappear, but that's never stopped be before, so it's probably not a surprise it didn't stop me this time.

I always meant to come back and regularly post here again, but . . . same sort of thing in the other direction.

The only place I've stayed active, if disappearing for months at a time and mostly only posting to say why I haven't been posting can be said to be "active", is my patreon, and that's only because if I lose that income I lose my ability to stay in my house, full stop.

Originally the plan was for everything posted over there to eventually be available here for free, and that's still mostly the plan, which means I've got a fair bit of pre-made content to share, but there will be exceptions because of how things developed.

So, there's some stuff that's happened that makes keeping some stuff off the open web desirable.

-

One, probably the most minor one but also the longest running one, is that for a long time, since back when I was actually active here in fact, I've occasionally done sort of live reacts to bad stuff.  Bad in various ways, sometimes stuff of terrible quality, sometimes immoral.  Originally this was mostly extremely low quality fanfic, and the thing is . . . I give people the benefit of the doubt there.  If someone is writing like they're a twelve year old, I assume they're a twelve year old.  I don't want to make some kid cry (or even worse, put them off writing entirely) by publicly savaging their work.

That's why I never shared such stuff here.  I haven't actually done this, but patreon provides a way for me to share that stuff without risking making children cry.  I put it up behind a paywall, and even if they search the internet for their work, they'll never see me tearing it apart.

A much bigger deal is that when I made this blog* various people who know me in real life promised that they wouldn't read it so I could feel free to say whatever without looking over my figurative shoulder.  That promise has not been kept.  So if I want to freely talk about things related to people around me, it can't be here.  And ideally it can't be on the open web.  Thus the usefulness of pay-walling stuff at patreon.  It is, again, not really about money, it's about privacy.

Somewhere between the two is that something I wrote on here has literally been brought up in court.  It was no big deal, just a poem, and nothing came of it, but it's kind of . . . daunting, maybe?  Not really a thing I expected to happen when I started this place.

So that's also made me realize that having a barrier between things I say about, say, personal disputes involving my sister and her (now-ex) neighbors might be better off stored in a place where a lawyer with a grudge and an internet connection couldn't find them.

Some sort of members only space, like my patreon.

(The lawyer didn't actually have a grudge against me, and indeed I wasn't in the courtroom, and know of the poem showing up in court only second-hand.)

-

One can note that the fiction this blog was originally created to share doesn't fall into any of these categories, nor do the decons I started but then ran out of steam on pretty fast.  So basically the topics that will be hidden, safely ensconced in members only access on my patreon, are the live reacts I never really did here (if I ever get around to sharing them at all) and life updates that I'm not comfortable having the people involved in those updates read.

Assuming I actually manage to stick with updating here and don't disappear again.

-

Ok, all of that stuff about my patreon vs here and the place where content will differ out of the way, here's an update on me.

I have not been doing well.  At all.

Enough bad shit has happened that there's no way I could keep track of it all, but the big thing was 17 months ago.  (I think, as near as I can tell I first mentioned it seventeen months ago.)

I get SSI for reasons of disability.  In a just world everyone would get enough to live on regardless, and in a somewhat less decent world disabled people would all get the same assistance regardless, because being financially well off doesn't make you less disabled, and we shouldn't punish people for being able to work in spite of their disability.

In this world, if you have more than $2,000 in assets (the house you live in, if you own it, and a single car, if you use it, don't count; everything else does) in a given month, you don't get paid.

We're gonna come back to that, but first some context.

[link to skip the context]

-

In 2021 the world was on fire and I felt helpless, there was an attempted coup no one was being held accountable, a disease we could have dealt with in a matter of weeks had been allowed to run rampant for a year and every new strain of note was even more contagious than the last (this could kind of go without saying, since for it to be of note it needs to out compete what's already out there, but it's become apparent that a lot of things that should go without saying don't) and we were discovering that instead of infection giving you antibodies with which to fight it off, people could and did get reinfected and every new infection increased the odds of increasingly serious complications.

And then there was the rats.

-

2020 was the year I had people living with me.  I don't regret giving housemate a place to stay with me rent free, given she was literally planning to be homeless to get out of a mutually terrible situation with my sister, and am kinda proud that because of that she was able to get on her feet and get a job at Pizza Hut instead of being forced to make money the way she had in the past (prostitution) which she positively hated (beyond all of the reasons one might hate that job in general, she's a lesbian and the Johns were male.)

I do regret everything else that resulted from be letting her stay here.  When we ran out of toilet paper she used paper towels.  You can't flush those.  Toilet paper is made to dissolve, paper towels are made to hold together.  Sewage backed up into the house, notably including the place where I was sleeping at the time.  The place plumbers needed to get to to fix things was the absolute least accessible corner of the basement.  Furniture that had been stored there for years (maybe decades) had to be moved.  It was a lot of work.

That was when houseguest came.  In theory to help clear out a space for the plumber to work, but not everyone was on the same page.  Some people thought he was staying long term.  Then he was trapped by travel restrictions for the pandemic and the question became kind of moot.

He was there to help clear out one spot in the basement.  First day he arrived my depression was so bad I couldn't function.  All I could do was sit on the couch, staring forward, listening to the very, very loud sounds of him "cleaning" the kitchen, overstimulation sucks and housemate and houseguest both excelled at causing auditory overstimulation.

They couldn't do anything quietly.  Even something as simple as cleaning dishes, which is a naturally quiet act given that a sponge or (if stuff is really stuck on) scouring pad rubbing against a dish or cookware is generally quiet as all fuck, sounded like they'd put a bunch of glass, metal, and ceramics in a tumble dryer and turned it onto the fastest possible spin setting.

When I finally did make it into the kitchen I found that a lot of stuff had indeed been cleaned . . . so the kitchen was clean . . . and it was empty.  My blender?  Gone.  My popcorn popper?  Gone.  my countertop oven?  Gone.  My bread machine?  Gone.  My pizza pans?  Gone.  My silverware?  Gone.  My cookware?  Gone.

Basically the only things not-gone were my microwave, my refrigerator, my normal (full size) stove, and my dishwasher.  Oh, and my kitchen table and kitchen cabinets.

They threw out everything else.

Good news, trash hadn't been collected yet.  Bad news: they made no distinction between food waste, non-waste, and clean waste.  So to find my fucking cookware, I had to dig through unsanitary shit, but more than that I couldn't just throw out the food waste because it was mixed in with stuff I couldn't afford to replace.

They did the same thing in multiple other rooms.  There was so much I had to go through, it was impossible to get the job done quickly regardless, but my mental health was also shit.

So the food waste ended up sitting outside waiting for me to go through it.  In 2020.  When all of the city rats suddenly needed to find new food sources because the restaurant dumpsters they usually used for food were no longer being stocked up.  At the same time a long abandoned building not far from me was demolished without being cleared of rodents first.  We don't know for sure if it had rats, but if it did, they suddenly needed to find a new home.

Definitely city rats, and possibly rats from the abandoned building, found my home.  Because of the food waste mixed with the "I am actively suffering because I don't have access to this useful thing, and I don't have the money to buy a new one" stuff.  Usually I spent months suffering for the lack of something before I managed to find it, there was just so much to go through.  Sometimes I'm pretty sure it was a year.

But it wasn't just the stuff outside.  Housemate and Houseguest both left uneaten food all over the fucking place.  So when the rats eventually found their way inside, they found a buffet.

They chew through your walls.  You could hear them gnawing some nights.

This was Hell.  But that wasn't the problem come 2021.

-

Rats are a health hazard.  The city takes notice when a large number of rats decide to take up residence on your property.  The public health guy from the city was an intimidating liar.  It took me a long time to realize this, so a cycle started.

The first time he showed up was very cordial and not at all terrible, to his credit.  Every time after that he would make threats and ultimatums so, so extremely stressful and scary that I'd lock up and be unable to do anything.  With the passage of time I'd become more functional and get work done, but it'd become clear I couldn't do what he demanded before the time the threat/ultimatum came to pass, still I'd work to the bone trying.  Then the deadline would come and nothing happened.  I'd email him.  No response.

I'd stop working because I didn't know if there was even any point.  My life was pure and utter dread and I was desperate to know what was happening.  All effort was in getting information on what the fuck the situation was.  Had I been given an extension I hadn't been notified about?  Was it already too late?  Was I gonna be kicked out of my house because it was declared a health hazard?  (One of the the threats.)  Was my house in the process of being condemned because of the incredibly persistent rats (another of the threats) was [insert terrible thing here] already in motion?

The uncertainly was Hellish and it consumed everything.  Working was impossible.

Then, over time, I'd become acclimated to the uncertainty, and start working on fixing things again.

And that's when he'd come back.  That's when he'd do everything in his power (including telling egregious lies) to kick my generalized anxiety disorder from, "Hey, I almost forgot I had that," to, "I cannot function because my anxiety is well past the point that renders me incapable of doing anything."

And repeat.

-

Inasmuch as there was good news, I was no longer suffering from Housemate and Houseguest|.

Housemate and Houseguest had tried dating.  It worked out about as well as you'd expect given that this involved a (non-bisexual) lesbian attempting to be in sexual and romantic relationship with a straight dude.  After the inevitable breakup, they both started being horrible to each other.  Houseguest demanded I kick out Housemate, I refused to take a side, so he left.

After an unpleasant experience away from home where someone tried to strangle me (yes, I'm pretty sure it was attempted strangulation, and the goal was not merely the actual choking that took place, though the choking sucked too) I returned home to discover my cat had disappeared.  More than that, Houseguest hadn't thought to contact me to tell me the cat had disappeared, nor to mention it when I got back, and was apparently never planning on telling me she hadn't seen the cat the whole time I was gone.

The cat was old, frail, and only allowed outside because being outside (and probably destroying the ecosystem) was the only thing that seemed to bring her joy anymore.  I knew there was a risk of her not coming back every time time I let her out.  I did my best to emotionally prepare for that.  I was not emotionally prepared for her to have disappeared to the point she hadn't been seen in days when I got back from being attacked.

It was my birthday.

I ended up in a bad place, said some things I shouldn't have, and other things I should have said much, much sooner, and told her to find a new place to stay.

There wasn't a deadline, I didn't know how long it would take and the whole point of taking her in was keeping her from being homeless, but by September first she'd found another place to live.  Public health guy came later in September.

So at that point, I didn't have to deal with either of them, and my mom started coming down regularly to help me deal with the rat problem.  For a while it was great.  Punctuated with the public health guy fucking up my mental health, but seeing her and working with her was great.  Good for my mental health, a welcome change from what being around housemate and houseguest had been like.  Consistent positive human contact.

The garage was packed with stuff to go through to separate the stuff I needed from the actual trash, and we did almost all of it in about a month.  The one thing left to do was to move an old couch that had turned into a nesting area.  My mom was on her way to rent a truck so we could take the old couch to the dump, and after that we planned on working on all of the stuff lost due to "cleaning" that had been stored inside the house.

She was on the road, on her way, when she got a call from the police.  My sister had been involuntarily admitted to a psyche ward and my mother was being told to come pick up my sister's three kids.

After that, my mom didn't have time to come down.  And it's harder to work alone.  Not just harder in that you need to do all the work instead of part of the work, harder in that it's harder to motivate yourself on your own than when you have someone working with you.

And her not being able to come down and help was the end of (almost all of) my in-person human contact.  The bottom dropped out.  My mental health collapsed.  Even now, over three years later and coming up on four, the majority of that "inside the house" we were about to start on remains undone.

But the public health guy kept on coming and fucking with my mental health into early 2021.

-

So the world was on fire, there was a coup attempt no one was being held accountable for, I was being told my house would be condemned and possibly demolished if I couldn't deal with shit that my mental health wouldn't allow me to deal with, said mental health was absolute shit, and then GameStop.

Volatility creates the potential for people involved in stocks to make or lose a lot of money fast.  The difference between, "TO THE MOON!" and, "It's worth like five dollars," is hella volatile, and no one's retirement money was invested in GameStop.  The only people engaging with that shitshow were people who were willing to engage in a high risk marketplace that was set to completely collapse any second.  No moral qualms about making money off GameStop stock, because everyone losing money had self-selected into this incredibly punishing game in hopes of getting rich quick.

In the past, it was impossible for people like me to engage in the stock market, it cost too much.  Then fractional trading.  You didn't have to buy full stocks, you could just say, "I want five bucks of [whatever]," and if [whatever] was trading at $500 dollars a share, you'd get 1% ownership of one share.

So I thought, given everything was fucked anyway, why not give it a try?  For once in my life I wasn't in the red, I had to figure out what to do with what was left over of my stimulus funds, and I thought, "Why should rich people be the only ones to make money by doing nothing of value?"

The answer, by the way, is because the rules are set up such that only rich people are able to make money by doing nothing of value.  For a little bit, I was actually doing well, until I ran up against those rules.  I should have stopped when I realized just how rigged the game was (I'd known it was rigged, but vastly underestimated the degree), but the stock market is the world's largest casino, and it turns out I'm a gambling addict.

Never had an opportunity to discover that before, and I don't have a formal diagnosis, but "addiction" is the only way I can describe what was happening to me.  I.  Could.  Not.  Stop.

Notes I was taking were full of asides saying, "This is unhealthy, and I need to stop," sometimes in those exact words, other times in other words that meant the same thing.

I couldn't stop.

Then my computer broke.

Good news: I'd used some of the stimulus money for a down payment on a desktop.  Possibly the first desktop I'd owned in decades.  I was in the process of setting it up when my laptop died.  As I transferred files, passwords, logins, and so forth from my laptop's hard drives to the new computer I made sure not to transfer the information needed to log into the brokerage account.

Because I was afraid.  I was afraid that if it were possible to get into that account, I'd go back to how I was, allow it to consume my entire life again, and be unable to stop.

I knew that the money I had in there, about a thousand dollars I think, would lose its value because it was all in stuff that could only possibly go up in the short term, and would drop way the fuck down once a degree of sanity returned.

Even as much as a thousand dollars could help me (five months of food, for example) I thought it was an acceptable loss if it meant I wouldn't lose myself to the stock market and a gambling addiction again.

-

And then we come to seventeen months ago.  Somebody (some non-governmental agency contracted by the SSA) told the SSA I had over thirty fucking thousand dollars in that account.

Again, any month your countable assets are $2,000 or more, you get nothing.

They were cutting my SSI payments to zero and demanding repayment.  This would make survival impossible.

So I transferred the login information to the desktop.  Couldn't log in.  Jumped through a ton of hoops, including walking to the next town over to get an up to date state ID on a day that was way too hot for walking, and doing some online thing to indicate that I had the same face as the one on the State ID.

No dice.

Eventually I got in by hotwiring my desktop to run off of the laptop's hard drive, which the site interpreted as being the same computer.  As I recall, there was one hundred and sixty something dollars.

Even though I'd never seriously believed I had anything like $30,000 in that account, I still somehow managed to feel the gut punch and loss as if I'd had $30,000 taken away from me.

That wasn't the problem seventeen months ago.

The problem was that in the midst of all of this the SSA did a full blown review where they discovered they'd been handling my case wrong for years.  They'd made bad assumptions in phone interviews, whereas if they'd asked for clarification instead of making assumptions I'd have told them what they needed to get things right.

Also, if certain rules had been explained to me more clearly, I would have known to point out that some stuff wasn't adding up.

-

The thing is, they'd been mishandling my case in my favor.

When I said people would help me pay bills sometimes, referring to when I'd ask for donations because I couldn't cover a bill, they assumed the people were paying the bills directly, and this is completely different from how things are treated if people give me money with which I pay the bill (which is what was happening.)

Short version: donations are unearned income, and I am allowed to have fucking mountains of unearned income with no penalties whatsoever provided the income is not in the form of money, rent, or food.  (I think the food thing has recently changed though.)

I am allowed to have $20 of unearned income with no penalties if it's in the form of money.

They already think I'm getting more than $20 of unearned income, because I don't own the house, and they think no one would ever let anyone live in a house at just the cost of expenses, because they think everyone on earth is a rent seeking motherfucker.  (If I owned the house, they'd say I was getting no-house related unearned income, but because my mom owns it they invented a rent they claim I should be paying, and the difference between that and the expenses is the unearned income they're punishing me for re:housing.)

What this means is that if I, say, need $800 for oil and someone gives me $800 dollars to buy oil and I buy $800 dollars of oil with that money, I get penalized $800.  If the person with $800 dollars pays the oil company directly, I'm not penalized at all.

The practical upshot of this is that I can't fucking fundraise when I fall short.  I have to instead pay for the shortfall with debt.  Credit card debt, which racks up interest like fucking whoa.  And it's been that way for 17 months.

The only exception was when I got someone else to do a GoFundMe to pay for oil for me, but that person had to bow out of the "I'll fundraise for you," position due to mental health reasons and no one replaced them.

-

And what happened 17 months ago is worse than just that, but for this bit I think it's all on me.

As of 17 months ago, my patreon income is classed as unearned and thus cut out of the base amount I get paid monthly, meaning that I fall short a lot more often than I used to.

I spent a long time trying to convince them my earned income is earned income, and it never worked.  Recently, I think I figured out why.  The SSA and IRS share information to determine the benefits a person should have.  So if I say I'm self-employed and the IRS says, "She's not paying self-employment taxes," the SSA trusts the IRS.

Now my self employment income is around 4.5 thousand dollars a year.  If you look up who needs to file taxes you'll find that a single person under 65 only needs to file taxes if their gross countable income is $12,950 or more.  (Well, that's what the IRS website says right now, but I think it's for last year.)  So it looks like I don't need to.

On less than perfect websites it really looks like I don't need to, because there's nothing about exceptions.

When I found out the $12,950 figure didn't apply to me I went to check places I'd checked before.  Depending on the exact page in question one of two things was happening with respect to exceptions.  On some, there was an asterisk I'd consistently failed to notice for years.  On others, it was a "but first" thing.

That refers to an episode of M*A*S*H my mother has told me about.  Hawkeye and Trapper are sent to defuse a bomb, and these are the instructions:

First, you need a wrench. Now place it gently on the nut just above the locking ring, and loosen.

Now, rotate the locking ring counterclockwise.

Now, remove the tail assembly.

And carefully cut the wires leading to the clockwork fuse at the head.

But first, remove the fuse.

The result is that the wires get cut before the, "But first, remove the fuse," is read.  The bomb detonates.

On tax sites without an asterisk it tells you that the threshold for someone in my demographic is $12,950, then it lists nine other demographics and the thresholds for them.

Then, completely outside of the chart that shows the thresholds for filing, it says that self-employed individuals are required to file if their income is at or over $400.

Which is a very different value than $12,950.

So the fact I don't file taxes clearly means I can't be making more than $4,000 dollars in self employment income a year.

Based on what I know of how the SSA handles things, I'll have a windfall consisting of all of the money withheld because my earned income was classified as unearned the moment the tax situation is fixed and I can use the tax documents as proof it's earned income.  Though who knows what the back taxes will be.

The thing is, that does jack shit to address the high interest on the debt I used to pay for things that money was supposed to go to.  And I've reached the point where the interest on the debt is piling up so fast there's seriously not enough left over to pay utilities (which is why I'm behind on them and at risk of having them switched off.)

But it gets worse.

-

Six months ago, I was in a bad place mentally.  I think I remember why, but it falls into the "stuff I don't want to put on the open web because of who might be reading" category.

I started having suicide-adjacent thoughts.  They weren't suicidal any more than someone saying "Just kill me now," is asking to be euthanized (credit to my therapist for that comparison) and indeed it was just an intrusive thought in the form of a phrase that kept entering my head.  Whenever I thought about the future and the problems I'd have to face in it, the words, "Well, I'll just kill myself," appeared unbidden in my head.  No related thoughts or feelings or desires or plans or whatnot related to suicide, just the words.

Now this is an easily identified maladaptive coping mechanism.  You can't worry about, or otherwise stress out about, the future if there is no future.  Thus it releases the pressure the future is putting on your mental health.

There's two problems, one is that I've been terrified my depression might become suicidal for most of my life, and thoughts like that don't help.

The other, the one that's having a big impact right here right now, it was successful in producing that "no tomorrow" thinking, but said thinking wasn't limited to stress about the future.

And six months interest free financing is a thing.

-

You can probably see where this is going, but there's another wrinkle.

I never self-harm physically, unless you count not eating, drinking, and/or sleeping (which some people do, but I really don't) but there are other things I do to hurt myself.

A friend who has a history of physical self-harm once shared other ways she hurt herself, and that came with some, "That's me!" realizations.

She'd do things she knew were stupid and irresponsible so that a) they'd come back to bite her, and b) she could tell herself she was stupid and irresponsible.  She could "prove" to herself that she was a bad person, no matter what other people said, because only a bad person would do things that stupid and irresponsible while fully aware that it was stupid and irresponsible to do them.

I don't do that a lot, but sometimes when my mental health is really bad; yeah: that's me.

So six months ago I spent a bunch of money on useless digital goods that aren't returnable or transferable.  No returns means I can't get the money back.  No transfers means I can't resell it to get part of the money back.  It was, very much, stupid and irresponsible.

Thus allowing me to tell myself that I'm a terrible fucked up person who is a drain on society and deserves everything, every bad thing at least, that ever comes her way.

-

To keep the lights, phone, internet, and water turned on, to refill my nearly empty oil tank, and to stop the stupid stuff from six months ago from exploding via retroactive compound interest I need $3,240.78 (plus or minus depending on fluctuations in the price of oil) in less than two weeks (That is, before November 1st), and I don't have a way to raise anything because I can't take direct donations and I don't have anyone willing to take them on my behalf.

But the stupid and irresponsible spending wasn't all confined to a single month, it spanned the boundary between two months, so there's another $1,249.62 "lest this explode" that needs to be paid before December starts, and as impossible as it seems to get any of this, it's not even the majority of the problem.

Because there's also all of the debt that built up to the point it's growing so fast it leaves me short on funds for utilities.

Put it all together, and add in repairs I need to do to the roof (which could cave in when the snows come if not fixed) and the basement (the windows and the door need to be fixed because right now cold air can flow right into the house through holes) and it's circa $10,000.

Circa $10,000 That I need to somehow get raised and paid to appropriate places without ever actually touching or controlling the money itself.

The exact figure, less the cost of materials for repairs (because I don't know the exact cost of those) is $9,624.63 with the usual margin of error based on the fluctuating price of oil.  The materials should cost less than $375 so while what I need is circa $10,000, it's also under $10,000.

-

The only part of the roof that needs to be repaired, by the way, is the beams holding it up.  The actual roofing is pristine because after someone saw the damage done by a positively absurd windstorm and paid to have the outside redone.  The roofers who did that work had apparently never worked on a roof like mine before, because the beams holding the roof up are in a very, very specific place phase of falling apart.

Human beings temporarily walking on the roof isn't enough to cave it in (yet) but it is enough to make the cracked supports bend.  A lot.  The experience of walking on it was described as "bouncy".  While they were working on it, I heard them talking to each other about how in all their years they'd never felt a roof act like that before, and even if I hadn't overheard it, they made sure to report it to the person who actually paid them.

The situation is this: the beams are all in one piece, which is why it hasn't collapsed, but the beams are all severely cracked to the point they can and do bend at the cracks.  Or, to put it more parsimoniously, they're buckling.  That's not a sustainable state.

Enough bends, and they'll break completely.  Likewise, if there's extra weight on them for a long enough period, that'll break them too.  Here's the thing: roof rakes exist to stop snow from piling up too heavy on a roof, but you can never rake all the snow off.  And then when rain comes and soaks into that snow things get much heavier, if it turns to ice, that extra weight sticks around.

That's why roof rakes are a preventative.  Once the damage is done, and in this case it has been done, they can't fix anything, and can't guarantee a collapse won't come.

I don't actually know if the roof will cave in this winter if I don't get it fixed.  I do know that if can't prove that I'm capable of dealing with the problem I'll lose the house.  When we were in talks about me being given the house so my SSI stopped having a bunch deducted from it for not paying an imaginary rent in full.  That, combined with getting taxes figured out and filed so my earned income is counted as earned would fix the root cause of the financial problems I've been having since forever.

Except, it may be too late for that.  Because the root cause being fixed will mean fuckall if I can't deal with the $9,624.63 and change I'm currently facing down.

-

Before I went back and added the stuff about the nature of the roof problem, this is how things ended:
(Stuff already said formatted as a quote)

Circa $10,000 That I need to somehow get raised and paid to appropriate places without ever actually touching or controlling the money itself.

The exact figure, less the cost of materials for repairs (because I don't know the exact cost of those) is $9,624.63 with the usual margin of error based on the fluctuating price of oil.  The materials should cost less than $375 so while what I need is circa $10,000, it's also under $10,000.

Pretty sure I'm fucked.

That's why I was thinking of holding off on reviving this place until after fundraising.  I don't want it to seem like I only remember Stealing Commas when I need money, and I currently need money.  Somehow.

-

* (↑) I still think "blog" sounds like something you throw up, and if people were gonna shorten "web log" to something "webl" would have been better.  Yeah, it's two syllables ("web-el"), but at least it doesn't sound like vomit.

I need help (also, what's been going on the last 2 1/4 years of my life)

I told myself that when I came back here it would be because I had something to share.  It wouldn't be another begging post.  I set deadlines for when I'd resume posting, in hopes of giving a sense of urgency that would let me produce something.  The deadlines wooshed passed, no posts were made.

I'm here to beg.  I don't have something creative to share.  This is exactly what I promised myself I wouldn't do.

Let's talk about the last two years.

First, though, as I said, I'm here to beg.

I'm here to beg for over $3,800 dollars.
(Sorry for the lack of an exact figure, the explanation for that is below.)

⁂

Donate button is in the upper righthand corner, but PayPal's coded it in a way that you can't just link to the donate page; you have to get there by pressing the button.  I think it's because they want everyone to have a PayPal account, so they make the thing that does require a PayPal account easier to pass around.  That's my PayPal.me page.  (http://paypal.me/christhecynic)

If you want to signal boost, that's probably the the link to share.  And sweet fuck could I ever use some signal boosting.  Another way to signal boost would be using this tweet, which is at the end of a thread that covers a tiny bit of what I'll share below.

The only upside of the "Donate" button here is that will take credit cards without requiring one to have a paypal account.  A warning about it, though.  If you click it, there's a checkbox that says "Make this a monthly donation".  Don't check that box.  Do not.  It does not work.  It has never worked.  I have no idea why they put it there when it never worked, and I certainly don't know why they haven't removed it.

For monthly donations, use my patreon.  (https://www.patreon.com/chris_the_cynic)   Don't expect actual content, though.  At least not stuff that's worth reading.  Most of the posts are of the form, "Hey, I haven't posted anything in two months, and here's why: my mental health sucks.  There might be some promising signs things will improve, but in the next 'Why I haven't posted anything' post, it'll turn out that they were false hope."

I vaguely remembered something about setting up a Ko-fi account, and sure enough I was able to find it.  Not sure when I set it up, but based on the description I used it must have been way back when I still had a camera.  I miss photography.  Anyway, I've reset my password and got back in, so if Ko-fi is better than Paypal.me for anyone, this is my Ko-fi page.  (https://ko-fi.com/christhecynic)  If you're gonna signal boost, maybe spread that link along with the paypal.me one.

⁂

Ok, so, the last two years.  Not long before my birthday, I'm pretty sure someone tried to kill me.  I can't prove it, and he had better opportunities that he passed up, but when he started choking me in a rage (before there wasn't rage, he was toying with me) I sincerely believe he intended to strangle me.

For those who don't know, "strangle" means kill.  Specifically, it means "choke to death".

I got back home.  A few days later was my birthday.  I made two posts.  One of them was called, "I survived another year," and given the context, I have to wonder if the experience was on my mind when I made that title.

If memory serves, my birthday was when I realized my cat was gone.  Or maybe my birthday was when I realized that my depression induced immobility (I seriously couldn't make myself leave the house) meant that I'd let enough time pass that the chances of finding her alive had dropped from "very slim" to "almost zero" without me so much as putting up a "missing cat" flyer or asking any of the neighbors if they'd seen her.

Houseguest was gone by then, having had a falling out with housemate that proved they were both . . . actually, one of them's died since then.  If there's any peace to be had, I'm gonna let 'em rest in it.

Out of everything--throwing out my valuables, running roughshod over my house and my life without any kind of permission, causing sewage to backup into my sleeping area, causing a rat infestation, out of every fucking thing--it was my cat that finally made me tell housemate she had to leave.

See, while I'd been away from the house (at the place of the attempted strangling) I'd left the cat and the dog in her care.  When she didn't see the cat, she says she assumed I must have taken the cat with me, which is something I'd literally never done, but that's not the problem.

She didn't call to check, she just made that assumption, decided that the cat not showing up for food or water or literally anything was therefore explained, and ignored her absence.  When I got back home, I was kind of distracted.  Thinking you came pretty close to being murdered will do that to you.

That's why it took a bit to realize that, since my return, the cat had been gone way too long.  She might disappear for a bit periodically, but not that long.  Then, come to find out that she'd been missing not just since my return, but since I left.  A rather longer, rather more worrying, amount of time.

Housemate had apparently decided she was never going to mention the cat to me.  Certainly didn't say a word when I returned without the cat she'd baselessly assumed I took with me when I left in spite of leaving it, like the dog (which she did care for) in her care.

Whenever it was that I realized that there was no fucking way I was going to find my frail old cat again, I crossed a line for the first time.  For longer than I can remember, I usually haven't cared if I lived or died.  I hadn't wanted to die, but neither did I want to live.  If some kind of eternal enchanted sleep from which you'd never wake up, but neither would you die in said sleep, were an option, that would appeal to me so fucking much.

But I'd never actively wanted to die.  Then, one day, because of my cat, or rather the lack of her, I did.

Then housemate tried to stop me from kicking her out by threatening to kill herself, (she later admitted she didn't mean it, which makes me feel better about thinking she was full of shit when she said it.)

So the cat.  The cat that was technically named "Pandora" but was really named "the Cat".  She was old.  She was frail.  I knew she could be gone at any time.  I worried whenever I let her out, but wanting to go out was the only time I saw her wanting anything anymore, and I wasn't gonna take that one last joy away from her.

I knew she might leave and never come back, but the way it happened, with me in another county and not even knowing until days after I got back because I was distracted by trauma, I wasn't prepared for that.

I'd had her since she was a kitten the size of my fist.  For the vast, vast majority of the time after my mom left this house to move in with her boyfriend, she was the only other mammal in the house, and since the gecko isn't something you can handle (it's apparently normal for the gecko species in question to have too much fear and too much bite to be a pet you can . . . pet) the cat was my only companion.

I wasn't prepared for her to disappear without a trace without me noticing.  I wasn't prepared for wondering if she really never showed up after I left, or housemate just wasn't attentive enough to see if she was waiting outside and needed to be let in.  I wasn't prepared to wonder if she disappeared because she chose to as dying animals sometimes do, because of injury or attack, or because she suddenly found that the doors to my house no longer opened for her.

I wasn't prepared for the lack of closure.

⁂

In late August, housemate had found both a job and a place she could afford to stay with the pay from that job.  When she first tried to get a job after moving into my house, the lockdown kicked in just before her first day of work.  The whole time she was here, she was staying rent free.  Houseguest too.

I guess her finally being able to find a job was probably an early sign that, while COVID-19 was in full swing, the US wasn't going to fight it, and we've certainly surrendered to it in the years since.

September marked the return to me being the only human living here.  September also marked when the rat problem drew institutional notice.

⁂

Can't remember what I've said here, and I'm not gonna check, but when housemate using paper towels in lieu of toilet paper caused sewage to back up into my house (and my personal sleeping area) the problem was such that a plumber needed to put a giant machine in a very specific place.  That place was the absolute least accessible part of my house.

Furniture that had been stored in the basement for years or decades needed to be moved, and housemate thought it was a three person job.  That's why houseguest originally came.  Then he got stranded by the lockdown.  Then he decided he liked it here and wanted to stay.  Then things went wrong.

But originally he came to help move furniture in the basement.  On the day he arrived I was in a really bad place.  I spent the entire day sitting on the couch because I lacked the energy to stand up.  I heard housemate and houseguest "cleaning" my kitchen, which is not moving furniture in the basement, but was helpless to do anything about it.

They threw out everything.  My blender.  My toaster oven.  A different kind of oven that I always used to cook meat (especially steak) that I don't know the technical term for.  The newer better phone I was planning to replace my crap corded phone with.  Some of my jewelry.  Family photos.  $200 dollars in savings bonds belonging to my sister.  Pots.  Pans.

Everything.

The kitchen looked clean afterward, yes.  It also looked empty.  I couldn't cook, because I no longer had cookware.

The good news was that it wasn't trash day.  Or, I suppose, the day before trash day.  The bad news was that they mixed the "trash" with the actual trash.  And worst still, they'd mixed stuff I could not and cannot afford to replace with food waste.

They would repeat this process for various rooms, each time claiming that they'd learned their lesson and wouldn't pull the same shit again.  I'm conflict averse enough that I spent much of the time they were living here rent free hiding from them.  I didn't have the fight in me to stop them from doing things I knew they'd fuck up badly.

In fact, when it comes to having fight in me, I seem to have two settings: doormat and . . . not throwing punches, but dangerously close.  Physical.  The one time I crossed out of doormat territory while both of them were here had me grabbing onto houseguest and shoving him against a wall.  It stopped at that, but that just means I was the only one to lay hands.

Regardless, everything, no matter how useful or valuable, in a given room gets bagged up as trash, and mixed with trash, and sometimes that actual trash is food waste.

I spent the rest of the year digging through bags of "trash" separating the stuff that really was trash from the much larger category of, "I've been suffering for X months because I couldn't find this, thank God it didn't make it into the stuff put out for weekly pickup!"

This was not a fast process, and depression didn't make it any faster.  And, again, food waste.

⁂

At the same time, the lockdown forced the city rats, used to bountiful feeding from now-empty restaurant dumpsters, to branch out and look for new feeding grounds.  Possibly exacerbating the problem was an old church, derelict for years, being demolished without any attempt to check if it had become a vermin nest, or exterminate any vermin that might have infested it.

I don't think I made the connection to the church the last time I posted here, a neighbor brought it up rather later as I recall, so I probably didn't mention that.  Then again, we don't know for sure that it was related to the neighborhood's sudden rat problem.

What I do know is that the various rats seeking new food and shelter found a fucking banquet laid out for them in the "trash" I had yet to go through.  It would be nice to say that my garage became their new nesting grounds, but that would ignore something that's critically important.

I've always made a distinction between a clean mess and . . . the other kind of mess.

A clean mess is a bunch of completely dry cardboard boxes in an unruly heap.  A clean mess is when a stack of papers gets knocked over.  A clean mess is a floor strewn with toys.  A clean mess is when you take the dishes and silverware and whatnot out of the dish washer, make sure they're clean, but don't get them put back into drawers and cabinets and such.

An unclean mess?  It's what happens when you don't clear the table after eating.  It's what happens when you don't wash the dishes, it's what happens when you leave food or other organic material around where it can decay, molder, form new and different species previously unknown to science, and/or be eaten by rats.

Having colonized my garage, the rats sent out expeditions to nearby areas of interest, my house being the closest.  Once upon a time they would have found no loose food.  With housemate and houseguest living here, they found no end to food.  Seriously, no end.

No matter how many times I told them top stop leaving food out because we could literally hear the rats chewing through my walls so stop feeding the rats, housemate and houseguest kept on leaving food out, and the rats, being both cunning and opportunistic, kept eating it.  Sure, on any given day they might eat all of it, but the next day housemate and houseguest would leave them more.

They're not just cunning and opportunistic.  They're not just capable of chewing straight through your walls.  They're also stubborn and tenacious.

Once they've found a feeding ground, they aren't willing to give it up just because the previously unending food finally stops.  They'll start experimenting.  They'll chew through anything, in hopes there might be food in it.

They even got into the rat poison I got but then decided against using (didn't want a dead rat decomposing inside one of my walls) but also shampoo, and just . . . everything.

I'd only ever dealt with mice before.

So come September, housemate and houseguest were gone, and with them the supply of daily food that had originally drawn the rats into the house, but the rats had already started experimenting with containers that, while not obviously food related, weren't rat proof (they're a curious lot), and when their usual in-house food supply got cut off, that kicked into high gear.

Containers that had kept the rats out for months were suddenly being proven woefully non-rat-proof as the rats upped their game.

And outside, I still hadn't gone through all of the "trash" because depression and stress, and living with two people who made me want to just disappear while I was inside my own house (not because they were malicious, but just because personalities didn't mesh at all.)

And then the city came to call.

⁂

The rat guy showed up, explained he was from the city investigating reports of a rat haven, and asked me to show him around.  It didn't take him long to (correctly) identify my property as a rat haven.

I would later learn that he took this as license to stop investigating all reports of rats anywhere near me, on the assumption that they had to be coming from my property and my property alone.  It's possible that that was true, I have no way of knowing.

My experience with them suggests that they'll set up a new colony, if circumstances permit, no matter how close the old colony is, so in the area the rat guy decided he never had to look into there could have been dozens of colonies, but again, I have no way of knowing.

Regardless, the rat guy, the city public health official, had arrived, and so began a new chapter in my life.

See, a rat haven is a public health hazard because rats carry diseases, and as a result, it's illegal to be a rat haven.  You could be fined, your property could be condemned, the whole place could even be razed if they determined it was bad enough to justify it.  (After all, if a building is declared unlivable and condemned, what's the point of leaving it standing?)

So this is what would happen, and it took me way, way too long to recognize the pattern.

The rat guy would come, and every time after the first time he would berate me, threaten me, and lie to me.  I won't be able to remember every lie, but the only one that really matters is the ultimatum.  Every time he would give a deadline, and if I didn't have things solved to his satisfaction by the deadline, terrible things would happen.

He would go all out to frighten me, and he would scare me so much that I would shut the fuck down and be unable to do anything.  Time would pass, I'd start to become more functional again, and I'd get to work on fixing the the problem.  Because of the time that had passed, it'd become clear that I couldn't get things done by the deadline.

I'd have to divide my time between trying to fix the problem and trying to contact him asking for an extension.  As the deadline grew closer, less and less time would be devoted to fixing the the problem, because it became clearer and clearer that getting it done by the deadline was an impossible task.  I needed some kind of extension or accommodation, or something or all of the work I'd done would be for nothing.

He'd ignore emails and phone calls, it's only now that I realize I never tried sending a physical letter.  He wouldn't just refuse to respond to any attempt from me to contact him, but also any attempt from my mother, who's the actual property owner.

The deadline would come.  I wouldn't hear a word.

Had he assessed the state of property without telling me?  Had things progressed to the next level?  Did I get an extension and the notice just never made it to me?  Was I in some kind of limbo?  What the fucking fuck?

I'd be in outright panic, because the things he threatened me with didn't actually require I be notified in advance.  To prevent them, I needed to convince him I'd made enough progress, or completely fixed X or Y part of the problem, but if I didn't convince him, then the bad shit that was happening was supposed to kick in automatically.

Well, if I didn't even see him, then I surely couldn't have convinced him, so as I continued to hear nothing, I'd just go through a process of catastrophizing that I'm not sure a person without depression, anxiety, and so forth can truly understand.

Obviously literally no time was spent trying to solve the rat problem.  It was too late.  I had to figure out some way to do some sort of administrative magic to undo things that were supposedly already in motion and retroactively get the time I was allowed extended.  And my point of contact wasn't answering his phone calls or checking his email.

At one point I got worried that maybe something had happened to the rat guy.  He was the city public health official.  A search of his name said that he was part of the city's team for responding to the pandemic.  Maybe he'd gotten COVID-19.  What if I was making all of these attempts to contact someone who was in the hospital, or something.  Wouldn't that be terrible?

I tried reaching out to a co-worker of his to see if they could tell me if he was ok.  The co-worker ignored me too.

Eventually either the realization that the ultimatum hadn't come to pass or fatalism would set in.  Either, "I guess, maybe, just this once, no news really is good news," or, "Well, if I'm fucked I'm fucked, might as well keep doing what I was doing," because the simple truth of the matter was I was planning on fixing the rat problem before the rat guy even showed up.  Not like I wanted my house to be rat infested.

So I'd get to work, and it'd take a while to get into a flow of it, like it always did, and my depression would slow me down, but I'd start making some real progress.  It'd be clear that if I could just keep this up, I'd definitely hit this or that major milestone soon.

And then the rat guy would show up, unannounced, and repeat the process.  He'd give me another completely fake ultimatum, I'd believe every fucking word, and he'd leave me too terrified to do anything.

This process would repeat, I don't know how many times, until January 2021.  Or maybe early February.

But during this time, something more important happened.

⁂

My mother, as mentioned, is the home owner.  I pay all the expenses on the property, but I don't own it, she does, and so she and I were obviously talking about someone from the city threatening terrible repercussions vis a vis the property she owns.

At some point, she started coming down to physically help me with the work.  We'd spend days together undoing the damage housemate and houseguest had caused.  It's so quick to throw everything you can grab into a bag, it's a lot slower to sort it all out.

The first thing you have to is dump it the fuck out.  Not sure how long it took me to realize this, but trying to go through the bag from top to bottom with the stuff still in the bag is the slowest possible way to approach the problem.

And we worked things out as we went.  And eventually we had a system.  And when rat guy and his deadlines weren't preventing us from working on the problem, we were making progress at breakneck speed.

We were working outside, we had a sort of makeshift giant table set up so the bags could be dumped for easy sorting without needing anyone to be bending down or crouched on the ground or what have you, and actual trash was being separated from recyclables from stuff I'd been looking for for months and it was . . . good.

It was good.  Human contact that wasn't stressing me the fuck out, someone who loved me within arm's reach, working outdoors in a good season for it.  The cooperation helped me from falling into a complete depressive slump.  My mental health might make some days slower, but with my mom there working with me it didn't grind to a halt.

My garage, which had been filled with fucking bags upon bags was getting cleared out, and we were talking about when we'd finish it and move onto the house.

The rare things that housemate and houseguest had realized they shouldn't throw out were in jumbled unsorted piles in the basement, and they were where we'd potentially find the most useful things that had gone missing, or at least, the most useful things that had gone missing that we hadn't already found.

For all of the progress we were making, none of it was making my life in the house any better, but the garage had to come first, because the food waste still mixed in was the biggest thing keeping the rats around.

There was a couch way in the back of the garage that had been there since I was a child.  I can vaguely remember using it when it was still in the house, but I can't attach anything else to those memories.  Rats had visibly been nesting in it.  It was too big to take to the dump in my mom's vehicle, so we were gonna rent a truck.

That was gonna be the day we took all of the "definitely trash, but unable to be thrown out the usual way" stuff away.  It was gonna be a major milestone, and after it happened there'd be only a few more things to finish up in the garage, and then we could move on to the house.

The day came, my mom had called and told me she was on her way.

Then she called again.

⁂

I can't remember if it was the police or Child Protective Services that called her, but she'd been told my sister had been sent to the psyche ward, and she would have to drive up and take in my sister's kids.

The people at the psyche ward wanted to have my sister committed, by my sister won the hearing that would have committed her, and so she only spent a week in the psyche ward.  She never got custody of her children back.

My sister blames my mother.

At first my mom was taking care of three children, at her age, she and her boyfriend couldn't handle that, and my sister's children were split up.  Since then, my mother has cared for the eldest, while the other two have been outside our family.

With a child to look after, my mom no longer had time to come down and help me deal with the situation at the house.

Just like that, my only source of human contact disappeared.

⁂

That was, if I'm not getting my months confused, late November 2020, meaning the cycles of rat guy terrifying me into being unable to do anything would continue for a few months more.

That didn't help, but . . . I think it's the only source of human contact thing that's the bigger deal.

The work my mother and I had done was enough for the rat population to dwindle, the rat guy disappeared from my life.  We were into 2021, and . . . only source of human contact had disappeared.

Also, at some point in there, I got sick.  COVID-19 symptoms, but without the worry I'd give it to my mother, and without anyone else I was in contact with, I couldn't muster the motivation to get tested.

That's not important.  What's important is that when I stopped having that human contact, it was like the bottom dropped out, my depression got so much worse, and I just stopped.

All this time later, and the work my mother and I were going to do in the house hasn't been done.  So much stuff, important stuff without which I can't fully utilize my house and, especially, my kitchen, has yet to be found.  The whole basement is basically a "no go; too much clutter" area.  Thank God they didn't put any food waste down there.

But that's the present, back to early 2021.  Because there was a . . . let's call it an alternate source of human contact for a bit.

⁂

For a time in early 2021, my sister and her boyfriend were camped out in her van in my driveway.  My anxiety was at the highest level it's ever been, basically non-stop.

At some point, they had a disagreement, and my sister decided she didn't want to be outside.  She decided to clean up while she was in here.

I probably don't need to explain why that very concept triggers my anxiety at this point.  That, ultimately, wasn't what led to the breaking point.  It was the noise.  Sometimes, I'm hypersensitive to sound.  Every noise was so overpowering it was like a physical attack.  It hurt.  She wouldn't stop.

Two modes: doormat; physical.

She wouldn't stop.  It was hurting me.

She was pretty close to the front door, going through some stuff the dog had knocked over in the hallway it opens up to.  I pushed and pulled her out of my house.  I didn't know what to do.

Later on, I couldn't tell you how long--a day, a week, a month?  Probably not a month--she was in my house again, and refused to leave again, and said that if I touched her she'd call the cops.  Quite possibly reasonable.  I don't know if pushing and pulling constitutes a crime, but it's definitely getting physical, and that's not a good way to solve problems.

I found a third mode: calling the cops.  (Credit to my sister for giving me the idea.)

Terrified, because I was inviting people with guns into a potentially volatile situation, but calling the cops none the less because I didn't know what else to do.

They got her to leave, thankfully without any violence.

I think it was the next day she showed up and acted like nothing had happened.

The cops said you need to be firm, I'm not good at that, and just not let the person back in, because without a, "You're not allowed here," limit being continually enforced, sooner or later, the person will be there and refusing to leave again.

I'm not good at being firm, and ACAB is definitely a thing, but being able to say, "The cops told me not to let you back here," made things easier.

Thus ended my sister camped out in her van in my driveway.  (Sometimes with her boyfriend, sometimes not.)

⁂

As 2021 dragged on, and things involving custody of my sister's children got increasingly heated, my depression and anxiety worsened, and I kept on getting drawn into things, and every time my phone rang it felt like an attack, and I dreaded hearing what the message might be (I screen my phone calls) and when the answering machine filled up, instead of clearing it off or picking up without screening, I just left it full, and let it ring until the person on the other end gave up.

I also stopped checking my mail.  I'd bring it in the house so the box didn't get full, and then drop it in a pile somewhere without even checking who it was from, much less opening it.

This led to me missing what would have been my first dentist appointment in years.  This cost me my food supplement.

⁂

As of January 2022, I haven't been on food stamps.  It took me so long to try to deal with it that they said it was impossible to reinstate, and I'd need to reapply.  I tried.  In April.  I haven't heard back at all.  Naturally, I should call them.  Find out what's wrong.  Fix the problem, stop spending $200 I don't have on food each month when there's a (potential) solution just a phone call away.

That is not how I have spent my year.  I've spent my year letting my depression lead to me getting so undernourished, dehydrated, and/or sleep deprived that I can't function.  Undernourishment is the most expensive one.

There comes a point where you don't have energy to prepare food, meaning even if you have food you can't use it unless it's the right kind of food (grab and eat, think a granola bar or a cookie.)  I think there was an entire month where I ate granola bars almost exclusively, but eventually you don't have grab and eat food, and that's where the expense comes in.

If you don't have the energy to prepare food due to lack of calories, and the only food you have in the house is food that needs to be prepared before it can be eaten, then you need prepared food delivered, and enough of it that you'll have the energy needed to make use of the food you do have.

That can cost in the realm of half a month of store bought food.  Needing to do it multiple times?  It adds up.

⁂

Someone who was reading in 2020 and has a good memory might notice that I left out the part where my dog got hit by a car in March of 2020.

She's doing fine.  She's been doing fine.  All she needed was to be kept stable, have a blood transfusion, and have her punctured lung fixed, and she was basically back to normal.  As soon as the medications she'd been put on wore off, she was completely back to normal.

When Chloe got back from the emergency vet, completely recovered except for medication induced . . . drowsiness, I think it was, the sense of urgency--the thing that had let me fundraise in spite of my depression-- disappeared.

I stopped trying.

Living on public assistance is always living near the edge, one major disruption away from complete financial catastrophe.  Never fully dealing with the debt that came from paying for Chloe's life to be saved?  That put me closer to the edge.

I'm not sure how much closer, but there have definitely been disruptions causing catastrophes causing me to go begging, but they all sort of pale in comparison to the big ones I'm facing now.

⁂

The lack of my food supplement, the fact that when I managed to get that dentist appointment rescheduled I didn't take into account the effect of the lack of my food supplement.

Briefly, fixing my teeth is not covered even though the holes in them are rather large, and I always knew I'd need to fundraise to pay for it, but I didn't really think about what it would mean to be doing that in the middle of other financial problems.  I just thought that I'd finally get my teeth fixed.  In fact, it's only the teeth on the right side that have been fixed so far, but sweet fuck did that cost a lot.

Ok, so, lack of food supplement for 11 months now, repeatedly needing to do the expensive shit that is buying emergency "Undernourishment has left me with too little energy to make food, so I need stuff that's already made delivered to my door" food, dentistry, having to pay for all of this shit on credit cards, interest, late fees, interest on late fees, and Vladimir Putin waging a genocidal war in Ukraine.

Because of that last one, heating oil costs more than twice as much as it normally would.  The weather grows cold, my tank isn't on the verge of running out right this second, but it is close to empty.

I've had my phone, internet, and power cut multiple times for non-payment.  (Only ever one at a time, mind.)  Twice I've had someone come to my door to say, "I'm here to disconnect your water, if you don't want me to, you should pay now."

A month ago, I tried to work out what it would take to get me back to living right on the edge of disaster, instead of living in a state of ongoing . . . whatever the fuck you call this.   The very drawn out early stages of a disaster in progress.

I came up with $2,511.12.  I was wrong.  I didn't take into account heating oil, and also that tally comes with the sort of rosy idea that I would have gotten my food supplement back right then, whereas I spent the past month barely functional, certainly not reaching out and solving problems.

When I say I didn't take into account heating oil, I don't mean the increase in the price, I mean even if I had raised that much (I raised less than a fifth) I'd have had nothing set aside for heating oil.

So, what I didn't raise then plus heating oil is circa $3,500, but that assumed I'd have my food supplement back, where I actually used some of what I did raise for food instead of digging myself out of the hole, and I had another starvation-mode episode, putting it to circa $3,800.  (I bought more than a normal month's worth of food in hopes of avoiding a future starvation-mode episode.)

The reason for the "circa" is that the price of heating oil fluctuates by the day.  There's also some additional things but . . .

But let me tell you about the day I bought food.

⁂

After a while of having trouble getting this prescription or that authorized or filled, I finally had all of my medications and was taking them and they seemed to be working.  I finally had appointments related to sleep apnea set up, and treating that could be the missing piece that finally lets me break through from, "As good as I can ever get, but still worse than I should be," to, "Actually fucking normal, like a mentally healthy person would be."

I had a talk therapist again, and had just finished a session with him that was cementing my belief he was gonna work out really well for me.  I was back in contact with my primary care physician, and had just gotten a blood pressure problem sorted out with minimal difficulty.  All signs were positive, and it seemed like all I had to do was drink some water and go to sleep at a reasonable hour, and I'd be ready to finally make some phone calls and sort out the food supplement issue.

There may have been other signs too.

AND I bought a bunch of food with a specific eye toward making sure there was enough grab and eat stuff to avoid another starvation mode thing.

Things really seemed to be looking up, and I had hope.

Then the payment didn't go through.  Tried it a couple times because I was told the machine was finicky.  Still declined.  Tried a different card.  Didn't work.  Card three failed because I hadn't noticed that it was expired and a new one was already in a pile of mail in my house waiting to be activated.

Card four worked.

So after I get home, and I get the stuff that needs to be refrigerated or frozen put away, I hopped onto my computer to figure out what was up with that shit.  And it turned out that it wasn't actually . . .  I should have seen it coming.  I knew that I raised less than one fifth of what I needed, and the fact I was barely functional for a month didn't mean my financial problems had taken a vacation.

Things were bad.  Things were very bad, but they weren't necessarily unexpectedly bad.  I had come up more than $2,000 short of my "avoid catastrophe" price tag, so where did I think things were going to be a month down the line?

I started doing a new tally.  I remembered to include heating oil this time.  I added in the cost of dealing with the starvation mode thing.  I added in what buying food for November had taken away from paying of what I'd needed back in October.  I hit $3,800 plus or minus, depending on the fluctuations in the price of heating oil.

When I'd bought food, I'd also stocked up on some non-food supplies that were well overdue, the cost was definitely more than the fluctuations in in the price of heating oil, but how much more?

I stopped.  I couldn't take it anymore.  I didn't want to know how close to $4,000 it was.  Fuck's sake, I couldn't even raise $500 when I went for $2,511.12 a month ago.

What did it matter what the exact tally was, when there was no hope regardless?

So I never did check the price of those last things.  I just know that they're enough to turn "$3,800 plus or minus" into "over $3,800."  How much over?  I don't even want to know.

Doing that tally took me from the most hopeful I've been in . . . years, probably, to depressed to the point of being just above non-functional.

And that's where things stand.

Plus $64 because Capital One, a card I don't think I've used in a year, charged me a membership fee, and I didn't notice until after the payment was due, so then they charged a late fee on the membership fee.  Paid it off so I won't have to worry about interest on that and another late fee come December.

So that card's completely empty, but if things keep going the way they're going, I'm gonna fill it up too, because I'm in so deep that my debt can only grow.

And the price to get to a point where that's not true anymore?  $3,800 dollars.

Over $3,800 dollars.

For a writer who hasn't published a chapter in over two years, and a would-be amateur photographer with no camera.  I don't see a way out of this, which is why--even though I promised myself that when I finally returned to this place it wouldn't be to beg--I'm here begging.