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.

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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.)

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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.

I survived another year (It's my birthday)

I didn't mean to go dark for over three months.  Sorry about that.

The best way I have to describe how things are right now is that it's been like trying not to drown.  Every day is a struggle to keep my head above water, and if I inhale . . . well, that's about as good as it gets.  Keeping up with anything?  Keeping in touch with anyone?  That's beyond me.

I try to eat, I try to drink, I try to sleep.  Sometimes I even succeed.  Sleep is my favorite.  I rarely remember any dreams, so it's just the comforting embrace of darkness.  Nothing hurts; nothing is bad.  It's like I don't exist.

Then I wake up, and the world is just as bad as it ever was, but now I'm a bit older and have gone a bit longer without accomplishing anything.

Anyway, as of today I'm old enough to legally serve as President of the United States.

-

I have some stuff I'm going to bring over here to share.  Think it's all Equestria Girls stuff.

I did finally start trying to make let's plays, but my computer needs repair.  I guess the heat sink being improperly attached is a known issue.  One hopes that the resulting overheating hasn't damaged anything else.  Contacting tech support is, in theory, easy.  In practice . . . depression sucks.

-

I've been meaning to make a list of things that would be useful and/or nice.

Mostly because, "Here are things you might not be using that I could use," isn't asking for money, and I hate asking for money, even though I do need it.  (A lot of it, in fact.)  After the dog got hit by a car, my high interest debt increased by nearly $4,000 dollars and the amount I owe my mother broke $10,000.  That was in late March.  Things are worse now, but I don't have exact figures for how much so off the top of my head.

So, my birthday seems like as good a time as any to talk about stuff I want or need on the off chance someone might give me something.  I'm going to follow this up with a post to that effect.

Comment Dump of updates posted elsewhere, because I haven't finished the recap plus update that was supposed to be posted here

First, here's the last thing posted here to talk about the state of things:

• Comment Dump: The past month and a week and a day

That that was also a comment dump probably says something about where I am when it comes to actually writing things.

(Bear in mind that what follows involves stuff taken from three different places.  There is plenty of duplication herein.)

Wondrously Hyperlinked Table of Contents:

• February 15th -- Disqus Comment (things done that week)
• February 16th -- Disqus Comment (games and hopes)
• February 20th -- Disqus Comment (plumbing and problems with it)
• February 25th -- On a Discord Server ("cleaning" begins)
• February 28th -- Disqus Comment (things done that week)
• February 28th -- Fimfiction Blog Post (mental health, story progress)
• February 28th -- On a Discord Server (stuff that doesn't belong in stoves)
• February 29th -- On a Discord Server (progress toward plumbing fix)
• February 29th -- On a Discord Server (cookies, expectations)
• March  1st -- On a Discord Server (plumbing, cash, communication)
• March  2nd -- Patreon Post (Recap, needing to dig stuff out of trash, so on)
• March  5th -- On a Discord Server (photos in the trash, my dead uncle)
• March  5th -- On a Discord Server (back from the wake, open caskets, memory)
• March  6th -- Disqus Comment (why there's a dog, dealing with the ongoing "cleaning")
• March  7th -- On a Discord Server (spreading misery never helps)
• March 13th -- On a Discord Server (how people prepare for pandemics)
• March 13th -- On a Discord Server (rain, proper packing of trash)
• March 13th -- Disqus Comment (rain, attempting to rescue stuff, general state of things)

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February 15th (↑) -- Disqus Comment.  Link to original context.

I collected the comments I made in open threads here about how I've been doing and what's been going on into a post at Stealing Commas.

I made a post to answer the question of if there's anything people can do to help me. I wish it didn't boil down to "Here are multiple ways you can spend money." Unfortunately, that's the state of things. I need to deal with serious financial problems, and I need fiction to serve as both escape and inspiration, and the only fiction that's working for me right now is not even close to free.

I also need calories, but I feel like telling people on the internet "You could have pizza delivered to me"* is courting logistical catastrophe.

* Delivery is great when you lack the energy to do much of anything, and the Portland Pie Company makes fantastic pizza.

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February 16th (↑) -- Disqus Comment.  Link to original context.

As noted somewhere or other, primary computer is working again.

If I can pull myself together enough to make the attempt, I might go back to the "Maybe I could do let's plays" idea I was considering before primary computer stopped working. The idea being that I'd really like to be producing something (I feel so very useless and worthless when I'm not) and taking a break from myself and the real world by playing games is something that I'm doing anyway, since it makes life bearable.

Whether or not I manage to do that, I am at least able to play games again.

Yesterday I reinstalled and played a game called AER: Memories of Old it's really good. In particular, the flying is . . . it's probably not perfect, because nothing ever is, but it's good enough that I can't see any way to improve upon it. It's exactly what you want from the bird side of a game where you can turn into a bird.

I spent a good long while yesterday just flying. I did save the world at some point (because: why not?) but I spent significantly more flying for flying's sake. Zipping through trees, skimming along clouds, occasionally going through waterfalls or holes in the floating islands.

So, yeah, I totally recommend that.

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February 20th (↑) -- Disqus Comment.  Link to original context.

[I've never heard anyone ask for a plumbing content note, but given that we're talking about shit here, I figured people might want a warning. This is that warning.]

There's a plumbing problem in my house. It's almost certainly a clog caused by the fact that, when toilet paper ran out, my housemate used paper towels. This is nothing against my housemate, by the way, I didn't know either.

It's kind of obvious in retrospect: paper towels are made so you can clean up, sometimes with scrubbing, things that are wet. That is to say, they are specifically designed to not dissolve in water. Toilet paper is designed to dissolve in water, and plumbing systems rely upon that fact. Substituting paper towels for toilet paper might work once or twice (though I wouldn't recommend testing that, because it also might not) but done at any length it will result in disaster.

There already was a problem because of that. I managed to fix it (it was not fun) but my current theory is that while I fixed the immediate problem, I didn't get everything out. I mean, I was fishing stuff out with an unwrapped coat hanger, not any kind of plumbing tool, so it's pretty reasonable to assume my results weren't perfect.

Pause to note something. First, I actually have asthma, but it's minor exercise induced asthma. So when I talk about not being able to breathe, unless it's something that happened during or immediately after exertion, it's not a matter of asthma.

That wasn't the thing to note, I just wanted to have that disclaimer before I noted the something in question. My breathing is less than ideal when confronted with smells or fumes of a certain character. It feels like the two are linked, but I couldn't go into any great detail about the feeling.

For fumes it tends to be at a far lower level. The reason I stay in the car at a gas station is to avoid discomfort (sometimes silent, sometimes involving lots of coughing) for sufficiently large smells, it's on another level. (This feels like a difference of degree rather than quality, as noted.)

Certain types of shit, certain types of rot, and (possibly) urine produce the strongest reaction. It's kind of like a gag reflex, but at the same very much not like a gag reflex. I lack the words (or perhaps the points of reference) to describe it properly. The smell hits me and I can't breathe. I've never tested how long the inability to breathe lasts for. I remove myself from the smell, breathe, and (if necessary) return and repeat.

So, for example, when it falls on me to change diapers, I have to do it in stages.

Fishing paper towels out of your sewer pipe smells a lot like changing diapers, but there's no cute child, and there's no readily apparent limit. One knows that it can't go on forever, but until you actually reach the point where you're not finding more, there's no end in sight.

So, like I said, fixing the original problem was not a pleasant process. Definitely not something I had any desire to repeat.

My best guess on what happened is that, while I got a lot of stuff out (and things flowed properly again), I didn't get everything, and what remained eventually collected together to form a new clog. I don't know whether or not that's true, but it's my best guess.

Originally I was going to try to fix the current problem myself, but two things happened. One is that I couldn't bring myself to even start the attempt. Why? See above. I may not have known what would be involved in full, but I know the smell and how my body reacts to it. The other is that if I'm right about what happened, the present problem is because I wasn't thorough enough the first time; who's to say that I would be this time?

So I got a professional, which wasn't easy because severe depression does not, for me, mix well with phones.

Professional came today, professional did what he could, turns out the current clog is in a bad place. It's outside the house. I was afraid that might be the case. It's far enough outside the house that special tools need to be used. Even though the clog is almost certainly composed of paper towels, we're talking the kinds of tools they'd use for if a tree were growing through the pipe.

(I'm not actually sure if this is because such tools are the only ones he has that are that long, company policy, or some regulation or other. Just that the guy either can't do it, or isn't allowed to do it, without breaking out those tools.)

This in itself isn't a terribly big problem. The guy showed up in a big company truck that had those tools and doubtless many more. The problem is that the sewer / main drain pipe,* by a combination of design and necessity, is in the least well traveled corner of the basement. The basement that is used for storage.

While the space available is more than enough to fix most potential plumbing problems, the equipment needed to fix this one needs more space than currently available. (And it also needs to get there.) Again: the least well traveled corner of a basement being used, primarily, for storage.

So, in closing, fuck.

* I'm not sure which is the correct terminology, but I've definitely heard both. "Sewer" because it's the one and only pipe in the house that connects to the sewer, "main drain" because it's what all the other drain pipes drain into.

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February 25th (↑) -- On a Discord Server

Not eating enough finally caught up to me.  I can barely hold my head up, I doubt I could stand for long.  Sitting on the couch, trying to keep my eyes open, but it isn't a "sleepy" kind of tired.  I just don't have any energy.

Yesterday my sister's sorta-boyfriend came to help clear the space the plumber needs to work in the basement.

He and housemate, who was my sister's friend before my sister turned on her and became outrageously emotionally abusive, are currently cleaning my kitchen, which is not in the basement.

The only reason housemate is my housemate is that she had literally no place else to go, and the choice of "become homeless or keep getting abused" wasn't fair, so I offered my home.  I don't like having other people in my house, but housemate kept to herself so it was ok.

If I had the energy (and I managed to cope with dealing with people) I'd be in the kitchen, and almost certainly telling them not to fucking do half of the things they're doing.  I can hear them talking and working (and maybe I'm misinterpreting, but), it definitely sounds like why I don't ever accept offers of help cleaning: no one ever does what the fuck you tell them.

They do what they think is best for you.  They do what's easy or obvious.  They operate on a combination of, "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission," and, "She thinks she doesn't want this, but she'll thank me in the end."

-

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for my kitchen to be clean, and it will be, but either my future is going to involve digging through fucking garbage bags (which will, of course, be mostly filled with actual garbage) or I'm going to lose stuff I don't want to lose.

-

If people could be trusted to just do what I ask them to do, my house would have been cleaned ages ago because I wouldn't be constantly turning away help.  With my depression how it is, though, its possible that I never would have gotten it done anyway.  It's been three years since things got bad, two since things got worse, and . . . I don't know, eight or nine months since things got even worse than that.

So, anyway, that's going on.  On the one hand, nice people are being helpful.  On the other hand, it's incredibly stressful.

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February 28th (↑) -- Disqus Comment.  Link to original context.

I wrote a thing. Said thing being a conversation (and accompanying thoughts) in the Equestria Girls 'verse that touches on moons as a unit of measure (in light of the difference between a sidereal month and a synodic month), the smell of old books, probability, question begging, and hastily made cover stories for other dimensional duplicates.

I posted three things at Patreon, but if you can read them you probably already got automatic email notifications. Still, here's a list.

First we had my proposed remake of the game The Last of Us (now with 100% less killing off of teenage lesbians.)

Second is something that's free to everyone, but that's mostly because it's been freely available at other places for positively ages. It's the first chapter of an Equestria Girls story called Fractured Friendship. I mostly posted it so that there would be on-Patreon context for the last thing.

Finally there was a fragment of Fractured Friendship that will eventually be the beginning of Chapter 2. Not sure when exactly that will happen, since I've been trying to write the rest of chapter two for a very long time and had no progress.

The three things at Patreon are old things I dug up rather than any kind of recent writing.

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Februrary 28th -- Fimfiction Blog Post.  Link to original context.

Still Alive (and an update on where various stories stand) 

Figured that I'd check in. Things are bad. Things have always been bad. Things had already been notably bad for six months before I became a member here. They've only gotten worse since then.

At this point the best I can say about where I'm at is, "I'm not suicidal yet," which isn't nearly as positive as it sounds because in days gone by I would have never imagined it might be necessary to tack a "yet" onto the end of the sentence, and now I feel it is.

Here's a rundown of where my stories stand:

Fractured Friendship
⊙ 971 words have been written for Chapter 2
⊙ 11,727 18,010 words have been written for later chapters
᠎ ᠎ ᠎ ᠎ (That figure is inflated because some are redundant while others are superfluous.)

A New Path Forward
⊙ 0 words have been written for Chapter 3
⊙ 1,702 words have been written for Chapter 5
⊙ 287 words of bare dialogue have been written for a yet to be determined later chapter
⊙ 813 words from a different yet to be determined chapter have been written

From the Ashes
⊙ 104 words have been written for Chapter 1. (The only published chapter is the prologue.)
⊙ 1,389 words have been written for Chapter 2 or 3 (won't be sure which until I get there.)
⊙ 5,760 words have been written for another chapter, I know not which.
⊙ 526 words have been written that likely belong in one or both of the previously mentioned chapters.

Down the Memory Hole
⊙ 0 words have been written for Chapter 2.
⊙ 331 words have been written for a later installment. (Late enough to be circa the climax)

Those are the in progress stories that have words actually written instead of just plans in my head.

Stories I'm not actually writing (including eleventy billion alternate Anon-a-Miss ideas)
⊙ 45,992 words have been written.

- - - - - ❋ ❋ ❋ - - - - -

Let's close with a random snippet from the story I didn't actually end up writing for the second Imposing Sovereigns contest:

“Equestria was almost conquered, twice, by a creature whose sole power was the ability to steal magic.”

“Ok, but Equestria is almost conquered all the time,” Sci-Twi said. “After the first eight times, it stops sounding impressive.”

“Your incredibly rude and tasteless point is well made,” Celestia said.

“Thank you.”

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February 28th (↑) -- On a Discord Server

I should be asleep, but I decided that eating was important and set out to make myself a pizza.

It never occurred to me to check to see if someone might have placed meltable plastic in my oven.  It never occurred to me to check to see if someone had placed stuff that doesn't belong in an oven in my oven in general.

Through the beauty of preheating I have destroyed one or more things, I know not what.  In the morning, when said things have had a chance to cool down, I shall inspect the damage.  No pizza tonight.

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February 29th (↑) -- On a Discord Server

So, on the one hand, real progress toward getting plumbing fixed.  Space needed for plumber to work has been cleared, then need to clear the way to get there (because, to avoid stairs, it's via a door I literally nailed shut last winter), then work is done and plumber comes tomorrow morning.

That's good.  Especially if it makes people stop "helpfully" cleaning my house.

On the other hand, I'm drenched in sweat and I can't take a shower or wash clothes until the plumbing is actually fixed.  When the work is done, I'll change into less dirty clothes, but that's not remotely the same as being clean.

As a complete aside, I've been having nausea for this whole ordeal.  It seems to be a result of not doing much in the way of eating.

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February 29th (↑) -- On a Discord Server

Yesterday I got a massive thing of cookies.  They're a great thing to eat when (because you haven't been eating) you don't have the energy to eat much of anything.

In entirely unrelated news, yesterday I published a blog post the gist of which was:

Things have gotten so bad that the only good thing I can say is, "I'm not suicidal yet."

Also, here's a status update (with exact word counts) for every one of my stories that has progress beyond what's published.

Only response:

I'm still waiting for some chapters for Fractured Friendship.

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March 1st (↑) -- On a Discord Server

So, I got help setting up the thing with the plumber because I can't do phones right now.  Would have been nice if the person helping had told me that the plumber in question was cash or check only before we set up to have the guy come here on a day when the banks are closed.  (Also, the first of the month isn't the best time for cash.)

As such, I'm sitting here hoping that enough of my patreon income is processed in time, so I can send it to paypal (which is thankfully instantaneous) and then run across the street to get that money out of an ATM.

Fun.

-

I just took a shower.  Being clean is wonderful.

Any idea what that fee is lookin like?
(wait can i even ask that sry)

Yes, you can ask.  It ended up being $190 and my dad was able to come over with cash.  (Which is good, because Patreon processing is still at $85 and change.)

hoh damn, I'm glad the dad came through
Because that was a shituation right there

In more ways than one.  I'm convinced that human shit is the worst smelling shit in the world.  (Chickens try really hard for the title, though.)

And, yeah, if I'd known I needed cash I wouldn't have had the plumber come on a day when banks are closed and my online income was being processed.  If I could have gone to the bank, I could have gotten the cash.  By this time tomorrow my patreon income will be processed and that (once I transfer it to Paypal, which, again, is instant) can be gotten from an ATM, no bank needed.

The communications breakdown was actually fairly simple, I would have assumed I needed to pay in cash, except the previous plumber (who flaked out on finishing the job) took credit and I expected the person helping me to inform me of any major differences for non-flaky plumber, needing to be paid in a different way being a major difference.  Person helping me saw the situation as "Not taking credit is the default option, so it goes without saying."

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March 2nd (↑) -- Patreon Post Link to original context.

How we got to the point that I need to put scare quotes around "helpful" and "cleaning", and what it's like now that we're here

I'm going to stick this one inside a collapsible.

[Contains: plumbing problems, feeling helpless in one's one home because people are "helping", flashlights, glassware, stuff, things, things and stuff, and dead plants.]

A while ago, early November maybe, I went up to help my sister for, I think, a weekend.  It was definitely three days.  The plan was to arrive on one day, work on what needed doing until it was time to sleep, spend the whole next day working, and then work until my mom arrived to take me home on the third day.

No work got done.

On the ride up my sister told me about how she wanted her then-housemate gone but didn't have the heart to throw her out because, as she had nowhere else to go, that would make her homeless.  Even though housemate tried to stay out of sight, my sister spent the first day too preoccupied with housemate do do anything.  That night I thought I was going to have to do a lot of awkward and uncomfortable work to fix things.

Before I got out of bed the next morning, my sister told me, at great length, how horrible housemate was.  (Housemate woke up to this.)  It was pretty clear pretty fast that things couldn't be fixed.  My sister spent the day yelling at housemate and threatening to throw her out right that second.  Housemate spent most of the day crying in her room.  She called everyone she could think of and asked them to come and give her a ride away.  No one was simultaneously willing and able.

To be clear, she was only asking for a ride from these people.  There was no other home she was trying to get a ride to.  The plan was to be homeless in Portland, because she knew (from experience) that she could survive being homeless in Portland, and the same couldn't be said of being homeless in the less populated area where my sister lives.

I offered housemate two things.  One was a ride out of there when my mom came the day after.  The other was an empty room at my house.  The hardest part was convincing my sister to just fucking wait until the next day, instead of kicking housemate out right then.

The third day was completely different.  My sister tried to convince both of use to stay for two more days and actually get some work done.

First off, the reason that work hadn't been done on days one and two was that my sister wouldn't stop going on about how horrible housemate was and how she couldn't endure another minute of having housemate in the house, which left no time to do actual work.

Second, she'd been trying to get rid of housemate this whole time and it was a constant struggle just to get her to wait until day three because another night (or indeed another hour) was, apparently, too much time spent with housemate in the house.  Now she was asking for two more days and nights because . . . bwah?

As you might imagine, we got the fuck out of there.

⁂

For the record, I am in no way saying that housemate was not at fault in the relationship.  I wasn't there, I don't know what the fuck led to that point.  Housemate is obsessive about my sister, and she makes no secret of the fact that the love she feels for my sister isn't exactly the chaste familial kind.  (My sister loves her back, but it is the familial kind.  It's the same type of love our father had for the two of us when we were kids: tainted fucked up love.)

I legitimately have no idea if the things my sister said about housemate were true or not.  I just know that when I was there it was completely one sided with a clear victim.

Anyway, now housemate is my housemate which worked out to be far less disruptive than I expected on a day to day basis.

⁂

Fast forward to late November and my sister's truck runs her over.  This is, naturally, a "Drop everything and help out" situation.  Housemate tried to do the same --they'd managed to work together one time since housemate had come to live with me and my sister did request her presence-- but that worked out not in the least.  So housemate went back to my house while I was at my sister's and at the hospital.  House ran out of toilet paper; housemate used paper towels.  Don't ever do that.

In retrospect the problem is kind of obvious: toilet paper is made to come apart in water, paper towels are made to hold together when wet (so one can scrub.)  That being said, I could easily have made the same mistake if I'd been at home, run out, and my depression had been too severe for me to make a trip to the store.

Anyway: bad idea; don't ever do that.

I was the one to notice there was a problem, figure out what it was, and try to solve it.

Fishing paper towels out of a sewer pipe with a tool you've improvised from a wire coat hanger is not fun.  I had at least one involuntary gag reflex per attempt.  There were a lot of attempts (usually successful) because the paper towels seemed to go on without end.

I went back up to help my sister before I finished and was informed that the job had been completed by a family member in my absence.

While the immediate problem might have been solved, the job had not, in fact, been completed.  There were still paper towels in the system, and they collected to form a new clog further down the line.  Far enough down the line that it was outside the house (but not so far as to become the city's problem.)

This wasn't noticed immediately because some previous plumber had broken a clean out cap. They'd twisted the fitting right off, leaving a hole in the middle.  I have no idea how long ago that might have happened.  Years for sure.  A decade? maybe.  Decades plural?  Could be.

There had never been a problem that interacted with that hole.  Now there was.  In what was, arguably, the most remote corner of the basement.  For a while I could tell that something was wrong, but I couldn't tell what or where.  It wasn't until I was downstairs when the washing machine was draining and could hear the water coming out through the hole in the cleanout plug that I figured out what was wrong.

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At this point it's probably important to mention that my depression was making it basically impossible to make phone calls.  Eventually we did get a plumber to come, he determined that the problem was far enough in (more than six feet) that he'd need to use a tool that took more space than was available, and he said he'd have a quote for the rest of the job when we called up to tell him we'd cleared the space.

We never got that quote.

Housemate thought we'd need help, getting the help took several days.  One too many days for the plumber, who retroactively decided that he considered the conditions unsafe and was afraid to come back.  That deserves some attention.

I didn't think to ask the plumber "How much space do you need?" when he was there, because sometimes absurdly obvious things go right over my head.  So when we'd imported the helper housemate thought we'd need to clear the space, we were suddenly faced with the fact we didn't know actually know what that space was.

So we called the plumber, or rather the company he worked for, to ask.  This was actually the day after imported helper arrived, because the day of arrival wasn't a particularly good day for any of us, so we decided to rest, recover, and then get to work the next morning.  At that point we discovered that the plumber had told his boss, the previous day, that he wasn't coming back here.

That means that he came here, determined that the problem (in spite of just being paper towels) required big honking equipment (so, again, don't ever let paper towels go down the drain), told me to call him back when we'd cleared space for it, spent several days ready and willing to return to my house, and then, after several days of considering the house a safe working environment, decided, sight unseen, that it had somehow mutated into an unsafe one.

Now, it turns out that when a plumber in that company decides they're not going back to a house, the company stops sharing information like "It's best to have an eight foot by eight foot area cleared when using the thingamajig in question" or, "Here's how much the job would have cost."

So the operator couldn't give us any of the answers that had been sitting around ready to be relayed until the plumber got cold feet and changed his mind the day before we called.  She could, however, say to the plumber, "They're literally asking you what conditions you want and offering to provide exactly what you ask for, no matter what that may happen to be, so could you at least tell them what it would take for you to do the job?"

This left us in a weird situation.  We didn't know what we had to do to make the plumbing possible and we also didn't know if we should call a different plumber.  We did have three people to do the work.

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In the end it turned out that we didn't need three people to do the work of clearing the area.  Imported helper and I were able to clear it, tons of extra space, and several adjacent spaces in one day (during which housemate was in a depressive slump that prevented her from helping.)  We did this after getting a new and different plumber who was willing to tell us what he needed in order to do his job.

Here's the thing, though.  The day after arriving, imported helper started to clean the kitchen, which is not in the basement and had no bearing on the plumber (the equipment needed was less than ideal for going down stairs, so the plumber entered through the back door and never needed to visit the ground floor.)  Several days were taken on that, and other things, before we even called the new and different plumber who actually did plumbing.

On the first day, not eating caught up to me and I could barely hold my head up.  I spent the whole day sitting on the couch because a lack of calories meant I didn't have enough energy to do much of anything else.  That meant that I was stuck sitting there listening while housemate and imported helper cleaned the kitchen which sounded like breaking glass and ceramic and would have been stressful anyway because I wasn't there to separate the good stuff from the trash.

I had food delivered and ingested sufficient calories that night, in the following days I was more able to do stuff.  That said, the clanging of pots and pans (remember: kitchen) proved to be too much for me, and I had to give up on helping one day because of that.  Too much noise; had to hide.

The lack of eating nausea didn't go away nearly as easily as the lack of energy from the lack of calories.  That limited my involvement too.  Just the fact there were two of them left me feeling outnumbered.  With the exception of the day that depression had housemate too out of it to engage, both housemate and imported helper have way more energy than I do.

It's not quite that I feel unsafe; I know that neither of these people would intentionally hurt me.  That said, outnumbered, out powered, and not remotely in control.  Especially since, whether I'm able to help or not, they could ask me things, and they don't.  They just do what they think is best.

People cleaning my house for me without needing any effort on my part sounds nice in overly simplistic theory.  The thing is, I don't trust them.  It's not that I expect them to steal things or anything like that.  They are generally nice and trustworthy people.  I just don't trust them to do the job properly.

They say the right things, but the results speak differently.

The rooms they've cleaned are clean.  There's no doubt about that.  They're also empty.  Desolate.  It isn't hard to see why.

It's easy to clean the threshing floor when you don't separate the wheat from the chaff.  Just throw out everything, and you're done.  It's so very quick and simple.  Sure, you don't have any actual grain at the end of it, but it's not like that matters, right?

I had a sense from the start that, "We're cleaning!" actually meant, "You're going to have to dig through a bunch of trash bags one by one to pull things out."  I've been assured that, because they understand and respect that it's not their house, that won't be the case and they're leaving everything for me to go through at leisure.  Only things that are very definitely undeniably obviously trash are being sorted as trash.

I was given this assurance without ever needing to state my misgivings, by the way.

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One of the bags of "Yup, only trash here," burst some days ago, and they haven't gotten around to picking it up yet.  (Fun.)  I had a look through it today.  Laid out on the ground I did indeed find some trash.  Also a lot of my silverware.  Canned food.  (All of my fucking peaches.)  A flashlight.

My depression has been so bad that I haven't watered plants like I should.  Many have died.  I am not proud of this.  I do have a question, though.  Who throws out the vase because the plant in it has died?

Apparently the answer to that is "Housemate and/or imported helper."

The plug for the kitchen sink.  Several glass cups, not a chip on them.  (Impressive given that they were thrown in a bag with metal cans, metal silverware, and so forth, carried in it, and then fell on a paved driveway when that bag broke.)  Neon green frosting, unopened.*  Flash cards for Ancient Greek, somehow dry and pristine (in spite of being left outside in the wetness of late winter since the bag burst) and still bound by elastic into one easy to cycle through thematic group.  My tuna strainer (and its concentric extension for times when you get an oversized can.)  Pliers.

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Let's pause for a moment on those pliers.  They were lost.  Part of cleaning is finding lost things.  You find your lost pliers and you don't need to waste money on new pliers when you have perfectly good pliers already.  That, of course, only works if you don't throw the fucking pliers out.

Not everything was lost.  I knew where the canned food was, and the only thing needed to use it was having the will.  (And a can opener, but that's nailed to the fucking wall, well . . . to the copulating cabinet.)  The plug to the kitchen sink probably could have used some cleaning and both the silverware and the cups definitely needed cleaning, but I knew where all of these things were.

The tuna strainer I'm not sure about.  Once upon a time we did lose one and ended up buying a new one.  This was long enough ago that "we" meant my mom and I.  I have yet to come across a situation where I needed two, so I've been pretty laissez-faire** when it comes to keeping track of the second one (whichever that happens to be) when I've got a firm grasp on where the one I'm using is.  The one that got thrown out might have been the one I wasn't keeping track of, it might have been the one I was.  There's a decent chance I'll never know.

The neon green frosting I could have located (probably, we'll never know for sure now) in spite of not knowing precisely where it was.  The kitchen has, or rather: had a general "cake stuff" area.

The flashlight, the flash cards, and the pliers, though?  Those were very definitely lost.  Again, one of the best parts of cleaning --real cleaning instead of this "throw out everything" shit-- is finding lost things.  I've already gotten into the details of the pliers.  Recap: I'd have needed to buy new ones if I hadn't found them.

The flash cards are different.  They're a reminder of one of the few good things in a very bleak part of my life.  They're something that could finally spur me into actually re-learning Ancient Greek, which I've been meaning to do forever.  And, whether I start that project now or later, they're functional.

The flashlight is complicated.  Right now, I could use another flashlight in the house.  That may continue to be the case.  On the other hand, it could turn out that when this ordeal is over I have more flashlights than I could ever want or need in the house.  (I know that won't be the case with the pliers, but for flashlights it's possible.)  In that case, there are various possibilities.

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I've been in plenty of situations where it would be useful to have a spare flashlight to loan to someone, and in many of those situations it would be even better if you could just give it to them.  I'm pretty sure that I have family members who could use flashlights in their cars, but don't have them.  Having a dedicated flashlight for something means that wherever you take that something, you'll always have a flashlight.  It could be a tent bag.  It could be a purse or a backpack.  It could be a first aid kit.  (Not all injuries happen in well lit places.)  It could be basically anything.

As one final thing, I can make something out of it.

Like what? you may ask.

So, anyone who's seen me in a place where there's free or obscenely cheap stuff has probably noticed that I have a tendency to grab things of clear patterned glass.  For example, I have at least two (possibly three) Wexford pattern clear glass cruets in spite of the fact that I have never once thought to myself, "I need something to hold liquid condiments such as oil or vinegar."

But, Chris, you could possibly say but probably wouldn't, those things are nothing.  You can get them online for five to twelve dollars. 

This is true.  I've only just learned that it's true as a side effect of trying to figure out what those damned things are called.  That being said, first off it's better when it's free and, even when it isn't free, it feels more significant when you find it yourself and hold it in your hands before getting it.

Ok, but you still haven't said why you want them or what it has to do with flashlights, the hypothetical interlocutor I've been calling "you" will now say as a cheap way to advance the narrative.

The answer is, quite simply, this:

Now, the first thing to note is that that's not one of the aforementioned cruets.  I have no idea what this lidded glass bowl is called, and I do not, in fact, have two of them.  It does, however, have a flashlight in it.

But, Chris, hypothetical you says again, that looks like crap.  The light is all concentrated in one spot, you've braced the flashlight by doing something ugly with the wrist strap, and everything's massively uneven and uninspiring.

Right you are, hypothetical rude person.  That doesn't look terribly good and leaves a lot to be desired.  However, the reason it doesn't look all that good and leaves a lot to be desired is because the flashlight in question is one I use as a flashlight.

After sticking it in there, taking a few pictures, and finally using lid as beam spreader so that I could hold the flashlight like a torch while I walked around the house during that power outage (assuming I'm remembering correctly), I separated the flashlight from the glass kitchenware so that the flashlight could easily be used as a flashlight in future times (which by now include past and present times) and the kitchenware could sit on a shelf being pretty.

If, however, I didn't need the flashlight to continue to be a flashlight, I could have ripped it apart, altered it to suit the intended purpose, and made a much nicer lamp than the improvised and temporary fare you see above.

That only works if the unnecessary flashlight is in my possession instead of in the trash, though, which brings us back to the central thesis of this post:

People are "cleaning" my house, and I want them to stop, but am conflict averse (and one of them lives here now and thus ought to have a say regardless), and all of this means that I'm going to need to dig through a bunch of trash bags because: sweet fuck people, you can't just throw out everything!

As an aside, while the two Wexford pattern clear glass cruets I definitely own are (somehow) still on their shelf in the kitchen, the illuminated glass bowl, with cover, pictured above is not on its shelf.  This does not mean that it's been thrown out (though it might have been) because housemate and imported helper cleared almost every damned thing out of the kitchen with some subset of it intended to be returned at a later time.

One would hope that the pretty glass thing made it into the "temporarily removed" pile instead of the "trash, get rid of it" pile, if only because in the first pile it seems less likely to be broken.

There is something I like about such things beyond just shoving a light source inside of them, though.  (And beyond their obvious mundane aesthetic appeal, I mean.)  Shine a laser into the lidded glass bowl, and the effect is beautiful.  I never looked into it as much as I intended at the time, but it seemed like it might be possible to make a light source out of that effect, provided the surrounding area were sufficiently dark.  Even if it couldn't be used for practical lighting, it's still pretty.

Ok, so, we're done with the burst bag of trash that included a bunch of non-trash, right?  The flashlight was the last thing to discuss, as I recall.  So, let's stick an asterism here so that the wall of text is punctuated by non-text.  (I'll retroactively insert some up-post as well.)

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Wait, that wasn't the end of it.  Plant pots, and . . . other stuff.  I've totally forgotten.  (This is the last thing I'm adding to the post, having come back to stick it in after writing the rest.)  The plant pots are significant just because not everything comes down to matters of hydroponics.  That there were more not-trash things than listed above is significant mostly because the list really did go on (and on.)  In a single bag.  That contained pounds of perfectly good canned peaches.  (Canned diced tomatoes too.)  And was supposed to be entirely trash.

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Here's another fun tidbit.  There are three places in my house where I keep plants.  There are two that housemate and imported helper haven't come near yet, and the one place they've dealt with.  The place they dealt with had only one plant that survived my depression-induced lack of watering.

When the plants all disappeared, I had (for the first and only time) cause to believe that maybe this cleaning wouldn't be as bad as I imagined.  While the dead plants were gone without a trace, the live plant had been carefully laid aside and kept safe.  I was going to put it back in the window, but I couldn't find anything to put it in.  (If those vases hadn't been thrown out, it would have been a different story.)  This happened while I was the only one in the house.

So I was forced to wait so that I could ask housemate and imported helper, "Where'd you put all the stuff that could hold a plant?"  By the time I had a chance to ask, the plant had mysteriously vanished.

The only kitchen plant to survive my depression, and the neglect that came with it, killed by cleaning.  I mean, there's a slim chance that I'll find it before it's dead, but it's probably outside.  Even if it has survived the night so far, and it's really not made for that, come Thursday the low is supposed to be below freezing.

I can't look through that much "trash" in that amount of time and expect to find something that small.

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So, here's the thing, or one of the things, about having to look through bags of trash to find the stuff that shouldn't have been thrown out instead of putting trash in the trash while putting non-trash where it goes: bags of trash have trash in them.  (Usually.)

That means that the whole thing is a good deal less pleasant than dealing with the original mess.  It also means that any time you put something icky in the trash, it's with the knowledge that you're going to have to deal with that shit later.

Eat a banana, throw the peel in the trash.  Unless you looked through that bag and verified it was all actually trash immediately before throwing the peel in and then took it out of the trash can, tied it up, and put it wherever you store curb-ready trash immediately after throwing the peel in, you're going to meet that peel again.

No matter how unappealing (pun not intended, but acknowledged) that peel is when it goes in, it's going to be worse the next time you meet it.

The smart thing to do, other than saying, "Please, for the love of God, stop fucking cleaning my house!" would probably be to have a private secret trash bag into which I could safely put things like that banana peel because, since the others didn't know about it, I wouldn't have to worry about someone not-me putting non-trash in it.  (If I were to put non-trash in it, that would be my own fault, and thus qualitatively different.)

I'm not actually gonna do that.

Have another picture of a flashlight:

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* It comes in packs of multiple colors, so sometimes you have to set one or more away for the next cake because the current cake doesn't need every color.  They're sealed completely air tight (you have to physically cut the container open to get at the frosting) so that it will keep until the next cake comes around.

** Yes, I did have a long discussion about economics today.

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March 5th (↑) -- On a Discord Server

Adventures in having "helpful" people "cleaning" my house, part n:

I've spent all morning in the driveway going through trash bags.  Most of it really should have been thrown out.  In the recycling instead of the trash, but that wouldn't be so much of a problem.

I found photographs, which are definitely older than me and possibly older than my mom of my grandfather and others.  I didn't look through them, so I can't really say who was in them in any detail.  One person who might be in those photos is my grandfather's brother Andy.  Andy died two Tuesdays ago (February 25th), and today is his wake and funeral.  (Not burial, though.  You have to wait for the ground to thaw.)

Not long after I found the photos, one of the helpful cleaners noticed that I was going through the trash and announced that she was going to stop helping because she couldn't work if it was going to be for nothing.  I very much hope she's serious.

(Another thing being thrown out: the newer better phone that's supposed to replace my crappy current phone.  Fun.)

wait why are they cleaning your entire house
(also my condolences...¿)

Because that seems to have been the plan from the beginning, and I just wasn't let in on it.  Also, as of yesterday I'm stuck with one of my sister's dogs.  I am not in a mental state where I'm able to take care of a dog right now, so I kind of need extra people around, which removes the only option I hadn't tried yet: yelling at them to get the fuck out.

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March 5th (↑) -- On a Discord Server

Back from the wake.  I would have stayed for the funeral, but neither of the person who gave me a ride there had to head off well before that and the one who gave me a ride home hadn't been planning on staying and I didn't want to impose.  Said person way my mom, and her uncle just died (obviously), so it's not a good time for imposing.  (Besides which, even though I would have stayed for the funeral service, it's not like I would have gotten much out of it.  It would have been more of a perfunctory attendance.)

Didn't mean to get side tracked on logistics and scheduling.

What I wanted to say, instead, was this: they never look right.

Never.

They're too big in some places and too thin in others and they never look right.

(this me quoting a story someone else on the server wrote)

It looked nothing like Sunset Shimmer.

It looked exactly like Sunset's corpse.

Every fucking time there's an open casket.  They never look right.  They look strange and wrong and foreign and unknown and fuck my memory!

I saw him not long ago.  A few months maybe.  I don't remember what he looked like, not really.  I saw his corpse an hour ago, perhaps less, I don't remember what it looked like, not really.

My memory doesn't work that way.  It's probably why I take so many pictures, even of things that really, honestly, there's no reason to take pictures of.  Instead there's this . . . sense, a feeling, like trying to get a firm grasp on something from a dream you're in the process of forgtetting.  I know the idea of what he looked like, and that would be enough to recognize him in an instant, and it's certainly enough to know that the thing in the casket doesn't look like him.

I should have shot fucking video the last time I saw him, even though we weren't talking about much of anything and I, as I so often do in conversation, sounded like an idiot (I'm pretty sure.)  Because now I'm never going to see him again, and I don't remember what he looked like.

-

My uncle Andy (technically great uncle, but we didn't call him that) was the last of his generation in the family.  Everyone else was already gone.  I can't explain why that matters, and I'm pretty sure it shouldn't, but for some reason that just adds to the . . . everything.

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March 6th (↑) -- Disqus Comment.  Link to original context.

Nothing new this week. Nothing old that I've dug up and posting. I did come across some old writings of mine, possibly high school era, in the past week, but I've been way too much in "I have to rescue things before the people

Wait, I did have something new. At patreon I wrote a post called How we got to the point that I need to put scare quotes around "helpful" and "cleaning", and what it's like now that we're here, but if you're not paying me that link is pretty worthless. I have an incomplete post for Stealing Commas that will cover much of the same territory while also placing it in a larger context (basically: the last three years), but I didn't manage to finish it.

[Not being in control of my own house, pet violence, coercion by threatening to put a pet down, memories of a different pet being put down]

Anyway, in the course of trying to save stuff from the "helpful" people "cleaning" my house I cam across some old stuff of mine. Poetry and prose both, very possibly from high school, and if not then likely early college. I haven't had a chance to look at it, because I'm spending my time going through bags of "trash" and pulling out large quantities of not-trash.

The plumbing problem has been fixed. Finally taking a shower was great.

My sister never trained or properly socialized her dogs. This resulted in some kind of vicious dog to dog violence. My sister called up and basically said that  no. She flat out said that if I wouldn't let her dog stay at my house she would put it down, herself, with a fucking shotgun.

Apart from not being house trained, the dog is fine as far as dogs go. I'm not really in a place, mentally, where I can take care of a dog. Housemate will probably do much of the work, and right now the person we brought in to help clear space for the plumber (furniture needed to be moved) will also help until he heads back out. Both of them have some level of experience with training dogs, so that's theoretically good.

When I say that "we" brought him in to help clear the space . . . *deep breath*

Housemate didn't think two people would be enough. Two people was enough. (She was out of it due to her depression being set off, hard, the day we actually cleared the space in question.) It was sold to me as him coming to clear the necessary space for plumbing. Apparently everyone else on earth knew that he was coming to help clean the whole house.

I was well aware that people "cleaning" my house would in fact be "Me being forced to dig through fucking trash bags to pull out non-trash" which was why I wanted it to just be about clearing out space for the necessary equipment for the plumbing.

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March 7th (↑) -- On a Discord Server

You know the thing that almost all Anon-a-Miss fics get wrong?  No matter how justified the anger, verbally ripping people down and making them feel bad doesn't make you feel good.  Not really.  In the moment you can sometimes ride a wave of righteous fury and feel like you're accomplishing something, but in the end nothing has been fixed and you're empty.

-

Housemate and temporary housemate were away for much of today.  I was going through the giant pile of trash bags they'd created pulling out the non-trash things.  This shouldn't be necessary in the first place, but I'd kind of gotten used to it.

Things started to go wrong when I found a tarot card, then several more, then several more again, then went into the house so I could use the kitchen table to help in putting them in order (easiest way to check what, if anything, is missing.)  It's the second full deck of tarot cards I found in the stuff they threw out.

Then I found my glasses.  They needed to have the frame fixed, so I've been wearing backup ones that aren't my actual prescription.  Trouble with finding my glasses is, I only found half of the frame.  Also my-- Wait, before that I found my favorite shirt.  Not the first clothing I've found, but this was very definitely very completely clean.  Then my glasses, and the doubly emergency backup glasses for situations like if someone threw my glasses into the trash, and then something happened to backup glasses too.

Then jewelry.  And books.  Books have been a stable of what they've thrown out.  Home improvement supplies, new in their boxes.  So on.

And I was left to stew on this for much of the day while I raced against the setting sun to find everything that had been dumped in that particular bag especially, I hoped, the rest of my glasses.  (I didn't.)

They came back from where they'd been, a photo shoot with a friend of theirs, and as soon as both of them were in the house I unloaded on them.  So they went from a good day to me berating them.  Ruined their day with enough force to cause emotional whiplash; my day (and my mood) have not improved.  Because that never works.

They fucked up, the behavior was downright assholic, but me tearing them down fixed nothing.  I just brought more misery into the world, nothing more.

-

That's the thing that all of the "Yell at the Rainbooms and/or CMC" fics miss.  It never makes you feel better, not really.

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March 13th (↑) -- On a Discord Server

Wait . . . the reason it was difficult to get toilet paper is because people thought it would save them from a pandemic and started stockpiling it?

Sweet fuck do we live in a strange world.

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March 13th (↑) -- On a Discord Server

It's raining today.  Hard.

There are still a bunch of trash bags outside filled with a mixture of trash and not-trash.  Given how heavily the not-trash skews towards things that respond badly to water (including fucking books) this is a very stressful thing for me.

The people who bagged all of this up and took it outside, and kept on doing so after there was no space remaining in the garage which, while hardly the safest place, at least has a roof over it, are in another city/town right now.  This is probably a good thing since flaying people alive is supposed to an over the top threat rather than a means of non-verbal interpersonal communication.
‌
There would be less to stress out about if they'd bagged things up well, since trash bags are waterproof, but many of the bags are quite thoroughly perforated at this point.

It probably would have all fit in the garage if they'd used any sort of care in packing, because I keep finding empty containers and cardboard boxes that haven't been broken down meaning that much (possibly even most) of the volume is taken up by empty space.

But the kind of people who bag well and/or with care probably wouldn't have thrown out half of the things they threw out.

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March 13th (↑) -- Disqus Comment.  Link to original context.

It's raining today.  That, in itself, is stressful.  You see, there are still a large number of bags of "trash" outside.  I've been spending a lot of my daylight time, perhaps even most of my daylight time, going through those bags.  I've pulled out a lot of things that don't respond well to water.  (Electronics, books, and loose-papers-with-important-things-written-on-them stand out.)

The trash bags are water poof, which is good, but the lack of care with which they were filled has led to many of them becoming . . . perforated.  Water can and does get in.  I have seen it.  (Though, mercifully, only rarely.)

It's also the case that whenever I remove a bag and make progress on separating the wheat from the chaff not-trash from the trash, I might be putting at risk something that was, up to that point, perfectly preserved.  Without the removed bag there, new holes may be exposed.  It could be that right now, as I type this, the most important thing to be thrown out is being destroyed because a bag I went through yesterday is no longer playing blocker.

Entirely apart from the fact that we're talking about the fact my books and jewelry and so forth have been thrown out, the way these bags were filled is downright absurd.  The reason it took so many bags, which is probably the reason that the bags of "trash" didn't all fit in the garage under the roof thereof, is because the volume is largely empty space.  (As near as I can tell, based on what I've gone through so far.)  Boxes were not broken down.  Containers were not opened.

The rolling suitcase/dufflebag I use when traveling for a week or more was thrown out (which it shouldn't have been) empty.  That's a pretty decent volume of air and a relatively small amount of plastic and canvas.  When it's in a large black trash bag, though, it looks like any other pile of trash.

It occurs to me now, when it's definitely too late for the storm that's here, that I might have done better to open up all the bags, take out the big empty things, and then see if I could fit what remained somewhere safe.

A hug part of the reason it takes so much time is because of how damned slow it is to go through the little stuff.  If I'd focused on the big stuff only, instead of going one bag at a time, maybe I could have had everything safe by today.  Fuck.

I'm alone today.  In human terms at least.  My sister's dog is still here.  Not really fit to take care of her properly, but given how neglected she was in the past, it's probably still a step up.  I don't really know why I'm alone today.  The housemate and extended-stay house guest were supposed to be spending a single night away to test out a possible living and working arrangement.  That night was two nights ago.

I would love to be able to enjoy their absence, but I'm way too worn down, it means that the dog is solely my responsibility, and it means that the things they said they'd do which I probably can trust them to do (washing the dishes is the only thing that comes to mind) won't get done unless I take time away from the thousand other things I need to do because of their past actions, recuperation, or both.

I can't cope with this shit, and yet I have no choice.

All of this, including the plumbing problem that set off these adventures in ["When we say, "Clean," we mean, "Toss everything important to you in the trash"], is because I tried to be a decent human being.  The relationship between my sister and housemate was toxic as fuck, housemate was begging people to get her out of there even though she had no place else to go.  Her plan, insofar as it existed, was to be homeless in a city she knew (from experience) she could survive being homeless in instead of a countryside where that wasn't true.

I offered her an empty room at my house, so she'd have a place to go.  I don't regret that and if I had known about (but somehow been unable to change) all of the bullshit that resulted from it, I'd still have made the same decision, but it still feels massively unfair that doing something good has led to this.