I want to live past the first week of April.

I hate this. But I'll probably end up dead if I don't do it, and I figure I ought to offer people the chance between tossing five dollars in and me being dead, because five dollars isn't much and it really will probably make that much difference. I am a wildly inadequate human and therefore don't have enough fives of dollars, but many people are better at surviving than me. So here we go.

I've been looking forward to the April 8th eclipse since well before the last one. The path of totality goes pretty much directly over Bloomington, and well before I found out I could make it to see the 2017 eclipse I had assumed I'd be in a position to make it to the 2024 one. But I'm crap at living in society right now. I've applied to hundreds of jobs since last summer and gotten hardly any interviews, none of which has resulted in anything other than a "yeah sorry no" email. I've finally managed to get a couple of my more visually offensive teeth fixed, but this hasn't had time to translate to me getting a job (if it ever does). And I'll be honest with you, I am pretty sure I won't make it if I can't afford to get back to my homeland for this.

Knowing about an amazing, beautiful, singular thing which will occur at a specific time and in a specific set of places so far in advance is kind of a new thing. And in most previous years that would've been enough for me to manage it. It should've been enough now too. But it isn't. Unless you're also stuck at a very low level of societal acceptability-- and I try, really hard, and I'm very willing to work and I don't know quite what is so wrong with me that I just can't get the opportunity and I need to write up the King County Public Health Clinic for this year to begin to express how hard it is to claw your way back up once you've fallen behind even a little, and NONE OF THIS IS WORKING-- you can't really see how hard it is at the bottom, and how easy it is to find yourself there. It's never been difficult to fall through the cracks. But the cracks keep growing, and the pit they empty into keeps deepening.

It's stupid and I feel stupid about it, but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be able to avoid killing myself if I don't make it out to Bloomington to see the eclipse. It's a singular, stunning event, and it means more than I can say to me. I was closer to suicide than most people have ever been stuck being a couple of weeks ago, and I've only been closer once. I pulled myself out by means of Discworld novels and baking banana bread, but it's temporary and I know it.

I'm working on my life. Of course I am. But this is less than a month away and if it's April 6th and I know it's not going to happen I AM going to start walking south with a bottle of whiskey and whatever pills I can find wherever I can find them and a razor and dodge off wherever it seems appropriate and the nighttime temperature will get cold enough that that plus drugs plus blood loss will probably kill me and I'm reasonably certain that no one will find me until animals have had the chance to eat a considerable portion of my corpse. I hate it, but I know that this is what I will do. I had a Suicide Plan. It devolved into this, and at this point I recognize that it's going to do it again if I can't fix things at least a very little bit.

So I thought that, despite how often and emphatically I've been told that asking for help makes me weak and pathetic, I should probably just go ahead and do it. I am weak. I am pathetic. I am not an ubermensch, I am not even a mensch in the sense of social competence and financial success. I am a failure. I cannot survive in this hyperindividualistic, hypercapitalist society. I'm a failure and I need help or I will die. And I have an approximate date on it right now, and that's fucking scary.

But some of you who are better at being alive do seem to think it's viable to keep me around. And I am asking you to help enable that, because I cannot do it on my own. Now is fucking hard for a lot of us. We've definitely hit full-on sci-fi dystopia in a way that Tiny V would never have expected. It is SO MUCH WORSE now than I thought it ever could be. But here we are, and I don't want to take anything I haven't earned from any of you who are also struggling to survive. Because a lot of us are.

The fact remains that if I cannot be in Bloomington, Indiana on April 8th, 2024 I am almost certainly going to kill myself. So don't drop more than you can in, and if it's possible I'll return all donations if there isn't enough to get me there. But we're a social species, and I am clearly utterly inadequate on my own, and I need help. If continued V seems worth a couple of bucks, I'd appreciate it.

Don't get me wrong, I feel at least as much contempt for myself for needing this as most of you can probably muster. But it's become clear to me that I beg or I straight up die. And I don't want to die. There is so much beauty in the world. I've determined today that the raven nest in the Seattle arboretum probably didn't fail, and I cannot tell you how much I want to observe baby ravens.

Nothing about me is what is wanted. I am not financially viable, and I am therefore worthless by many, many metrics. But I genuinely think, however little it matters, that that's not true. I'm not actually worthless, as hard as it is to hold to that idea despite my poverty. I want to stay alive. I want to learn more about crows. I want to write stories. I want to exist.

But my inability to make it out to see the eclipse is going to function as a very final symbol of the idea that I don't deserve to. I cannot avoid that on my own.

We were not meant to survive in isolation. Humans can't do that. We are only as successful as we are as a species because we're good at community. That's not how we're living now, and that's why things are as utterly fucked as they are. Hyperindividualism doesn't work unless you're born with considerable advantages.

I was not born with enough of them, and i haven't managed to make up for that since, and I'm not what anyone wants. Trust me, I hate myself for needing this more than you hate me for asking for it. But I'm not going to be alive on April 9th without help.

Please. Help me. And know that I am incredibly sorry I have to ask. I wouldn't do it if I thought I could avoid it. If I didn't think it was this or death. Again, I know it's stupid. But this is where we are. I need a plane ticket, an airport-to-Bloomington-and-back shuttle ticket, and ideally food and transportation whilst I'm there. If I'd been brave or pathetic enough to ask earlier it would've been cheaper. But I hoped I could work it out for myself.

I can't. So this is where we are. I'm sorry.

Also I can see Alastor again if this works. The cover photo is my poor sweet broken boy at his intake appointment. Especially if I can afford transportation, I have every intention of spending considerable time cleaning opossum cages or whatever needs doing at WildCare, because it's one of the most important things that has ever existed in my life. So that's a side benefit for wildlife rescue. Look! I'm useful and not just a wretched inadequate sponge!