Here’s the short version: I have been dealing with a gnarly personal situation for weeks now and it has gotten in the way of every single other thing in my life. Sadly, the places where the bills come from do not care about gnarly personal situations and still insist on being paid. This would be bad during a time of year when the work is flowing, but winter is notoriously slow for freelancers and work opportunities have been practically non-existent and I hate to ask again, but I could really use your help. 

My most urgent problem is that I need to come up with about $1,000 by 2/3 to keep my storage unit from being sold at auction. I’m so fried that I’m tempted to just let it all go so I don’t have to think about any of it anymore, but there are some irreplaceable memories in there that I would rather not part with if at all possible (pictures of deceased and long lost loved ones being at the top of that list). 

There are three other issues at play here. In order of importance they are:

1. I hate asking for help—especially money help–with a firey passion and would really really really REALLY rather earn it.

2. I am in desperate need of distraction from said gnarly personal situation and its continuing fallout.

3. I would really really like to get ahead of some bills and give myself some room to breathe.

So! What I am hoping is that, if you are willing and able, you might consider sponsoring a blog post? For simplicity’s sake: It can be of any length on any topic. It can be written, drawn, photo essay, or even video. I’ll publish it on my own site and on Medium and will credit you (whatever name you want me to use) with the sponsorship and link your name to the site of your choice. 

Every penny I earn from this will go toward paying that storage unit—the first $1,000 (if I can reach that) will go toward getting it current. Anything over that will pay for future rent. My pipe dream is to be able to pay for rent through June, but honestly, if I can just get it current, that would be rad. 

I know that times are extremely tough right now and there are people who are much more deserving than I am out there so please, no pressure. I’ve just exhausted all of my other options* and desperate times, you know? 

At any rate, I appreciate you all reading this and please do not feel pressured to send any funds if you can’t afford to do so. This is my mess. I just thought I’d go for the hail mary, you know?

Here are the places where I can take donations and blog-post-sponsorship payments:

Paypal.me/Snarke

Venmo.com/Snarke

Cash.app/$Snarke

Also: I am very aware that I am still in the red on a couple of projects/loans from my last fundraiser so if you are someone I still owe something to, please please do not send any more funds. I already feel like I’m taking advantage of your kindness by posting this. I refuse to take any more from you.

*I hate to admit it, but I’ve even been doing LLM training when I can score a project and yes, it feels just as gross and evil as you think it does but beggars and choosers and all of that.

I typed out the following meaning to post it as a comment on his post, but I thought maybe others would find benefit from it as well. It’s not super well-written and I’m using “man” here to refer specifically to my former classmate (so don’t @ me, bros, not all men, yadda yadda yadda). Anyway, here is what I wanted to comment:

Teach a man about taxes: Pay him ten dollars to clean, let him keep it, and then tell him to fix the road himself when he bitches about the pothole at the end of the street. 

Teach a man about taxes: Pay him ten dollars to clean, let him keep it, and tell him to build his own damn electrical grid when his power gets shut off. 

Teach a man about taxes: Pay him ten dollars to clean, let him keep it, and then tell him to dig his own well and manually pump his own water when he complains about the tap water smelling funny. 

Teach a man about taxes: Pay him ten dollars to clean, let him keep it, and tell him to shut up and learn to like the taste when he finds fecal matter in the tube of ground beef he bought at the store. 

Teach a man about taxes: Pay him ten dollars to clean, let him keep it, and then tell him to just shut up and die when the medicine he was told would treat his infection out to be just hard-pressed arsenic and sawdust. 

Teach a man about taxes: Pay him ten dollars to clean, let him keep it, and tell him to stay home and educate his own damn kids when he bitches that they aren’t learning anything in school. Speaking of which…

Teach a man about taxes so that he doesn’t post ignorant shit like this, proving that he has no idea what taxes actually do… except in this case I know you already learned about taxes and what they are for because I sat in the same classrooms you did. Maybe you should have actually paid attention. 

This morning my phone started blowing up with notifications about the Epstein Transparency Act. EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN VOTED AGAINST THE EPSTEIN TRANSPARENCY ACT! AFTER PARTY LINE VOTE, EPSTEIN TRANSPARENCY ACT IS DEAD! And on and on and on and on. 

As these headlines kept popping up on my phone, I’ll admit that my first instinct was to curse creatively (and extensively) and then immediately share every single post on my own social media profiles. 

I’m glad I didn’t do that. Because here’s the thing. The headlines are misleading (shocker, I know). They aren’t technically incorrect, they are just selectively truthful, like so much of legacy media is these days.

If we go only by what legacy media reports, there are four steps involved in an idea becoming an action.

1. Someone has an idea.

2. The House of Representatives votes on the idea. If they pass it, it goes to the Senate. 

3. The Senate votes on the idea. If they pass it, it goes to the President.

4. The President signs the idea into law or vetoes it. 

Boom! Done.

Here’s what actually happens.

1. Someone has an idea.

2. That person tells their idea to some other people. Those people work together to come up with a cohesive way to describe the idea and why it matters. 

3. They write all that down and turn it in to the Clerk of the House.

4. The Clerk of the House gives the idea a number and puts it in front of the Speaker of the House.

5. The Speaker of the House takes a look and then assigns the idea to a House Committee. 

6. That Committee then takes a look at the idea and then gets to work learning more and fighting about it. 

7. Eventually the Committee figures out what they need to know (or what they think they need to know) and actually writes a bill. 

8. The Committee then votes to either send that bill to the Speaker of the House or to “table” it. Tabling is fancy pants speak for “shove it in a drawer and deny it ever existed”. 

9. The Speaker looks at the bill and decides whether or not to send it to the floor for a full vote.

10. Hijinx ensue. (Not really, but for the purposes of this post, we’re only looking at the beginning of the legislative process. The rest can wait.)

What Happened Today?

As of today, the Epstein Transparency Act was at step 8 in the process. The House Rules Committee was voting on whether or not to advance the Act or to table it. 

There are twelve people on the House Rules Committee. Eight of them are Republicans. Four of them are Democrats.

All eight Republicans voted to table the Epstein Transparency Act. All four Democrats voted to advance it. Typically, this is where the Act would die and the other 211 Republicans in the House could breathe a sigh of relief because they wouldn’t be forced to vote on the Act themselves. 

However…

There is another way that an idea can be brought to the floor of the House for a vote. Representatives are allowed to petition the House to force a full floor vote on an idea. If they gather enough signatures, then it won’t matter what the Committee says or what the Speaker wants. The idea will be voted on. Period*. 

AFAIK, as I write this, there is still a petition being circulated in the House to force a floor vote on the Epstein Transparency Act. The Petition is co-sponsored by Representative Khanna (D-CA) and Representative Massie (R-KY) and only needs two more signatures to succeed. All 212 Democrats have signed the petition. Four Republicans have added their names. 

So, no. The Epstein Transparency Act is not dead yet. 

*This would be the rule if we were still in any semblance of a normal timeline. In our apocalyptic upside-down, nobody has any idea what the rules actually are anymore so anything could happen. 

The White House admins tried to cover this up by posting old pictures of him golfing. They tried posting photos of Trump getting into the Beast that looked like they were taken with a flip camera phone that was zoomed all the way in from across the street. They had the kids say dude was fine. JD Vance said went on record to say he was fine. Someone on staff posted something like 50 different things onto his Truth Social profile within the course of a single day. 

The rest of the world paused. Dare we hope? Dare we dream? Do we risk jinxing it by talking about the possibility of the greatest announcement ever being moments away? Some people even began to feel hope. Those who did say that it felt weird. 

And then, on Monday evening, the announcement was made: THE PRESIDENT would be making an announcement in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon.

Social media exploded with hope and with warnings not to get too hopeful. We speculated about what it could possibly be. Would the feed start by showing JD behind the Resolute desk, playing with his hot wheels? Would TFG be in the chair, hooked up to marionette strings that were being operated by Stephen Miller? Would they hype everybody up just to cancel it? 

Then today happened. The time for the announcement arrived…and passed. The White House pushed the announcement back by a half hour. Then another fifteen minutes. And then another fifteen minutes. 

And then, the moment we’d all been anxiously awaiting. About 50(ish) minutes after the event’s scheduled start time the live feed began and something none of us could have possibly predicted happened.

TFG made some BS announcement about moving Space Force’s headquarters from Colorado to Alabama. 

This isn’t actually going to happen. There are no bases being built in Alabama. There is no order from the Department of Defense to begin preparations for the move, nothing. So, y’know. A lie. Like any other day that ends in y.

After the announcement, TFG stepped away from the mic and ushered his sycophantic bystanders up one by one to give them the highest honor in the land: showering Trump with praise. 

Pete Hegseth rambled for a minute or so about how much he loves Donnie and how Donnie gives the universe life, or some nonsense, and then bolted. 

The governor of Alabama sang Donnie’s praises and then either stood so far off camera that nobody could see him or bolted, too. 

After they had publicly praised Deare Leedr, they stood in a line behind Donnie for another forty minutes while Donnie rambled, waxed nonsensical about how awesome he is at fixing everything ever, told a bunch of lies and then took questions from the press. 

The press? Only the loyalist friendliest folks. One of them even asked him how he felt about having died over the weekend. TFG claimed he both did not know that had happened and that he knew all about it but didn’t care because he was super active, like the activitiest, yugely active, more active than any President ever.

Honestly, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what Donnie was saying. It was all the same BS, though minus crazy sharks and whales being driven mad (bummer). I was paying attention to the people surrounding him.

Y’all they were standing so close to him. Like, if he leaned back a little, he could have been spooned by the guy standing behind him (not JD, the one next to him). As he continued to babble on and on, their frozen smiles became looks of desperation and then, finally dissociation. Balding tan suit guy looked like he was planning what to have for dinner. JD looked like he was trying to make a show of looking supportive but, not knowing how to make his face do that, mostly just looked like he was trying not to cry. Donnie’s big spoon stared blankly out above the cameras. 

It was painful. And Stupid. And would have been hilarious if it were a SNL sketch. 

If you want to read the posts I did on Bluesky before and during the non-event, here’s the link for that!  

Fast forward to August 14, 2025. I’m thinking about what I should write for my next post. I take a bite of a chicken sandwich and the crown on my back molar breaks off. Not falls off. Nope, not in my world. It breaks off and takes half of my molar with it. 

Heebus Cristo  on a pogo stick, Universe. Say it louder. 

Actually? Don’t. Ouch. 

So, what does that mean for future posting here? Heck if I know. I’m giving myself some time to calm down and stop catastrophizing before I make a decision. 

FWIW: I’ve been to the dentist and I’m being referred to an oral surgeon to remove the non-savable molar from my skull because its roots have decided to snuggle up with my sinus. I’m not in pain because that tooth had a root canal before the crown was put on. I’ll be fine, it’s just going to take a minute to breathe through the “chicken shouldn’t have a chunk in it” trauma of it all.  

And I’m more frustrated than I’ve ever been in my life. I miss writing. Not the writing I did for others, but the writing I’ve done for ME (and, yes, you). I miss writing about my stuff. I miss taking policy apart and exploring it and poking at it and telling you about what I’m learning. I miss shouting into the void about how fucked up everything is, and I really miss doing my part (however small it may be) to speak truth to power. 

Okay, maybe that last sentence should be that I miss doing my part (however small it may be) to speak truth ABOUT power. 

There are reasons I haven’t done this. The biggest is that I no longer live alone. I live in a roommate situation and my landlord/roommate highly values their privacy and does not want any of the ire that my writing may stir up to accidentally drift over on to them in any way, shape, or form. And, in this era of doxxing and malevolence, that’s legit. They have every right to stay off the radar, and I need to respect that. 

And I’ll be honest: I’m afraid of the jerks out there, too. They aren’t content to just rage on social media anymore, y’know? 

But I’ve never been a keep quiet-er. For better or for worse, I’ve been a should loud, make a spectacle of myself, and deal with whatever happens-er. I need to get back to that somehow. I hope that happens here because dammit, I want my name to be counted among the dissenters. But if it has to happen somewhere else and vaguely anonymously or pseudonymously, then that’s okay too. 

I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet, but I wanted to post an update anyway. 

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, y’all. 

So! How have you been?

Because it happens so early in primary season, at least one of the major political parties is still in fight mode. The candidates are still at least trying to win votes. They are saying interesting (and yes, sometimes bug-nuts bonkers) things. There is a reason to care about the results rolling in. 

This year? Not so much. Neither of the party nominations is truly up for grabs. We’ve known who the candidates are going to be for years. It is not likely that there will be any shocking reveals or surprises tonight. 

Worse, neither party has a candidate that the masses are particularly enthused about. On one side, we have Biden. Biden’s popularity has tanked because of his terrible* response to the genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza. It doesn’t matter how much good he has done or will do. Even if he denounces Israel today, commits to helping Palestinians (which isn’t likely, given today’s news) and manages to completely rebuild Gaza, nobody is going to believe that he’s had an actual change of heart. It will all be seen as a lame attempt at sucking up to voters. And nobody likes a phony.

Unless you’re MAGA. 

Speaking of which, the winner of the GOP primary is going to be Trump. And Trump? I mean…is there anything I really have to say? He’s…. Trump. Ick. 

I know that there are interesting races happening down ballot. Local elections really do matter. And I do care about them. But a lot of that care and interest is getting trampled by just how forked we are in terms of the Presidential race. 

I miss the days when this was exciting instead of terrifying. 

*I know. I know “terrible” is not nearly a strong enough word for Biden’s response to Gaza. Is there even an adjective strong enough for that? 

That was the hardest sentence I’ve ever had to write. 

She passed away peacefully here at home with the gentle help of a veterinarian from Compassionate Care. I was holding her the entire time and made sure that the last words she heard me say were “I love you to the end of all the multiverses and back. Thank you for being my friend.” The last glimpses I had of her were of the top of her head—the only part of her visible after the veterinarian had carefully swaddled her in a cozy blanket—as the veterinarian carried her away.

I’m having her cremated and I can go pick up her remains in a couple of weeks. They will try to do paw prints of her front paws (because shes’ polydactyl) but warned me that might be tricky, so I’m not going to count on having those. If they work out, they’ll be a beautiful gift. If they don’t, that’s okay. 

This small room suddenly feels way too big and empty. It’s still a habit to look for her every time I come through the door. It’s still a habit to glance over at her every once in a while to make sure she’s okay. And every time I don’t see her I panic for a second and then remember. And then I cry. A lot. 

My housemates (bipedal and quadruped) are being very patient and gentle with me. The humans have been giving me space but letting me know they’re there if I need them, making sure I eat something, caregiving as much as I’ll let them (I am spectacularly bad at this). The cats and the dog are all over me every time I leave my room. I can’t go anywhere outside of my room without at least one quadruped by my side the entire time. 

And, of course, I’ve gotten all of your hugs and messages and vibes and I appreciate every single one of them. I’m not up to responding to each one individually yet but please know that I’m reading all of them. I also am tremendously grateful for those of you who helped cover the costs of Compassionate Care and my storage unit. Because of you, Poppy was able to cross the rainbow bridge comfortably and that means more to me than I can ever express, even with the help of GIFs and memes. 

That’s it for now. I have no eloquent way to wrap up this post.

Our regularly scheduled programming will return…eventually. After all, it is an election year. 

Poppy is not doing well. She’s not super interested in food. The only thing she’ll eat is Gerber’s pureed Chicken/Turkey baby food (the kind that is just chicken or turkey, nothing else) with a little bit of pumpkin mixed into it. She’s drinking water but seems to be eliminating it almost as soon as she consumes it. She’s having a hard time getting around and can’t stand or sit up for very long. She purrs for me and likes to use my hand as a pillow, but mostly she’s just hanging out on one of her perches (I have to lift her onto it and off of it). 

I’m pretty sure it’s time. I’m pretty sure she’s hanging on because she knows how much I love her and how much losing her will hurt me. I’m trying to be strong for her. I’ve told her that if she needs to go, it’s okay. I’ll be okay. I love her always and I don’t want her to suffer so if she needs to go, I want her to go. Her body seems to be quickly becoming more of a prison than a house and nobody wants that.

If she were younger, I’d take her to the vet and hope there was some form of treatment we could do that would save her. But Poppy is 18. She’d turn 19 next month. She is a very old lady and hates leaving our room and dislikes pretty much all other humans. I think the stress of traveling to and from a veterinarian’s office (not to mention the visit itself) would be too stressful and cause more harm than good.

So yeah… if things don’t turn around in the next few days I think…it’s time.

I am not okay. I’ve been preparing myself for this a little bit at a time for a long while now, but there is no such thing as being completely ready to lose a loved one. My heart is shattering into a billion pieces and I am completely falling apart. I try not to cry in front of her because I know it stresses her out, but I can’t stand spending more than a minute or two away from her, just in case. 

I was supposed to spend this week working my tail off doing driving shifts for Amazon Flex, Instacart, DoorDash, and UberEats to earn money for my big storage unit payment due next Monday (around $800 that covers four months) and if I don’t pay it, my storage unit goes up for auction on Tuesday. Then there’s the  cost of compassionate care, end of life transition and cremation for Poppy, when it’s time, which will also cost about $700. 

And you know what, if I lose my storage unit, I’ll be okay. I’ll miss some of it but ultimately, I’ll be okay. It’s just stuff. 

But I don’t want Poppy to have to suffer. I don’t want her to have to hang on longer than she has to…and I don’t want to leave her alone during what might be the last days of her life. The idea of her passing while I’m not here…I can’t, y’all. I can’t. Even the thought of it makes it hurt too much to breathe.

So I need help. Please understand that I am not actually asking for money. I know that’s the logical progression of this type of post and if you would like to send some funds to help out, that would be lovely. I won’t turn them away. And if you want to manifest someone who wants to hire me for whatever I can do from my spot next to Poppy, that would be awesome.

What I’m actually asking for and really need here is…support. Good vibes. Hug vibes. Good thoughts, mojo, whatever. I need you. I need my people and I can’t go to you because I can’t (and wouldn’t even if I could) leave my best friend. 

Plus, if we’re being brutally honest, I’d probably just make some stupid joke, insist that I was fine and then wait until I was by myself to cry myself inside out. I’m healthy that way. 

If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading all of this. I appreciate you all. I have no eloquent way to end this post, so…

Thank you, control tower. Over and out.