Ceaseless Fables of Beyonding

Alright everybody, here’s a quick how-do-ya-do to keep you posted. To begin with: I am currently housed. I have until the 10th of March to cough up my part of this month’s rent. The donations and support have helped greatly so far. I am also busting my hump behind the scenes to scare up as much dough as possible in the next 8 days. The stress has been a blast. Also the neighbors have been helping out by yelling and slamming doors even more than usual. 

I apologize for being a touch lazy with the cartoons and stuff lately. I keep falling behind because physical work is physically tiring and I don’t race to the drawing board after a full day pounding nails or scraping off old paint. I am astronomically grateful and humbled to see my Patron count rising for the first time in like ever. So I’ll have some goodies up sooner rather than later. I’m also gonna get the Collections set up. That’s long overdue. 

Thanks again for your support. 

Hello friends. I’ll cut to the chase. I need help. Very badly. Like, I’m about to be out on the street in a week. That’s how badly.  

For over a year I’ve been essentially living off of my friend/roommate, and it’s literally killing him. I work with him doing carpentry and construction, which historically has covered rent, and doing cartoons and commissions was ideally my second job, with which I could (ideally) cover my half of the bills, as well as food. I had a decently thriving eBay store for a while, where I sold almost all of the toys and memorabilia I’d saved since childhood, plus vintage toys I sold on commission for other folks. 

Economic factors outside out my control have decimated my cartoonist career, and I sell something on eBay about every few months, for under $20. A year ago, a job building a deck in Stockbridge (45 minute ride from where I live) ended in total disaster, injuring both my roommate and myself, and coinciding horrifically with the death of my roommate’s truck. Neither of us has recovered financially since then, and I’ve been subsisting on donations from fans, friends and family. We are both now part of the 40% of Americans who can’t pay rent. I’ve almost been evicted four times. Neither of us has health insurance; it’s just not reality. We just do our best not to get hurt. My roommate had to replace his truck, which set us back farther of course, plus because of the suburb in which we reside, his car insurance is over $150 a month, thanks to the notoriously terrible drivers here. 

It shouldn’t surprise you that on February 5th I was bounced off the hood of a BMW on East Ponce here in Clarkston. I survived intact because I am so psychotic that I fully expect to be struck by cars or randomly assaulted any time I am outdoors anywhere in Metro Atlanta. That is my mindset. I am diagnosed manic depressive and suicidal. 

Not long after this my roommate’s left front tire deflated, and when he put the spare on it later exploded, luckily not sending him to his doom on the highway. We lost over a week of paying work. In January the truck had brake problems that required service, and we lost two weeks. A week doing what we do translates to about $1,000. Also in January, my roommate’s kitty of 15 years succumbed to cancer, and my hamster Gomez passed away days later. It hurts to talk about either. 

I’ve been using free healthcare here in Atlanta for years to get the daily medication I need. If I didn’t need it, I would’ve moved in with family or friends in another state a long time ago. I don’t want to give up on Atlanta because of the great memories I have from the late 1990’s to 2014. I still dream of getting back on top with a functioning studio, like I once had. Every day that dream gets farther away. I’m too embarrassed to even check in on Facebook. I want to tell people I’m okay, but I’m not. I go from blind rage to catatonia to suicidal depression in a day. All I want to do is push everyone away and go die. My self-confidence and self-esteem are in the toilet. I have never felt more worthless in my life. 

It hurts me intensely when people ask why I don’t just get a job. I don’t think anyone understands what a corner I’ve painted myself into in life. I’ve put everything I have into being an independent artist and creator. On the advice of a therapist I applied to the lowest-rung, we-take-anyone staffing company I know of, and for whatever reason, I never heard back. I send out applications every day. Because I’ve worked “off the books” for over two decades, I have zero experience outside of my field, and no wage records with the Dept. of Labor. 

It could be because I was in county jail for 48 days 11 years ago, for aggravated assault and battery. It could be because I’ve written countless articles and comics that go against the “accepted media narrative” post-2020. It could be because I don’t want to work for a corporation that will force me to do things I don’t agree with to stay employed. It could be because I haven’t showered in weeks due to overwhelming depression. I could be the victim of an ancient curse. There could be a thousand reasons. I can’t get a regular job. 

Consider the following. Last month I found a Methodist church within walking distance and started going every Sunday to pray to God for strength. I read the Bible almost daily, praying for guidance. 

Me. I haven’t changed, I’m still 100% the same guy you know, who wrote and drew all that stuff. But this is how bad things are. I go to a church and I pray to God. I figure that if I have to go to church food pantries to survive, I might as well not just pay lip service, and there is no other positive way to connect with my community. Atlanta’s art/alternative community is long dead. It’s all violence, anger, and trash. I don’t even want to admit how long I’ve been alone. There is no reason of which I am aware for a human female to tolerate me.

When I was working from home, going without food was tolerable, but since I now typically work a job that requires physical exertion, I have to buy food, which by the way is substantially more expensive (thanks again to economic factors outside my control, which I’ll spare you a rant about). So if I work four days 9 to 4, and lunch averages eight bucks a pop to get me through without passing out, that’s $32. 

Now once again the landlord is requiring (late) February rent and March rent, plus the exorbitant “eviction fee” of $250, by the end of this month. 

That’s over $2,500. Of which over $1,250 is my responsibility. 

I need help. In my pipe dreams, I imagined that if I could only get a thousand Patrons at $1 a month, I’d have a grand a month. I’d be able to supply more and higher quality content, on a regular basis. But it’s too late for pipe dreams. I’m trapped. I can’t work enough or create enough to get by without donations. I try to justify it in my mind by remembering that when I was growing up, the PBS station constantly begged for donations to stay on the air. Every time I’ve seen Bernie Sanders (whom I once supported, to my detriment) in the past ten years, he’s begged for donations, despite owning several mansions and living a life that I could only dream of. Every single “social cause” you could name of the last decade has not only subsisted on your generous donations, but the indomitable support of nefarious NGOs (look it up) that I will refrain from naming here. 

Anything truly independent requires help and donations from other people. In technical terms I am an “underground cartoonist”. A “fringe artist”. I need all the monetary help I can get. For all intents and purposes I am unemployable. In May I will be 52 years old. I am what I am. This is it. 

I don’t want to be anyone other than who I am. I don’t want to give up what I have built. 

I need your help. I desperately need your help. There’s nothing else to say at this point. I am fighting extinction and I can’t do it alone. 

Thank you sincerely for sticking with me this long. 

Click here to visit the donation page. You can choose your own amount or pick from three choices. Using PayPal is not required, you can use any debit or credit card you like. 

If you’d like to use Venmo, here’s the link.

This is a general public update to let everyone know where things are at in my life right now. I hope this makes things a little easier to grasp when dealing with me. Thanks in advance.

1. Today my computer monitor finally croaked. For the time being I have no way to use my home computer. I am typing this on my laptop, which does not have Photoshop, Acrobat, Debut, VideoPad, or any of the other programs I use for work/creating content.

2. Until sometime later this week, I will have not had home internet for several months. 

3. I haven’t had phone service for over a year. I couldn’t get my old number and it screwed everything up. I’ve been using a TracFone burner that picks up wi-fi. 

4. I can’t afford a car. Not even ZipCar. Most of the time I can’t even afford public transit. 

5. For the past four years I’ve had to run two fans in my bedroom to drown out the sounds of the woman next door violently beating her children, the woman downstairs who shouts into her phone for an average of ten hours a day directly beneath my bed, and other random sounds of the hellhole I can’t even afford to live in. I have nowhere else to go. I have no one. There is nowhere I can go for peace and quiet. Not even the library where I use the wi-fi.  

6. Today I had the second anxiety breakdown of the week. This makes a “regular job”, whatever that is, improbable. If I can’t sleep at least five hours a night, which I can’t, my alarm doesn’t wake me up because I can’t tell dreams from reality. I’m not going to take sleeping pills just because I live adjacent to shitty people. Melatonin is more than enough. 

7. I’ve been going to Grady for years for treatment. I’m not going to humiliate myself by having a breakdown in front of someone as proof. If I’m around anyone it just comes out as uncontrollable apoplexy, and then I become catatonically embarrassed. Typically it manifests as me not being able to get out of bed for hours, like today. If anyone thinks I’m “faking”, fine. Do us both a favor and never work a suicide hotline. 

8. My cousin is helping me out with a new monitor. If he and several devoted fans and/or friends weren’t helping me out financially since 2017 I’d be dead. Try to think about the options someone who spent 30+ years drawing subversive cartoons has in the 2020’s. I can assure you it’s slim to none. I have to invent opportunities for myself. The computer I’ve been using for years now (a sweet Dell Optiplex) was even a donation from a very good friend. I have this laptop and my Wacom tablet only because there were stimulus checks under Trump. Without Trump I’d be worse off than I am now. I don’t care what anyone thinks about that. I really don’t. 

9. I have considered pawning my amazing Wacom tablet because I had to cancel my Adobe subscription, and I barely use it anyway since I have to go to the library for wi-fi (depending on when they’re open). Both Adobe and Amazon overdrafted my bank account in the past two months, costing me over $100 in fees. 

10. Amazon will not let me access my account or cancel it because my old phone died and I can’t get the number back. I can’t access or cancel it from someone else’s phone. I haven’t been able to use Amazon Prime in over a year because of this. 

11. I have been experiencing piercing headaches and random chest pains for a while now. The only reason I was able to get some rest today was because I dragged my old boom box out of the closet and cranked up radio static to cover the animal downstairs who yells into her phone for ten hours a day. I woke up about an hour ago with a worse headache. 

12. I want everyone to think about what it is like living above a foreign person who screams and yells for ten hours a day. I want you to think real hard about it. My monthly rent, which I ostensibly pay half of, is $1,200. Think about killing yourself trying to make enough money to live in this situation. Think about all the things you saved from childhood, that you loved, that you had to sell for just another month. Think about the lengths to which you’d go to try not to lose your mind needing a mere quantum of peace and quiet. Before you ask- the landlord could give a shit. Nobody cares. Really, think about what years of that would do to your attitude and your mental state. And it’s nobody’s fault but my own. I made the wrong choices in life. 

13.  Not only did my beloved hamster Gomez pass on this month, but so did a wonderful sweet kitty belonging to my roommate, who was around 17 and suffered a long, painful decline. For months we were cleaning up her accidents rather than putting her down. That’s how wonderful and sweet. 

14. I’m not quitting what I do. I’ll die first. 

Thanks as always for your support and understanding. I think I covered everything. Probably not.