At this point I’m waiting to hear from Neighbor about tonight’s meat-sorting. He told me when he left here, so now what I’m awaiting is word that he’s on his way back. I normally give it about forty minutes after that notice and then start walking over.
One of these weeks, if I’m feeling adventurous, I may ask him if I can tag along and then let my brother know we’re coming so that we can meet up somewhere; Doug has a P.O. box in Cave Junction and has got to live nearby. I doubt Neighbor will go along with it, but in theory we could just leave early and then have a bit of time. I don’t know if Neighbor and I are friends yet, strictly speaking, but there’s nothing wrong with him meeting someone from my family, and it might help Doug to be able to put at least one face to my current situation. I dunno. Just at a guess. Or actually, I’m going to give it several more weeks just to see how things go here. I could even give it until after the August meeting because I think that might be a better gauge of the general situation. We’ll see.
And speaking of Doug, I don’t hear from him. I don’t know why. I did communicate with him right when I arrived here, and he’s got my number, and that’s as far as it goes. He contacted Dad pretty regularly when I was still in Louisiana so I’m not sure what’s going on. I know he’s got health issues, and that could be it; I also know he’s dealing with the situation with his daughter and who knows, maybe some shit came up there. I think I’ll send him a dog photo or something soon to see if he bites. Might as well.
This site is now at my new hosting service and I’m pretty happy about it. They have free security certificates and free whois privacy and those alone make them worth the cost of the service, which is less for my first year than two months at Old Host as it is. Bluehost, the one before Old Host, is pissing me off though. I fiddled where I should have faddled and now I can’t change anything in my contact records for one of my domains and I can’t transfer the domain either. Bluehost has to fix my domain-owner email before I can do that. They’re fucking around instead of doing what I asked them. I think I’ll get back into chat tomorrow and flame their faces off, is what I think I’ll do. I’m tired of the games. I left them in the first place because they were letting vandals fuck up a site I was running, and as I was going in to try to fix the problem I realized they had completely rearranged their site without any warning and I could hardly find what I needed. They have zero regard for the customer experience or even site functionality, really, and I’m fucking over it. Old Host (the one I’m quitting now) has been better, but they’re far too expensive for what I’m actually getting. Let’s hope New Host is far less disappointing. And let me not end all my paragraphs with “we’ll see.”
So I had an interesting development since the last post. It isn’t going to be much of a development for reasons which will become apparent as you read, but I ended up with another paid annual subscriber to the Substack and, as some of them do, he included a note. So turns out this is someone back in Columbus. He’s not anyone I’ve ever met. I emailed him to see if I could figure out where he knew me from — my theory was the Art and Artists of 614 group since he said this was Facebook and years ago — but apparently not. He saw me on Reddit when the Gender Critical subreddit was banned and he saw me a couple other places. Anyway, he’s in Clintonville. Going by his description of the general area, I probably could have walked to his place. His name is unusual enough that I was able to discover that he’s close to my age, though probably a few years younger. I can’t tell much of anything else about him other than his general career trajectory (he worked at OCLC before Matt started there!) and I haven’t tried. It’d be a bit weird. But he sent me words of encouragement, and he agrees with my assessment that the last three years have been basically me getting a bum fucking deal. My words, not his. It kind of makes me wonder who else is lurking, though — and he has been lurking; he’s probably been one of my Columbus hits here and there for the past however long — and just never said anything. I wish they had. But then it’s just as much my fault for holing up in that fucking house. I should have been trying harder to build my own life, and maybe I’d still be there with my daughter now. And Matt could be off somewhere else going and fucking himself.
Can’t do a thing about it, though. Can’t even think of this as “oh, I have a new friend,” because no way in hell am I getting back there and even if I could right now, I wouldn’t risk it. My situation is even more fragile than it was at the beginning of May. So that’ll just have to be whatever it is and I’ll just be thankful there are more people in the world who wish me well than I had previously been aware of.
I’m trying to make myself draw, and wondering why I have to make myself do it. But I think I’m still struggling a lot with depression. It’s not as bad as it has sometimes been but I have my episodes. I suppose it’s progress, though, that I don’t start drama with people while I am in the worse throes of it. You got to figure shit gets better eventually. At SOME FUCKING POINT I’ve got to catch a fucking break. I just wish it’d hurry the fuck up.
I am not sure just now whether I will be approved for MediCAL. I sent them the information they asked for and got no acknowledgement. I guess I will just wait and see what comes in the mail, because I am a gigantic fucking coward and I don’t want to call the caseworker only to be politely told to fuck off. I would probably be more worried, but if this falls through then I have a plan B because I qualify for VA coverage. It’s not ideal. There’s no VA clinic in Del Norte County. But if it would keep me from having no coverage, I’ll fucking go for it.
I am so pissed at Dad. I could have had a perfectly fine situation there if he’d just fucking relaxed and stopped trying to fucking control me.
But on the other hand, a lot about this situation aligns better with either the values I have or the values I want to have, depending on the topic. That’s not a bad thing.