Tim Lieder

I am still in Facebook jail for mocking white people - or specifically using the phrase "blue eyed white devils" in regards to Game of Thrones. The algorithm did it. The algorithm is a fucking Nazi. Facebook is bullshit and yet I'm addicted. As soon as Tuesday comes I will check every hour to make sure I know when I can go back.

Gambit is dead. My other cats are leaving each other alone. Oskar is still shitting in the kitchen. Felix is still taking some grisly shits and not covering them up properly. I apologize for that update but he just did it and I can smell that. Damnit Felix.

I waited for the call for the Fair Hearing only to learn that the New York Burial Fund that denied my claim had sent me a packet ONE WEEK AGO and expected me to have it by now. I actually do have it. It's in my mailbox but I didn't check the mail. I asked for an adjournment. I don't know if I'm going to succeed. They didn't get the paperwork from the Veterans Administration or Isabella Geriatric. I'm going to have to figure out ways to say that it's still ok to pay me. With Isabella I contacted a lawyer for a possible lawsuit and they are stonewalling me for medical records. With the VA, I don't know. It's not my fault that they are not sending in the fucking paperwork.

Besides I didn't even use the VA. The VA would have paid for burial expenses and put Mom in a military cemetery (just like grandmother and grandfather are buried together in Fort Snelling because grandfather Jake was in WWII). Mom wanted to be cremated. So no money from the VA.

Speaking of which I still have Mom's ashes. I really don't know where to put them. I just brought out Gambit and put him in a park next to a tree (only Socrates got a burial because my friend worked at the local church at the time). But Mom was only in New York for the last few months and for a couple weeks in September 2004 when she drove me here (and then flew back). She had a good time then. She really liked TIme's Square. Should I spread Mom's ashes in Times Square.

Also Isabella may say that Mom owes them money because she was supposed to give them her entire Social Security and Pension. She never signed that paperwork. And for fuck's sake I had to use the money to keep her from starving to death with that shitty food. They got about $40,000 a month from the state for her. They didn't need her $1000/month. Anyhow Isabella - the place that killed my mom - may very well stop this. But they are also just not sending in the forms.

So it's my fucking responsibility? Fuck this.

I had the same issue back in September when I tried to apply for rent relief. Not the rent relief that paid HALF of my monthly rent (I'm still five months behind because Cuomo is a master of the empty gesture) but a rent relief that would be a loan. I wanted it to pay off my rent, but I didn't want it as a loan because like other loans it would have just added to my debt.

But I did TRY to get all the forms in. Only the fuckers in the department decided that they needed a SIGNED NOTE from my roommate stating how much he paid a month. My roommate who doesn't fucking talk to me is supposed to sign a note. I got everything else but a fucking note. This is worse than when the people at the humane society hear that I have a roommate and decide that despite years of taking care of cats and having cats in my apartment that they want me to BRING MY ROOMMATE WITH ME to the animal shelter to give over their approval. That was back when I actually had a friendly roommate who might have been convinced to do it. But it was still idiotic.

So I probably won't get money from the state for my mom. I got money from GOFundMe.

Speaking of which here's the gofundme for Gambit's vet bill - https://www.gofundme.com/help-pay-veterinary-bill-for-gambit

I don't think I'm going to get much. I'll find out next week when I can post on Facebook but generally people prefer to help living cats. This is basically me spending $1200 to find out that my cat has cancer a day before he died.

I probably should go to another vet. When Patches died, I only had to pay $700 to find out that she was dying of FLV.

Pretty nothing days. I still have to finish a short story.

I am also trying to help a guy out who is editing an anthology that interests me (I also submitted) and he's trying to get diversity but looking in the wrong places. He thinks that most horror writers are white dudes and hasn't been proactive in testing that assumption. He's also not accepting reprints which is increasingly becoming a pet peeve. If you are editing an anthology and NOT paying pro-rates (or even semi-pro) then fucking accept reprints. I got a few dozen stories that would fit but I published them already. I have friends who would have great stories for the anthologies but they were published already.

Seriously, pro-rate writers are not going to submit to a token payment anthology under the best of conditions. And without accepting reprints there's no way to get them.

My pro-rate sales are few so I don't consider myself a pro-rate writer. I submitted a story because it's very niche - 1918 anarchist werewolves with Yiddish idioms throughout - but had the anthology not been almost made for the story I would have avoided it.

Anyhow, the 1986 anthology is still there.

Last thing, my freezer is filled up. I went to the grocery store and used almost all of my SNAP benefits. They came today. Keyfood is fucking evil in its markups.

Oh yeah, I also have been having too much fun with Dogecoin. Since you can day trade the shit out of that volatile preposterous thing I've been selling it high and buying it low but it looks like it might be crashing finally. I mean a month ago it was less than a penny and then it shot up. It's now going between 6.5 cents and 8 cents a coin. Last week when I started buying these things they were 4 cents a coin.

There's a very really chance that I'm going to lose as it just crashes back to that .0003 a share. But I've never had more than $50 in it. So it sucks but I can consider it an expensive lesson.

Ok. That's it.

I posted about Neil DeGrasse Tyson whom I wanted to believe is innocent and may still be innocent of the rape (but definitely not the sexual harassment) and as much as I'm valiantly resisting trying to act like his defense attorney because he has entertained me, I am pretty raw about the whole thing. Not every #metoo is going to be someone I hate (Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose) or someone that I'm pretty indifferent towards (Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K. in the last year when he was losing it). There will be people that I genuinely like acting like shitbags. The last one was Bill Cosby and wow, did I ever want that one to be false. Hell, I heard about the rape trial like everyone else. And ignored it when it was dismissed (the first one). If Cosby never made the pound cake speech would he have ever been caught?

So I post that and my friend Ian (no last name) goes "what did he do that was so wrong" and that's the kind of conversation that I do not want to have. I say that even if he wasn't being harassing, he was being creepy and as much as we want to give him the benefit of the doubt, that shit is not acceptable. I kind of left it at that.

This is not the usual way I deal with people (friends and friends of friends especially) getting all rape apologist. I spent most of September yelling at Kavanaugh supporters including George Murray who was the guy I once talked to about converting to Judaism in Saint Louis Park because he did it first. Anyone else and I would have been nasty and then blocked him or gotten blocked.

But with Ian, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I decided to believe that this wasn't Ian. Ian would make these arguments because he wanted to believe in the goodness of Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He would act like the defense attorney, doing all he could to dismiss the original rape allegation (which are still in that he said/she said place) and get into some pretty sketchy territory that betrayed how many of these rape culture attitudes he's absorbed. Then after he argued it out he could reflect and feel ashamed of his thoughts.

Usually my SOP for these situations is "ok, fine, MAYBE you will repent and get out of that shitty mind set but I don't have the time." With Ian, we've been friends since high school. I like Ian. In many years of friendship this is the FIRST time I encountered him talking like this. So I'm giving an old friend who decided to be shitty rape apologist the benefit of the doubt. My patience is not infinite, but there are some people that you put up with.

Does this make me a hypocrite? Maybe. After all, I constantly tell my friends on Facebook that they shouldn't have racist friends if they don't want me calling out their racist friends. I also have little patience for the argument that people should be friends with human dumpster fires in order to bring them around. When you allow your Facebook friends to be racists and rape apologists, you are making things miserable for your non-dumpster fire FB friends who have to argue with that.

So back to Ian. I don't go full fuckyou on him because I know Ian and I like Ian. I say a couple things that I think he can accept and then let my friends argue with him. He's wrong, but I do not have the time or the energy to spend all night arguing with him and that's the kind of mood he's in. Hell, half of my year in therapy was spent talking about how I should NOT be fighting with people online (Is the Required Hate story about how I talked shit at her at 2 in the morning still one of my first hits on Google? I haven't googled myself for a time. And that evil asshole was clever in going after my tweets in support of one of the bombing campaigns against Gaza first).

But of course, I then leave the door open for my friends to argue with Ian. And it went on and on. I wake up to I don't know how many comments in the comment thread but by that point Ian is trying to say that NDGT couldn't have roofied the woman and my friend M getting increasingly exasperated as she tried to explain that there were many other drugs that could cause blackouts.

I probably shouldn't have put a sarcastic gif in response to Ian because then M tags me and tells me to come for my boy (when you've been arguing rape culture all night, that phrase is not out of bounds) and I simply say that I don't want to spend all night fighting with Ian and that she seems to be doing fine.

So now while I'm annoyed with Ian for going rape apologist, M is pissed at me for not doing anything. Or for accepting rape apologists. So I try to say that I think she's got it and that I give him the benefit of the doubt. She says fuck this shit and makes a Facebook post calling me out (without saying my name) and going that you cannot be an ally if you accept your friends being rape apologists.

Probably true.

But I never call myself an ally. Too easy to fuck up when you think of yourself as an ally. And this was not a situation that I was going to get out of unscathed. I deleted the thread and then she got very condescending saying that I shouldn't delete the thread and that she didn't have the time to tell me how I'm wrong.

Thank G-d for the 30 day timeout.

But what the fuck does she want me to do? I disagreed with him. I encouraged my friends to fight with him. THe only thing I didn't do was go full fuckyou on him (as I usually do) and/or block him. Am I supposed to spend all night trying to explain to someone who is perfectly well versed in rape culture as to why he shouldn't be defending Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Should I fly out to his house and punch him in the face?

Usually I'm the other side of this issue, asking my Facebook friends to talk to their dumpster fire friends who are spouting the nastiest racist rape apologist shit. I'm also telling my friends that if they don't want me calling out their friends that they shouldn't have racist friends in the first place. I also strongly suggest that they drop these assholes so their friends don't have to block this shit all the time.

What I don't do is blame my friends for their shitty friends because we all have shitty friends. And many of our shitty friends are saying the kind of shitty things that we once thought and if they want to put in the emotional work of dealing with those people, I'm not going to call them out and say that they are total hypocrites for the one fucking time out of thousand when they didn't go "fuck you, you fucking rape apologist asshole here's a 1000 word essay on why you don't know shit".

Seriously, I get that M was frustrated with Ian, but she chose to fight him. She chose to get into it with a FOAF that was saying dumb rape apologist bullshit. Long after it should have been obvious that he was not listening to reason (at least not last night) she kept going. And then she blamed me for it. Because she knew Ian as this shitty guy who was so stubborn about wanting Neil degrasse Tyson to be innocent that he was going to go into conspiracy theory logic. I know him as a friend from high school who also went to my college. And someone that I've been happy to talk with and fight with (about GMOs for a time there) for years.

So I'm not going to abandon Ian at least not at this point. If he keeps this shit up, sure I will reconsider it. And M shaming me for having shitty friends is only going to piss me off.