I don't like money. I'd rather people help each other directly, so that we didn't need money to have our needs met. My utopian vision of society as anything other than a prison to ensure continued productivity is yet to materialize.

So, here I am, asking for money. I haven't found someone to do this part of running the collective yet. I'm sure someone else would be much better suited to the money begging part of running a collective than me, but here I am.

This post is going to be long. This is what I've been doing just the past 5 days. 

I've been too busy to go back much farther, and for it to make much of any sense, so I'll just cover the last few days.

On Friday, I talked with my partner B's ex-partner, convincing them to move into my neighborhood so that they could have any kind of social support, which would be a significant improvement over the *zero* social support that he's got where he's at right now. 

My partner B is struggling with being able to take care of themselves and their kids, so I've been trying to help them how I can with getting them more support, even while they live a 2 hour drive north.

On Saturday, I went to a local amateur radio swap meet with the specific purpose of meeting other local radio enthusiasts, so that I could expand my circles, and find more people to reach out to. I brought out a satchel with my other hobbies in it: flashlights, batteries, and keyboards, along with my amateur radio set. I had good conversations with a few people there. I met a guy who's mostly blind, and mostly wheelchair-bound, who was interested in the flashlights that I have, since I've been a flashlight hobbyist for a couple years, so I know quite a bit about them. He asked to take some time later to consult with me about getting a high-end flashlight with good specs because he needs a lot of light to see, with the little vision that he has left.

I've taken to going on walks at night, because Spokane is falling apart. The police are pushing out the homeless encampment with nowhere for the people there to go. Spokane is the edge of civilization out here. Idaho has so fully criminalized homelessness that it's not even an option for the destitute of spokane to try to go there.

So I've been going on walks around my neighborhood, because the neighbors are afraid of the outside world, they're afraid to talk to each other, and people are afraid to walk around at night. I have really bright flashlights, and my words, and I take these and go out walking, and hope that they will be enough to protect me.

Saturday, while I was out walking, I came across a guy named Daniel who was in bad shape. His head was wounded, and he was having a bit of a hard time walking. I asked him about what his situation was, and he said that he lived in Pullman, to the south, and that he had given a ride to someone to get them to spokane, and then they'd sabotaged his car so it wouldn't work, and stolen his keys, then stolen everything of value out of his car, and he think's they've been trying to find his car so they can finish stealing it.

His car wouldn't run, and it looks like it's in really rough shape, so he obviously doesn't belong. He put a sign that says "help me" on the car. No one helped him.

That was a month ago that he got stranded here.

Saturday, he got beat up pretty badly, a dumbbell smashed over his head, and left in pretty bad shape. The one other person he knows found him, and got his dog, and took them both back to his house.

Since he got stranded here, he knows that whoever sabotaged his car has been looking for it to undo whatever they did so they can steal it, and he's been pushing it a block every day. In my neighborhood, people keep coming up to him and pointing their guns at his car and telling him to leave. he can't leave. his car doesn't work.

I've got 2 vacant houses next to my house, so I helped tow his car into a parking spot in the alley behind my house, so that he'd be left alone.

After helping him move his car, I took him with me to the bar nearby so we could talk. He's a sincerely good person, stuck in a really shitty situation. He wants to be out of spokane as much as everyone who lives here would like him gone from Spokane. He's been here a month and the most help he's gotten from anyone around here is the password to their wifi, and he's had anything of good use stolen from him.

His phone was stolen, so he doesn't have any contacts of people he knows to help him. I gave him my phone number and email. It's him, and his dog. He's one of the most genuine people I've met in a while. His dog is scared as he is, but one of the sweetest dogs I've ever met.

After that, I did work on the online mutual aid network I'm getting set up, and handed off the keys to the person who's helping me run the network/internet services for the online mutual aid network. 

Sunday, I checked on him. He was doing okay, but he said he was feeling worse. I tried to get him to go to the hospital, but he didn't want to go to the hospital here, because Spokane has been so shitty he didn't want to deal with our shitty hospitals on top of it.

I talked with the neighbors directly behind mine about the previously mentioned neighborhood problems which are starting to directly affect the safety of the people of the neighborhood, and told them about this guy's situation, and how I'm helping him, and about how I think he's a good person in a shitty situation, and if there's any problems, to call me and I'll go out and resolve it, and also asked for help in fixing Guy's vehicle.

I also talked with a lot of neighbors in the area about the local problems. I can't be specific, for my own safety. I was walking basically all afternoon talking with neighbors about the neighborhood problems.

that night, I went on another walk. didn't run into many people. I encountered a homeless person wandering around the neighborhood who was beyond my help. He was struggling to tie his shoes, and clearly out of his mind with something. I pointed my long-range spotlight into the sky to distract him while I talked with him a little bit. He said that someone had given him gum with glass in it. His tongue was swollen and he could barely keep it in his mouth. He asked me if I wanted him to leave. I said that as long as he was leaving people's houses and cars alone, I didn't care what he did.

Monday, I go out to talk with someone from the city to try to figure out what the fuck the city is doing about the neighborhood problems. I get somewhat unsatisfactory answers, and am told to tell the neighbors to call a city number every time there's a problem in the area. I think it's bullshit, but it's what I have for now. 

I talk with Daniel again. He's in worse shape now. He says he can barely walk, and his headache is getting worse. I get him some food from taco bell. He eats it all. He's hurting, and we get him some ibuprofen.

I go out to schedule repairs to my car. It's needed repairs for a while, and I've finally gotten the go-ahead from the money-handler of my household to get them done.

I go out monday night on a walk, and I meet someone refilling a community pantry. They're like the tiny libraries that people put in their front yards, but instead of books, they're filled with food for community members. They're someone like me, who goes out to try to help people, and talks to people, and keeps trying to help people, and keeps trying to talk to people, and make the world better. I'm glad I met them.

While I was out earlier in the night, I went up to Daniel and I asked to make sure he's okay. He was getting sleep, which was good. He'd not been able to sleep since he got beat up. I got him some more ibuprofen. Late in the night, I found him out walking. He'd walked to the house of the one guy he knows, because that guy had offered to drive him to pullman, but never followed up. He wanted to go to pullman because he has family there, and knows there are people to take care of him if he's able to get back there, so he wants to go to the hospital there instead.

Today, my partner who lives up north came into the city for some appointments, and they had 5 hours to spend with me and get the appointments done. They were going to share their property with someone else to split the rent, but that plan fell through because reasons, and they're in really bad shape and really need help right now, so I've been talking with their close friends who live near them and own the property they're on to try to figure out a way to get them the help they need. (before you get sassy about landlords charging their friends rent, they're paying barely what the property costs to maintain in rent, which is what we're looking for solutions for)

While they were in town, one of the other friends of the collective had time to come downtown where I am, and talk about plans to help people in the collective. They're an engineer-mindset kind of person, and so we discussed material solutions to problems that are ongoing, like a mouse infestation that we're struggling with, and the very broad lack of funds that my collective is dealing with.

After talking with them about work to do in the collective, I finally had a bit of time to myself, and sat down with a gaming group that I used a play online with a lot. About half an hour into that, I get a call. It's Daniel, and he's in the hospital.

He had gone out to the social services building this morning to get some food, and collapsed in their lobby. They called an ambulance and carted him off to the hospital. It had taken him most of the day, but he had finally gotten him a bed, and he had called me because they needed someone to come and pick up his dog, who was with him, because the dog couldn't stay with him while the hospital did its tests.

I quickly got the information I needed from him, and where he was, cut my game short, and headed out to go pick up his dog from him at the hospital.

When I got to the hospital, I had to go to the emergency room to get to him, and the emergency room is currently wildly over-capacity. There were dozens, maybe over a hundred people in the waiting room for the emergency department. It's full of desperate sick people waiting to try to get the emergency support that they need, and the greed of the hospital administrators, and the failures of our society, meant that all these people needed help, and weren't getting it soon.

Right now, I'm the only person in the world that he has; he's lost contact with everyone he knows because his phone was stolen. If I hadn't given him my phone number, he would have no one, and he would have lost his dog, because the hospital would have insisted on him going in to take the tests without his dog. I made sure the nurses taking care of him knew how important it was that they contact me, because he has no one else, and that once he's stabilized, I'll drive him back to Pullman myself to check into the hospital there.

As I was walking out of the hospital, through the emergency waiting room, I was very mindful of something that I'm still struggling with: I was taking that dog away from Daniel, the last safe haven that it knew. They're in an unfamiliar area, they don't know anyone, and they barely know me, and Daniel was trusting me to take his dog, and his dog was trusting me to take care of her, even when I was taking her away from the only person that they knew.

As I walked through the waiting room, a tiny bright spark in my day: the people I'm passing by with Daniel's dog, exclaiming how cute she is. I considered stopping to let them pet her, but I was worried that it might put her under more stress.

After getting back home, and getting this dog settled in my back yard, I undertook the task of getting Daniel's vehicle pushed into my gated backyard so that the rest of his things weren't stolen. It was a lot of work to get that done. I enlisted the help of one neighbor, and one of my housemates, and it took a bit of bumper-pushing with my own car to get it done.

After I got that done, I talked a bit with a couple of my housemates, and then sat down to write this. It's taken over an hour to write this. After I'm done writing this, I'm going to take my flashlights and go walk around my neighborhood some more.

When Daniel gets released from the hospital, I'm going to drive him and his dog to Pullman. I don't know how yet. My collective is tight on money, but I think I can make it happen.

This is the work that I do. The people I live with help ensure my needs are met, but I don't make money from this. The reimbursements through opencollective offset the costs of the work that I do and the things that I buy to help other people enough to keep my housemates from getting upset at how much it costs to help people, but I'm not paid for this work. This is just the last 5 days, but this is also my life. I'm trying to help people, and I keep trying to help people. I try to talk with people, and I keep trying to talk with people. I've been doing this for months.

The thing that lets me do that is the same thing that keeps me from being able to do it as well as I'd like: I don't have a bullshit job that's filling my life with meaningless work that doesn't actually help anyone, but it means I also don't have my own income.

If you think that the work that I do is important, please share this, and contribute money. Maybe I can help the world be just a little bit less shit, a little bit at a time. Right now, it doesn't feel like it. It feels like everything is constantly falling apart, and I'm in a kayak pushing against a river.