Help Harpo Find a Home and Found a Sanctuary

My name is Rain. You can see Harpo and my other cats on Insta, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit to see what we're about.

I'm trapped in a dangerous place, physically and mentally, and I don’t know what to do. This latest setback seems to have broken something in my depression and chronic pain and PTSD-addled brain, to the point where I’ve started dissociating for long, blank periods of time. If you already know our story and why we're struggling to find housing, you can just skip this summary and scroll down to THE DREAM if you like, or click this link and this one for more details.

When I started selling Harpo merch in November, the goal was to raise $10,000 to move. I figured having six months' rent plus a security deposit would be enough to mitigate my having been evicted in 2018 in the wake of Portland’s new rent control law and the damage that did to my credit. Then once I paid the first/last/security, I’d use the other half for Harpo’s surgery and getting Groucho, Diva, and Gummitch in for some long-overdue checkups.

Apparently, I was wrong. Every place I’ve talked to has ghosted me, except for one which told me I would have to meet their criteria for someone who was unemployed, which is to have enough in savings to cover the entire term of the lease, which is insane! It would seem that being an internet content creator is not a “real job,” even when you have tax documents.

But the biggest problem is that after you get evicted, it’s almost impossible to find anyone to rent to you who isn’t a super shady slumlord, and my current landlords have tried to evict me three times, first for asking for repairs, then for reporting them to the city, then for them having to spend tens of thousands of dollars to repair everything they were cited for. Fortunately, only one of those attempts actually made it to court, where it was dismissed. But they’re still a bad reference.

(Yes, I know I should sue them, but I’m afraid to do that while I still live here. Their family has a long history of violence, according to the neighbors, who advised me to start closing the catio at night, lest the cats end up getting poisoned.)

This is a big reason why there are so many homeless people in the US now. I have talked to SO MANY people in camps who are there because they got evicted by a landlord who wanted to slap a “luxury upgrade” on their apartment and raise the rent. Then they missed a shift or two at work and lost their jobs. That would have been me four years ago if I punched a clock instead of captioning Holocaust survivor testimony on a super flexible schedule. That would have been me a year and a half ago if I didn’t have a trained cat that made people on the internet care whether I live or die, who started earning enough to bring me above the poverty line for the first time since getting struck by a drunk driver in 2006.

Many times since November, people have asked me why I didn’t just start a GoFundMe. And I said that while I’d done that in the past, back when Harpo almost died of cancer, I didn’t want to do it anymore, as earning money on Ko-Fi by making people laugh is much better than soliciting it on GFM by making people sad or angry. Because I’ve gotten so used to thinking of GFM as an emergency platform that I forgot that people also use it more like Kickstarter. So that is what I am going to do.

THE DREAM!

The dream is that in the time he has left, Harpo can earn enough for a down payment on a duplex to share with a friend, or a triplex to share with two friends, or a four-plex to share with three friends. My friends would help me provide sanctuary for senior and special needs cats while I foster and train kittens. (I’ve always wondered if Harpo would bring me actual kittens.)

The dream is to earn that down payment by reducing my captioning hours a bit, actually hiring someone to help with back end stuff instead of just asking friends for help, and then spending as much time as possible sharing as much of Harpo’s final year or two on this earth with all of you via more and better heist videos, stills, live streams, blog posts, outtakes, and videos of him playing regular cat games with his friends. I have HOURS of footage I haven't even had time to edit!

The dream is to use my background in behavioral science and animal cognition to teach people how to better communicate with their animals, and how to make their cats more like Harpo. Because that’s what I hear all day long, “my cat is so boring, I wish they were more like Harpo.” But Harpo actually used to be the most boring of my four cats! It was training that made him blossom. I want to help other people amplify their pets’ quirks and eccentricities through carefully calibrated positive reinforcement. I want to show them how to turn them into a structured daily game to maximize their enrichment, like Harpo and I have.

But before we can do any of that, we need to get out of this ugly, leaky, moldy, vermin-infested, structurally dangerous, badly plumbed, illegally wired, hazardous debris-strewn dump, which is slowly killing me, which is owned by evangelical white supremacists who hate my guts. So if Harpo has ever helped you get through a bad day, I hope you will help us get through this bad situation and out the other side into safe, stable housing again, where I can then use some of the money that got us there to start making that dream happen.

Then Harpo can continue spreading joy even after he’s gone through the Harpo & Friends Cat Sanctuary. Every cat we help will be his legacy.

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