Help Jeff Recover From Homelessness

Sometime around fall of 2020 there was a knock at my door; a process server from the court was there, with a $10,000 lawsuit filed in my wife's name, debt which I knew nothing about. She refused to discuss it with me at all, and instead starting packing her bags. The next day I discovered she hadn't been paying rent for 8 months, and that I was under threat of eviction. I cried a lot for the death of a relationship and life I had tried to build, but once I was done, I set myself to clearing out her enormous volume of abandoned stuff, podcasting, streaming, and doing as much gig work as I could to pay all the bills myself.

 

A few weeks into this process, in November, I got really sick. The long story short is that my kidneys were shutting down, and I had to be hospitalized for several days- my body has never truly been the same since then, though there have been ups and downs- I couldn't work physically at all for months. Generally the worst symptoms have been fatigue and weakness, severe enough that it can make it difficult to work at anything at all, even at a desk some days.

 

Worse still, the landlord threatening my eviction is my mother, and she was not interested in rent either going forwards or back; she wants to sell the property whatever happens, and renal failure be damned, which she holds me to blame for, anyway. She gave me until August to leave, and I did. Since then I've been staying with friends and living out of my car off of my savings and donations.

 

The good news is that, with help, I have found a place to live and perhaps recover my health and build a new life, and the time to make the long drive west from Georgia and move in has come upon me. The bad news is it costs thousands of dollars in America to move in to even a modest apartment with a roommate, and this cost will basically exhaust everything that I have left after the medical bills and divorce. I know times are dire for many these days, but I have no furniture, no money for groceries or utilities or a doctor, and no income beyond what I make online, which helps, but is nowhere near enough to set me up from scratch.

 

I have no family to turn to- my abusive father is not in the picture, and my mother considers me a lost cause. I'm asking for $5000 as a somewhat ambitious goal to help stabilize myself; settle in, see a doctor and try to get well, buy a bed to sleep on, and get back to life. I desperately miss having the energy to write and record podcasts and do streams, and there's so much more I want to share with the world. I want to call in to The Majority Report and make Sam Seder laugh in front of thousands, and explain W.E.B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction to an audience of tens. I want to stream with my friends whose jokes I don't always get, maybe even get a decent job, and survive all this- because I think I'm worth saving. Anything on top of that (not that I dare to be TOO hopeful) I'd invest in equipment to improve those podcasts and streams and spread my reach, but to be honest, such a wonderful luxury feels so far away that I can barely conceive of it.

 

Thanks for reading, donating, sharing, and for your encouragement, I really could use all of it these days. Left Is Best.

UPDATE: Wow. I'm feeling pretty emotional about the speed and volume of donations, so much so that I'm better suited to weeping than explaining how I feel right now. Thank you all so much, especially to Sam and The Majority Report, whom I know boosted this and make the best damn left politics talk show you've ever seen. I have upped the goal to $10,000 in case people want to further give me some breathing room while I set up my new life, and want to say thank you all for the support and encouragement. It's a cruel world, so much so that I forget good things can sometimes still happen.