What To Do, Facing the End of My Self-Appointed Job

The end is coming closer by the day.  June 2013.  Armageddon.  For me, at least.

People lose their jobs every day and have to find some other way to find meaning, human contact, money--and survive.

I have thought of trying to put together my own nonprofit.  But getting the federal status, so one can apply for grants, can take a year or two.  I have no business training.  I have a car run into the ground from helping other people and their cats.  215,000 miles on it.  I cannot justify using it further, beyond June, if it lasts til June.  It's going to die, and then not only will I be unable to transport cats, I won't even be able to help myself, like getting groceries, cat food and litter.  I've probably done myself in already in that regard.

So, outside of some miracle that included a transport vehicle, going beyond June, trying to form a nonprofit myself, is only wishful thinking.   In Oregon, a nonprofit must include three board members.  I have yet to find even one reliable volunteer.  Not even one.  Fundraising, how could I do that alone?  I'm no gadabout with great contacts.  I am lucky to get one bag of cat food donated from a local source a year.  Some people are good at some things, others at other things.

 I'm a loner, pretty much a recluse.  Damaged in many ways. I have nightmares from my past still and now nightmares intruded upon by locals who have done terrible things to animals.  Faces haunt my dreams.  Not humans. Cats in trouble.  I reach out to them and wake up comforting ghosts.

Retirement?  Yeah, right.  I don't do nothing well.  Would probably kill me.  Will probably kill me.

S/nipped, in Coos Bay, one clinic I've used for a couple of years, is raising their prices in February.  I don't know yet by how much.  I use just three clinics now.  I use S/nipped in Coos Bay when I can scrounge the gas money.  They do a great job and I can get in pretty much whatever I can bring, but the gas costs and putting more miles on that mileage old car, not good.  And the trip exhausts me.  Two and a half hours driving each way.  That's no big deal though.  I can take it.  I don't drive tired.  I sleep in my car during the day if I have to, or at a rest area in transit.  I don't mind sleeping in my car at all.  I think I could sleep anywhere.

I use Heartland's spay surgery, when they have room, which is not often and I don't get many done there.  Heartland is over in Corvallis, where I used to live, where I lived almost my entire life until the latest housing crisis shoved me across the river.  I got evicted by a slum lady.  There's no housing in Corvallis anymore for poor people.  It's been run over by the university expansion and developers.  I meet so many people I used to see in Corvallis, now forced over here.   It costs lots to live over there in the land of the rich and progressive.    It's nice over there though.  Really nice parks and bike paths and cute little businesses with catchy names.   Over here, drugs, cars, concrete, life is much harder and harsher.  But the people are more humble, down to earth, friendlier.

Heartland's workers are really nice people.  I like the people who work there.  But as for usefulness in high volume spay neuter for population control, they can't do that kind of volume.

I use the FCCO too, but not often.  They're easy to use.  I check in the cats, then go find something to do during the day or sleep somewhere in my car, unless it is scorching hot.  It's much easier to car sleep in the winter than the summer.  You can keep warm easier than you can keep cool, when sleeping.  Try to sleep in my car in the summer months and it's like a dog or cat or a baby left locked in a car on a 95 degree day.  Only nobody breaks a window in outrage to save an exhausted sleeping over heated cat trapper roasting to death.  Darwin, people think, in action.

So I understand where I sit now, with June coming at me and no real plan onward doing the same. Change.
I'll still be here, in a county crawling in people who don't fix their cats and barely notice the suffering.

I'll probably die being unable to do a damn thing about it.  Or gouge out my eyes?

I'd like to move, so I could be helpful somewhere where services exist so I could keep on going.  Fat chance.  No money.  Moving takes money.

My brothers are no help.  They're too busy themselves surviving.  I try to call them for advice but they don't even have the time to answer.  I'm too needy.  I need to figure something out for myself.  

Basic facts:  no local Linn or Benton nonprofits want to let me piggyback under them to create a spay neuter fund and program.

Takes a year or two, plus money, plus at least two more people for a board, to get a nonprofit going.  After federal status, which takes the longest, one can apply for grants.   I don't have the money to even apply.  I don't have others interested in working with me.  I don't have a vehicle that will even last the wait to get the status, if I were to get it.

I need to let it go. In June, it's over. I need to figure out what to do with the rest of my days.

A spay neuter funding nonprofit provides absolutely the most bang for the buck, reducing the numbers humanely and quickly, of cats, reducing costs to shelters (that get most of the animal funding donations now), to taxpayers, to neighborhoods, helping the environment, reducing zootic disease outbreaks and disease vector spread possibilities.

But most importantly, although all these other side effects are absolutely a consequence of spay neuter, is the reduction of suffering to the animals.

It's so obvious to me that's where the money and effort should be focused.  The solution right there.  Plain sight.  Common sense. Nobody sees how easy it could be.  But I do.

If I try to form a nonprofit, I want to do it right.  I would create a brandable name, with a specific mission, and what I would love to do, is to create products with the brand, to fund its mission.  That's the way to do it.  I watched it with Poppa Inc., selling plants to produce revenue to fix companion animals.  They did not beg for donars nor was Poppa dependent upon grants.  It's wonderful to find donars and grants but not always easy to find them.

Then I would want to set up an easy, step by step, protocol for answering requests for help and for seeking out unfixed cats in cities and counties.  I would want to recruit the young, with their new ideas and energy, too.  Could I do it?  I'm going to try!  When I go down, it won't be for lack of trying.

If there is ever a power vaccuum in our country, it is not the government we have to fear, it will be the crazy gun people and gangs.  Yes, gangs.  They're heavily armed already, organized and that would be hell.  Just look at Mexico.   And those are American guns, bought by proxy, from greedy unscrupulous gun freaks,  (and in really stupid government big ideas ((i.e. Fast and Furious)) being used in to massacre innocents in Mexico.  The cartels are fueled by American drug addicts.

So I support anything that breaks up gangs and keeps them without access to weapons of any kind, other than, say, slingshots.  I don't think alcoholics should have guns. They use them to kill their spouses and kids. I don't think people convicted of certain drug use or dealing should have access to guns.  Meth heads have damaged their brains for good.

So anyhow, I hope there is no time when crazy gun people decide to start a revolution over wanting more and more guns.  I wish there could be revolutions of love instead, for the living, of concern for kids living in horrors of abuse and neglect with drug and alcohol infected parents. Etc.

But American society is cowboy all the way.   We consume violence in all forms presented.  We practise it.  We worship it.  We make fun of those who advocate against it as weaklings.  Kindness is mocked privately too.  We bow down and kneel before violence as our god of gods.

Our holy guns.  Sacred religious objects.

Kind of scary, aren't we?