an important thing: WHERE I AM AT AND WHERE THINGS ARE GOING AND HOW I AM GOING TO GET MY LIFE BACK: THE POST: THE MOVIE: THE GAME (Patreon)

hi. i've been busy all day working on the upcoming rotteen vinyl. but that's not the most important thing here. it's cool, though, but not why this post is here.

this is post is here because it should be clear that i've been focused on merch this year and haven't been able to put out much new work. and the reason for that is i've gotten to the point where i dread putting energy into art. let's get into why, i'll try to keep it concise.

last year, in a rut of loneliness as well as emotional and physical distance from other humans, i hit the ugliest mental health brickwall i've ever hit and became reliant on entactogenic, serotonergic, and dopaminergic substances (namely MDA and 6-APB) because it was the only way i could find any happiness, motivation, or love in the world or myself. i was looking for solace in chemicals, but instead found a pit where i couldn't even begin to do the things i love, even socialize, without being half-braindead on a stimulant or something. somehow, i kept doing things, but nowhere near as much as i had hoped.

i lost track of a lot during 2018, including my finances, which is why 2019 has been the year of merch. to say i'm in debt is putting it lightly. i barely even kept track of what day it was until last month, when i realized i was in fact slowly killing myself. but, regarding finances - i was sure that an inheritance was going to take care of much of the issue. this now seems to not be the case, and was more or less a 'surprise' as of last night, which is why i've been working all day. because of this, the halloween stream's $550 price tag actually wound up hitting me much more directly than expected. so, things are not so hot.

last week, i formally (and publicly, in an effort to truly resign to it) went cold turkey on all hard substances i had been taking. i'm staying that way. i need to find energy in myself and in the world around me again. i need to be a human being again. i don't want to keep hurting myself looking for happiness where there is none. i want to feel good again.

moreover, i want to love people again, and i want to love what i do again. i want to create and love doing it, but there's more to that than quitting what was hurting me. i need to square away this debt. so i'm working on that now, and that's why the merch stuff is continuing. the DLxEUGENE tape and other stuff, but what it is isn't important to this post, the rest of this is much more important.

as it stands, i'm going to have to keep up this crunch until July 2020 at a bare minimum if i want to clear my debt. this means a lot of merch and not much energy for new work. i'm doing absolutely everything with the energy i have to clear my plate as quickly as possible. and i'm not going to stop until it's clear.

without your support, i would likely be dead by now. i would not have a home, i would not have anything. i cannot even begin to thank you enough. if you could continue supporting me through this, although i cannot guarantee much aside from ongoing merch releases for a while - i literally won't have the funds or energy for the most part - i can promise you that i'm going to keep trying and that i hope once things clear up, i'll be able to find that energy again and truly get back to staying on top of life and looking forwards to creating instead of scrambling in the present to stay alive.

again, thank you. i'm sorry for my failings, but it needs to be uphill from here.

for the sake of transparency, because i think that's important:

my rent is $1200cad/mo (utilities included), my debt payments are $1700cad/mo, and will be increasing to $1900cad/mo in 2020 until July 2020. currently, patreon covers about $2000cad/mo, which is more or less my guaranteed income thanks to you. 1900+1200 is $3100/mo, which is 1100 more than i make, so i have to do that much in merch and bandcamp sales, and that's before also paying for groceries. it's kind of miraculous that i've made it this far given how the odds have been stacked against me, but i've managed so far. my bandcamp digital sales don't actually acount for very much, some days $0, it's pretty random. but yeah theres the transparency for yall so you can see how i'm trying to do things.

a kind individual on twitter asked if there was a place they could send donations, and i guess https://www.paypal.me/HALLEYLABS is probably the easiest way to do that as long as it's not sent as payment for a service. absolutely no pressure to do this, not even 1%, i just figured since one person had asked it would make sense to include it. 

somehow i've gone my life until now without having a Major Crisis - well, i mean, i've had one, but this is different. this is a distinctly personal crisis in which i've been actively watching my life crumble before my eyes and have done nothing about it. and i'm not sure why i haven't. fear, anxiety, depression, it's all part of it, but i still don't know how it all happened.

thank you for reading. thank you for being here for me. thank you for everything. i'm going to keep trying. your ongoing support is appreciated beyond words, beyond feeling, beyond everything. thank you, thank you, thank you so much.

please look after yourself. i've been telling you this the whole time because i haven't been doing the same.