chaosmonkey.com - home of Mark Hale

Hello, internet. My name is Mark Hale. You may know me from twitter as @ChaosMonkey, or as the co-creator of @FakeAPStylebook and co-editor of the FakeAPStylebook book “Write More Good.” You may even have known me way back in the olden times of 2004 as a slow-to-update comics blogger. Whatever the case, thanks for reading this. It’s kind of long and it gets a little tough.

I am in Louisville, KY, and I am unemployed. Have been for two months. Unemployment was denied because the national cable company I worked for terminated me for not making sales at what is, at its core, a tech support position. The job was, for me, unimaginably stressful and I don’t miss it. What I do miss is the money, or rather what the money allowed me to do, which is take care of my pets.

Let me say this right off the bat: I’m not asking for donations or money. My wife still works and I am fortunate enough to have some SSI money coming in due to a visual impairment, but anything you could give wouldn’t keep us in our house or pay our bills, anyhow, due to personal and college debts. (We are not in credit card debt, by the way. For better or worse we don’t “believe” in them.) Frankly, I could live in a box as long as I knew my pets had a safe place to live. As it is we’re on a path to moving in with my in-laws, where the pets are not welcome.

Our red-eared sliders (turtles) we’re comfortable releasing into the wild. They’ve lived in a small pond out back for the summer and deserve to be outside.

Our albino channel catfish, Happy, wouldn’t fare so well. We’ve raised him—or her, we don’t know—over the last five years from about to four inches to the point where he’s just over a foot long. He lives in a 125-gallon tank that, frankly, we got for a song. We could probably be talked into donating him and the tank to a shcool or library; any details beyond that would have to be worked out with my wife, who is the fish lover here.

The biggest worry is our cats. We’re suckers for fuzzy faces and have taken in a few who were either strays or came from a home where someone got sick of them either when they stopped being kittens or had some small disciplinary issue. It breaks my heart to say it, but I’m unable to take care of them as well as they deserve. Not to be melodramatic, but I never wanted kids, just cats, since I was in the first grade. But it’s more than we can deal with now and they can’t come with us.

If you can help, or know someone who can, you can contact me via tumblr or send an email to helpmarkspets [at] gmail [dot] com. I’ll respond with pics, info, whatever you want or need.

If you’ve got leads on work in the Louisville area, that would be great. If you or someone you know could adopt or foster a cat till we’re back on our feet, that’s what we really need help with.

Thank you for reading this far. Please keep us in your thoughts and whatever else.

—Mark