The Abyss

goodrx is the most well known one, but if i'm trying to find the cheapest price for a patient i compare it to scriptcycle, and use whichever is offering the best price. you just type in the medication (PLEASE make sure you're getting the right drug, dosage, and quantity) and your zip code and they will spit out some offers for you

some pharmacies may have their own discount card to compare to as well!

if you are getting a name brand medication, you can also look at the manufacturer's website to see if they offer any evouchers for you to use too

Redditors crashed the website with donations over $25k and 0 wishes left. via /r/MadeMeSmile

Right-wing populism a powerful enough ideological tool that you can literally get someone to join a cult of personality around a man even as he empowers someone who directly harmed them, simply by acknowledging the potential for the redirection of raw anger. The Trump administration literally, personally damaged the bomber’s life, but he likely never even knew it, never even knew that the man behind his foreclosure was now working with the man he idolized. Following the foreclosure, he was probably just angry at the prevailing system, but his anger had no structure, no ideology (it seems he wasn’t even politically active before 2016). In absence of a popular leftist systemic critique, the hard right was able to monopolize the response to anger among many white people, redirect it, and mold it in the shape of producerism. Rather than being led to realize the way the construction of power in society actually functions to disadvantage him along the lines of class while keeping him invested in the system with compensatory privileges along lines of race, gender, etc. (see Du Bois’ “wages of whiteness” argument [pg. 700-701 here]), he instead was led to follow the fraudulent right-wing alternative: that corrupt liberal elites were using their power to ruin his life through their promotion of “globalism,” multiculturalism, cronyism, etc. 

Things like this always make me think back to an anecdote from Chip Berlet’s extremely insightful “Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close For Comfort”:

Posse [Commitatus] and [Christian] Identity organizers capitalized on the farm crisis of the 1980s. Rural America faced its worst economic slump in half a century, owing largely to unfair and inequitable policies by the federal government and private banks. While most of society ignored angry and desperate rural families’ legitimate grievances, far-right activists urged resistance and offered ready scapegoats, namely, the Jews who supposedly controlled the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve. In the early 1980’s, Posse activists helped to split the influential American Agricultural Movement, while Identity theology and antisemitic conspiracy theories gained an alarming level of acceptance in rural America. One poll in 1985 found that in the farm belt 27 percent of respondents felt that ‘international Jewish bankers’ were responsible for the farm crisis.

rest stops on highways

trails by the highway just out of earshot of traffic

schools during breaks

those little beaches right next to ferry docks

your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep

the lighting section of home depot

A lot of these places are called liminal spaces - which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.

The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep - all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease. 

You heard the man, folks.

Some resources:

32BJ SEIU - For cleaners, property maintenance workers, doormen, security officers, window cleaners, building engineers, and school and food service workers.

UFCW - Representing workers in the retail, grocery, packing and processing, chemical, cannabis and distillery industries.

 1199SEIU - For healthcare workers, including nurses, nurse aides, techs, lab workers, clerks, housekeepers, dietary workers, transporters, pharmacists, social workers and other medical professionals.

National Writers’ Union - Open to all writers and editors who are either published or intend to publish. 

Scandinavian apartment | styling by Lindholm& photos by Spinnell