Voluntary Support

Every so often, I need to remind my readers that because, like the old MAD Magazine and PBS stations, I don’t accept paid advertising, every so often I need to ask my readers for their voluntary support. And when I say “voluntary”, I mean truly voluntary, not extracted from y’all by paywalls, nag screens, annoying popups, or other methods of coercion. Other than a reasonably-inobtrusive little paragraph three times a week which most of y’all probably don’t even notice any more, I limit myself to asking for your support in a full column like this one about three times a year (last year it was only twice) unless there’s some sort of emergency need. And now that I’m only supporting one and have throttled my driving back to one weekly trip to Aberdeen and 4x a year to Seattle, even the emergencies come less often (and I certainly hope that remains the case from now on). But fewer and smaller bills is not the same as no bills, and while I’m not currently having trouble making ends meet,…