I'm Verified at Vocal and Stripe Yet Cannot Withdraw Twenty-Five Dollars, Nor Get a Reply from Support

I'm starting to get a little pissed.

I can't withdraw twenty-five dollars—a princely sum, to be sure—from my Vocal wallet, although I've withdrawn sixteen times before, and, according to Stripe's AI bot helper guy, I'm completely verified over there, as well as being verified over here.

I'm double dawg verified everywhere and about everything. All sorts of checkmarks and little special symbols. I'm not a scammer, bot, what-have-you. I'm a red-blooded, blue-balled, bull-goose looney from Saskatchewan.

(Actually, no...)

One thing I have learned in this life is that everything I have, I have to fight for zealously, as someone is going to want to cheat me out of it. People are not your friends; men are not and never shall be "brothers."

They're mostly predators. And the rest bleat like sheep, ready to be sheared.

I cancelled my Vocal+ membership because, despite having, uh, "reached out" to their Support, I'm not getting any. I understand they must be operating under a veritable deluge of support and technical issues, but, really, just a friendly email filling me in on why I'm subscribed to a service I can't use, while no one seems to care that I can't use it, would be nice.

I hate to seem like a bother, but, shucks, I did PAY to get Vocal+ and am really not seeing what the issue could possibly be.

If Stripe says I'm okay, and Vocal is giving me the verified checkmark, and I still have my Vocal+ subscription until January, despite having cancelled it out of a creeping sense of unease and frustration, I'm not really seeing what the problem here is.

I mean, I can assure you, as paltry as the sum is, I need it a lot more than anyone who works for Vocal, and most of the people who post here.

At any rate, my huge flow of posting here is, apparently, coming to an end. I suppose I was making VOCAL money, too, and, in the end, that's all that matters to most business models.

I suppose I'll go get a Substack.

No one reads me here, anyway.

Love and napalm.

Addendum. I need two hundred more words to post this.

Here's part of an article I wrote on Dark Shadows:

Having watched a fourth of the series "Dark Shadows," the sage of the family Collins which was such a cultural milestone of the late Sixties and early Seventies, and which has accrued a "cult" around itself since its inception sixty years ago, I'm struck at how it gradually descends the supernatural ladder of mythic occurrences: storylines and plots evolved from the intervention of mere ghosts in the form of Josette Collins, to embracing an actual supernatural character in the form of the "Phoenix" Laura, whose fiery death and rebirth called to young David Collins, a natural born Fool and Divine Child, of the Sun, who serves as the child-like fulcrum of psychic awareness for the first leg of the journey.

The bridge is the story arc provided by Irish hooligan and raconteur Jason McGuire, an altogether unpleasant, not to say "sleazy" con artist and grifter,a criminal opportunist from Elizabeth's past. The Hermit here, he blows into troubled Collinwood to reveal secrets best left buried--left, in fact, literally buried beneath the flagstones of a locked room in the basement. Symbolic, surely, as the locked room below is the hidden ghost of a crime buried in the forgotten past.

What's buried beneath the flagstones? Investigation by the local sherrif, Burke Devlin, etc. reveal nothing in the hidden, or locked room. McGuire convinces Elizabeth, the unhappy Empress whose dreams of herself lying ina a casket seems to prefigure...

Should do it.

Love, napalm, and otherwise.

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