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I was wondering yesterday if I’ll ever mosh again. Or, more to the point, if we’ll ever mosh again. Will the pit ever open UP? By the time the pit does OPEN UP, will my old frail bones (and fully developed mind) be comfortable colliding with the youths at some half-assed punk show? (Do I have to do the thing where I go, “Obviously this is low priority”?) Ahem: Obviously this is low priority.

But I was thinking this was because I don’t—and never did—really like moshing. I wouldn’t choose it. It often happened, and I was there, and then you’re moshing. A lot of going to live shows was basically like this—a collection of not good but very fun stuff: your favorite artist reduced to the quality of LOUD; new friend, call him stranger A, sweating on you; paying $7 for a beer that tastes like plastic.

Do you miss that too?

If so, I’ve been finding a balm in scratchy live performances of artists I like. I find in them a dose of the unexpected. And, as I live increasingly online, I find in them a respite from ill-fitting perfection in the optimized spaces I traverse digitally.

One of my favorites for this is Ryley Walker—an artist who uploads a ton to Patreon. You can pay a few bucks and join me. I’ve enjoyed “Live at Shibuya 7th Floor, Tokyo, Japan” and “Live in Paris @ Mona Bismarck American Center June 1 2017.” Walker interlaces his songs, sometimes long acoustic riffs, with chitchat that I find amusing. It’s nice to hear a human, you know?

Or you can listen to a few examples of Bob Dylan singing terribly, which I enjoy. Here’s “Pancho and Lefty,” and this concert from 1984 has horrific quality, and he just stops playing a song at 19 minutes for no reason. Great. I don’t want to be fully pleased at the moment. For me, there’s a certain cheeriness in seeking out the random and slightly broken but tolerable.

That’s the good news I got for you. Sorry, the real news is…hard to mine at the moment.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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