The company I’ve been working with and am a minority partner in, as I’ve mentioned before, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It’s been closed down for the past three weeks, and tomorrow the principals and shareholders are holding an emergency meeting to decide whether or not to keep the company going. At this point, the equation is very simple: We have $100 left in the checking account, and debts in the hundreds of thousands. We get more venture capital or we die.

This is, as you might imagine, putting a beating on my own finances. My Web site is the only thing keeping a roof over my head right now, and it’s not bringing in enough.

So, decision time.

The situation: I’m in a lease here until May. The lease can not be broken for any reason. That commits me to Atlanta whether I like it or not, and I don’t have the capital to move, even if I were to try to sneak out in the middle of the night.

Biggest expenses are credit card bills, run up many years ago when the company was first getting started and was paying me in stock rather than cash. (Stock which is now worthless, of course. Ha!)

The options:

– Pray for a miracle at Spectrum. Ha!

– Find a 9-to-5 job somewhere else. Possibly in IT or Web work, possibly in prepress, possibly in advertising, possibly saying “You want some fries with that?”

– Hang out my shingle as a computer consultant again. I’m told the market’s pretty good for consultants, as companies fire their in-house IT staff and outsource.

– Find a way to increase the revenue from my Web site. Doubling it would let me survive; tripling it would mean I’m actually better off than I was before.

I’m leaning toward the latter option right now. To that end, one of the things I’m working on is setting up an affiliate system for Onyx, my sex game. Affiliates would get a unique URL, and would get a share of every sale they made. I know a lot of folks out there have Web sites and wouldn’t mind some extra income of their own.

Another of the things I’d like to do is to print and sell posters of the Map of Human Sexuality I’ve created. A lot of folks have asked me about this, and I (just) have enough room on a credit card to pay for a production run of offset posters, of which I would need to sell 77 in order to break even. Doing this and not breaking even would be a disaster at this point.

So, here’s the scoop:

– If you ae interested in selling copies of Onyx from your Web site, let me know. I’m still setting up the affiliate management software. I’ll have to make banner graphics for it as well. Right now, I’m looking at probably paying out $10 for each affiliate sale.

– If you’d buy a poster at $12 (plus shipping), let me know. I’d like to gauge interest before I commit the funds. A part of me thinks I need to be committed for even considering taking that gamble.

– Any other brilliant ideas? I’m all ears!

Spent the entire afternoon at the doctor’s office today, on account of this nasty hacking coughing yuck that I’ve had for the last three weeks and that has been hanging on like an uninvited house guest. I was swabbed, poked, prodded, X-rayed, poked some more, and several people looked at me and said “hmm” a lot.

After hours of poking, swabbing, prodding, X-raying, and “hmm”ing, the diagnosis is: antibiotic-resistant pneumonia.

Fuck me dead.

The doctor is taking it seriously and treating it aggressively. My kitchen counter now looks like I knocked over a pharmacy. Two different steroids, two different antibiotics, one shot in the ass (that burns like a motherfucker), an inhaler, industrial-strength cough medicine, some foul-tasting bright-orange pills that I don’t even know what they are, two different OTC cough medicines and expectorants that my doctor suggested, and another appointment to go in next week for further evaluation. Hundred and seven bucks for all the prescriptions, and my insurance paid more than twice that.

Apparently it’s going around. Doctor told me I was the third case of antibiotic-resistant pneumonia she’d seen today. Ye gods.

You know it’s bad when you’ve been too sick even to be horny.