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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 5th, 2024

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  • I’ve lost four senior pets in the last 3 years, all between 14 and 23 years old.

    You make them as comfortable as possible for as long as you can, and you shower them with love and treats for as long as they live.

    When you have to let them go, you stay with them until their last breath and you thank them for all the years they gave you.

    Go home and bawl your eyes out. Grieve for as long as you have to.

    But never, ever, ever give them up or give them away. They deserve better.


  • Reading A People’s History of the United States put that on my radar. I hadn’t given the idea any thought until a college course assigned this book. I was educated in a standard American public school during the Reagan and Clinton eras, complete with Pledge of Allegiance. The standard schoolbooks omit a lot of atrocities and smooth over the ugly reality.

    Whatever legitimate criticisms you lay on it, Zinn’s takedown opened my worldview and intensified my pre-existing anti-authoritarian streak.

    9/11 happened shortly after and by then I considered Bush an illegitimate president. I watched him wage an unjustified war, and with the whole of our bloody rampage across the globe that clicked neatly into place. “America #1” is a sick joke.








  • There was a particular easy listening station when I was a kid that played 60s, 70s, and 80s folk, soft rock, motown, and other singer-songwriter stuff that helped me deal with the anxiety of fighting parents and the deathly silence in between.

    These days I listen to old episodes of MST3K or Rifftrax on YT, Best of the Worst, or one of the myriad of “oldies playing quietly in the next room and it’s raining” that you can easily find.

    My mind still races at night. I eventually made a playlist to recreate that old radio station vibe. It doesn’t hit the same way it used to.




  • Just went through this twice in the last year with a 17, and then a 20+ year old kittie, both well-loved companions. Those last months are the hard ones, but they need us more, not less. To cut them off from us in their waning days is to spare ourselves the pain of impending loss, all at the expense of their dignity and comfort.

    Gosh if only a person in his position could appreciate the need for compassion towards the elderly.