Imagined Community

I've been thinking some fairly dark thinks since a week ago Tuesday, and should really be getting a lot darker as the president-elect starts to name names for cabinet appointments that seem to be limited to people who seem specifically unqualified to fill them, like an ethics-and-legally-challenged attorney general or a head of the Department of Health and Human Services who thinks diseases are caused primarily by insufficient wheat germ intake or, in all other cases, hoodoo.

I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing, though, that I seem to be taking it a lot better this time around than I did in 2016. I think the absolute collapse of the polling in that cycle, plus the basic incredulity that we as a people could elect someone that obviously stupid to be president, made it a much more whiplash-inducing collision of expectation and reality, especially coming off eight years of Obama and what seemed like a fairly stable center-left coalition of voters. Not hugely inspiring or transformation in retrospect, but at least an environment where positive sociopolitical change could be negotiated, like Obamacare. One day we'll remember the days of relatively reliable, slightly subsidized medical insurance before "coverage" devolves into your insurer just mailing you an at-home surgical supply kit (with simple pictorial instructions) in lieu of the expensive kerfuffle of in-patient professional intervention, any day now.

It's probably because these pathways have already been carved that I'm not swirling into tornado fits of rage-panic. I wouldn't even say I'm feeling numb (another common sentiment over on Bluesky, come check it out before it's all Russian porn bots, like twitter) and I know that because of the impatience I definitely feel for my fellow lefties mouthing a lot of the "take care of yourself and remember to breathe" advice through this. It's not that I discount their feelings or that huge segments of the population should rightfully panic (including civil servants, which may well include myself or people very close to me as far as you know) when a president is arriving blown into office on the bloviating winds of recrimination and punitivity, in a Stalinist kind of mode, but with fewer machine guns and more bronzer. I think it's more that a creeping, unbidden lump of nihilism has crystallized in my trachea, filtering out expressions of fear in favor of only a simmering low-level anger drowning everything else out, like a self-soothing cat's purr through a Marshall stack.

It's a hell of a thing to have your belief in your country shaken, but it's almost more shocking to come to the conclusion that belief in your country maybe isn't really a necessity at all. The idea that a country exists as an idea is definitely some New World thinking, where all our countries are way closer to the year in which they were made up out of nothing, and thus appear to rely a lot more on constant positive reinforcement than older nation-cultures. It's a combination of insecurity and romanticism that doesn't sound all that durable when you say it out loud anyway; a lot more Tinkerbell than Türkiye, if you follow. Modern Türkiye only dates back to 1923 so maybe that's not the best example, but it's an old culture and I wanted the alliteration, you get it.

America represents something, which politicians like Reagan and Obama have been able to articulate and mobilize into practical political results, but what's the right amount of investment for Regular Joes like you and me? Maybe the feelings of disappointment following an election ranging from ick to existential despair are tied too much to this overlay of Enlightenment thinking that cynics have been exploiting in four-year cycles for going on 250 years now. I mean, what's Poland, right? It's the place where the Polish people live, like literally Pole-Land. You don't gotta believe in that, it's just a cultural-linguistic truism expressed as a line on a map in Eastern Europe. It's defined as much by what it isn't (these aren't Belarussians or Slovaks and VERY DEFINITELY not Germans) as what it is. Sure, it's disappeared a few times historically, but the Poles as a people stayed in roughly the same area. There's persistence of identity not reliant on anybody's feelings... well, except for when whoever is running Russia or Germany at any point in history gets handsy, but it seems safe for now!

OK, so Türkiye and Poland, maybe not the best two examples. And yeah, here in the Western Hemisphere we don't really have the cohesion of old human migratory patterns and the development of linguistic other-ness vs. neighboring populations to give us a core to rely on if the borders imploded or were erased by a grabby neighbor (we're watching you, Canada). I guess if we broke up, we could all "go back to where we came from," but I was born in LA County, that's two counties over from where I am now. For the time being, I supposed I don't have much choice but to continue to keep believing in this silly, self-destructive place. I don't want to have to move all my stuff. I just wish all of my friends could say that

Garbage People

I keep waiting for the vitriol to hit, or at least the despair. Something familiar and urgent, to set me on the path to what is ultimately cathartic: a scream, a cry, a punching of things perhaps/perhaps not appropriate for punching, a consuming of glutens and starches in quantities discouraged by modern medicine. You know, the normal stuff.

Maybe it's due to age and perspective or maybe a version of that where it's hard to be surprised by the same bullshit twice, but I'm finding myself way more at the deep-sigh-slow-headshake level rather than the bloood-curse-the-sun-and-moon-and-all-the-humans-beneath-both sort of a pitch. It's not that I'm not mad, it's more like your meth head son getting arrested. The first time, it's a traumatic existential brain-lance that requires you to rethink everything you thought you understood about the world and those closest to you; the seventeenth time, you politely thank the police officer who let you know and you hide the silverware before you know they're going to get out. Sure, at some level you have to deal with who they are, but you learn it's not really about you, not directly. You just want to make sure they don't set the rest of the neighborhood on fire.

Traditionally, if your party lost what felt like an important election, this is the period of time between Veterans Day and Thanksgiving for an intra-party civil war with as many sides as there are people with publishable platforms on which to express them, most of which come down to "well, she woulda won if only she had done exactly as I said." People, you see, are fucking tedious that way.

I'm not going to do that. I liked Kamala Harris and I still like her. I thought she ran a great campaign on short notice. I could see her and her people trying to strike the right balance between an economic message and the anti-Trump message to find some kind of resonance, but you know what, when people can't afford to live anywhere, even if by all other metrics we're doing way better in the U.S. than any other industrialized country since the pandemic, people are going to vote how they're going to vote. Incumbent parties are getting wiped out all over the western world, and this is what that looks like.

It doesn't look like Trump actually flipped anyone, people just stayed home. Maybe that had to do with bomb threats (by Russia maybe?) in swing states. I know I had the worry of polling place violence ahead of Election Day, maybe it was that. My primary guess after seeing the margins county by county eerily reflect the 2016 results is that we're not a mature enough country to elect a woman as president. I don't know. I just know we've done this before and we'll have to do it again: watch a stupid person who doesn't really want the job alternate between golfing and having temper tantrums en route to trying to fleece the country for as much as he can squeeze out of it (including selling classified stuff to foreign bad actors) before his time runs out.

As a chaotic half-asleep doofus, nobody really knows what he's going to do in the next four years. There are only two things we know for sure: he's not going to do the Big Thing he promised to do in his campaign (deporting tens of millions of people would be way harder than building a big stupid border wall, which he also failed at) and he's not going to run again, ever.

It's more a dusky tin than a silver lining, but hope is hope, you take it as it glimmers.

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PS: I more than understand that there's a lot at stake in people's lives, for women, for Palestinians, for trans kids, as a result of this. The point of the above was not to minimize or be glib, it's just a) to express what I'm feeling in the exact moment I'm typing, which is all this space is ever, ever for, and b) a disaster like this can only push is as far as we're willing to be pushed. Don't let the bastards get you down.

Muscle Confusion

I was at the gym Wednesday, because I still do that twice a week even though my knees sound like 15 pounds of balled-up cellophane being run over by a Subaru Impreza every time I flex them under load.* I'm not bragging about my workout regularity as I'm still alarmingly fatter than I would like to be/am used to being. It turns out that the things you did your whole life to regulate your weight stop working right around the time you turn 50. Your prize for surviving half a century is a closet full of large-size T-shirts that no longer fit comfortably. Congratulations.

I don't spend a lot of time in locker rooms as a rule. It's not that I'm worried some old timer is going to go sauntering through after a shower with his towel inexplicably over his shoulder (although this happens, please see the previous very correct use of "inexplicably") or anything like that, I just find them to be kind of gross in the specific way a perpetually damp** environment overcrowded with a bunch of dewy, sheen-y humans sharing surfaces without the prophylactic benefits of a full complement of outerwear can be. It's a microclimate more suited to fungi than mammals, which is why it's always also your best opportunity to catch whatever the trendiest new strain of athlete's foot the kids are passing around these days.

There's really no need for me to go into a locker room as I don't shower at the gym (see above re: athlete's foot). I stick to the organized fitness classes, and most people there just bring their little pile of stuff and set it alongside the workout area, but I will admit it, I love a locker. A little temporary space set aside in a very organized and numbered line of similar regimented spaces that I can have all for myself; the securing of said space with a dinky four-number combination padlock... I find it all very satisfying. This is taking into account that my padlock could be cracked by someone with either about 12 minutes to spare or anything over 135 lbs of bodyweight to put into a heel kick, so sure, it's security theater like the way they look in your bag before you enter a baseball stadium. And we all pay for the same gym, so it's not like there's a ring of locker thieves we have to worry about. Half the people there just toss their hoodie into a locker without bothering to add a lock, knowing it will be there when they get done, but that's them opting to miss out on the ka-thunk of applying or undoing the padlock. Theirs is a life devoid of joy.

I'm in and out pretty fast usually, and I'm certainly not paying any attention to anyone else while I'm in there. I step around the guys posing in the floor-length mirrors, I let the gaggle of dudes carrying on a long conversation about uh "supplements" into the steam room pass, I get my ka-thunk and I'm gone. Wednesday, however, a raised voice caught my attention. It was going on in a very familiar locker-room masculine way of peacocking in front of other men in one of our favorite genres, the "if they woulda tried that with me, I woulda..." story formula, always delivered in a place of safety miles away (literally and situationally) from whatever hypothetical they are fantasizing about insta-solving with an act of defiant violence.

In this case, he was going on about something I took the time to look up, this story about how a gang of Venezuelan illegals absolutely did not and never did take over an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado. In the least surprising twist ever, he then pivoted to how it will all be taken care of "come Election Day" when Trump sweeps into office and bonks all the Spanish-speaking people in America over the head with a big bonking stick, throws them in a bag and tosses them some indeterminate distance south toward Cancún or wherever, over and past the wall that was never actually built during his first term.

Two things: 1) I instantly confirmed and re-dedicated myself to my pre-existing rule not to pay attention to anything in locker rooms, and 2) I started to laugh a little bit as argumentative thoughts started forming in my head, of the depth and quality as you'd normally find in a twitter fight, none of which were expressed.

The guy (whom I could not see) got progressively louder and angrier, with no responses from whomever he was speaking to (probably more aptly: "at"), and I felt a profound reflex eye-roll and a sigh coming on. 

And then he goes "I didn't fight in two wars to watch my country get taken over by communists and socialists," or something to that effect. Now, obviously, this is an even stupider thing to say, as at least things like "apartment buildings," "Venezuelans" and "Aurora, Colorado" all actually exist, even if they were being combined in a way that had no relationship to the events being offered into evidence, but no actual communist or socialist has been earnestly active in American politics since maybe about 1926. So everything he was saying was of course dismissible. But at that point, I mostly just felt a sting of empathy, not pity like "this poor person is cursed with being stupid," more like "dude is going through it and this is him expressing it." And he wasn't hurting anyone (I didn't check to see if his conversation partner either existed or felt threatened/cornered), I just profoundly disagreed with his premises, his sources and his conclusions. But there was no value in engaging. If I've learned anything from being online, it's definitely that.

That's the whole Trump political arc summed up, though, one long "if they woulda tried that with me, I woulda..." story. The trick of course is that he was already president for four years and didn't accomplish a single one of the things he said he was going to accomplish, except fuck up the Supreme Court, which any off-the-rack Republican would have done anyway. The locker room loudmouths will find out where they stand next Tuesday, before the next blog entry comes out. Then we all get to wait and see how they respond. I'm sure they'll take it fine.

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*There are absolutely certain words or phrases that are perfectly understandable, but just off-putting when deployed in most contexts. I understand the placement of "under load" here fits those criteria. Just be grateful I didn't find a way to work in the word "moist."

**See, I coulda, but I didn't.

I Got That Grave Plot, And It's Right Off The Highway

Events just keeping getting more and more intense as Election Day gets closer. Not really the events themselves I guess, it's not going to get a lot more intense than someone shooting at one of the major party nominees back in July. But we're living in a period where pre-election polls are unreliable to the point of primarily existing to either instill or heighten anxiety, which is the same basic business model for Fox News, though I don't really understand how the polling companies turn the erosion of trust in institutions and the degradation of the emotional wellbeing of its audience into fat stacks of cash, the way Fox does with commercials for reverse mortgages and the types of powered recliner chairs you need a prescription to buy.

As the space of time between the immediate moment and the point of decision draws near, it becomes obvious that we're in a pressurized vessel of some kind, it's just not clear if it's the kind that makes you comfortable in inhospitable environments, like an airplane or a submarine, or the kind that explodes your eyeballs out of your head when either the pressure builds past the point of human tolerance or the walls fail. I guess that last part is also potentially like an airplane or a submarine.

It's a real struggle to stay informed without getting too informed, if you follow. I don't just mean getting steeped in the muddy shitwater of outright lies able to flow into the tributaries of the information superhighway unregulated, I mean spending any time at all hooked up to any source of "news" anymore. This is not both-sidesing in any way; the info spring that doesn't just parrot what's been funneled into it from the Kremlin by the all-important public servant Guy With Red Face Except For Sunglasses Tan-Line on facebook or whatever is clearly a preferred source. The problem is that there aren't any information environments that aren't tainted by people and their goddamned feelings entirely. The downside to everyone having an outlet, everyone having a voice, is that they insist on continuing to use all of it.

It probably won't surprise you to know that I follow people like Chris Hayes or Jamelle Bouie or Michael Harriot on social media, nor will you fall over in your chair to learn that these days I'm most often finding the voices I'm seeking on Bluesky. For the uninitiated, Bluesky is basically twitter, but before Musk put his stink on it. Like 15 years before that, when it barely had 10 million users. It's become a life-raft for lefties and/or those who would prefer not to get back in touch with their stalkers, anyone fleeing New Coke twitter.

So it's not just "here is what's happening," in presenter-voice or analyst-voice, it's a pretty steady drip from a big rusty bucket of left-wing anxiety vomit. These are people whose thoughts and writing I respect, but I honestly can barely take it. I'm rubbed pretty raw already, but for some reason the very reasonable pointing out that "the polls aren't actually bad for Harris" or "the media covering Trump like he's normal is insane" is just making me more likely to recoil from all touch. I suppose it makes sense, like if you knew you had head lice, it wouldn't really help your situation to have people you respected point out what a bummer it is and/or diagnose for you over and over again how it came about. You've been told enough not to swap hats with people you meet on the bus, you don't need to hear it again and again.

I'll be avoiding a lot of media between now and Election Day. I was going to say "since I've already voted," but what does that matter if I knew how I was going to vote like four years ago? The idea that I've gone to these sources to help me decide between Trump and [Not Trump] would be an insult to everyone's intelligence, mostly my own. There are limits even to my own depths of self-delusion. I guess what I want from my news sources (just people now, I guess) is some kind of comfort. Like one person needs to say "don't worry, it'll be Harris, no problem, we'll know by 8 pm Pacific time that Tuesday night" and that would be all I needed.

But then I was a grown-ass adult in 2016 and people told me that about Hillary for an entire summer and look how that turned out? Overall, skepticism is the right approach to protect against overconfidence and/or susceptibility to outright bullshit, but vigilance is an active thing and I'm so, so sleepy. I'm 50 and I'm starting to understand why old people are more likely to fall for this stuff. Who has this kind of energy?

Please Don't Put In The Newspaper That I Was Mad

Well, after reviewing last week's post, I want to reiterate that I unequivocally and in no way believe in the power of the jinx. My argument has always been: if I had that kind of magic power, to speak results into existence, things like election cycles would be way less stressful than they currently are. Like, the Trump campaign would be devolving into a series of self-parody singalong events or enduring publicly shaming vocal challenges from undecided voters resulting in an obvious surge or voter preference for the Harris campaign, putting the result comfortably out of question.

But see, I only got the first parts and not the results. Everything looks the same as it has since Biden dropped out, promising-but-too-close.

The only thing I did manage to do was watch the Detroit Tigers and San Diego Padres crash out of the baseball playoffs after advocating for both of them last week. But again, I accept neither credit nor blame. I also said at the time whomever was playing against the Yankees and Dodgers would be acceptable as well, so I am now a massive NY Mets and Cleveland Guardians* supporter. Since both teams are currently down in their respective series, I feel like it's safe to say that without incurring any legal liability for any failures going forward. I don't think there's a more pure expression of engaging with modern sports than indemnification, I think you'll agree.

What you're reading so far is the anxiety brain leakage of a man in the late stages of a presidential political cycle. I've been doing this blog thing for 20 years now, which means this is my sixth cycle where I've created a public record of my experiences as a partisan (in particular) and as a voter (in general) and an American (in the goofy-ass abstract). You don't have to go back and look it up, you can absolutely trust me when I say in all the previous ones, I took it all super well, with maturity and grace, with no recordable signs of undue alarm and/or full-blown tongue-swallowing panic. I understand these points are all potentially falsifiable as it's all in print, but also it's all in print, so you don't have access to my facial expressions or physical state at those points to get a real picture of my emotional wellbeing, not really, or at least not in any way that would be admissible in a court of law.

Just like now, you don't know if I'm fine or not. I can even say "I'm really not OK, you guys," and maybe, like Donald Trump, I can just say after the fact "I was being sarcastic, you know I was being sarcastic" about, say, injecting yourself with bleach to ward off COVID, with all the credibility implied therein.

Honestly though, two-plus weeks out, I'm in a really interesting place. I felt fairly sanguine for a couple of months, then absolutely panicked last weekend when the vibes online amongst the lefties I follow all went sour for no discernible reason. The vice president was on Fox News and The Breakfast Club and could be going on Joe Rogan's podcast for some reason... Basically I need Harris out there in public to reassure me that I don't only have Trump to listen to. I think the biggest big-picture takeaway is that being on the left, freakouts are just part of the process, unfortunately. I think we imagine that the people on the other side are just so locked in and certain that they don't experience the same kind of spasms of self-doubt that make us so charming and fun to be around in Octobers of election years.

But like most things we assume about The Other Side, I suspect that it's not true, it just manifests in different ways. I don't spend a lot of time in right-wing online outlets, but I see it herniating into the shared spaces expressed as rage, mostly working the refs (the evil "left wing" press, state election officials, Taylor Swift) and assigning blame to their perceived problem-area bad-actors (immigrants, Jewish people...). The targets differ from lefties and the means of expression hit differently, but these are questions of tone rather than content. When I say "I'm not sure I trust this country to vote for a woman" and they say "the NOAA and FEMA make hurricanes using satellites," we're saying essentially the same thing.

Anyway, I voted yesterday. I dropped off my mail-in ballot and it's behind me. I thought I'd feel a bit of relief as there's literally nothing else to be done, but there's literally nothing else to be done. All the noise persists, but the end of all the means has already occurred, for me at least. I'd love to feel disengaged and unburdened, but apparently that will come when I'm dead and/or these inconveniences of "representative democracy" are behind us. Depending on how things go November 5th, maybe one is closer than the other.

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*It's an improvement over the previous name, but *only* on the merits. You could have picked literally anything else. "Guardians" is so bland it becomes off-putting. Not the the point of making me root for the Yankees, mind, for that would have had to renamed the teams R*dsk*ns or something.

Standard Carriage Fees

So, Spectrum is a terrible company. I'm sure some people are happy with whatever particular service they are into them for (wireless, cable television, home internet, urinary tract infections...), but by and large they are still operating under an industry model that was created in the late 1970s that carves areas up as monopoly zones for companies like this (Spectrum fka Charter Cable here where I live, Cox in Orange County next door...) which gives them zero incentive to devote time or funds to improving customer experience, either in the use of their contracted service or in talking to customer service representatives. I will say, every time I've called customer service, the individuals working there have all been super nice and seemed genuinely interested in helping, but 100% of the time, I get directed to the wrong department at least twice and no one immediately knows how to help with my actual problem. Their reps seem to be largely based in the South, so you get your apology for having to recite your issue for the third time in a very sweet drawl. It doesn't get you any closer to your goal, but at least your ears got a show.

I was thrilled to have mostly cut ties with Spectrum when I dropped my TV package with them two years ago (I'm GenX, leave me alone about cord-cutting, I got there, goddammit). I couldn't do that with my cable internet unfortunately as the only other option is (and I'm not kidding) AT&T DSL, which works at about 6 MBps (vs. 400 for the cable internet). I've gotten so tired of waiting for ANYONE to extend fiber optic cable to my on-the-edge-of-rural subdivision, but apparently digging trenching into a road up 700 feet of elevation into an area where the coyotes outnumber the people 3:1, suddenly it's not "cost effective." If we can get these coyotes into something online like sports betting, we might have a better chance. How do we get Jamie Foxx on this?

If I'd wanted to do my own sports betting on the LA Angels, my baseball team of geographically-destined choice, I'd have had to do it blindly all year as our local, asphyxiating regional sports network has exclusive rights to their games and only appears on old-type systems, like cable (Spectrum) and I think DirecTV, if that's still around? If you get a bundled Hulu-Disney+ deal, that's far too advanced an idea. It turns out Disney has enough money, they don't need to bend to the extortionate demands of live-sports pirates. People will just hand their money over in steadily increasing amounts from one of their hundreds of other revenue streams, without the unknowable increase in subscriber numbers carrying the Angels, Clippers, Kings and Ducks might bring. It could be in the low dozens!

All of this is to say I haven't followed much baseball this year. And I don't feel as though I've missed out on too much as my team has been, without exaggeration, the worst it has ever been over its 60-plus years of existence. I've had to endure articles at my favorite workers-collective sports blog about how, yes, the Chicago White Sox flirted with being the worst team of all time this year, but somehow it still feels worse to be an Angels fan. This is a journalistic service I pay for. I guess there is a whole segment of the service economy out there for men who want to have their genitals stepped on by a woman in high-heeled shoes, this isn't that far off.

All that said, I have been intrigued enough to dip in to some of the playoff baseball this year. I've never felt a single second of shame for being motivated just as much by schadenfruede as I am by passion for my own team, so the easiest, most obvious ins for me are to root lustily and heartily for whomever happens to be playing either the Yankees or the Dodgers. That can only last as long as either are still in the tournament, so picking up a team in a more positive sense has more legs. As such, I've semi-adopted the San Diego Padres (I was just down in SD a week ago, having a great time with good company, even walked by the empty stadium while wandering the Gaslamp Quarter, close enough!) and the Detroit Tigers, the team my dead dad rooted for. On the one hand, my dad and I weren't especially close, but on the other hand, I do already have a Tigers hat. Typically its on my head more than my hand, but you're going to make this really difficult if you insist on reading this all so literally.

Essentially at maximum I have four teams to potentially root for (Tigers, Padres, Yankee opponent and Dodgers opponent), but that's down three since the Padres and Dodgers are playing each other. I will confess those ones are harder to watch as they include my ex-TV-boyfriend Shohei Ohtani, who continues to be charismatic and astounding. This is the first time I've seen much of him since we broke up last winter. When I see him, I tell him he looks good, I just wish he dressed better.

Let's not get crazy though, when I say I'm watching baseball, I've probably seen about 6 total innings of all the games played so far. But as a comparative percentage, I'm up about 600% from last year.

Doctor, It Hurts When I Go Like This

A few years ago, somebody in charge of California, the bleeding heart bright blue utopia set apart from our backwards sister states in the way that we're built on the unique principles of worker exploitation and police shootings, decided it should be illegal to buy and sell pets. The original law was passed in 2017 and has since been refined and strengthened in an effort to crawl our way toward the goal of being a no-kill state for shelter companion animals. Dogs, cats, rabbits, etc., I think the law means. I'm not sure how far down the policy extends to things like rodents and reptiles, but maybe at some point we just throw them all in a pit together and see who comes out on top. It won't be cruel because it will be like how it is in nature, if nature looked a lot more like UFC.

I'm not sure where these good-hearted no-sales people were when I bought a dog from a mall for $1500 in 2009, but hey, fine, good looking out for everyone else.

The new law means that there are no more pet purchases, only pet adoptions in this state. When I got my first-ever cat about a month ago, I had to fill out this whole adoption application that said I'd be home a bunch and could never abandon my animal and would subject myself to wellness visits by the agency. It feels intrusive and scary, but my son got his cat through the same agency and they have made zero follow-ups or checks on any of the things that seemed super important on the form. As vulnerable and judged as it made me feel, what was the consequence going to be? Would they repossess my cat? You just ask the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses or, hell, event he DoorDash drivers I invited here how easy it is to get me to open my front door. I could be in here doing some really darkly abusive shit to this cat--making her wear vests, letting her watch Fox News--and there's not a goddamned thing they could do about it.

After all that though, they still charged me $50 and I got her from a PetSmart, so it sure felt like I was buying a cat, except: I got a broken one! And even though the whole detailed contract I had to fill out exists, it doesn't count as a receipt! They made me promise I couldn't take it back, even if it was defective! That's Joe Biden's America right there.

Actually she's a good and decent, if jittery cat. She can't jump for shit, which is not the actual defective part, that's just hilarious to watch. No, she got this sore on her chin, but it healed up after a few days. But right above that now she has a fat lip, which does not seem to be healing in the same way. So I have no idea if the incidences are related or not, and no amount of googling "cat fat lip" has yielded encouraging results. It turns out googling pet symptoms has the exact same effect as googling human symptoms: eventually, they all say you have cancer.

I'm pretty confident my cat does not have face cancer, though. At $58 for just the visit, I feel like I'd be getting my money's worth if the vet found something, but at the same time, "something" from veterinarians is always super expensive. It's been a long time since I've had a pet (more than a decade), but they always said "well, the expensive part is the anesthetic." They want to knock these animals out for every goddamned thing, as I recall. X-rays on a squirmy dog, OK, fine, I guess I get it, but you're expressing anal glands, I think Tabby can tough it out fully conscious.

It's all too late now because I'm stuck with her. All the pets I've had in the past have been in multi-human households, so this is the first time I'm bonding with a pet, just one-on-one. That shit gets deep pretty fast, like full co-dependent deep. I probably should have sprung for the pet insurance just to cover the therapy.