Dog is dead. There’s more to say on that but not tonight. Tonight is for quiet sadness, and for all the old feels about the times I choose death for another being, or wanted me own, or that abandoned someone who needed me to save myself. For related reasons I watched Hotel for Dogs (2020) today. It’s not bad for what it is, but it’s not very much. It has a solid concept but it’s stripped down to such nothing that even with long dog tricks the film is only 75 minutes. It’s ostensibly about saving dogs from the pound and to that end there’s a cute, simple heist story…

I have, since I was a very young parent, imagined that people only want me around if they depend on me for something. That the only ethical thing I could offer such people was a path to independence. That my duty was to keep people from mistakenly getting attached to me, and to train them to not need me. As I got older I imagined that people only depended on me because there were no better options, and that absent the circumstances that isolated them a better option would certainly become available. I imagined that my own selfish desire for connection made me manipulate people into such situations, instead of…

Here’s my political analysis. It’s the same as last year’s. We should stop having presidents. It’s worth a small cost to vote, because you can pick the branded flavor of your oppression, and because you can influence who you get to overthrow. But don’t expect it to matter. It never has. If it did you wouldn’t be allowed to do it. Dog is more obviously dying again. His back legs are weak and he’s notably more tired. Sometimes that’s temporary, but I suspect he hasn’t got a lot of temporaries left even if this one is. It makes extra snuggly, which though it has a sad cause, is still a…

One of the reasons I haven’t been writing is because my anxiety has been high. Like, real high. Which I attributed to, you know, lifelong mental illness. I am rarely stuck there these days, anxious in a way I can’t identify or resolve, but it’s a place that feels familar. Turns out my blood pressure spent some time in the “severe anxiety” section of the chart, and I was feeling terrible not because my brain is fried but because I was dying. My life is complicated sometimes; and some people’s obvious sign of distress is another person’s “hard day”. So I medicated my BP and I feel much better. I…

The power went out today for a couple of hours. That’s pretty uncommon here both because I’m in the city 1Power outages are just a fact of life if you live in the middle of nowhere. Particularly before modern reconnectors, when an outage meant someone had to physically find and replace a blown fuse. and because the weather rarely presents challenges to power delivery. But it made me miss the big UPS I had at the last place. I gave it up 2I do have plans for battery protection, just not with a giant central UPS. I have a small backup for Shanda’s desk – what good is a desk…

Here’s a shape these had before – not all the time, but often enough – a moral 1Themes, too, were a shape these once had. 8 small takes on the same topic, or a series of big ones that integrate into a single, complicated feel.. Something that lets me tell a short story about a feeling and then use it to frame facts of my recent life. As people familar with Capitalism will know, my last landlord was terrible and incompetent and owes me money. They’re now at the stage where they want me to listen to their bad feelings about how they are such bad landlords that they broke…

D&D today. We lost the C-verse setting, for reasons that were not explained to me, but otherwise continued with similar characters. I’ve got a new plan to antagonize Shanda, to give you opportunities for anger, and to give voice to the motivations that make murder necessary. We are a band of mercenaries using violence to exert our will on a foreign serfs and extracting wealth from local communities as we travel, as is typical in combat RP settings 1Dimension 20: Fantasy High addresses this as the central plot of both seasons – that “adventuring” requires oppression, and gets political support to accommodate it. The fight isn’t between good and evil,…

My landlord now feels like they fucked up, which is great. They haven’t gotten to feeling helpless yet but we’re on the right path. They’ve emailed again, after I stopped replying. They were angry but also afraid and still demanding my compromise beyond the bounds of law. So I will continue to bait them into admitting crimes by not talking and then sending a certified letter to them demanding immediate payment. I hope they ignore it an I get a judge to declare they owe $6k instead of the $2k I am demanding presently. I like being good at this, when my brain will stop yelling about how I’m unethically…

I’ve had a couple of days to catch up with myself. It mostly went well. There would maybe even have been some writing if there was any upholstered seating in the entire room, or even enough space on the bed for my elbows. But it was good even without writing. I took one of my days off to bait my landlord into admitting their willful refusal to return my deposit. As you might expect, they are not entirely familiar with either their general or legal duties as a landlord and were unprepared to terminate our relationship cleanly. As you ought to expect, I am prepared 1for terminating any relationship, at…

I’m officially off today – until Wednesday in fact – for reasons other than “too busy/sick to work”, for the first time in a goodly while. I have skipped work a lot of days this summer, but didn’t actually get to take any off; I ditched lots of meetings but didn’t actually reduce my workload very much. I’m not dedicated to the job, but one of the ways I’ve arranged to have a very flexible schedule is to be “available” and to produce visible tokens of work even on days when I can’t work, so that my absence is less visible. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t been able…