Wytch

Thanks. I don’t take my work home as such but I also do have a partner that lends a sympathetic ear when I need it. So I’m lucky in that regard. Truthfully, I get to focus on my home life the moment I’m off the clock.

At the time of answering though, we could have used a few extra hands.

My work. We’re understaffed and underappreciated.

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.

World of Warcraft server. It was shortly after its initial launch. I don’t know how many of the myriad relationships that spawned on that server lasted, but we’ve been together for almost 20 years now. We haven’t played the game for a long time now, but we’ve survived all of life’s expansions so far.

• The Thing ('82)
• Hot Fuzz
• Mad Max: Fury Road
• Spirited Away
• Taxi Driver
• The Matrix
• Unforgiven
• Nosferatu
• Suspiria ('77)
• 12 Angry Men
• Psycho
• The Wizard of Oz

The genre doesn’t lend itself particularly to restfulness. It’s too high energy. I like it for that, and fit it in accordingly.

Gothic and symphonic metal became and remain a huge part of my listening routine. It hit at just the right time in early adulthood. I listen to a moderately diverse set of genres but those fun, dark, and catchy styles have always brought me joy.

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.

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May very well go up in flames, is how bad.