Remembrance, or, A Practice in Still Not Writing About the Ninja Turtles

Hi, everybody! I hope the last week has treated you well, or at the very least, just treated you okay. It is officially Fall--football is in full swing, I am back on my (non-alcoholic) cider bullshit again, the weather is...well, still kinda warm and humid and miserable because this is the hell we are creating on Earth, but it will probably cool down for a minute or two here soon.

Autumn brings change, we all know it. I won't pontificate on it too much. How do the leaves change color? What is going on with that? I do not know. I assume it is nefarious. I have stood outside my house yelling at the tree in my yard "what are you doing???" for about a week straight the last few Octobers, and I do plan to do it again this year. Because change is scary.

And unfortunately, there are people out there even more scared of change than I am, and instead of yelling at their own trees, they are implementing totalitarianism on an entire country, which happens to be the one I and most of the people I love live in. These are bad people, preying on vulnerabilities that they also designed. These are people who will tell dangerous, sure-to-be-deadly lies like that your trans neighbors are terrorists and that your immigrant neighbors are illegal. It is all bullshit. Completely unserious nonsense from losers who have chosen to let silly and downright stupid victim complexes that have prevented them from feeling love for the better part of their shitty, miserable lives. Yet, here we are, all hanging at the whims of these dipshits while Chuck Schumer writes a book about why he simply must fund genocide or whatever the hell.

We are in weird, discombobulating times, and it is hard to feel like the minutia of everyday life matters all that much pitted against The Horrors. But sometimes it has to matter.

Last Monday, my wife and I lost one of our 6 guinea pigs to a long-term respiratory illness. Her name was Bitsy, and we adopted her last April, along with her sister, Boo. She was a sweet, shy wheezy little girl with tan and brown fur that pointed in every which directed. She loved napping in her little cave with some pea flakes and a chew toy, and though she didn't always love being picked up, she loved to cuddle once you got her. I used to be able to hear her and Boo's little foot steps scurrying above me from my basement office every evening. We had her since she was the size of my hand, and we have loved her since then too. We miss her a lot already.

But what do you do with this kind of loss, these feelings of grief that, all things considered, could be much heavier? How can your world stop for a 4 pound rodent while the world around you is burning? I don't really know, besides that it just has to. More than ever, it is important to feel, and it is important to honor the care and joy that we put into the world. What we are seeing right now is an antisocial faction of our society staking claim to everything they can, so that they do not have to care for or about other people or other living things. It is pure Id, and it is, again, deeply deeply stupid. Because man, what the fuck else is there that is worth anything? Dumb assholes throughout history (or at least my lifetime) have tried to position being cold, aloof, and uncaring as this maximally efficient Brain-Genius personality type that leads to power and satisfaction. And well, a lot of these dorks have power, I guess, but I can tell you they will never be satisfied. You cannot opt out of caring for the world around you and still be satisfied. Nothing will ever be enough if loving your neighbors isn't. If you don't subscribe to the human experiment for the promise of being able to feed your neighbors, human, guinea pig, or otherwise, you need to listen to me when I tell you you are fucking up. And what all this means is that even as we face down what looks to be inevitable collapse, you have to mourn your guinea pig. Because that is what we are here for.

So, as usual, I wrote a poem about it. This one goes out to Bitsy. We love you, Bitsy.