If you're here, you could be there.

Lady Miss Friday woke me up around 3 or 4 but I couldn't figure out what she wanted. Even worse, I couldn't get back to sleep. I'd received a reply from Colleen, signing on to mineI finally did get up to make real coffee, but then I saw Houdini in his Strawberry. I'd been here before. Some things feel like a glitch in the Matrix. Some feel foretold. Healthily, I was really very complimented he decided to go in his Strawberry. I know he loved it and it felt very...like...home in bed surrounded by family. I almost looked around for his Tea Cozy. I thought about burying him out front in the spot by the mailboxes that Lady Miss Friday has been so intent on. Since she puts up with The Girls so well, I thought they could get to know each other spiritually. But then I remembered those apparently dickhead neighbors with the video cameras. I figured I could bury him tonight, and briefly wondered at being so comfortable spending the day with his corpse. Almost attached, really. Even though I try, I can't let go. Conversely, I worried that my not feeling the same violent, vicious, self-loathing as when Mousey died meant I didn't love Houdini enough. When I was young our great-grandma died and I was entirely unmoved. There was some concern from my folks and scorn from my brother over it, and I've often struggled with the "selfishness" of grief when I have felt it. They're dead, they don't care, so this is all performative.

I backed away from the crazy and focused on work. I get all the very logical, rational reasons that I'm not allowed to volunteer hours, but then I thought about the day trading (so to speak) that we eventually got to do before. As long as there was a manager in the office, we could sometimes work a holiday and trade in the day off later. Unfortunately, even though it would be easier to track us now, they won't let us since we're working remotely. Kathy offered to help with my workload, but even if I could effectively ration it, that's like 800 of my sore spots.

I'd been hunting in the back of my head all morning re: Colleen protecting me by keeping me ignorant and finally decided to just send her "Trouble Me" by 10k Maniacs. It effectively conveyed my dislike of being "protected" as such but emphasizes the cheery side of it. There are studies in behavioral psych that show focusing on positive reinforcement instead of positive punishment is far more effective. But then I thought maybe I should send her "Hold On To Me" by Valerie Broussard instead. Then I thought sending link after link would be spamming and *bothering.* I wrestled with that for a while, then just started a playlist of tracks so I could send several in one link. Checkmate, Anxiety(?)

We had our weekly meeting, but unfortunately I had both preoccupational and technical difficulties. Kept hopping back into the VPN to get more work done. I was at least there (both technologically and mentally) when the topic of the Reviewer Queue and what to do about staff attorneys haven't sent the Tag email in X amount of time. Someone brought up that it was no big deal to just send them a reminder email. I have what approaches a goddamn phobia of bothering people, and told them that. Lynelle signed on with her anxiety when she has to harass us with her weekly reports, and it was weird to be exposed to my own double standard since those reports *drastically* reduce my own anxiety over losing things in the cracks. Meta meta. My webcam wonked out at that point but when it wouldn't reconnect, I figured it was almost over anyway. It was not, but the connection didn't care. On my lunch, I thought I did a good job of balancing what work I can get away with and other pending needs.

Tim called. It was as suspected. They'd let him stay, but only if he paid his rent in full at the start of the month. On the plus side, due to my credit card's points program, I'll make $20 each month he makes all his payments for it. The lady at the marina said I was exceptionally kind but I didn't take the opportunity to proselytize since Symbism isn't official yet. I almost made enough progress to not worry about the 4 day weekend, but the last claim I worked on was a titan. I actually overshot my time by a few minutes, but I'm hoping they'll look the other way for such a minor infraction.

I tried again with my Herb-E and it was much more successful. Not, unfortunately, to the level I was looking for, but that doesn't exist and my stopgap goal of so stoned I don't recognize my own apartment is pretty high. I can at least smoke what I bought, and it gives me more options to tide me over on the Quest.

As the night sky took over I couldn't put off burying Houdini any longer. I couldn't sort out how I felt about it. And how I felt about needing or wanting substances for it. I didn't trust myself to do it after I got drunk. GHB's whispers started intensifying, so I made a deal with myself that I could buy wine at the store after I buried him. I thought about burying him in his Strawberry, but I knew I probably wouldn't be up to digging that deep a grave. In both life and death, male mice are very pungent, and I recognized the tang as soon as I moved his body. After I buried him, on my post notifying everyone that he'd passed, someone cheerfully queried whether he was really dead or just in a coma, therefore I'd just buried him alive. So...yay pungency.

I bought a handle of merlot, a few treat groceries, and I *FINALLY* remembered to buy pens. I credit Houdini. Went through a few cups, but didn't feel the desperate overlayer that usually comes with drinking. The desire to chug was there, but it wasn't desperate. Later in the evening, possibly after midnight, I went walkin' on FB and saw a post from Jesse that seemed suicidal. Late-night not really being an appropriate time to rationalize something like that, I hit him up. He's having difficulty receiving needed medical care because his doc is a dick. Looking back on it now (literally, since I largely forgot about it), I think I did an okay job of giving thoughtful advice despite my inebriation.

Julian let me know that he finally told his mom about the visit. I was starting to worry he would just like...text her from the plane or something. I also got back to Jacob's friend. Within 5 texts, he sent me a dick pic, and when I sent him my porn info, said he didn't want to date a porn actor. Poor, happily single Squeak.

I cleaned more on my break - mostly just kitchen and y'know... Myself. I still need a haircut, I'm just not looking forward to struggling with my clippers. Started drinking after work, and ended up educating a few trolls. Someone made a comment that since covid hasn't affected him or his family, he doesn't care what happens to everyone else. I stayed polite and respectful, but it really does not take much provocation for my fangs to come out. The OP on one of the posts asked us to stop, tagging me in particular, so I did. But then they kept coming, and one of them even tried to come for my mice. I'm not really sure there was anything left of him by the time OP deleted the post.

I felt a million times better on waking, and Tim called me to check on me and the mice. We got a ton of mail and were already short staffed. I managed to clean out Lady Miss Friday's litter box, but not do anything else around the house or for myself I need to.

A bee flew in, and couldn't find his way out. I considered trying to grab him despite the sting, but figured I might crush him. And I considered crushing him as a more merciful death than starving to death if he couldn't find his way out. I finally did just spider him with a cup, and glowed as he happily buzzed away.

In the afternoon, I was wondering again about the old supplement I'd read for Exalted: Abyssals. It stuck out because in the introduction, Abyssals was thematically likened to Miyu, Bloodlust, SOTN, and....others. It's sort of bugged me that I couldn't remember them, so I went on an internet hunt for that paragraph. It didn't take long before I landed on Scribd, where the whole book is available. There was a referral deal where folks who signed up got a few free months, so I shared it. It started me thinking about my attraction to those darker themes, and I remembered my gravitation towards suicide in media. I didn't come to any conclusions, but I did find out Bryan is a big Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman fan.

Watching my mice in the evening, it occurred to me that my feelings actually changed regarding them when I couldn't stop them from sneaking down. Fear of failure, preemptive self hatred for them having babies....I dunno. But it was a dream to have them return to little drops of brightness again.

The Cobra Extracts cartridge works fine with the new pens I bought, and is 87.5% THC. I managed to get a little high on it, but not quite where I'm looking to go. Later in the evening, Lady Miss Friday came out while I was watching Community. Instead of demanding I come lay on the bed, though, she laid down next to me and eventually fell asleep. It was wonderful.

Boyd, a Twitter friend, had checked in on me a few days ago, and I finally found the time to give a detailed answer. I'm usually on my phone, so my responses have often been less complete than he deserves, but I found time at a keyboard. We filled each other in on some delicate details. I told him about everything that happened in the last year, he noted that he was addicted to meth forever.

At Tim's suggestion, I called the Postal Annex for packing paper. I overshare, and maybe it's the "vegan" in me, but I made sure to tell her it was for rescue feeders. People should follow Albert Schweitzer's advice. When I did log in to work, it was tough to stay focused because I had so many non-work things pressing on me. A week's worth of over half of all claims plus 2.3 digits of mail is a lot on a remote connection. To say nothing of the back of my brain screaming at me all fucking morning that my mice were going to die horribly if I didn't clean their cage THIS SECOND and I'm a horrible Mouse Dad, and they would have been better off being left as feeders....and then Lady Miss Friday being *really* unhappy with me being on the computer. I decided to section it out. I spent the morning on claims (with a small break to lay with her on the bed with her, according to her demands), zipped to the Postal Annex on lunch, cleaned the kid's cage, gave them all crunched up wads of paper to hide, play and chew in, then tucked into the eservice after lunch. Really, I was on kind of a roll, and would have happily kept working for free....I even asked about putting in volunteer hours. An addictive personality doesn't discriminate.

While I was on break, I called my mum. I haven't in a while, she's been posting *a lot* in support of me....and I obviously needed her help with my homework. She did mention that last year was Hell for her, too, so I guess both of our issues started exploding at the same time. She confirmed a lot of Tim's thoughts. Used the exact words that Papa played us against one another. When I mentioned that I worshiped him as a child, she noted he demanded that. And used guilt and shame to control us. I tend to forget that my dad was sort of Diet Racist, if even diet, but she told me that he would insult her Mexican heritage to shut her up in public. He hated people responding "Okay" to a request, and would explode at her when she did... but she learned that, and would use it passive aggressively. Unsurprisingly, she's still on the battlefield, so she also took this opportunity to bash Colleen, but I learned that Papa was initially going to surrender us at start of the divorce because he was so heartbroken. I can't help but wonder what my life would have been like, but I would never say anything like that to my mum.

I also learned some things about me. Apparently FHA's friends who called me a ticking time bomb were not the first by many, many years. She did note that I've always been Harmony Bear, just with much more extreme reactions when I was little. They took steps to try to mitigate the damage from the divorce on me and my brother, according to our situations. Ultimately, we've all of us been dragged down in this poisonous, barbed tangle...that's on fire. I knew I was an incredibly withdrawn child, which apparently was a sudden change that occurred around the first time I was apparently molested. Jared exploded from the various traumas, I wanted to disappear.

But she told me what might be my absolute favorite story about me as a child, as fucked up as that might be. We had Japanese exchange students growing up, and I got along swimmingly with most of them. Actually, since this was before I had any inkling of the gay gravitation towards fabulous women, I had several "girlfriends." But apparently one of the male students was awful. I don't know his name, so we'll just call him Jerk. We were at Faith & Ray's, Jerk was fucking with their dog, Miles, and I'd been asking him repeatedly (in my passive, shy voice) to stop. And then Miles yelped. Faith came running when she heard the yelp and saw my face *change.* I went after the kid, and I wasn't about to not fuck him the fuck up, to borrow a phrase from Lana del Rey. Faith stopped me, but no one had ever seen my temper before. Literally all of my parents were Animal Friends, vicious as a rabid Chihuahua, and Papa had actually killed a fuckton of people as a military operative, so it's not terribly surprising that The Thing to flip me from a painfully withdrawn child into a literal murderous rage would be cruelty to animals. Come to think of it, not a lot has changed.

I didn't end up eating at all yesterday, and despite my stomach rumbling today, nothing sounded edible. I finally had a handful of pretzels in the evening, just to put something in my system. And then smoked and had wine. My tummy got upset after my second glass of wine, though, and I threw up.

FHA messaged me in the evening with a picture of a seal and a pup cuddling together on the beach, and it sent me back to Pinterest to look at even more happy pinnipeds. I don't believe in "enough." We also took that opportunity to catch up a bit. He's had...a week, but it's taking steps to fix things. Shit I should have done decades ago.

I thought the 24 hour wait time for Allan was enough, so I posted Silver Linings to the music group, though only Mitchell reacted. I checked in Bryan Riley and Ashley, listened to it a few hundred more times, watched my happy, happy mice run around their new playground, let Lady Miss Friday out once more.

I was going to crash, but Julian sent me a YouTube video of 2Cellists. I've seen them before - two conventionally if absurdly attractive Bros who are also cello prodigies. He sent the message with the caption "their hot," but when I replied I'd subscribe to their Only Fans, it started a whole thing. He called me, thinking I was under the influence, and insisted he wasn't.... Even when he left to get another beer. It was a reminder of the reasons we broke up.