If you're here, you could be there.

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.