Orange fluffy cat inside my car.

I have to go to work and this is not my cat.

Thank you for this.

And it’s a deeply personal offense: that you are here and they are not; that beautiful days and small good things happen without them; that you have to witness and feel it all right alongside the grief.

Dogs come into the world with nothing

Then you come and pick one up

And life is better for everyone

Can You Please Stop Telling Me To Live My Best Life Please Thoughts On The Advice Pandemic

There is far too much pressure to live your best life these days. Leave me alone and let me live my most middling life in peace, with the colourful miscellany of highs and lows that naturally entails.
www.tom-cox.com/can-you-plea...

Pigeon driving the bus would like a word

Human-made art! And @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social , please tell your mother that she makes lovely stuff too!

Having just re-read Jennifer Egan’s “The Candy House,” this resonates. Systems of power that create simulated reality are not working for the humans they’re extracting raw materials from.

A labor of love!

Me too. He’s human, and sees others as humans. I hadn’t realized how starved for that trait in leadership I had become, and I welcome its steadfast return.

catholics: oh hey u guys are back early

me: pope's woke

catholics: what?

me: *grabs rosary, heads toward the confessional* pope's woke

TFW an ancient song from your childhood is revealed in all of its bittersweet glory.

Yeah. Exactly this.

A tweet from Pope Leo XIV that reads: “When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.”

Apparently the Pope has read Baudrillard.

Moe - omeward bound…

So many worthy entries here, but I am going with You Oughta Know

Strikes me that this is a high control-need thing: Reality is whatever I say in the moment to remain right about what I feel. No principles, no data, no expertise—only the need to stay in control, one-up everyone, and reinforce the self. The Big Ideas are tools of coercion to maintain self image.

It’s okay to keep an Ambivalence Box labeled ”Discard if not opened by…”

For me? There were already so many thoughts I hadn‘t been privy to, but the diaries were not a guarantee of the answers I needed. So the boxes sit, still.

Only six sacraments for me? When that asshole across the aisle gets seven because he’s a boy? No. GTFOOH. I refuse to hate myself like that, said little me.

As ever, thank YOU.

I keep wanting it to make sense. But some people want its absence.

(Watching a fox-pilled Catholic get mad at the Pope, and she sees nothing wrong with following her feelings instead of her faith. O-Kay. But the issue is me saying WTF.)

Also, I can’t recommend @jeffsharlet.bsky.social’s The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War highly enough. Relevant to your concerns.

Feelings = truth. Study and understanding = fake news. Why do you keep insisting that scholarship, reflection and education make a difference to matters of faith? Book learning is detrimental to belief!

AWAY!!!

The other six pairs you stash around the house will prove even more useful.

A firmer editorial hand to reign in the terminally online voice would have been good. But that (Huck Finn lighting out for the Territory) ending!

Go gently with yourself today.

It's another cognitive dissonance test. If you're bothered by the contradiction, you fail.

Drawing from a deeper well.

That’ll go over well in the confessional, I’m sure.