The World That's Coming

There’s no way to say goodbye to a pet, not really. Everything feels emotionally overwhelming, and you try your best in the moment, wishing that they understand on some level, hoping that your very presence and the physical affection you’re offering is, on some level, reassuring and enough to bring them some level of happiness at the end.

Ernie’s death came quickly, thanks to the vet’s skill, but it was the last part of a week that had been more difficult and, I suspect, more stressful and upsetting for him than he could have imagined.

He’d had oral surgery on the Tuesday, to have 25 teeth removed; they’d rotted in his skull over the years, under the gums, and were causing him pain, so it was decided that they had to come out; he went in nervous in the morning, and came out doped up and drooling that evening. The surgery, they said, had been longer and more extensive than anticipated, but they expected a full recovery.

I did, too; after all, his brother Gus had something similar happen last year, and he was back to normal in a day or so. That wasn’t the case for Ernie, however.

He spent hours on the Wednesday whining and crying and vomiting; there was so much vomit. He sounded so unhappy, on a primal level. I called the vet, and was told this was normal the day after a major surgery, as bad as it seemed, and that I should call the next day if he hasn’t improved. By Thursday morning, he couldn’t stand up and was still refusing food and now refusing water. The vet agreed to take a look.

Everything after that is a blur, really; multiple discoveries of bad news — his kidneys seemed to be failing, his blood sugar was far too low, his stomach distended, the nodules on his liver — and no real understanding about why or what was the reason for the sudden, shocking downward turn. I felt helpless and heartbroken with each new call. As he was checked into a hospital for constant care, I knew on some level it was the end even as others told me that he could still get better.

Friday morning, 6am, I got the call that nothing had improved and that they still had no idea what was happening. I asked if he could survive without this level of constant medical intervention, with IVs and anti-nausea medications and everything, and was told that he still hadn’t tried to eat or drink anything at that point. “If this was your dog, what would you do?” I asked the vet.

Two hours later, I was in a small room with him. His tail wagged when he saw me, the first time his tail had wagged since Monday. I held him on my lap as the vet offered the three injections, and told him that I loved him, that I’d miss him, and that he was a good boy. I hope he knew, somehow, that all three were true.

Like most people on social media, judging by my feed, I fell for the siren song of Wordle some time ago. How could I resist? There’s just something about the appeal of a quick, daily, word game that lets you think Oh, I’m so smart, I guessed “rouge” on three attempts on a regular basis while also giving you the space to ignore the pure luck factor of it all. (Look, if you start off with the wrong word, sometimes you’re just fucked.)

The problem with Wordle, though, is that there’s just one word a day. That’s not enough for the truly obsessive need for distraction that lives inside my brain, dear reader. I needed something… more. I needed Quordle.

As the name suggests, Quordle is Wordle, but you’re simultaneously guessing four different words at the same time; you get more passes to make that happen, of course — nine instead of six — but that’s not the only change that’s important. No, with Quordle, there’s a “practice” setting that lets you play as many rounds as you want, instead of just one round a day. And that, let me tell you, is a game changer.

Quordle has become what I do if my brain is feeling restless, but I’m not ready to handle anything particularly requiring true focus just yet. If I have my iPad to hand — for some reason, I only play it on my iPad, which feels like a sign of true obsessiveness — then I’ll just play a quick round, and then almost certainly play a second before remembering I should probably be doing something else instead. It’s something that happens almost every day.

Moreover, it’s something that in a strange way has made me… slower and more methodical outside of the game, perhaps? For the first three passes, I’m throwing out whatever words I can think of to get letters on (and off) the board, but then I stop and start being analytical and deductive; I become a consonant Sherlock Holmes, trying out combinations in my head, however unlikely they seem. It sounds ridiculous, but Quordle has taught me the value of doing something similar in my writing and self-editing, as well.

I’m aware that the game is, perhaps, a timesuck and something I could and should pass up in favor of more worthwhile pursuits. Eventually, that may even happen. For now, though, I just need to figure out if any word could start with an X and then have a U as the next letter.

The cat had entirely, utterly disappeared. There were three of us looking for him, running through the three-level house and checking all the rooms as quickly as we could, and he was nowhere to be found.

We were preparing for an inspection of the house by the landlords, and already relatively excited, by which I mean stressed and exhausted; although we were pretty confident that everything would be fine — we take really good care of this house! We make small repairs ourselves, without complaint! —there was just a feeling of, listen, you never know when things can go south unexpectedly, that made us nervous. Both Chloe and I have become suspicious of relying on good feelings and good fortune over the past year or so.

With the landlords due in thirty minutes or so, the plan was for her mom, visiting from out of town, to take the cats during the inspection to ensure an orderliness and calm that wouldn’t otherwise happen; but one of the cats had utterly vanished. He’d been around for a first attempt to go in a crate to be carried out, but he’d resisted and run upstairs; we watched him go… but he was nowhere to be found upstairs. Nor, it turned out, was he downstairs, either.

We searched the house maybe four, five times with no luck. He was simply gone, but that was impossible, too — he couldn’t get outside because doors and windows were shut. Things had reached the point where we were starting to find it simultaneously funny and genuinely insane-making; how can a cat disappear so completely? Did he even exist in the first place, or have we been hallucinating him all these years? Was this the end of a cat version of Fight Club? All the while, the clock is ticking down and the landlords’ arrival is getting closer.

Reality was restored when he was discovered inside a box spring, having burrowed himself in there at some point without anyone noticing. The inspection went well, and all was good in the world, but for the rest of the day, I kept remembering what it felt like when he was simply nowhere, as impossible as it was.

As has become de rigueur in recent years, there’s been no shortage of shitty reality television being used as decompression material for our overworked brains in the last few weeks. After the thinking-too-hard workday, I’ve developed an almost-need for a certain level of schlock to marinate in before sleep, before returning to the grind the next day. All of which is to say, I’ve very much been appreciating the current Golden Age of Camp Reality I think television has entered in the last couple of years.

The joy of streaming means that, currently, Chloe and I can enjoy episodes of Love Island Australia, RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars, Legendary, or Below Deck shows — that’s shows plural, not episodes, I point out, because as I write, both Below Deck: Down Under and Below Deck: Sailing Yacht are running new episodes simultaneously, which is crazy to me — in addition to any new discovery that we might make. It’s a joy, and a necessary mental balm, to have these pieces of trash to marinate in while trying to slow our brains down from that day’s work. It’s the most restorative viewing I could imagine at this point.

This sounds like sarcasm, but it’s not, I promise; there really is something impossibly relaxing about enjoying the histrionics and cliches that you can almost guarantee from any one of these shows, not to mention the schadenfreude of being able to look at almost any single one of the people onscreen and go, well, at least I’m not as bad as all that.

(If there is one thing in reality shows that I genuinely love more than anything else, it’s reality shows where everyone is over the top and overly emotional with the exception of one person, who gets to basically watch everything unfold and then make snarky commentary to the camera after the fact; it’s the ultimate audience stand-in, and when done well, it’s irresistible.)

Occasionally, I stop and think to myself that I should, perhaps, be reading more books, watching more highbrow cinema, and spending my decompressing time in more productive ways. And then I hear the low energy techno throb of the Love Island theme and such thoughts get pushed to the back of my head as I wonder whether Mitch and Tina will get it together tonight after all.

It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?

I knew in advance that May was going to be a crunch time, in terms of workload; it was the month when my new weekly contract with Wired kicked in — I’m back at Wired on a regular basis! Who saw that coming? — as well as the launch month for ReedPop’s new Popverse site, which I’m contributing pretty heavily to, and I also had deadlines elsewhere on top of that. As the month approached, I was well aware that it would be one where I’d be juggling more than usual at least in the early days, and so would have to keep my head down until I felt confident that I could handle and schedule everything appropriately.

It basically took me the month to feel confident and comfortable about that. Even now, I’m not sure that I’m necessarily doing it right.

This site, sadly, was the one that suffered; what was originally meant to be just a few days of posting images instead of writing became a full month out of necessity, as my head was full of other things that needed done instead. There were even times when I wondered if I should drop my twice-weekly comics newsletter, just because I wasn’t sure if I had time to do it properly. (I’m not going to, upon reflection; I feel like it’s something I need for myself, especially in the midst of all this other freelance work.)

So: it’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you without, uh, some blog posts to step to, I guess…?

I’m actually writing this in advance, at the end of May, to try and build a buffer of posts so that I don’t run aground here again anytime soon. It might seem otherwise at times, but this space is important to me, and I don’t want to lose it. Especially as I ramp up the writing I get paid for again, this free form meandering room feels even more important than ever. Sorry for my silence; I’ll try to be better moving forward, I promise.