[image description: An elegant black cat with a long tail sits in profile on a block of black marble, blocking the view of Assless Chaps behind them. Text reads, “55, Obsidious ~ The Small God of Occluding Cats”] ____________________________________________________________
The cat is in the way.
This is a basic fact of the universe, simple and immutable. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing, the cat is in the way. The world is spinning, the atomic structure of the universe is decaying, the cat is the way. The faithful pray, the apostate condemn, and the cat is in the way.
How is the cat always, inevitably, unavoidably, in the way? When did we get a cat, anyway? How did that cat get in here? Hey, is anyone willing to take responsibility for this cat? Can someone tell me whose cat this is?
No.
No, no one can tell you whose cat this is. No, no one is going to take responsibility for that cat. No, no one let the cat in, and the cat is in the way because it is the nature of cats to be in the way. If the cat were not in the way, something much more terrible than the cat might rise in its absence. The cat occupies space to ensure that the space is occupied, because the space will be occupied, whether it is by the cat or by something far more terrible. The cat is doing you a favor. Do not count the cat’s eyes. The cat’s eyes are none of your concern. The cat can see you. Isn’t that enough?
Isn’t it enough that the cat is being generous enough to protect you from the terrible thing that would be looking at you with some uncounted number of eyes if the cat were not there? Isn’t it enough that the cat is soft, and the cat is purring, and the cat is in the way?
Isn’t it enough?
Let it be enough.
The cat loves you. The cat will love you even into the void. The cat will forgive you for your frailties, and the cat is in the way.
The cat is always in the way.
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Artist Lee Moyer (Trident of Aurelia, 13th Age) and author Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children, October Daye & InCryptid series) sincerely appreciate you, but wonder if you could scoot just the tiniest little bit to the left?
2. Be a silly billy
PSA:
1. If you are not silly, it is vital you become silly
2. If you are silly, you must stay silly
2. If you used to be silly but have stopped, you must make all efforts to return to silliness
Keep talking about this until it changes.
Also, I am just going to say it:
If your CEO is so inconsequential to the success of your company that he can be gunned down in the street like a dog and it has absolutely no impact on your company whatsoever, maybe he doesn't actually need to be paid several hundred times as much as your median employee.
Maybe you could get away with, like, ten to fifteen times and spend the extra tens of millions of dollars you save on something else.
Just thinking out loud.
Origami books/diagrams are wild, if they do have written instructions they include lots of beautiful and baffling phrases like “mountain fold” “valley fold” “crane base”, etc. What is this code?!
As a 90′s kid, it blows my mind that origami youtube videos exist. You can look up any model and watch a pair of manicured hands assemble the thing in real time, in full color, in 3D, with cheerful flute music in the background. When I was little, you had a library book with no words and these esoteric little dotted lines and arrows and it was just you, your hands, your paper, and the cruel, uncaring eyes of God.
how i became impossible by Mary Ruefle
Me: oh yeah, if you think school photography is hard now, try imagining doing this with film.
The new girl: what's film?
Me: ... film. Like... film that goes in a film camera.
New girl: what's that mean?
Me: ... before cameras were digital.
New girl: how did you do it before digital?
Me:... with film? I haven't had enough coffee for this conversation
Your body is an ancestor. Your body is an altar to your ancestors. Every one of your cells holds an ancient and anarchic love story. Around 2.7 billion years ago free-living prokaryotes melted into one another to form the mitochondria and organelles of the cells that build our bodies today. All you need to do to honor your ancestors is to roll up like a pill bug, into the innate shape of safety: the fetal position. The curl of your body, then, is an altar not just to the womb that grew you, but to the retroviruses that, 200 million years ago taught mammals how to develop the protein syncytin that creates the synctrophoblast layer of the placenta. Breathe in, slowly, knowing that your breath loops you into the biome of your ecosystem. Every seven to ten years your cells will have turned over, rearticulated by your inhales and exhales, your appetites and proclivity for certain flavors. If you live in a valley, chances are the ancient glacial moraine, the fossils crushed underfoot, the spores from grandmotherly honey fungi, have all entered into and rebuilt the very molecular make up of your bones, your lungs, and even your eyes. Even your lungfuls of exhaust churn you into an ancestor altar for Mesozoic ferns pressurized into the fossil fuels. You are threaded through with fossils. Your microbiome is an ode to bacterial legacies you would not be able to trace with birth certificates and blood lineages. You are the ongoing-ness of the dead. The alembic where they are given breath again. Every decision, every idea, every poem you breathe and live is a resurrection of elements that date back to the birth of this universe itself. Today I realize that due to the miracle of metabolic recycling, it is even possible that my body, somehow, holds the cells of my great-great grandmother. Or your great-great grandmother. Or that I am built from carbon that once intimately orchestrated the flight of a hummingbird or a pterodactyl. Your body is an ecosystem of ancestors. An outcome born not of a single human thread, but a web of relations that ripples outwards into the intimate ocean of deep time.
Your Body is an Ancestor, Sophie Strand
Oh. My. Gods.
For those who missed it, I just opened an Etsy shop and I'm having a 20% OFF sale storewide :) there are 3 days left of the sale before prices return to normal.
Actually, people are good by nature and you’re a fool if you think otherwise.
My least favorite things about anti- UBI discourse is always the techbros whining that "nobody is going to work anymore! People will just watch Netflix all day!" and I have 2 responses:
1) Who the fuck cares. Who the fuck cares what people do with their time! That's kind of the fucking point!
2) People aren't going to stop laboring. Housework (look, it's right there in the word!) will still need to be done. So will maintenance on our homes and personal spaces. Children will still need carers, as will the elderly and disabled. There are millions of examples of ~work~ that we do all the time, uncompensated, that won't suddenly stop because we aren't forced to sell our labor to provide corporation's profits.
I'm not surprised that what is traditionally women's work is invisible to these dipshits, but it never fails to anger me.
Anyway. Join the IWW.
She/her; ASOIF Fan Dany Stan; All colors for all kids; Trans Rights are Human Rights
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