Free to a good home
Warm, loving, affectionate pet. Sensitive to your moods and eager to please. Happy to do what you do as long as he’s with you. Snuggly and cute despite being a large breed. Always up for a cuddle or a wrestle. Funny and silly. Loves to make you laugh. Loyal and dedicated, though not a working breed. Great with kids. The perfect companion for someone who needs a kind and faithful companion to light their lonely path.
Free to a good home
Pet with some issues. Affectionate, but clingy. Flexible, but dependent. Silly, but also quite clumsy. Not safe around delicate things. Has a number of medical issues, so watch out for those vet’s bills. Prone to fits of melancholy. Cute but in a way that can really get on your nerves after a while. Awkward around people he doesn’t know. Not exactly low maintenance. May come to seem like a burden. Can be a real white elephant to the wrong owner. Can be downright depressing at times.
Free to a good home
A scared little animal
Who’s been running for a very long time
And is ever so cold, and tired, and lonely
And just wants to finally come home
Live to sleep?
I found myself thinking the following thought :
“I stay awake only for as long as I have to. ”
And that thought shocked me because I do not normally think of myself as that kind of person at all.
But I also realized it was true, more or less. The moment I get out of bed, a part of me starts longing to be back in it and counting the minutes until I go back to sleep.
And it is that part of me – that pressure in my mind – that pulls me back into bed the minute it can get away with it and keeps me in this cycle of sleeping in two hour naps instead of staying awake all day and sleeping at night like a normal person.
This craving for the escape of sleep is the source of that inward tide that act like gravity on my soul, pulling me down along with my mood and my energy levels and making it so that I have to constantly input energy even to just stay awake.
I’d be a lot better off if I could escape this gravity well.
But to discover that terrible tendency within me is a real eye-opener. It gives me an idea of what I am up against as I try to embrace life and living and the world outside my head. A substantial part of me wants the opposite : to sleep forever.
To not have to cope with anything ever again.
To finally escape from everything forever.
To basically be dead.
I got head work to do, that’s for sure.
I thought this was pretty damned good,
Could do something similar with us gays calling each other “fags”.
I’m a big believer in taking back the words. If you’re not ashamed to be it, they can’t hurt you by calling you it – even if they use a very offensive version of it.
It’s easy to turn it back on the haters, too.
“Why yes, I am fat. You have correctly deduced that I am grossly overweight. What subtle signs did you use to derive that startling and original conclusion? Was it something in the way I walk? Or perhaps the thickness of my fingers? Or was it the huge ball of fat currently stretching my shirt out, you fucking idiot?”
Don’t fuck with the funny fat guy.
A Mandela moment
Came across this factoid today : Crayola discontinued the “Flesh” colored crayon way back in 1962.
One small problem : I am positive I saw “Flesh” colored crayons in the Crayola crayon boxes of my youth and I was born in 1973.
So that’s impossible. Yet the memory remains. And that’s some freaky shit.
There’s potential outs. It could be that “Flesh” was discontinued in the USA but not Canada. But that seems pretty unlikely.
It could be that the crayons were not actually from Crayola and I am misremembering the brand. But you’d think the crappy brands would have changed too.
It could be that the ones we were buying were from before 1962. Crayola crayons are extremely shelf stable and vendors don’t like to order new stock unless they have
absolutely none of something left.
So it is at least marginally plausible that at some point, a massive bunch of unreconstructed Crayolas entered the Prince Edward Island system.
But we all know what it really is : it’s the Mandela Effect.
Somehow. a false memory gets encoded into our minds as if it was real. Something about the nature of the information and the nature of our minds leads to us somehow deriving a false memory as our memories get compressed and stored.
I wonder if it’s a modern phenomenon brought on by the amount of information in our heads passing a certain limit of our mind’s indexing capabilities and causing errors?
That’s also marginally plausible.
The big one for people my age is the Berenstain Bears.
Now that has always been their name. BerenstAIN Bears. With an A. No book has ever been officially published with any other name. Therefore any other name you remember them under has to be false.
I totally remember seeing BerenstEIN Bears books.
And I loved them! Granted, they were a tad schmaltzy and lame for a pint sized cynic like me, but there was such love and warmth and such top notch moral lessons in them that they won me over.
It was just like my sitcoms! But with furries!
But no. It’s a Mandela memory. And literally millions of other people have the exact same false memory. How is this possible?
My only clue is that Berenstein is a much more “normal” name. We see dozens of -steins in our lives. Who the fuck ever heard of a -stain?
Plus it just sounds gross, giving us another reason to change it on the way in.
So instead of recording it like it is, our minds made a “close enough” copy out of parts is already had around.
But that doesn’t explain other examples, like the original, people thinking Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the late eighties.
On what level did that “make more sense”?
The answer, I think, would take a godlike understanding of everything that was going on at the time plus everything there is to know about human memory to derive.
Meanwhile, we can all just enjoy being freaked out by it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.