The trouble with FB

 This is why Facebook and their arbitrary rules are bullshit. This guy can make a comment like this and it doesn't go against community standards, but everyone I know (myself included) keeps getting thrown in Facebook jail over nothing. If you call out racists or misogynists or homophobes you get suspended; if you are a racist, misogynist or homophobe they protect you. Calling a Nazi and Nazi gets you kicked, but calling a woman a slut is just fine. I'm afraid to even post this on Facebook because I'll probably get thrown off for 30 days, and I can't take that chance because I'm going to need to be on it for my new job.  The irony is that I could be suspended for posting a pic of the thing they said didn't go against community standards. 😡 It's disgusting. I wish there was an alternative.

Before The Dawn

     The other morning I had to take a friend to the hospital for surgery. She had to be there at 5am, so I was on the road to her place at 4:15. It felt weird driving at that time of the morning, at least driving completely sober and well rested. In my life experience, driving at that time usually meant that I was on my way home from a long night out. I hadn’t been in that situation for over a decade, so while the feeling was one of some vague familiarity, it also had the weird sensation of being strange and new.
     Obviously, you notice that there are less people on the roads. Almost no one is on the road in the residential areas you drive through, but it’s even the same on the highways. It’s always strange in those early hours of the morning when you’re on what’s normally a very busy highway, but there are only a set of tail lights way off in front of you that you can barely make out, and far off headlights behind you that barely register in the rearview mirror. If you get to a bend in the road, you can’t see either, and it’s like you’re alone in a long expanse of deserted road.
     The city streets are empty as well. On the way over to her house, I didn’t really pay that much attention to it. It was early, and I was still shaking the sleep off and trying to focus on driving. I am not a morning person, and unless it’s the aforementioned situation of still being up from the night before, I am definitely not a very early morning person.
     I picked her up, and took her to the hospital, dropped her off, and then headed back home to get a little more sleep and wait for them to call and give me a time when I could pick her back up and take her home.
     As I started the drive home, I decided to take the long way, and go directly through the city streets. I didn’t know when I would have the chance again to experience the city while it was still asleep, and see small parts of it just starting to wake up.
     The first thing I noticed was that some of the places that used to be open for 24 hours like convenience stores and gas stations, and even the supermarket, are now closed at night. Just one more thing the pandemic has changed.
     I got stuck behind a garbage truck. Apparently that never changes. Garbagemen are still working on these cold dark mornings. I was annoyed for a split second that I had to wait to get around them, but I quickly checked myself. It’s funny how you are conditioned in so many ways. Whenever I have to come to a stop for garbage trucks, delivery trucks, school buses, construction, even briefly, I get instantly irate. I often think to myself that they should do that stuff at night, when people aren’t on the roads, and I realized that these garbagemen were doing just that. Besides, I purposely took the long way so I could meander and experience the city at dawn, so what was my hurry? The world has conditioned us to expect instant gratification and view any tiny inconvenience as unacceptable. I did that thing where I had the same minor epiphany where I realized that I had to work on readjusting my head and get some realistic expectations. Then I instantly forgot it when I came to a red light at a completely deserted intersection, and spent my time waiting for the light to change by grousing about how they should have some kind of sensor so the lights would change for the lone person waiting to go.
     I didn’t notice any buses running, but it was only a little past five, so it might have been too early. I did see some people here and there walking on the sidewalks. When you see people out at 3am in the city, your first instinct might be to wonder what they are up to. Maybe I just spent too much of my life around drunks and drug addicts and dealers and other seedy characters to have an objective viewpoint, but I always assume something illegal or at least a little shady is going on. Not that I care. That’s one of the things I like about the city. I like that there’s a slightly nefarious underbelly to it.
     Thing is, it was 5am, so I realized that most people I saw walking in the early morning winter chill on a Wednesday were probably on their way to work or somewhere normal and above board. I reflected on how privileged my life was that it could take me a moment to comprehend that not everyone has a car or works a regular nine to five job. I should be painfully aware of that, because for 12 years or so in the 80’s and 90’s, I had a job like that. I used to work for a construction company, and I had to start work at 6am, sometimes earlier. I also lived 90 minutes away from where I worked, so I was usually on the road a little after 4am. That’s when I first noticed those long stretches of empty highway. In some ways, it was a very peaceful feeling, but many days it fueled my anxiety. These were the days before everyone had cell phones, and if I broke down or had an accident in the middle of nowhere, I was stuck. It was best not to think about it, but every time the car made a weird noise or the engine stuttered for a second, your mind started racing.
     I also got to experience the early morning city thing. I worked in Paterson, NJ, which was not the best neighborhood. You crushed crack vials under your feet as you walked into the yard at work, and I had my car broken into multiple times while it was parked on the street in front of work, even in broad daylight. I was accustomed to seeing people still hanging out on street corners at 5am, dealing drugs, hooking, whatever. There were times I had to go to construction jobs in NYC that started at 6am, so I was driving through the streets in the five boroughs at 4 or 5am.
     The difference between Manhattan at 5am and the small Pennsylvania city of Allentown is pretty striking. New York never sleeps, so even at 5am, there was a lot of stuff going on. People were in and out of the bodegas and liquor stores at that time, diners were serving breakfast and late night snacks for drunks, bakeries and bagel shops were opening and flooded the streets with delicious aromas. Taxis were dropping people off and picking people up, or simply tearing up and down the streets faster than they should. Life was generally carrying on. I used to love that time in New York, that mixture of people just starting their day and others just finishing their’s. It was still the city, but it wasn’t as hectic and congested. You rarely saw anyone in a business suit at that hour. You saw some people still dressed up, because they had been out all night, or were making that walk of shame. The thing about the city is that no one seemed ashamed about it anyway. The city takes on a different character at night, and when the sun starts coming up, you see it slowly change back into its daytime skin.
     Now, at dawn on a Wednesday in Allentown, that transformation was happening as well. The convenience stores and gas stations were opening, and traffic was starting to pick up. I saw a bus pulling over at its stop to let a sole passenger get on. As I parked in front of my apartment complex, I noticed people getting in their cars to head off to work. I saw a mother bundling her small kids into the car, probably to drop them off at daycare before she went to work. I saw some people walking their dogs, which had probably whined and danced at their sleepy owners because they had to go to the bathroom after a night’s sleep. I heard the birds chirping, and reminisced how that sound usually meant that I had stayed up all night partying, and signaled the beginning of regret.
     As I walked into my apartment, I was thinking about all of this. I had planned to come home and go right back to bed, and wait for the phone call from the hospital to wake me up and tell me to come back and pick up my friend, but now I rethought that strategy. I was up, and wide awake now. Maybe I would go for a walk down at the park, then come home and cook a big breakfast. Maybe I could get a jump on some of the stuff I had to do today.
     Maybe I was a morning person after all.

On Inauguration Day

So the nightmare we’ve been forced to endure these last four years is finally over. We made it! Of course, 400,000 plus didn’t make it. A bunch of other people fared much worse than us in that time. Still, the vast majority of us came through it relatively untouched. I realize that “relatively” is a relative word(how meta!), and we have all had to deal with something horrible from this administration’s time in power. Besides the pain in the economic and civil rights areas, many of us now have PTSD, and our faith in the system and the rest of humankind is shaken. It seems like the country is a mess and our democracy in tatters, and it feels like we will never be the same again. We won’t be, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The last four years has made us stronger. It has tempered us like steel. It has shown us the areas we need to work on, and the pitfalls to avoid. It has taught us where we need to put safeguards so this never happens again. Everything is a gift you can use to learn and grow, if you teach yourself how to view it properly.
We learned that one third of an entire third of this country’s population is irredeemable. The rest of that third is no cakewalk either, but it is manageable. We also learned that the worst people will out themselves eventually. They cannot hide who they are, and while we were happy to let them hide and ignore the fact that they existed for decades until Trump’s rhetoric called to them like a siren song, we don’t want them to go back into the shadows. We want them to expose who they really are, so we can neuter them. So we can shame them. We should want to do better than that, we should want to deprogram and reteach them. Some people you can’t reach, that’s a fact, so those people must be held accountable and shown that they can’t be a part of society if they can’t figure it out.
The horror of the last four years, and especially the last few weeks has taught us how fragile our democracy is in some areas. It was one last parting gift to make sure we noticed all the stuff we were witness to during this regime. What we do with all that information and warnings is up to us, but I believe it will get better. I believe that enough people have seen the truth of where we stand as a nation and just how bad things are in certain areas. Because of this whole fiasco, a whole bunch of people are now motivated to get involved and fix our country. The next generation of leaders has already formed, filled with righteous anger and determination forged in the crucible of one of the darkest periods this nation has ever navigated. We are all so much stronger now.
Which is a good thing, because the fight isn’t over yet. We have taken the hill though, and we are fighting from the high ground. I know that it’s hard to feel confident and in control after four years of abuse and mayhem, but the battle’s tide has turned. Don’t let them gaslight you into thinking you have no power. We have the power now, and we must use it to transform the country. We can’t think small, we can’t convince ourselves that we should be happy for breadcrumbs. We should demand everything we can dream of, and not look back. We should crush the things that have held us back for so long, and we should learn to believe in that utopia we can envision. You know the one, where people get fair treatment and corruption is not tolerated. Where there is equality in all forms, and people who work themselves to death have something to show for it, and all the money doesn’t go to a privileged few. We should have healthcare and living wages and quality education. We should eliminate systemic racism and get religious dogma out of government. There are a million things we can improve on, because that’s what this country has been doing from the start. America didn’t just become America when some revolutionaries drew up a declaration and a constitution. That was the birth of an idea; a vision of what America could be.
We’ve been working on fulfilling that dream ever since, and we still have a lot of work to do. You’re a part of that. You’ve done a lot of the really hard part already. After four years of playing defense and laying low, now it’s time to go on the defensive and sweep down across the battlefield. Now is the time to act on everything we’ve been preparing ourselves for all these years. Now it’s time to show what true patriots can accomplish, not by rioting and spewing hatred, but by using the powers of government and the rights afforded us to peacefully demand a change.
So now I’m going to go watch an inauguration for the first time in my life and bask in the normalcy of a functioning government and the decency of a man who will actually care about the country again.

But first, here's something about dog shit ...

Here are a few things I’m thinking about today. I usually talk about them on Facebook in long stories nobody reads, but I’m doing it here until Facebook lets me out of jail on ... I think the 27th or 28th.

I love dogs. I usually love people who love dogs, but in the same way that there are a lot of people who have kids who shouldn’t be raising kids, there are a lot of shitty dog owners. Literally.
My apartment complex has a dog park across the street. I use the term “dog park” loosely. It’s a fenced area about 40’ x 15’ where people who live here can let their dogs shit. So people stand there while their dogs sniff around the grass deciding where to poop. During that time, most of the dogs bark at everything they see, which dogs are wont to do. The owners never bother to shush them, or try to distract them, which means constant barking for ten or twenty minutes, which is pretty fucking annoying. It’s inconsiderate, especially since it starts at 5am and happens intermittently throughout the day, up until 1am sometimes. I get that dogs bark, and I’m not that put out when it happens at 3 in the afternoon, but try to have some control over your pet while people are sleeping. People who use the park are always complaining about people not picking up after their dogs. The park provides free bags and a receptacle to put them in, yet a good portion of the people who use the park ignore it. The apartment is always sending out emails imploring people to clean up after their pets, but to no avail.
I thought about all this on my morning hike through the woods. About a quarter mile into the woods today, I saw a bag filled with dog poop thrown under a small child’s bench that sits along the path. Someone took the time to bag up their dog’s shit, then just threw it to the side of the trail, right next to where children will be sitting. On the walk, I saw two more bags of dog shit tossed a few feet off the trail. What the fuck is wrong with people?
So after I left the woods and got back in my car, I noticed two women with three dogs. One was on a leash, but the other two were running free. They were all big dogs, mixed breed. The two not on a leash commenced to taking shits on the grass. Not in the woods, but in the grass in the park where kids go to play. The women then proceed to enter the woods with the dogs still not leashed. They didn’t pick up their dog’s shit off the grass. I saw a few people in the woods with dogs, all on leashes, and I hope to God that these inconsiderate moron’s two unleashed dogs don’t fight with them, or go up to them and get attacked. People like that shouldn’t be allowed to own dogs in the first place.
To be clear, it’s not the dog’s fault at all, it’s shitty owners.

Joe Biden has selected Dr. Rachel Levine to be his assistant health secretary. She is the health secretary of Pennsylvania, and has done an amazing job during the pandemic, and she deserves the appointment. She also happens to be transgender. I have watched for the past year as Pennsylvania deplorables posted horrible comments about her and transgender people in general. They mock her about her appearance, make crude jokes about her body and genitals, and spread all kinds of false stories about her and her policies and work. They are out in full force today, on posts by local news sources, making terrible and abusive comments about her and transgender people in general. They purposely call her by her male birth name, and refer to her by the wrong pronoun. These people put hate before their own health and welfare, and the welfare of everyone else. Through it all, she has handled herself with bravery, strength and dignity. She is a hero. Even though I know that Biden selected her because she is qualified and has earned it, I still like to also think of her new appointment as a big fuck you to all the hateful and ignorant pieces of shit who are ruled by blind hatred and fear. She is proof that hate will not win.

It should come as no surprise that the Trump administration has fucked up the Vaccine rollout as well. Now it looks like there aren’t enough vaccines for the people who already got the first shot to get the follow up shot in time. It would be bad enough if that meant that people would have to start over and get two more shots when they are available, but it could mean much worse news than that. You know how people tend to take half their course of antibiotics, then stop halfway because they feel better? That’s how we get antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. Well viruses and bacteria are very different, and vaccine resistance is rare, but it seems like giving half a dose to millions of people is going to up the odds of that happening with Covid-19. Maybe it won’t at all, I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. Still, it seems like it could be a problem.
Even if that isn’t a danger, it’s still inexcusable how badly Trump and his cronies messed this whole thing up. They are incompetant liars, and have already killed over 400,000 people. Still, morons love and defend him.

I’m worried about violence tomorrow, but I’m going to focus on the fact that the nightmare will be over and enjoy watching politics as usual rather than the shitshow we’ve been forced to endure for four years. Tomorrow will be a little nerve wracking, but it will be healing and inspirational, and I don’t think we’ll see anything too crazy from the fringe.
Biden wasn’t my first choice, but I can honestly say that I believe he wants what’s best and is an honorable human being. I haven’t agreed with all of his choices over the years, and I’m sure that I’ll disagree with some of his positions moving forward, but I’ll take it. That amounts to a ringing endorsement from someone like me, a far far left, pseudo communistic anarchist who’s about as cynical as you get about politics.

I realize that I probably buried the lede by going off on dog shit at the top of all this, but I’m too lazy to reorder it now. Oh well. At least I am putting the least important subject last, and the Mets should be used to last place by now.
Mets fans are all excited because we finally have a new owner, and he’s the richest MLB owner in history. He’s willing to spend whatever it takes to win, so Mets fans are now expecting to win every World Series for the next ten years. It doesn’t really work that way, but still, it feels like an exciting time to be a Mets fan. That said, I almost like it more when the Mets manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory every year. It’s hilarious to watch them and their snake bitten ways over the decades. I am torn between wanting the Mets to spend like crazy and build a powerhouse and destroy the rest of the league, and watching them spend all that money and fall prey to bad luck and injury and off field stuff like they alway do. That’s how the Mets roll. And it’s starting already.
Their new hotshot GM they just hired a few months ago has just gotten fired because he sent a female reporter explicit and unsolicited texts in 2016. I mean, in this day and age, how do the Mets not vet him properly?
To their credit, they fired him immediately, but the Mets often do the right thing. That’s why you have to just laugh at all their misfortune. It isn’t karma. They aren’t bad guys. They aren’t the Yankees, for fucks sake. They play by the rules, they work hard, and they implode nonetheless. Oh well, at least I can still laugh about it after fifty years suffering as a Mets fan ...

How I almost lost my bunny

     I haven't been on social media much this week, but it's been a really bad week. I thought I was going to lose Maddie, but thankfully, it seems like she's going to be okay.
     She stopped eating Tuesday night, but I really didn't notice until Wednesday. There are a few reasons why bunnies don't eat, even things that they normally love. They are finicky, as bad as cats. They sometimes decide that they don't want certain foods. Sometimes they go fill up on hay and you don't notice. Sometimes they're just weird.
     Many times though, it is a sign that something is wrong. It could just be gas, or it could be their teeth bothering them, or it could be something much more serious like a blockage or worse. Often when a bunny stops eating, they are dead within a couple of days, if they make it that long. Bunnies have a complex digestive system, and when a bunny stops eating, their gut can shut down within 24 hours. It’s called GI stasis, and it is one of the leading causes of death for bunnies. By Wednesday afternoon, I was getting very worried. I haven’t had any experience with GI stasis with either of my bunnies in fifteen years. I was lucky, I guess.
     Maddie was not acting that strangely, other than not being interested in food, no matter what I offered her. I tried massaging her belly to see if that helped, but nothing changed. She had also stopped pooping, which is a very bad sign.
     Now normally, I would take her to the vet right away. The problem with that is Pennsylvania’s unemployment insurance program is in complete disarray right now, partly because PA Republicans took away most of their funding years ago to make it harder for people to collect. They have a small workforce, and you can never get a hold of anyone on the phone or email. I have used a redialer app on my phone, and it redialed over 200 times and only ever got a busy signal. The main reason they are having trouble getting people their money is because Trump delayed signing the relief bill until after the cutoff date for the CARES act, and all that information and programming has to be redone.
     At any rate, what it meant was that I had no money to take Maddie to the vet. I mean, I have no money whatsoever. My bank account is currently overdrawn and getting hit with fees everyday. By Thursday morning, I was a mess, and my parents offered to pay for the vet, but they don’t have much money right now either. I explained to them that rabbits are exotics, and just taking her there could quickly add up to thousands of dollars. They would need to do x-rays right off the bat, probably keep her overnight, and if it was anything more serious than gas, it would quickly add up. Still, I figured just getting her there would be better than nothing, even if I couldn’t afford much treatment.
     Well, it turns out that my rabbit vet retired, and they have no one there who could help, because most vets know nothing about rabbits at all. I had thought I could make some kind of arrangement with them seeing as my family and I had been going there for decades, but we couldn’t even get in the door. Worse still, after a bunch of calls, I soon found out that the nearest vet who would take a rabbit was almost two hours away in Trenton, NJ! They would demand payment up front, and it would be an emergency visit with an exorbitant fee added on. I barely had enough gas in my car to get to my local vet, let alone New Jersey!
     It was then that I started to accept the fact that Maddie was going to die. When bunnies go into stasis, there are things you can do. Many bunny owners keep an emergency kit for it. One of the things they have is Metacam, which is a pain reliever. Bunnies in pain don’t eat, but if you can relieve the pain, they will start eating again. Trouble is, Metacam is prescription, and it’s illegal for a vet to prescribe it without seeing the animal, so we were back at square one. The other thing you keep in an emergency kit for buns is Critical Care, which is basically ground up pellets you mix with water and force feed to them. The thing is, if she had a blockage, force feeding her would be bad, so I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to do.
     Then I started thinking really hard about what would make her tummy ache. I suddenly remembered that on Tuesday for lunch I had made a salad, and I was left with a big broccoli stalk. I threw it on Maddie’s treat dish, thinking she would nibble on it a little and I would wind up throwing most of it away. That’s what usually happened. I realized that she had eaten the whole thing! She’s not used to that much broccoli. In the past, I only ever gave her a floret or two now and then. I realized then that she most likely had gas, and it was causing her discomfort.
     The other thing that people keep in their emergency kits is gas drops, the kind you give to infants. So I ran up to my parent’s house, borrowed 10 dollars, and headed to the drugstore. You have to use a syringe to get the liquid in their mouths, and rabbits do not like that process one little bit. Especially Maddie. She hates when you have your hands anywhere near her chin or mouth, she is a prey animal. So the rest of Thursday was spent battling Maddie to get doses of the gas drops in her. More of it ran down her chin than got in her mouth, I’m afraid. The end result was that it had no effect at all. It wasn’t working.
     Friday afternoon, I contacted the vet to see if they could put her down. I couldn’t afford or even access any treatment for her, and I didn’t want her to suffer. At this point, she hadn’t eaten in three days, and rabbits very rarely make it that long without dying. She didn’t seem like she was in any kind of excruciating pain, but she definitely wasn’t comfortable. She was spending most of her time under the dining room table, hiding away like most animals do if they are sick or dying. She was also hiding from me, because she was scared I was going to try to force gas drops in her. She kept shifting her position, because she couldn’t get comfortable. She was starving to death on top of everything else. It was killing me that I couldn’t help her, and I spent much of this week sobbing uncontrollably.
     Then I thought of when I had to put my first rabbit, Tampa, to sleep. There were no rabbit vets on duty that evening, but he was suffering. He had cancer, because that day he had suddenly stopped eating and was going downhill quickly. He was ten years old, and when I picked him up, I was shocked that he weighed almost nothing. So I took him to the vet, and they looked at him and confirmed that he was not going to live long, and I should put him down. The thing is, the vet on duty wasn’t a rabbit vet, so he took Tampa into another room, and it was some 25 minutes later that they brought his body out. They had trouble finding a vein, and ultimately had to inject him directly in the heart. I didn’t want to think about how much he suffered in that 25 minutes until they finally got it done.
     I didn’t want Maddie to go through that. She hadn’t moved from under the table almost all day, so I figured she wouldn’t even last until morning. I thought that maybe she would be better off just dying quietly at home, and who knows, maybe there was a miracle out there. I was due. I decided to hold off until Saturday at least.
     I hardly slept that night, checking on her constantly and trying in vain to get her to eat. I finally fell asleep around four, and I woke up about 8am and went to check on her, expecting her to be dead. To my surprise, she wasn’t. At that moment, I decided that I was going to try everything I could. I got the gas drops again, and forced the maximum dosage in her. This time, I got it all in. I went and ground up pellets and made my own critical care. I figured at this point, force feeding her couldn’t make it much worse. It turned out that I didn’t have a syringe big enough, so I ran to the pet store with my last five dollars to buy one, but they were opening later than usual due to covid. Okay, no problem, I still had to give her more gas drops anyway, I would just go back later.
     Well, Maddie had had enough of gas drops. She wouldn’t let me near her, and when I would finally catch her, she would fight tooth and nail to get away. I was all scratched up, and still no more drops were in her. I tried wrapping her in a blanket, and even that wouldn’t hold her. She took off under the table again, and I felt defeated. She was going to die after all.
     A little while later, I thought I heard the sound of gnawing. Maddie hadn’t even bothered to chew on anything the past few days, and chewing was her favorite pastime! I walked over and saw that she was chewing on my old sneaker, and when she saw me, she hopped out from under the table. She was sniffing around, and acting more like Maddie. I went over to her, and she took off under the table again, afraid of the drops. For the hell of it, I went and got her fresh vegetables to see if she would eat, even though I knew she wouldn’t. I was crying as I got under the table, and I told her how much I loved her and put the veggies by her and begged her to eat.
     And she did!
     She didn’t eat a lot of them, but this was the first time she ate anything in over 4 days! It did seem like a miracle. The only thing is, her gut had definitely shut down, and it can be really hard getting it started again. It was encouraging, but I knew we were a long way off from a full recovery. She needed to poop as well as eat, to make sure that the whole system was working. I fed her some more veggies a little bit later. The gas drops seemed to work, but her poor tummy must still have felt bad, because she wasn’t wolfing them down like a starving bunny should.
     A little while later, she hopped over to her litter box, and sat in there for a while. I hoped she was pooping, but you can never tell. It was excruciating, because she was taking her own sweet time about it, and I didn’t want to go near her in case she would run off again. About ten minutes later, she left the box, and I ran over, hoping to see poops. Low and behold, there they were! They were small, and a little runny, but it was something!
     So for the rest of Saturday and all day Sunday, I was seeing encouraging signs. Maddie still didn’t want snacks, and still didn’t want to eat a lot, but she did make another small poop twice. She still wasn’t being Maddie, and I was nervous. Even bunnies who go through stasis and start eating will die anyway.
     She slept under the table again last night, and this morning I gave her more veggies, and she ate nearly all of them. So I went over to the kitchen doorway where I usually give her treats and breakfast banana, and she ran over and begged! Still, she wouldn’t eat any treats or banana I tried to give her. I got more veggies and went to put them in her cage, and she ran like a shot to the cage, all excited. Still, she just walked away without eating anything. It was frustrating and maddening. Maybe she wasn’t getting better after all.
     About 20 minutes later, she was under the coffee table, in her usual spot, something she hadn’t done since Tuesday. She looked up at me, so I picked up the treat container I keep by the couch and shook it, and she jumped up in my lap! She went crazy eating some treats, and then jumped down and headed for the litter box. When she left, I checked, and there were some normal sized poops! She plopped down on the floor, comfortable and seemingly satisfied.
     Since then, she has been acting like my Maddie girl. She is investigating, chewing on all kinds of things, even picking at her hay. She is going to make it, and I can’t believe it because all the odds were against her. Who knows, maybe prayers work, because my friends and family who knew what was happening were praying hard and hoping against hope that she would be okay. My family was probably hoping that I would be okay as well, because if I lost Maddie right now, with everything else going on, I don’t know what I would do. I wouldn’t kill myself, but I would probably just give up.
     Or I wouldn’t. This period right now is a huge test of my whole positive outlook, because there is a lot of stuff going on that isn’t very positive at all. I guess that’s what hope and faith are about, holding onto to them when it’s hardest. I would go on if something happened to Maddie. I wouldn’t get another bunny right away, but I was already thinking about how I could maybe volunteer at a local shelter or rescue if possible. I will probably still go do that. I still remember that my friends love me and they care; about me and my bunny. I even made a new friend who helped me with some of the stasis stuff, and it helped to talk to another bunny person about everything I was dealing with, so thank you so much Jessica, and thank you Heather for putting me in touch with her! All I know is that I still have my beautiful Maddie girl, so I will get through this other stuff as well.

Consequences

     The more we learn about the riot and insurrection at the Capitol last week, the worse it gets. We are in the midst of the worst threat against democracy this country has faced since the Civil War. Worse than any war since, worse than any scandal, worse than any recession, worse than any natural disaster, worse than 9/11. It’s not over yet, not by a long shot.
     But just like any of those other things, we can learn from this, and we can improve. We now have the ability to spot the enemies of democracy and America, because they came out into the open and exposed themselves for who they really are. That’s why even tragic and catastrophic events like this are a gift. That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid of tyrants and hooligans and bullies, because there are so many more of us than there are of them, and even though it doesn’t seem like it at times, the Constitution and Law are on our side. You can fear what they might be able to accomplish, but don’t be afraid of them. That’s what they want. They are terrorists, after all. Look at what’s happening now. These criminals are being arrested and the GOP is facing consequences, in polls, at their jobs, and with their donors.
     So of course they are turning to the old trick that bullies and abusers use next: gaslighting. They are trying to push a narrative that the left is being mean by trying to remove or impeach Trump. They are claiming that we are the ones dividing the country. That’s some grade A bullshit right there. That is how abusive men control their wives, telling them that if they call the police or leave that they are splitting the family apart or forsaking their vows.
      The only people who will fall for that are their deplorable supporters, and that’s why they are doing it. They can hope that a few democrats will fall for it, but they know that 75 million or so yahoos will eat it up. The GOP hasn’t been concerned with issues or the welfare of the country for a long time; they are in the enabling business. They only care about giving the horrid one-third of this country soundbites and slogans that exonerate them of any responsibility or blame. The GOP worries about branding and messaging, not about people or lives or democracy, or about any consequences their words might bring.
     Now that has come home to roost, and it’s our job to make sure they pay. Any person who was in the Capitol that day rioting or trespassing needs to be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Any elected official who incited the mob or voted against certifying Biden’s electoral victory needs to be expelled, censured or impeached. Any corporation, organization or person who facilitated this insurrection needs to be punished as well.
     Conservatives love law and order so much, let’s be sure we give it to them.

Conan

This really is a great episode, recorded right after the Capitol riot and full of great and funny insights. 

https://www.earwolf.com/episode/ron-reagan