Well, not really. So our orange emperor bombed Iran and then realized they had all the counter terrorism related agencies out hunting for brown immigrants, so then they decided that counter terrorism was, once again, probably important, and yanked them back to their regular work. So now spouse is on a "call us when you need us" arrangement and not a "use us please, daddy" arrangement. This doesn't really make anything better. He just left to help with an immigration thing and he's def not happy about it. He didn't say much so that means he doesn't approve of whatever the circumstances are. It's his last week of "helping" and then the job will be passed to other coworkers. But still, it doesn't make it better, just because he will be not participating.

I was making breakfast in the kitchen and he comes in wearing new dark brown pants. I look at the pants and I look at him.

"I don't know what brown trousers says about today, but it's probably not good," I comment.

"I got them on sale," he says, proudly. He rarely shops for clothing for himself.

In better times I once suggested spouse buy a nice brown shirt and he flat scoffed at me and said he could never wear a brown shirt to work (as if everyone knows the WWII association), so I'd been assuming dark brown was a no-no wardrobe color entirely. I pat him on the butt. "Brown shirts: right out. Brown pants: Okay!"

I asked if he wanted me to pack him a sandwich because he was anticipating this taking up his whole day. He declined.

"Well, don't get mexican for lunch, wait until your food is ready, and then arrest the kitchen staff," I tell him, trying to inject some black humor.

"I've heard they've actually done that," he says.

"Really?" I am half-shocked. "That's a total dick move."

Spouse does not have a high opinion of the other agencies involved.

What do you do with these weird vignettes of absurdity in our new authoritarian order? What sorts of terrible little everyday conversations are playing out all over our country as some people wake up and prepare to go out to deliberately and irrevocably alter other people's lives because everyone tacitly agrees the rich people can't be touched? This is all so horrible and dumb. Nobody is obsessed with WWII like conservatives and yet here we are, getting pied pipered gleefully into our own Nazi Germany and the people who were best suited to being the watchdogs of such a thing are leading the pack. It is disgusting.

I keep looping around to the idea that what we can do best is remember. If we forget about what we lost, if we accept this as the new normal, it will be so much harder to crawl out. We must remember how we got where we are, so we can find our way back.

I have put quite a bit of work into my newspaper headline collage project. I am almost done with the "lead up" collage that covers 2017-2024. It was a lot more work than I thought. It's very dense. I keep remembering things I thought were important and cramming them in there like clowns in a clown car. There is still so much I left out and I could waste a ton of time on multiple collages, easy, but I have to move on to current day. It has a real psychological weight, I think. I added notes about the covid death toll in a red typewriter font as the timeline progresses. When 100,000 died, the New York Times filled the front page with the names of the dead and brief notes about their life. When the death toll swelled to 3,000 a day, there was a somber article. When we hit 1,000,000 dead, the tone was almost perfunctory. They stopped requiring hospitals to report in 2024.

We were never allowed to grieve covid. It has been swept under the rug. It is a psychological wound that will not heal until we as a nation are able to process that we collectively accepted/encouraged letting our fellow citizens die. Because we were scared shitless of accepting that things had changed forever and it was beyond our control.

80+ people are dead from the recent Texas flooding and people are losing their minds on weather conspiracies. But we have proven we can shrug that off, even if they are rich white kids. They'll be forgotten in a week or two.

I spent my July 4 getting a VPN and setting up social media accounts for my project. God bless spouse, I told him we should get a VPN and without skipping a beat he's all, "We use mullvad at work." Done and done. So I've set everything up to protect our privacy - at least enough to make us a tough nut to crack. It's not that I'm doing anything illegal or shameful (I am not), but I want to keep doing what I want to do for as long as I want to do it.

I've thought about putting out a book of the collages in November, so people can arm themselves before going to visit red hat relatives for the holidays. I found a print on demand company based out of the EU that supposedly does high quality art books and prints. Anyone can order and get it dropped shipped right from the printer. I don't have to do a damn thing. The books are expensive, but not laughably obscenely so, even with some profit tacked on. I will have to order a sample and check the quality. I was thinking about calling it "25 weeks in 2025". I really wanted to do "47 weeks in 2025" but 47 weeks lands too close to Christmas. "25 weeks in 2025" is still almost half a year, a good amount of content, and 25 is for the 25th amendment.

Profiting from the project gives me the capitalist ick, but I would like to get the project some proper anonymous hosting. I'm working on setting up a free neocities website (they don't like my VPN - need to take a trip to the library and use public wifi to sign up), but something more official with a real domain name would be nice. I can't do patreon or the like, because there is no way to take money online anonymously except for crypto, and crypto is more complicated than I want to mess with. At least this publisher is EU based so that would make it a little harder for the govt to get my info. I don't feel US based companies are trustworthy anymore. I am such a coward compared to people who are putting their full real names and actual faces out there. What do you think, in 6 months will expressing anti-47 opinions be enough to get you a law enforcement visit? I wouldn't care so much if spouse weren't doing what he does.

Anyway I am working on stuff. I should be ready to start posting soon. I am figuring out how to make little videos that pan through the collage using kdenlive. The software is challenging but I am fumbling my way through somehow. I made a little video and it looks like shit, but I'm working on it.

I have formatted the collages in a way that they can be cut into four pieces for individual social media posts. So each collage buys me 4 days to finish the next collage. I really hope I get faster because these first two have taken a lot of time. I know it's because I have been learning as I go and figuring out how to get the look I want, but they have taken way longer than I thought.

--

In lighter news, Kitten has caught two birds in the past week, which caused a lot of excitement when he brought them in the house and let them go. I don't think he has figured out they are made of meat yet because both were able to fly away once we got them back outside. He caught a sparrow and a starling. He can catch as many of those damned invasive starlings as he likes, as far as am concerned. They mob the feeders and drive off the native birds.

Kitten is now one year old, cat shaped and doing cat things. It used to be a known fact that Other Cat was the dumb one, because Cat was practically a feline genius. Well, Other Cat is the smart one now. I like to say that Kitten is a zen master. He lives in the Now and what happened 5 seconds ago, or will happen in 5 seconds, means nothing to him. He has brain cells, they are just like bouncy balls tossed down a stairwell. Other cat is a slow thinker, she has a 386 processor, but she does think and make deliberate decisions. Kitten is made of happy and all he cares about is having fun.

They get along okay, mostly. Kitten loves Other Cat. He loves to chase her and use her as a wank pillow (he's neutered, he just gets those urges). Other Cat thinks this is wildly undignified and complains bitterly, but she's way too clumsy and weak to fight him off. We have to keep them separated for a few hours a day when Kitten has too much energy, but when he is calm and sleepy, they nap on the bed no problem. They'll share a food dish. They're a lot like Tigger and Rabbit from Winnie-the-Pooh. As long as we rescue her when she gets mauled, she seems to put up with him okay.

Kitten loves the back yard but fortunately, despite all his puff-tail scampering and boldness, he is a coward at heart and shows no interest in jumping the fence. He likes it when Neighbor Cat and Yellow Cat visit. He DESPERATELY wants to make other cat friends. Neighbor Cat is mercurial and sometimes attacks when Kitten gets too close. Frankly it's good for him to get his ass kicked a little. Yellow Cat is friendly but skittish, will sniff noses, but moves on when Kitten shows too much interest. He cries when they jump the fence and leave, but he never tries to follow them. Which is great.

Kitten loves to help me water the plants. He is fascinated with water. We've discovered he loves to chase the spray out of the garden hose as we water the grass. He ends up soaked but he doesn't care. He'll chase the water like it's a laser pointer.

I miss Cat so much. He would have had a lot of fun with Kitten. There's just no replacement for him. I hope he is happy with whatever new family he got reincarnated into. He was/is a small cat god, bestowing the blessings of his cat presence to the worthy.