Cats can't process cheese. They get extremely fat super quickly and leave these soggy turds that you need to scrape off with a prying iron. I know. Dear lord, do I know.
They love cheese tho. They super love cheeeeese...
You're looking at (very) roughly 10 year lifespan on those things. Helps a LOT that you kept them properly stored and all, but once you're done moving, you take a weekend and transfer all that shit to a new medium, you hear? It's easy to just forget about the stuff in the attic until one day you're like, wow, do you remember when... And then you open up the storage and rats ate it all. It kind of really sucks. Don't be like that. Don't be rat man. Be great man. Or woman. Or whateveran.
Ok, what we'll do is, we'll take some sort of kibble, A, fortify it, call it "Vegetable Delight". Then another sort of kibble, B, fortify that, call it "Ox Fondue". Then another, just like the previous ones, call it, say, "Mystery Surprise". All fortified. Then you just alternate them. Mondays, A. Tuesdays, B. Then Wednesdays you think C but nope! A again. Then B, then A, THEN B, and then, finally C, so you have something special to look forward to on Sundays.
MOTHER fuckers. Tectonic activity now, all of a sudden? In OUR orbit? Has someone forgotten to take the moon out for a walk again? This shit just pisses me off I don't know what to tell you. We had JUST gotten it just so. The fuck are we gonna do now, buy a new moon?!
The transit information around here is all running some janky ass kernel from 20 years ago, and sure, it works, until it don't. I appreciate the effort and all, but damn I wish they'd take shit more seriously.
Write it all down. Just for yourself. Dumb takes and all. Write it all out so you have your own opinions clear before you on paper, black and white. Then when you've edited it all and have said everything you want to say in a way that you are satisfied with, print those pages and put them up in your bathroom right opposite where you shit. Every time you shit, you read it, close your eyes, and try to recite it without looking. In a couple of weeks you can perfectly tell anyone exactly what you feel and think about it without missing a beat.
If you can't perform on the spot it's because you're still not comfortable with what you really feel and think. This is the cure.
The second time was possibly even more heart-breaking, but at least nobody lost any money. My parents, my father specifically, I mean both of them but this concerns my father- they grew up in a war torn country. My father had three brothers. He was youngest. When he was three years old, war broke out. The big one, number two, and in the worst possible place. He loved his brothers, and the eldest one got drafted, the story is unclear and lost to time, but joined the airforce somewhere abroad. The second one, I can't even recall, but he disappeared somewhere, sometime, somehow, and none of dad's family ever heard anything from him again- MIA, basically.
It was a big thing for my father, my grandmother too, she lived with us for years in the new country after the war, and just like in the story above, it's first after I got up in years and some that I realized what that haunted look was on her face as she zoned out and pulled her fingernails along the armseat of the leather chair that was hers, as the family watched TV together. Dad used to say, "Grama! Stop scritching!", it was a thing and we all laughed at it because grama scritched. She was thinking of her two lost sons- one of them went into the airforce but was also never heard from again, the other, who knows. Nothing good, probably. But they never knew.
Dad was like her, he just never got over it. He had kind of reconciled the fact that his eldest brother either died fighting, or after the war just relocated somewhere in another country and couldn't find his family back home again. But the other brother, it just itched him until the day he died, he used to light a candle every Christmas and make the table for one person extra, just so that in case he happened to come knocking, the table would be set for him to sit down and have Christmas dinner with us. We didn't think much of it, only, again, in my older years did I understand what emotional luggage was being brought out and put on display on that one night every year.
Sorry for being long-winded, but it kind of matters- decades go by, no more grama, parents getting old, and one day there is a letter. Dear so-and-so, it has come to our attention that a lost relative of yours, by the name so-and-so, has been trying to get in touch with you. Disclosed are his personal information, we are reaching out to you to make sure that you are actually related to this person, and would you want to accept his communication? If so, please get back to us by sending $100 to the following address for verification purposes, and he will be passed along your contact information.
My dad called me at work, "Something amazing has happened, get over here straight away after work". So, of course, I did. By then I was coming up on 40 working IT, I'd been around. I took one look at that letter and just laughed at it, "dad, this is a classic scam. Like, do you mind if I keep this? I have never seen an actual printed Nigerian Prince letter with stamps and all, like, they really went the extra mile with this one!", and he looked at me with despair, and I will never forgive myself for not being quicker on my feet and realizing the trauma I was casually laughing off, and said, "are you sure? His name is in there, and all, and our name is too, this is clearly real!".
He wanted so badly for it to be real, my mom sat by him, they both started arguing with me, like, clearly it was real, and that is when I knew for sure that it wasn't, because they weren't arguing with me, they were arguing with reality, or god himself, pleading for it to be real. I just shook my head, ever the bitter cold rationalist, "no, this is a very classic trick, and your long lost brother is not trying to contact you".
I don't know how I should have handled it, to me it was just another Nigerian scam letter, I was just overcome with the novelty of having a physical copy in my hand, but to my father, and to my mother, it was the one tiny spark of hope they had been waiting for, for decades.
That is the type of sorrow and grief that scammers prey on, and cause. Fuck them all to pieces.
Very humble. Not very creative. But very humble.