#kogoramble

[kogo-dogo]

Okay, so. Yesterday, my spouse's cat (my beloved, furry stepdaughter) was suddenly very sick. Spouse had the car on the opposite end of the state for work, so I walked down the road to the local vet. Unfortunately, she needed to be rushed to the emergency vet in the next town over, so I had to order an Uber and cross my fingers.

Enter Donald, a gay Puerto Rican man who rolls up in an electric Kia with a rainbow Zelda shirt. I know he is Puerto Rican because that is the theme of his car's decor. He's probably in his late forties. He's gushing over the cat but his demeanor changes when I tell him how sick she is and how I need to get her to the ER. He solemnly informs me, "I'll take care of it," and RIPS out of the parking lot of my building.

Dude is flooring it. The entire time he is sending his husband text-to-speech messages about, "Going to the vet, do you want me to go in and talk to them?" He informs me that he actually needed to go speak to the vet at this clinic anyway--his dog who he just had to put down yesterday went there for renal failure treatments--and that "fate brought us together." He tells the cat to hang in there, that, "Girl, I will take care of you."

He turns on his emergency blinkers. He's weaving through traffic like he used to professionally race. Any gap he sees, he takes it. It is terrifying but I am in awe.

We get to blocked traffic because it is rush hour. He asks me if I trust him. I tell him, "I guess I have to in this situation," and he nods and swings into the shoulder, guns it, whips around the traffic, and takes off on a side road. The GPS means nothing to him. He knows exactly where he's going and he is beating the traffic jams for the sake of the cat. She can't wait.

When we pull into the vet clinic, he goes in with me. As my cat is taken in, he asks me if I want to see pictures of his late dog. He shows me a picture of a chihuahua in a bow tie and it is the cutest fucking dog I've ever seen. He tells me how his husband is a dog trainer and the dog had been around the world, and that this vet is a good one and my cat will be fine.

I compliment his shirt and he nods like Arnold at the end of Terminator 2. Then he just marches out the door.

Anyway. The cat is staying overnight at the emergency vet but seems to be doing fine aside from not wanting to eat. Apparently, this is a $2.5k case of "your cat has a cold and is constipated, and what you thought was respiratory distress was her gagging on snot while nauseous." We pick her up sometime today.

Wherever you are, thank you, Donald. My spouse left you a tip higher than the cost of the trip because you are awesome and your dedication to our cat was inspiring. 10/10, I would endanger myself on the road with you again.

[fuyena]

I have so many things to upload because I lost the password for this account for a while, lol. Bear with me while I throw things at you as hard as I can.

[kogo-dogo]

There is something extremely funny about how kids react to alt fashion in comparison to adults. Adults generally do not care and I am just Another Person In The Space, but kids lose their absolute mind. Examples include:

- The kid at Goodwill today who kept begging his dad to look at "the person with black lipstick" while his dad pointedly tried not to look at me but was obviously hoping I wouldn't notice.

- The kid at a DIFFERENT thrift store who gasped and kept waving at me while I was waiting for my fiance to finish trying on pants. I saw him tell his mom he saw a witch.

- The little girl who came up to me and my fiance and said, "No offense, but you look emo." My fiance was like, "Close enough!" and she very smugly went to go explain to her mom she was right.

- The three year old who saw me waiting for my fiance to pick me up from work, grinned, and loudly announced, "MOM LOOK A SLUT!"

[kogo-dogo]

Looking through the concept art on the SR1/2 Remaster and being dazzled by how pretty they tried to make young Kain. I don't know what's funnier: historical revisionism to make him hot, or the idea that some elfishly pretty boy grew up to be a bug with hooves.

[kogo-dogo]

Kain's lieutenants have always been hilarious to me because not all of them are created equal. Turel is telekinetic, Rahab is a literal shark monster. Even Melchiah can warp through walls.

Then you got Zephon who is like, "Girl, I can climb walls but only some of them."

[kogo-dogo]

My girlfriend is making a Snip model, and she's fascinated.

[kogo-dogo]

The whiplash I got when I thought an old family friend was going to confess a secret crush, and instead confessed he liked how big I drew tits.

[kogo-dogo]

Randomly remembered while complaining about IT to my spouse: When I was in high school (mid-2000s), I elected to take some IT courses with a local vocational school because I wanted to work with computers. I was a few classes deep into PC repair when it became obvious that most of the people around me were Xbox-era gamer bro types who watched Jackass religiously and had no concept of personal wellbeing. This included the instructor who was... 23, I think? Nerdy, bearded dude who looked like he could host a game review show with Tommy Tallarico.

But, the classes were informative but... weird. Since the OG Xbox was so similar to a tower PC, people would bring them in to fix and spend half the class "testing" it, then get their panties in a twist when the one AFAB person in class with them (me) beat them at Halo. They'd get in weird conversations with the instructor about how his wife was too hot for him. One guy carried around fake blood capsules and would use them for comedic effect. Monster Energy flowed like water.

But then came the Fight Club.

I don't know exactly HOW a Fight Club happened because I mostly kept to myself, but I did start noticing that a small group of dudes would cluster in the back of the room. There'd be a few "oohs" and "aahs" and quiet cheering and, eventually, I got curious and joined the circle. What I found was some dudes in their late teens beating the ever loving FUCK out of each other.

And so did the instructor, though he seemed to regard it as more "cool" than "worrying." I guess because he worked for the vocational school (for adults!) that it was different than my high school (for minors!) and he wasn't concerned, so he just laid some ground rules and the fights went on. And I would just be a little Roman spectator at the gladiatorial games, watching as these guys with Ivy Soul Calibur waifus donned their big-ass jackets and cargo pants and just... punched each other repeatedly.

They invited me to join. I politely declined. And I guess it's best I did because the whole thing stopped when one dude tried to drop kick another guy, missed, and then cracked his head against the ground. The whole group (newly concussed dude included) panicked. I have never seen fear like I saw on the instructor's face. Dude who got got by gravity is being told to walk it off and people are trying to help him think up excuses that won't get the instructor fired or the school sued.

And we all just quietly went back to the work tables after it was decided he slipped on a wet floor, and proceeded to gut a prehistoric Dell as if nothing happened.

And I'm grateful for the experience because, 1.) I know how to build a PC and do some local networking and make CAT 5 cables and 2.) whenever IT at my job is completely inept, I have enough insight to know what kind of person I'm dealing with so, you know. Maybe it's not his fault. Maybe he has a minor TBI. It happens.

[kogo-dogo]

Update, Smudge (the cat) is home. The vet staff didn't want her to leave because she's so sweet and cooperative. She proved how cooperative she was by refusing to let us take off her leg bandage where her IV was.

We were told she was still not eating much but WAS eating a little. This is false. She charged the food bowl as soon as she got home because apparently the issue is she wanted HER food and not the peon hospital food she was being provided.

[kogo-dogo]

Nobody really talks about how insidious brain fog is. Mine got gnarly after the chronic pain started, and now I feel like I am an idiot compared to ten years ago.

Man, I remember being witty and funny and fun. Now I get confused if a conversation has more than two people in it and I lose my phone 100000000000 times a day.

[kogo-dogo]

sweepermarket soup

[kogo-dogo]

Like, okay. In regards to that last reblog: Do you know how weird it is to grow up in an area as bad off as southeastern Kentucky and to not realize it until you just casually start talking to people who've never been? Like, it didn't sink in that the stuff I went through growing up poor in the mountains was not the norm until I left and the responses to my stories was shock/horror/sadness.

I remember once just casually dropping that my childhood best friend had been murdered by an addict (normal conversation back home; you'd usually be met with "Oh, that's a shame, I remember he was a good kid. Same thing happened to [INSERT NAME] a few years ago."), and people just responding way stronger than I expected. There were whole towns without grocery stores and that was normal. The only times I can recall being to the doctor as a kid was when I was severely hurt or couldn't breathe (I had pneumonia and I tried to walk it off because we couldn't afford the hospital bill even with insurance). A lot of my family has died of preventable causes. A lot of our water was unsafe to drink because of mining (mining companies have destroyed a lot of places near my hometown, and as recently as last year left an entire town without potable water). A lot of those preventable causes were caused by the water being poison.

It's truly tragic because the people who live there are, by and large, great people and you can actually trace everything back to big coal execs getting mad about unions and destroying land out of spite (they stripped entire regions of any resource they could take out on a train, which left those regions poor because they had nothing to trade). A lot of people in those areas are doing everything they can to change circumstances but nobody takes them seriously or they face significant pushback (from the coal companies! What a surprise!).

It's just really sad. It's always a big celebration when I see any successes, but I wish people would stop looking at them like ignorant, awful people and actually... care.

[kogo-dogo]

Teaching myself SQL and quietly seething about all the places I worked who wanted so, so desperately to use Excel and Access for all of their data.

This is so much better. This is so much better I'm going to throw UP.

[kogo-dogo]

I've been trying to live my life in a way that is truly authentic and not inhibited by the expectations of others or my stupid OCD rules. It means dressing how I want without worrying if I come across as a "poser," it means letting myself enjoy things fully, it means doing things I want to do when I want to do them instead of waiting for the perfect time.

This also means that some dude has to live with the whiplash of passing me on the street and telling me I look "cool as hell" in my massive spiked collar, then walking into an antique store a half hour later to see me uwu-talking a tiny tea set that can fit in the palm of my hand.

[kogo-dogo]

Since I've noticed other people doing it, and because I keep getting way far behind on my actual Art Tumblr™, I'm letting people know that I have a bluesky account, and I actually do post art there. And sometimes pictures of my cats. You can find it here, if you dare.

[kogo-dogo]

@filamints showed me the fucking gaycation post on Reddit, and it is the fakest fucking thing I've ever read, but every other line is golden.