Yesterday I took three cats to get dewormed and caught up on their shots, and it cost $700+. Literally they only got pills and shots. This would have been well under $200 a few years ago. Part of it is inflation, but most of it is that my local vet got bought by a corporation, as part of a large scale nationwide trend.

I chatted with the receptionist about it, who told me that every local vet within 50 miles had been bought by corporations. And I've had other recent conversations about the same change in different cities. So it's a fairly widespread phenomenon.

My thoughts:
1. Fuck those parasitic capitalists. They're just taking another industry that was working more-or-less fine, and transforming it into another vehicle for wealth extraction from the LMC and middle class.

2. They're not even improving things. We had a dispute about what occurred when two of the cats were fixed at the vet, in 2016, and it turned out those records have been purged. The corporations can't be bothered to hang on to records for the lifespan of their current clients. I'm sure that is the more profitable policy to implement, but fuck those guys.

3. My eternally optimistic self has generated the following take: as vets get fed up with their corporate overlords, more and more of them will convert a van and become mobile vets who only do house calls to cut down on overhead. I know lots of cities have mobile vets already, although it's not available in Heebieville. It seems so obviously the best model for pet treatment anyway.

On my way home, the Catholic church 1.5 blocks away was hosting a food pantry thing, and the line of cars was past our house. The juxtaposition just made me so goddamn angry: widespread food insecurity, and if these very same people try to take their cat to the vet, they'll owe several hundred dollars to the parasitic overlords who can't comprehend society in any terms beside get even-richer-quicker.

So is Trump actually going to be, like, arrested arrested? It seems unlikely, right?

Even an indictment seems hard to imagine, since it's been so many years with so many indictable offenses. I mean, this shithead was literally impeached twice and kept on keeping on. Surely we must be getting close, but when has it not felt that way?

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe fifty five

I recently read this divorce memoir, But You Seemed So Happy, and I found it both funny and insightful.

This one part keeps making me laugh when I think back on it. It's from a standalone essay, but I'm not sure how well the essay holds up without the context of her specific marriage. (Plus I'm pretty sure an editor gave it that miserably dumb title. I think the book chapter is just called How to Be Married.)

Step 6: Eat the Same Meals

You now eat meals together, the same meal. This is the expectation. Obviously you can snack on whatever you want. But snacking is different than meals, especially dinner meals. Did you always eat the same dinner as, say, your college roommates? No? Well that's over now. You and your favorite person eat the same thing almost every night, together. Because guess what, that's how this works. If you don't eat the same meal, people will write articles about the dangers of making different meals. Just watch. Yum-yum!

Laugh/cry.

Completely unrelated - and not actually based on Jammies in any way - I had a mini-debate with a friend on the phrase "Let's agree to disagree." I think anyone with a smidge of emotional awareness knows that when you deploy that phrase, you're provoking a surge of anger in the other person. Maybe you're a little pissed and doing so deliberately, but I don't think there's a way to convey that phrase with true neutrality. Maybe if you're almost wheedling/pleading?