You are mother fuckers, one and all.

I don’t care that you love your daughter and would never hurt her, that you own six cats and would never hurt them, that hey, I have this cat here you can have to replace yours, that I’m going through hard times right now, that I’m really sorry, I didn’t notice hitting anything and why are you shouting at me. It doesn’t give you fucking leeway to do 50 through a 15 mph area and run down my cat.

We loved Scooter. He was one of the most absolutely friendly and playful cats I’ve ever had a joy to know in my life - it was nearly a daily thing that we would see him at a neighbour’s house and playing with their children.

Mariah rescued both him and another of his litter from death’s door and bottle fed them back to health. Caira loved him. He was her play pal, you know. He never bit her or clawed her - a true rarity for our eclectic selection of cats - and she loved nothing more than to just hug him.

Everyone else here loved Scooter too. You’d never get him to admit it, but even Mariah’s dad loved the cat, and he’s a curmudgeon in the finest sense of the tradition.

So thank you. You ran down my daughter’s cat in front of her. Watching Scooter bleed out and die on the pavement, and knowing I couldn’t help him, was one of the absolute worst moments of my life.

Thank you, you son of a bitch.

Scooter

I don’t rant much here anymore. There’s two reasons: I offend people enough as it is on a daily basis (I really am sorry, Mi), and anything I say here has this tendency to come back and bite me when I least expect it. Especially about work, I mean there was one time when a mouse…shit. See?

So I’m left to venting at oblique topics. It wouldn’t do for me to rant about the midget eskimo conspiracy to control the military-industrial complex and beam Z-waves into our heads..for all that it’s true I know I’ll wind up working for an eskimo midget at some point. It’s not easy for all of that; I’ve a hundred tics, neurosis and outright scars all crammed into my head and vying for attention. Lets start with my family: You think I’m one step above a retard. Every single time I talk to either of you I wind up being told not to be stupid or outright being ignored.

The night I told you I was getting married I spent an hour trying to convince you I wasn’t stupid for making this choice. I guess it hasn’t worked as you (in order) have somehow managed to avoid telling anyone you know, get mad at me for actually telling our cousins and act embaressed when the topic comes up at all. And you got angry becasue I didn’t tell you any sooner. Wonder why?

San Diego. The day you picked to call was the one when Mariah and I were stuck in the hotel. Caira was sick on top of that so yeah, we weren’t in the best of moods. You wound up threatening to call immigration on me becasue I never called (how was I supposed to?) and siezed upon the fact it was an incredibly shitty day to tell me to just give up and go home.

Homecoming. You both supported me because work really screwed me over on my money, but there was never any agreement with my plans. You both tried to talk me into just dumping Mariah more than once and berated me for turning back into a hermit and never talking to either of you. Why should I? What is there I could say that you’d actually make an effort to accept? You haven’t yet, and I find it endlessly painful. I went from being with a woman who respects and trusts me, to a family who think I babble in tounges at best.

It started yesterday with stomach cramps, moving on to diarrhea and worse cramps by today. It wasn’t the proudest moment of my life, but it all wound up with me having to sneak into the ladies bathroom in Bewley’s cafe on O’Connell Street at 8 o’clock this morning as the men’s were closed for cleaning.

The second trip to the embassy went about as well as the last. It mostly consisted of shouting at the head of the immigrant visa department. She rejected the affidavits from Mariah and her family because they used the I-864 form, instead of the I-134. One is an “affidavit of support” and the other is an “affidavit of support for a visa applicant.” Confused? The two forms are near enough to identical to make no difference, both are approved by the Department of Homeland Security, and indeed there is no specific prescribed form in the papers I have from the embassy. But no, they won’t accept the standard I-864, and the administrator refused to expand on why this is so until I had threatened to lodge a formal complaint with her superior - Mariah and I have paid hundreds of dollars on this application, and I expect some sort of show from them.

Moving backward, it all started when she rejected the police certificate because they put my date of birth in as “11981.” To mine self, it’s incredibly petty and beureaucratic, amplified by the fact they refused to help me until I threatened to tattle to their bosses.

So yeah, another fucking setback. The only good thing that came out of this was I forced them to return my passport - the immigrant visa section tried (unintentionally, I think) to put me in a bind where I had to get documents that required my passport, but they had my passport. Half the time I want to climb into a plane and just go, I miss you both every day and it’s never going to get any easier.

It’s not much of a consolation, but at least the boardies side of things went a little better. First off, a huge thanks to DarrenG for putting me up on Saturday night, and for the long-term loan of the Sigma 70-300mm lens. I had an interesting time, I learned a few new things to do, both with my camera and Photoshop, and it was interesting to see everyone’s photos of the same subject.