blood and shit. for ten years i haven't gotten over that. for ten years i keep repeating those words. blood. and shit. and tears. gross and salt. primal, essential. that old dog wasn't alone when he died. i wanted it to be his family not me a semi-stranger roommate but it didn't matter. it was ok.

then he stopped breathing and the wound stopped sucking and his spirit dissipated around us. the young dog knew too. she was losing her mind. after all she was the murderer, but i know she didn't mean to. stressful times, dogs snap at each other. he was gone and we were left in the blood and shit.

i sat there and held onto that wound and looked into the dog's eyes and tried to talk calmly to him. backup was coming, my roommates were out of town but they had other folks staying over. i kept telling him, "not like this." not like this. live until your people can get here. just hold on.

and i'm down here on the floor with that old dog trying to figure out what's under the grotesque schmear, where the actual injury is, what happened here. i found something on his belly, like a sucking chest wound. i tried to apply pressure to stop the bleeding, which seemed to help a little bit

blood and shit smeared the walls, the floors, the furniture. the old dog lay panting on the wood flooring in the living room and the young dog was running around freaking out. i don't remember the sequence i remember looking up emergency vets and calling my roommates, who were remarkably calm

anyway if you read and enjoyed the linked essay please do hit doc's tip jar i want to see him be able to continue his good work
paypal.me/stompsite

as we come to this place here right now December 2024 i see a lot of turning away from the world, toward safe things that don't make us think very hard. but the child that i was is here to tell you: you need some grit in your oyster.

so no i don't buy your sweet uncomplicated cozy ideas. i also need a safe place but like doc says in the OP, we can't do that without putting ourselves in peril. taken to its ultimate endpoint, pure cozy will land you in billionaire brainworms and child abuse territory. it's real bad. it's nazi shit

i made it through maybe a year and a bit with her homeschooling me before i turned feral. god i hated being soft in body and brain. sharpen me against something. twenty years later she'd say to me "i understand that's a thing men need" she could never see the muddy girl in me. safety only.

i tell you all about my mommy issues to say: when i say i know the cozy><fash pipeline, i KNOW it. white halls and perfect germanic masculinity? jesus fucking christ. and that was the thing. there was NO room for any kind of discomfort. including disagreement or asking why. that was "talking back."

oh man give me the dirt give me the dust, the blood and shit, too-hot days and too-cold nights. give me the summit where a breeze is 60mph and there's no air between you and the sun. i recoiled at that life. i wanted the hard skin, i saw how hard the world was. give me some armor for this challenge

so to be preserved fluffy and creamy, static in gilded untextured halls, that's what she tried to make for me. everything sharp to be filed off or cushioned. no affordance left out. a perfect padded cell to exist in, uncorrupted. look at what i made, she says to her mom. isn't it beyond reproach?

anyway i hated going to school under those lights but to my brain they were a thing i had to power through. existing in the world meant being under a green buzzing death bulb, i needed to grow UV hardened skin. not to my mom though. her precious "boy" had to be kept safe and soft.

i no longer know what year it was exactly that i came home with her to stay and didn't go back to school until college but i remember one key reason was the lights in my 3rd grade classroom. i guess y'all won't have seen a green spectrum fluorescent in years, those bulbs were toxic to exist around.

when i was a kid i spent a lot of time at home with my mom. she wanted to keep me safe from a scary world. her favorite color was white. if you ever saw the 90s home design catalogs, those horror vacui maximalist sparkling bone white dream house interiors. everything clean, everything safe.

i don't want to get too ahead of myself here but i dusted off my old site bo.nez.one and started uploading pictures and code from my massive back catalog of pico8 experiments. will be other stuff as i find old files. still a very primitive site but i hope to make it a nice place to go look at my art

since i wrote this i thought maybe i was being too harsh, then T&S posted that bullshit thread where they greenlit a key method that was used to direct the worst abuses i've ever seen online (screenshots of PII hosted off-site). i can't use a site that expressly permits this type of action

have seen some trickery with triggers linking to different rooms and such, i think a small amount of that could be interesting if used in service of the right mechanic