Joshua's weblog

Three months ago — May 27th — we said goodbye to Scooter, my cat of 16 years. It was, probably, the hardest transition of my life, and that is saying something, for I was the only one standing in the room at my father’s bedside at the moment he began to make the leap from this world to the next. But how hard it was makes sense, in some ways: I knew Scooter longer than I knew Dad. Scooter was a perfect cat, and he taught me a lot.

This post has been a long time in the works. I've had it on my disk for five or so months, and I never really got it into a state where I liked it enough to post. Oddly enough, five months ago, when I wrote the first draft of this, #DeleteFacebook was trending, and I originally wrote:

"I had been planning another post for a while, with the thesis being an answer to the question: if we #DeleteFacebook, then what? I have been meaning to sit down and write that for a while, but I either haven't had the time to do it or I just didn't want to. It might not be coincidence that this post feels more pressing and urgent at this second at my fingertips; the two are inextricably linked in my head. (T.C. Sottek's piece from 2016 in The Verge, offers a different perspective on this.)"

I didn't "#DeleteFacebook" then, and I haven't now, but when Facebook was compromised and logged me out a few weeks ago, I never bothered to log back in. I was having a rough time around then, and the escapist urges to disconnect ran high.

I've dug this out because it seems apropos for this hashtag-holiday that's trending this week. As much as I above describe a coherent structure for a post that I wanted to write at some point, this post continues in the recent trend of having no such; instead, I offer, perhaps, a collection of vignettes on mental health -- in general, and mine in specific.