ghost, almost

Pandas are only alive because they're cute.

Dolphins are mammals and enjoy things that mammals commonly enjoy, such as intoxicants, and if you're going to pretend to be shocked and disgusted by a dolphin getting high you'll also have to throw away reindeer and every other animal that enjoys fermented juices including fruit flies. Dolphins are perceived by humans as being more intelligent and therefore more culpable to "sins" than other animals but humans can't even agree on what's immoral let alone expecting a non human animal to magically ascribe to our same biases for no reason and assign the animal negative traits when it fails to meet that asinine expectation.

The sooner you stop trying to shoehorn in some fake idea of an animal being more or less deserving of its existence the easier it will be to get through to people.

Which I should just go ahead and say right now, the OP was inspired by an article about a woman who was injured in a dolphin petting pen on vacation and the comments were full of people blaming THE DOLPHIN because "theyre nasty violent rapists" and not the humans, who captured it, forced it into a pen, and climbed and petted all over it knowing full well it was a large wild predator that had no business being swarmed by untrained fucking idiots.

By yama-bato

She is far more like Elon Musk. She is a radicalized person with an extreme amount of social and financial power, and for YEARS she has been using that power to try to influence her government into hurting vulnerable people, on purpose. And she has succeeded. THAT is the problem with her, and THAT is why spending money on her books is so dangerous, not because her books aged badly.

"Don't be in the way," he'd bark, "can you not see you're blocking people?" until I, too, was slinking in the shadows on the very margins of society, silent so I wouldn't be distracting or say the wrong thing, always sidling along so that I wasn't in the way, head so full of "100 things never to say," that I said nothing of any meaning, eyes darting around and under anyone, non-threatening, disengaged. I felt that I was allowed to focus on one set of things- physical objects that were mine. Books. Computer screens. Nature.

Can't annoy those.

He watched TV a lot. He was angry a lot, as you would be, although never violent, and we learned to skim and avoid and fade into nothing to avoid that anger. There were 3 or 4 people in the world he'd send darkly hilarious letters to, and the rest were as dark objects to avoid.

My mother seemed so different to me. I felt that she loved me, because she would spend time with me and sometimes smile and laugh and talk pleasantly and was always polite to servers, as she currently is to her carers. To me, she was always the social one, but she was almost always alone, and I thought that was normal for everyone, as it certainly was for me.

If you saw her, you would have seen a smile and warm, kind words, but the same slip. Never going too far, never demanding, never over-sharing, she followed every rule. Carts put aways after shopping, car fully in the spot, always patient, she kindly and properly worked among her work friends for decades, and only one would go to lunch with her for a while, then it all disappeared.

Two ways of walking through the world unseen and unnoticed, as on the edges of the trail where the dirt is packed and dry and no footprints are made.

How can you learn to engage when you've not seen engagement, when your conversation is so easily deflected and touches nothing, and you don't have the tools to probe? How can you show the love you feel toward those around you when you feel it radiating from you so strongly but those around you feel nothing, or else are repulsed?

How much of it is something with a name? How much is a sensory difference, or an autism, something undiagnosable that signals a fundamental incompatibility between our love and need for others and their feelings for us? And how much is simply never having been outside the shadows of the outskirts, and not knowing how to operate in the centre?

We may never know.

Who here in the shadows has not wondered why? Has not seen and - yearned? pined? words used for love of a person, but love of a world where we could be an integral part, useful and used, welcome and wanted, where our words might scratch upon occasion, but could also give joy? Who would not long to know what it would be like to be liked and loved by the world, to be so noted that when they are gone, they will be missed?

“I’ve had it with being labeled spineless simply because, at the end of the day, I really don’t give a shit whether we tax the rich to help poor families or hungry children or whatever,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)