If my mom were still around, she would be making kids cry on Fortnite.
Unfortunately, however, my mother passed away in 2000 from cancer when I was still pretty young. But one of my favorite things about her, that most assuredly carried on in me and in my two siblings, was that she was also a gamer. She was a fan of some of the earliest video games, including the very first game in The Legend of Zelda franchise. Before Nintendo Power, internet walkthroughs, and official players’ guides were even a thing, she was not only making her way through each dungeon and collecting pieces of the Triforce, but also mapping them out by hand. On graph paper and in excruciating detail!
Despite all the resources at our fingertips today, I still wish that I had those original handmade maps. I don’t feel like the hardcore gamers that exist today would ever even believe that a working mother of three played a video game at all, much less enjoying it and progressing through it enough to be that dedicated. And so many times in the years that have passed, when we’ve failed to maneuver our way through an instance in World of Warcraft, she would be rallying us back in fighting shape immediately… Whether it was a school night or not! And you best believe she would have been pwning every noob in those Mythic+ dungeons on the daily.
And that could translate to just about any game she set her sights on. She was a big fan of classic puzzle games and tabletop games, too. Don’t challenge her to a game of Yahtzee! or Clue unless you want your ass beat. She was very polite, thoughtful, inclusive, and very loving, but she’s also who taught me this important life lesson: “Don’t get mad, get even!”
Her birthday just recently passed on November 4th. I miss her a lot and often wonder how our lives would be different if she were still here. Not just in the ways the gaming industry has changed, but also maybe in the ways she would have helped change it. But also, as weird as it is to realize, she’s now been gone for more of my life than she was around for, and I wonder what it would have been like to know her as a fully-formed adult. If you can even call me that. But one thing I’m glad for is that her love of gaming eventually became my love of gaming. I’m glad that, as a small child, she let me ”help” her play by pushing buttons on the unplugged controller next to her. It’s one of my earliest and most fond memories of her, that I somehow managed to absorb into my Jello mold of a brain, because it’s also one that I hope I never forget. ❤️
A few days ago, I was walking somewhere and noticed myself doing “the shuffle.” You know the one: where your entire weight seems to shift between legs the whole way because something is creaking and painful somewhere. My sister, who came from Indiana like the rest of us, likes to refer to it as a “hitch in your get-along,” which is somehow the most Kansas any of us has ever sounded. When I finally paused, I thought about how I’m going to be forty-one (!!!) in March.
41!
I’m still reeling from having entered my forties in the first place. I don’t think I’ve ever been someone who has cared much about a person’s age, except for myself. I distinctly remember being a kid and thinking that 25 seemed “old” and that I’d never make it there. (To be fair, I was kind of a LOT as a child.) And hey, look at us now! But do you want to know the really weird bit? While sometimes I physically feel my age, like when I got that hitch in my get-along or my incredibly painful feet back during my brief stint in retail, I don’t feel my age at all mentally or emotionally. I’m still me inside — the same kid or teen or twentysomething or even thirtysomething that loves computers, video games, TV shows, and good music. I love storytelling and a sense of community and fun. And the idea of owning a home or getting married and having kids is still completely foreign, while people that I graduated from high school with are starting to become grandparents!
Anyone else relate more and more to Ouiser lately??
An older friend of mine once told me that it’ll always be this way, too. You’re always the same on the inside; it’s just that your body grows old, weak, and tired without your consent, and it sucks. Because as we age, we also learn more about people and the world around us. Imagine me at 16, armed with the knowledge, experience, and insatiable craving for the things that spark joy that I have now? I feel like I would’ve been unstoppable! Most awkward kid ever? For sure… But it would have been incredible.
Sometimes it makes me sad to think about all the things I didn’t do when I was younger. Finishing college, pursuing things that I loved for a career, etc., because hey… I might have been somewhere and settled by now! But I’m also not upset about who I’ve become by taking the path less traveled. I’ve concluded in the last few years that maybe I’m not meant to have kids or a spouse of my own. I’ve got my dad, my siblings, and my kitties, which, quite frankly, I should be able to claim as dependents with how expensive it is to care for them. I’m learning and pursuing what I love now, and while it’s taking an excruciatingly long time for me to get it, I also have a better sense of seriousness and determination about it. The 23-year-old version of myself, who had spent his birthday in Las Vegas drinking and throwing money away, would not have even thought twice about coding and web development. Now I literally cannot even imagine having fun on a birthday trip to Vegas. And I’m pretty okay about it!
There’s this thought that I’ve always had, which is that you wouldn’t be who you are today if you had made different decisions in the past. And we maybe shouldn’t have many regrets in life because of it. I don’t ordinarily subscribe to the idea that “everything happens for a reason,” but in this case, maybe it’s true. Maybe the past made us all who we are for reasons we just don’t understand until the future becomes the present. And until we can jump in a DeLorean and hit the rewind button, we’re going to have to live with it. (How’s that for “elder Millennial” pop culture references?? 😉)
If you’re anything like me, your earliest memories of spending significant time using a computer and the internet in general likely began on AOL. I met some of my longest “internet friends” by jumping into public chat rooms that revolved around mutual interests or were specifically tailored to teenagers who were roughly around the same age at the time. Honestly, with as often as I spent time online as opposed to socializing with people from high school, you could even say that I learned how to socialize on AOL. And maybe more importantly, in some circumstances, how not to socialize.
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If you can’t exactly relate or are too young to have been on the internet during the days of dial-up, let me put it to you this way: Millions of people used AOL to access the internet. In fact, according to some statistics about AOL, its peak user base was 35 million people and, in 1999, was worth $222 billion. At the height of the AOL craze, the company even bought out the massive media conglomerate Time Warner (as disastrous as that deal turned out to be) for $182 billion. It was enormously successful, and I personally believe that one could even say it is responsible for popularizing and pioneering the internet in America. The acceptance and adoption of online culture began with AOL.
Despite all of this, AOL’s misfortune started not long after the acquisition of Time Warner. Insider business decisions eventually led to Time Warner casting AOL out by 2003. Furthermore, the company saw shrinking numbers once dial-up started falling into disuse as users began favoring easier and faster broadband connections. I mean, who could blame us? Nobody wanted to wait 15 minutes for their internet connection to start up when they could just as easily sign onto a PC that was always connected. Especially once those upstart services started offering unlimited access, which ate into AOL’s model of selling their service hourly. And by 2017, the writing was truly on the wall, as AOL shut down the spinoff of its popular chat services, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).
Truthfully, not many were aware that AOL’s dial-up services were still available, as they were. I, myself, had personally thought AIM’s shutdown was the end of AOL’s dusty vestiges, outside of its free homepage and email services. Apparently, per CNBC’s Alex Sherman, there are only users in the “low thousands” still relying on AOL’s dial-up internet. The recent announcement that they would be shutting it down at the end of September, though, brought on the same wave of nostalgia for me that the closing of AIM brought. Reminiscing about chatting and making friends with people hundreds or thousands of miles away. People that I would never have had the opportunity to meet otherwise. There was something special about the internet back in those days. And while the technology has gotten harder, better, faster, stronger… We’re still here, and so is the internet that AOL helped build.
🐈⬛ During the writing of this post, my newest and youngest cat Inky decided to jump on my keyboard. I was later informed that he deserves to be heard. So in the spirit of letting him voice his opinion, he said this:
Have you ever felt a sense of nostalgia for a life you never lived? If so, we share something in common, and it’s called anemoia.
We’ve all experienced loneliness or felt homesick at some point. Those pangs or feelings of yearning for something from your past. The people, places, and things of it all. The right song can almost make your brain teleport through time, back to your younger years. But have you ever driven through a normal, quiet American suburb and noticed the different homes, one right after the other, and wondered to yourself: Who are the people that live in these homes? What are their lives like? What about the people who lived in that home before them? What did they do for work? Where were they from? Did children grow up here? What’s their story? And if they no longer live there, how did their story in this home end?
These are the things I think about when a normal home that I’m passing somehow catches my attention. Maybe it’s because I think I’m a little more sentimental than the average human, but the spaces we take up can tell us a lot about the people in them. In a lot of circumstances, someone’s home is a character in the story of their life in its own right. It could also stem from my overactive imagination, or from the kid I used to be who constantly wished he was someone else. Craving a little insight into the lives of other people seems perfectly normal to me, though. But it goes well beyond that, too.
Recently, I saw a photo somewhere on the internet, and I wish that I had remembered where it was so that I could show it to you now. But it was a simple photograph of a suburban neighborhood with normal homes. An orangey-pink glow in the sky that you sometimes see just before the sun goes down. The streets were wet from rain. And I had the feeling of missing the place in that photo. Even though it was a photo from a random stranger on the internet of a random neighborhood that I’ve very likely never even been. Then I started wondering about the why of it all.
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And, in many ways, those places are gone. Sure, suburbs still exist all across America and beyond, but we live in a world where “normal” means something completely different than it used to. We’re all hyper-connected more than ever with our mobile devices and social media. Too many of us, myself included, tend to focus on all the distractions rather than what’s happening in front of our faces. People are concerned with the lives of celebrities and their 10-minute trips to outer space. We’re concerned about political scandals, seemingly one right after another in the current administration. We’re trying to figure out all the controversy surrounding the latest superstar athlete. We want to get our paws on the absurdly pricednew dolls and gaming consoles. Everything is so larger-than-life now as we doom-scroll through our curated feeds and highlight reels. There are even “normal people” who have become mini-celebrities through social media. And did you know that, according to a Morning Consult survey, over half of the Gen Z members surveyed want to be social media influencers, and an even more surprising 41% of older adults do, too.
With everything moving and changing at light-speed, I think I miss the normalcy. I miss the things that are almost boring. When life progressed slowly, and when things were unassuming. When we had local heroes and legends. When things could be mysterious and wonderful. I miss the people who could be described as “salt of the earth.” The people who aren’t broadcasting their every waking, performative move in hopes it’ll go viral. And I’m not even shunning progress or technological advancement. Y’all know that I love the internet as much as the next person. These are the digital streets that raised me. But there really is a quiet dignity and truth to just simply living. And it feels like it’s an increasing rarity to find.
Jed Whedon, the younger brother of someone I used to admire and who shall no longer be named in this space, released an album in 2022 titled blue noise [blōō noiz] n. nostalgia for a life you never lived and previously had an album in 2010 called History of Forgotten Things. It made me really consider that maybe Jed also knew the call of anemoia, and his music has helped me understand the feeling a bit better. It seems to tap into my subconscious that’s yearning for a different world. A world that maybe I didn’t even live in. Maybe it’s a world that I just idealized in my mind, and it has always been this unmitigated flaming crap basket, and I just didn’t realize it. But surely everybody hears that whisper from another universe, right? That alternate timeline version of all of us that valued just being human. The next time you get that internal vibration when you see an old photo, someone else’s familiar furniture or wallpaper, the cracked cement by your parking spot at work, or the twinkle lights above an old café you never went to…
“Forgiveness is warm. Like a tear on a cheek. Think of that and of me when you stand in the rain. I loved you completely. And you loved me the same. That’s all. The rest is confetti.” — Victoria Pedretti as Nell Crain in The Haunting of Hill House by Mike Flanagan.
In my very first entry here in Jiggy’s Journal, I wrapped things up by briefly touching on being a lonely kid who felt like nobody was interested in befriending. I think this might be my first memory where I felt a sense of social anxiety. My medical records state that I still currently suffer from a “generalized anxiety,” so the idea that it started manifesting as early as kindergarten kinda tracks.
Although the feeling of not making friends eventually went away, I still spent massive amounts of time as a teen and young adult feeling worried and concerned about what other people thought of me. Even though I am, without question, a nerd at heart, I wasted so many of my younger years trying to mold myself into whatever my version of being “likeable” was. I bought and wore the name-brand clothes, I listened to the music that was popular at the time, and I hung out with people who drank and smoked weed! (I’ll give you a minute to clutch your pearls and collect yourself now.) But I would come home from being out with my so-called friends, and instead of feeling the joy and exhilaration that friendship and a hoppin’ nightlife are supposed to provide, I would sometimes cry myself to sleep instead. I would wake up with massive headaches, not from hangovers, but from dehydration. I hated trying to keep everybody but myself happy. Then one day, I woke up with that dehydration headache from crying the night before, and it was literally like someone flipped a switch in my brain.
I didn’t care anymore.
Which isn’t to say that I didn’t care about my life or my friends and family anymore. I’m an introvert, but I have still always loved meeting new people, chatting and being social, and my close friends and family are the most important thing to me. But I think I was finally developing the tougher skin that I probably should have started out with. I was starting to believe that “quality is better than quantity.” I can’t please everyone I ever meet. There are going to be people who don’t like me. There will be people who are friendly but not your friend. There are going to be people who will both enter and exit your life. And the only person who can best take care of you and your needs is yourself. And that’s okay. I don’t want to go get turnt or do things for “the ‘Gram” and a billion followers anymore. I’ve even recently noticed that I’ve been having far more fun on my Twitch streams since I stopped stressing myself out over the numbers. Yes, social media and creating content on the web are essentially numbers games or popularity contests, but I don’t think fate or the universe or something is going to let it just happen for someone who wants it too bad. Relax. Just find your zen.
Taylor knows what’s up.
The problem I’ve been facing in recent years, however, is that I’ve let the “I-don’t-care-what-you-think-of-me” attitude snowball into letting myself match people’s energy. And frankly, that’s not a great way to handle your differences with people who might already be having a bad day. And look, I still don’t care what most strangers on this rock think of me. But I do care what the people I love think of me, and ultimately, getting labeled as “the mean one” was not on my bucket list. So I’ve been trying to remedy things by trying to filter my thoughts a little more, maybe make them sound a little less venomous. I’m trying to remember that kindness makes a world of difference. And that I still love them even when I want to punch them in the throat.
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I have made a lot of social posts regarding how fun my streams have been since I stopped obsessing over follower and viewer counts. Just a few hours ago, I wrote another one in which I paraphrased a quote from The Haunting of Hill House. That same quote about life’s moments just being confetti is prominently featured at the top of this post. I’m not sure what initially made me think of it and then use it, but after I did, I wanted to see if director/producer Mike Flanagan had explained what exactly it was that he meant when he wrote that line for Nell. And boy, did I luck out! Mike explained his entire thought process at length in a post over on his Tumblr blog. At the end of his post, he beautifully explains the following:
“And it’s about how, outside of our love for each other, the rest is just… well, it’s fleeting. It’s colorful. It’s overwhelming. It’s blinding. It’s dancing. And, if we look at it right, it’s beautiful. But it’s also light. It’s tinsel. It flits and dances and falls and fades, it’s as light as air.
The rest is the stuff that falls around us, and flits away into nothing.
It’s the love that stays.” — Mike Flanagan on his Tumblr blog.
And it’s the truth. In the grand scheme of things, the people that I love are what matter the most. We always forget how influential our lives are to others. I still have habits that rubbed off on me from my mother, who has been gone for nearly 25 years now. In a way, her knowledge, her stories, her legacy, and her impact continue and live on through those of us who remember her. She was my mother. I love her completely, and she loved me the same. I can remember her hugging me close and apologizing for our trip to Disney World getting ruined by the torrential rain that had us completely soaked, I can remember the hand-drawn maps she made to guide her way through dungeons in the original Legend of Zelda video game, and I can remember the awesome muffins she used to bake from mixes she got at Sam’s Club. But that’s all the confetti. The brilliant and colorful but fleeting moments of my life that were shared with hers.
As I get older, I just hope that my family will feel the same way about me. Sometimes I can get upset with them. But while I hope they’ll remember plenty of shiny and sparkly confetti that I’ve sprinkled all over their lives, I hope it’s the love that stays.
As a kid, I legitimately despised being from and living most of my life in a state that most people have never thought twice about. I grew up in a small, suburban town just south of Indianapolis, and while my childhood was pleasant enough, I had the great misfortune of growing into a weirdo. I was a weird kid, and I liked weird things, and I likely have at least an ounce of the ’tism that made me act and feel very awkward. None of that made me very popular among my fellow Hoosier children. Even though there have been a couple of chapters in my life where I’ve had a solid circle of friends, I’ve never really ever been Mr. Popularity. You know where I did find friends, though? Online. Friends who lived in really fun, exciting, or fancy-sounding places like New York or California, or even foreign countries! England, Australia, India, Sweden, Italy, Japan!
My condolences to Jughead!
It’s not too hard to see why this weirdo spent a lot of time dreaming of ways to escape from Indy.
FedEx Foundations 📦
I think my perspective started changing around the time I got my job at the Indianapolis International Airport, working for the regional hub of FedEx Express. Back in 2006, I was in my early twenties and pretty much only making beer money flipping burgers. My older brother had been working at FedEx for a few years at that point, so when he suggested putting in an application, I was more than happy to do so! By the way, I wouldn’t normally advise working with family, but he had also mentioned that the facility was pretty massive, so the chances we would actually run into each other while working were kinda slim, so I was chill with giving it a shot. The company took about two months to give me a call back, but once they offered me a job that June, I jumped on it.
I’ve always been a tiny bit concerned that trading the smell of fries and onion rings on my clothes for jet fuel was probably going to cause me to develop some sort of terminal illness, but it was a trade that I was more than willing to take at the time!
FedEx was an important chapter for me, though, for a lot of reasons. It gave me my first “adult” responsibility outside of my sheltered little “small-town” life thus far. And some of those responsibilities were big. I started out just sorting packages and rewrapping packages that had broken open upstairs in a conveyor belt “matrix” of sorts that scanned the bar codes on mailing labels and then routed them to their appropriate destinations afterward. But the responsibility seemed to increase tenfold by the time I transferred to a position working outdoors on the ramp. Driving tractor-trailers, pulling long strings of huge aluminum containers filled with sorted packages, and trying not to hit the sometimes actively taxiing multi-million dollar aircraft with any of it in the process. It was stressful, and that wasn’t even half of the job! Those kids (and a few old dogs, too!) who are still out there doing that job, running heavy machinery and loading and unloading aircraft in practically every imaginable type of inclement weather situation, get the highest regards from yours truly. Especially since they’re only doing it for like $16 an hour!
WRTV 6 in Indianapolis reporting on the Indy Hub, my former stomping grounds!
I eventually became a “ramp agent,” a title that required me to go through several rounds of interviews and get a decent pay bump. My professional development skills weren’t the only things that grew while I was at FedEx, though. I made friends in my various work groups, many of whom I’m still in contact with and consider some of the best friends I’ve ever had. I attended numerous parties, festivals, concerts, graduations, trips out of state, at least four weddings, and two funerals. We did dinners, went out for drinks, had coffee or brunch on Sundays, holiday ugly sweater parties, retro-themed pub crawls, and formed a beer club at Shallo’s (one of Indy’s best hidden gems, by the way!). A few of us even got to join in Super Bowl festivities together during Super Bowl XLVI back in 2012 when Indy played host! These were the days when I felt young and fun and maybe only a little intoxicated.
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I had quite a few personal milestones during this era, too. Since the “Express” division of FedEx operates as an airline, they also used to have a perk where we could purchase standby seats on passenger flights through Southwest and other airlines for ridiculously low prices. Seriously, during a week of PTO, I flew from Indy to Arizona to visit some friends for like $75 round-trip! Is that even possible anymore with today’s prices? It was my first time flying alone, however, so even though I’d been an adult for a few good years, it still felt like a big deal. During this period, I also bought (and paid off!) my first car. It was a 2006 Chevy Impala that needed tons of work done on it after I got it, but it served me well up until the pandemic, when everyone stopped going places. That same Impala is still in the family. We had to tow that bitch all the way to Kansas when we moved, so needless to say, it’s still a hoopty, too!
“How Cosmopolitan!” 🍸
As much as I still love and appreciate FedEx for what it was, at the end of my tenure there, I had learned from experience that I’m not supervisor material. I may know the ropes of a particular job really well, but I’m not someone who can execute all of my job functions while also keeping tabs on what everyone else is doing. Nor did I appreciate taking the heat for what others failed to do. So by mid-2014, some friends from outside FedEx started helping me plan my next move, and that meant completely flipping the script.
In October of that year, I found myself getting employed by a local office that handled drug and alcohol testing for employers. A few good friends who already worked for the company vouched for me when I applied, so it made the hiring process a breeze. I was already acquainted with two of the three people who interviewed me for the job, so it was also the most comfortable job interview I’ve ever completed. And when the HR lady took me around to introduce me to everyone on my first day, it was almost comical that many of my new co-workers had the same response: “Oh yeah, we already know him!” So I went from working overnight with airplanes and boxes to data entry and paper pushing during the day.
The office was located in a fairly convenient spot in downtown Indianapolis. There was an office kitchen with free coffee! I had my own cubicle and a phone on my desk with my very own extension! And parking was free, which struck me as a rare perk among folks who live and work in urban environments! The first few weeks at this job felt impossibly cool. I was doing a big boy professional job in an office with a computer and a phone and coffee! Isn’t that like the poster image of an American working man? Now I was really living the life! It felt like I was living an episode of Mad Men or something. To put it into perspective, a former FedEx co-worker once asked my brother how I was liking the new job, and after he described all of this to them, they replied with a two-word exclamation:
“How cosmopolitan!”
Literally the rest of the office staff while I was hyping up my new job.
Throughout my twenties and thirties, and between working at FedEx and in this new office role for a majority of those years, my distaste for Indy started turning into something else. Eventually, I found myself growing fond of it. When big things happened for the city, like hosting the aforementioned Super Bowl or the annual Indy 500, it was a big thing for everyone. You couldn’t help but develop a little bit of pride in being from the Circle City. It was a blast whenever I got the time to get out and about in the city with my pals. I discovered new parts of the town that I didn’t know about before, including the city’s “cultural districts” like Fountain Square, the Wholesale District, and Broad Ripple Village. These are the places you could find most of Indy’s vintage, artsy, and independent restaurants, shops, and entertainment venues. Who doesn’t love the opportunity to shop at Silver in the City or go party at The Vogue? That honestly describes some of the weekends I’ve had in Indy.
Indianapolis is extremely underrated by the rest of the country. The entire state is often overlooked as “flyover country” to most of the population on the coasts. Honestly, I can kinda see why. Indiana is well-known for its miles and miles of corn and soybean fields. But it was also a really special place that is growing and creating its own cultural identity. Areas of the city, like Fountain Square, were being revitalized and were slowly moving away from being the kinds of places my family used to worry about me getting stabbed at. Buildings that were previously abandoned and run down were being transformed into funky spaces with stories to tell. A cross-section that mirrors Indy’s own mixture of young and hip with classic elegance and rural simplicity.
I wound up moving away from Indiana in early 2023. That was when we decided to join my sister, her husband, and their son out here in small-town Kansas. Two years later, I’m still trying to find my appreciation for this different kind of lifestyle. Moving so far away has allowed me to grow and spread my wings in different ways. And I love being closer to my family, and the convenience of being able to see them whenever I want is paramount, especially as the world grows weirder and more frightening every single day. But Indiana will forever be my home. I miss it deeply. It’s the place that raised me.
And I would kill for just a slice from Jockamo Pizza right about now!
The idea of ghosts has actually been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve been reading Trap Line by Timothy Zahn, a short story I found on Kindle that revolves around one engineer’s ability to “project” a ghostly apparition of himself across vast distances and makes first contact with aliens. I’ve also been listening to a lot of P!nk on Spotify while my sister and I continue our obsession with Palia. Recently, while reminiscing on a quest I had done for two of the game’s characters involving their mine potentially being haunted, the song “When I Get There” played, which is a beautiful and bittersweet song P!nk wrote as a letter to her late father in heaven. Today, my older brother told me, during a conversation about UFOs, that while he’s never seen an alien or a likely UFO, he is convinced that he’s seen a ghost. And lastly, I’ve mentioned a dozen or so times that Jiggy’s Journal is a blog and email newsletter publication powered by a platform incidentally called Ghost.
Needless to say, my vision last night could have just been light and shadow playing tricks on my fairly vulnerable psyche. Maybe this is all just coincidence? But I’m thinking not after last night.
“When I Get There” by P!nk.
Kitten Season 🐈
To tell the complete story, I need to bring you with me back to the summer of 2016. I was torn when my Dad came to me with a proposal: a friend of a friend of his in Kentucky had two kittens that were only a few weeks old, no longer wanted them for whatever ridiculous reason she gave them instead of “the novelty wore off,” and was simply going to dump them on the street if she wasn’t able to find a new home for them swiftly enough. “Do you want these kittens?” Dad asked, knowing very well that I wasn’t going to let two kittens get dumped on the street as an alternative. “Do I have a choice?” I asked him, looking at him like he were completely nuts.
I had little time to deliberate whether or not I was okay with forcing Tigger, who was my one and only pet at the time, to adjust to a more chaotic living situation with what amounted to two new babies in the mix. There were also a lot of adjustments to be made on our end in order to accommodate them. Including, but absolutely not limited to, kitten-proofing the house. We even bought a small dog crate to put them in at night when we slept because I was fearful that one of us might squish one of them on our way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. (Don’t worry—two nights into having them at home, they were completely free to roam the house at all hours. I couldn’t listen to them cry!) But I wound up deciding to take them anyway. Because, honestly, who says no to sharing their home with kittens?
Then, one weekend in June, Dad brought home the two adorable little furballs of joy. I didn’t know quite enough about cat biology this early into our journey with cats at home and wrongfully assumed that one of the kittens was a calico—a type of cat that is tricolored and almost exclusively female—due to him being mostly white with patches of gray tabby stripes in places. That explains why my nephew and I had initially given them the Star Trek-inspired names Curzon and Jadzia. We felt that they were highly unique names for kittens, but in retrospect, felt a touch too nerdy when my co-workers wound up needing a pronunciation after seeing my updates on social media. After learning at their first vet check-up that Jadzia was actually a boy, their names were quickly changed to what we know them as today: Rufus and Oliver.
Only about a month later, on what was easily one of the saddest nights of my entire life, Dad and I took a trip to the emergency vet with Oliver in tow. In the few hours up until that point, he had rapidly grown remarkably ill. So rapidly that it almost felt as though someone had flipped a switch in him. He had gone from energetic play with his brother to vomiting and was demonstrating an inability to stand or walk on his own. Dad could tell from his labored breathing simply sitting on the exam table that he was already suffering, and I did not want to subject him to further testing or procedures that they weren’t even sure would help him. Ultimately, as extraordinarily painful as it was for me, I said a tearful goodbye and chose the only humane thing left to do.
The only photo that exists of me with Oliver.
I was profoundly heartbroken. The veterinarian, who remained very kind and compassionate throughout the entire ordeal, had told us that it was likely that Oliver had been suffering from an underlying disease such as FeLV (Feline Leukemia Virus), and we just didn’t know since he hadn’t been exhibiting any symptoms up until then. It wasn’t our fault, but it didn’t feel that way to me. I was highly upset at the possibility that maybe he had gotten ahold of and eaten something that he shouldn’t have. I was also wildly fearful that his illness could have been spread to Tigger or Rufus, which resulted in us taking them to two different vets to be tested for FeLV and other diseases known to affect cats. Thankfully, except for Tig’s constantly recurring issue with ear mites, they both checked out to be perfectly healthy. Thus, the world spun madly on…
The Bond That Lives On 💖
Even though Tigger and Rufus received clean bills of health, I was still uneasy about them. Especially when it came to the youngest of the two. Oliver had technically been the only constant presence in Ruf’s life up until then. The way that Rufus constantly searched for his brother in those first few weeks without him made my heart hurt to watch. Sometimes, I think that animals have a better awareness of emotions and the world we live in than we do, but this was one instance in which I wish that I could have somehow given him the ability to say goodbye.
I consider myself a “crazy cat guy.” I love all three of my kitties, including my old man Tigger and our more recent addition, Cinnamon. They are practically my children. They are, without question, the loves of my life. But my bond with Rufus is special. The day we came home with Oliver’s empty carrier, I made a promise to Ruf that I would always love and take care of him. Now that he didn’t have his brother to confide in or to protect him, I felt like he was going to need a little extra love. While still painfully shy and could be considered the very definition of a “scaredy cat,” Rufus has been my best friend. He sleeps every night right beside me. And he has a way of always finding me when I need him. That old cliché about rescued pets rescuing their owners instead is true in a lot of ways between us. I tell my father constantly that Rufus is the best gift he ever gave me.
Perhaps the recurring theme of ghosts visiting us was what set the stage for last night’s encounter. I’ve been up late gaming, tooling around with my website or server, and launching my new public forums (which you should totally join!) a lot lately. Last night was no different, until I walked into the kitchen to grab another soda and caught, out of the corner of my eye, what looked like a white-ish colored cat sitting in our living room. I had to do a double-take, and even after taking a second look, I still thought the cat was sitting there. It wasn’t one of the others either, since they were all accounted for. It took completely glancing away and then back to the same spot again before the realization set in that no cat was sitting there and likely never had been. It was alarming, but after thinking about it from a few different perspectives, I’m convinced…
Oliver had paid me a visit that night.
I’m still uncertain as to why, but I do have a few theories. The first is that I’ve been dwelling a little on my own mortality. I’m still just learning at the ripe old age of 40 how to code/program and actually develop an understanding of how computers work. You see, I thought that gaining these skills might make me more employable, but I’m also aware that I’m getting into an age bracket that makes companies think twice. I’m also facing the unfortunate truth about how difficult it is to make friends as an adult. I’m an introvert, so it was already pretty hard, but trying to find time to “hang out” just isn’t a top priority for people who juggle multiple jobs and/or take care of children. Almost everyone else my age has a mortgage and grandchildren. It’s probably why the only other people I still know in this town outside of my family are retail co-workers that I don’t even work with anymore. Whatever the case may be, I think Oliver’s appearance last night—whether it was actually him from beyond or just a personal spiritual experience—means a couple of things.
It was a reminder of him being one of my babies, as brief as it was. It’s a reminder of how much I love my family and my other cats. It’s a reminder of my hometown back in Indiana and the friends I still have there. And the friends that I make going forward. I’m choosing to believe that the significance of Oliver’s spirit being felt nearby means something. These connections never truly fade away, despite time or distance. Love transcends physical boundaries.
My grandmother passed away in 2011, but I still recall having a serious conversation with her during one of the major holidays before her death. I told her about how the days leading up to holidays like that one made me incredibly anxious. I knew that I was going to see distant relatives that I rarely saw throughout the rest of the year, and I would be socially inept. But it never shook out that way because when the day actually came around, striking up a conversation with everyone wasn’t difficult at all. It was always as if no time had passed between any of us. And she told me that’s just what it’s like with family. My grandma, my late mother, and even little Oliver all remind me that love is maybe the only thing that lasts forever.
Jiggy’s Journal recently experienced technical trouble, and some content was damaged. Fortunately, I was able to reconstruct said content from the emailed versions, but many of the reference links and animated GIFs in this post were lost. My apologies for the inconvenience!
It has been five years since COVID.
I realize that, technically, the disease was first identified in China at the tail-end of 2019, but as many of us can probably recall, it wasn’t until March of 2020 that the World Health Organization (WHO) assessed the outbreak to be pandemic in scale. I was browsing the other day and saw that someone had written a line or a tweet or something referencing the five years since they were sent home from work with a laptop and told they would return to the office in two weeks. Remember when we only needed two weeks to “flatten the curve”? We were so optimistic!
I still remember hearing that a “severe respiratory coronavirus” had spread from Wuhan to other areas of China, then from China to other countries in Asia, and then globally from there. There were conflicting reports that it was just another form of SARS, which is another disease that generated some scary news headlines back in the early 2000s. And while it’s true that SARS and COVID are both coronaviruses that share a lot of similarities, they also have quite a few key differences, the most important of which is that SARS was contained and there have been no documented cases of it since 2004. COVID, on the other hand, seemed very different. Something that I think all of us would figure out soon…
The Immediate Impact & Long-Term Effects
I’m pretty torn on my opinion of the year 2020.
In March 2020, I was working for a company in Indianapolis that did data entry and processed lab results for companies that were drug testing their employees. Though my dad likes to joke around and tell people about how I collected urine samples all day, everything that I did was mostly office and administrative work. I was very hands-off with the urine, I promise! I always had a dream of being able to work from home though — in fact, I had just been rehired at the company after taking a brief little hiatus to pursue a job that was remote-based, but didn’t work out — so even though I was dreadfully anxious about COVID itself, I was ecstatic when my manager handed me a new laptop and sent me to start working from home! We were still deemed “essential employees,” but there was no reason why we couldn’t do our data entry tasks and answer phone calls and emails from our own home offices. So we did!
As an introvert and homebody, I was practically made for lockdown. Working from home? That means no 25-45 minute commute to the office and back every day! It also means that I can basically be in my pajamas all day and nobody will mind one bit! I was saving all kinds of money: I didn’t need to fuel up with gas or coffee for the drive, I didn’t need to order my expensive sandwich from Potbelly’s for lunch anymore, I didn’t need to chip in for Karen from Accounting’s kid’s birthday fundraiser or whatever. Hell, I didn’t even need to exchange fake pleasantries with Karen from Accounting anymore! Plus, I could take a nap in my bed with my cat or go on a walk around my neighborhood for some fresh air during my breaks! It all felt so freeing! Truthfully, I think a lot of us felt this sense of like, “Why haven’t those of us who could work from home been working from home all along?”
There were, of course, things about the pandemic that weren’t great. Hearing a constant barrage about the increasing death toll on practically every news outlet was depressing and terrifying. Everyone was afraid, confused, and scrambling for real information. The pandemic, for whatever reason, became a political issue here in the United States. Looking back, I think it was the start of people widely sharing misinformation on the internet. People started using ivermectin, a livestock dewormer, as a COVID aid and our clueless President suggested that we should inject disinfectants as treatment. Many Americans wouldn’t wear masks in public and refused to get the vaccine. So many that the WHO listed vaccine reluctance or refusal as one of the top 10 global health threats. It was also a nightmare trying to find supplies from people buying up entire stocks of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and other in-demand pandemic necessities.
Schools closed. My heart ached for kids who never got to experience some of life’s most important moments like homecomings, proms, and graduations. That’s not even taking into account the lasting effects on the behavior and mentality of kids who experienced the pandemic early on in life. Hollywood shut down. Many anticipated blockbusters and some of our favorite shows were either cancelled or indefinitely postponed because actors and crew were no longer able to report to set. The popular medical series, and one of my personal favorites, Grey’s Anatomy, not only shut down but later adapted the pandemic into its actual storytelling. Businesses also closed. Some permanently. So many of my favorite Indy hangouts went the way of the dodo due to little or no patronage during COVID lockdowns. (RIP Big Daddy’s, home of the amazing pot roast nachos and the first place that I ever played musical bingo!) Protests that occurred nationwide in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota a few months into 2020 also permanently altered the vibe of Indy for a lot of residents. It went from being an eclectic and growing city to something that almost needed to be feared. The world in general seemed to follow that same trajectory.
Where Are We Now?
Thinking about the entire concept of being five years removed from the onset of COVID immediately made me think back to an eerie moment in Avengers: Endgame when the film slowly cuts to a time jump of “Five Years Later” after an event that wiped half of all living creatures in the universe out of existence. Including several members of the titular team of Marvel superheroes.
Trailer for Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame.
While the Avengers were (spoiler alert!) successful in bringing back their friends and the rest of the universe, we weren’t quite as fortunate here in the real world. Alas, time travel isn’t exactly something we’ve achieved just yet, so we can’t really follow their blueprint to avert the crisis.
I recognize that I was extremely fortunate during this very turbulent time. Staying at home all the time is where I’m the most comfortable, the most productive, and where I’m the most in my element. Though I’ve been seriously sick a few times since the beginning of the pandemic and even had to have emergency surgery, I’ve never personally tested positive for COVID. But I have close family members who have had COVID, some who still have lingering effects of it. My father, who is getting up there in years and has some underlying health issues, was always in the forefront of my mind when it came to exposure or infection since he is essentially one of the more at-risk populations of complications from COVID. I’ve also known people whose lives came to an end due to COVID. It makes anti-vaxxers and those who deny that it was even real very difficult for me to stomach.
The plague of misinformation online and distrust that has been brewing with science and public health officials is a real crisis. I can get behind folks that are skeptical of their government and its policies. My fellow Americans should be questioning everything the current administration says and does. But science and medicine are real. Make sure you’re listening to the right sources of information. You may sometimes have to do a little Google research to ascertain what is fact and what is complete bullshit. And rather than limiting fact-checking like I mentioned Meta was doing in my last post, social media and tech platforms should be discouraging the spread of lies, not rewarding it. Somehow, we even managed to install a notorious anti-vaxxer as our U.S. Health Secretary! Seriously!
I often hear about things “returning to normal” these days as employees return to the office and students return to school. Many places don’t require a mask to be worn on entry or that you be vaccinated anymore. I’ve even been to a few conventions that didn’t turn out to be “superspreaders.” It’s nice that the world is regaining some of its normalcy, but I also think there are a lot of lessons from the pandemic that we should carry with us into the future. We should be embracing remote work. If it can be done remotely, it should be allowed to be done from home. We should also be embracing health initiatives like getting vaccinated, wearing masks and social distancing when you’re sick, or even just washing your damn hands! The number of people who needed clearer information and directions on effective hand-washing was seriously alarming. If your hands aren’t getting flaky and scaly from washing your hands too often, you’re doing it wrong! (Just kidding! Kinda. 👀)
All things considered, I think that the pandemic is an interesting study on humanity’s ability to adapt and survive. I think that our intellect might be one of the qualities that makes us so special and unique as a species. That intellect is what gives us our ability to adapt. I could probably write an entire dissertation about instances where humanity faced pivotal moments throughout history where adaptation was necessary for survival, but I won’t do that here. This story is already getting to be a little too long in the tooth as it is. But if you think about the history of humanity as a whole, we’ve gone through a hell of a lot that some species didn’t survive. And it’s important to remember that not all of us survived the pandemic, either.
Keep them in your hearts and minds during this five-year anniversary as they have definitely been weighing on mine.
