This guy came over yesterday and got busy trying to sweep my floors again. He's a natural born industrial cleaner kind of guy. He had 2 brooms, the swiffer, and my steam mop and was trying to use ALL of them at the same time. But he's cool, you know, eating markers and going all goth.
Something upset me yesterday way more than it ordinarily would have without my new meds messing with me (I'm having high blood pressure break outs now, very uncomfortable, a very typical response with me on ANY kind of pain control), and now this morning looks just stupid and hilarious, so I'm going to tell you the story.
I'm not a fake pet person. When I got on minecraft, I didn't go all mushy taming and naming and caring for critters, although I did a compliant practice the first week on mo creatures for the heck of it, named a rabbit after my very first rabbit that I had as a child, which is psychologically very foreshadowy if you knew the story about that rabbit and then followed me through time to the beginning of my evil lair. In the meantime, it was months before I attempted keeping my own farm in singleplayer (a disaster, which is funny because I grew up on a farm), and even longer before I finally let a friend get me onto a pegasus in mo creatures (which is brilliant, by the way, flying around is the bomb). Anyway, a couple of months ago while I was saving a village, I caught the ugliest wild horse I could find hanging around the area and named it after someone in real life, and then rode that bitch around the desert and villages in a mean I'm the boss kind of way. I didn't make a corral or anything, just let it roam free without protection, which meant a lion or bear could eat it, or a scorpion could kill it, or whatever. I didn't care. After I was done distracting myself with saving that village, I moved on and left the horse behind. Anyone could have taken it.
A couple of weeks ago I lost my amulet and nearly lost my pegasus, so I dug in and learned about pet IDs and teleporting and was surprised to find the rabbit, had forgotten all about it. I found out we can teleport our pets, so I tried it out, very cool, and since I needed a temporary place to keep my pegasus, I went ahead and tp'd my rabbit too. Our town has a nice fenced off pet area, so I put them in there, and then on second thought, tp'd the horse in just to see if that would work too, and it worked very well. Cool, had 3 pets in a safe location, moved on to other things.
Last week a couple of goats followed me in from a scout mission to the village I'm currently experimenting cool greenway and landscaping on, and since goats are annoying and eat everything, I corralled them, and doing that meant feeding them something so they'd follow me into the corral, and doing that tamed them, so I went ahead and just named them. Great, I have 2 pet goats... Some of you probably have no idea I milked goats by hand in real life for a few years, and that I especially love goats in real life, but I spare no love for them on mo creatures. However, one of them bears a name I was given in high school German class by one of the only two people in the entire school to ever treat me like a real friend (phone calls, visits at her house, actual talking and sitting by me in study hall kind of thing), and it's a joke name from a story about an idiot, so I guess I have a special goat now.
A horse followed the goats in, of course (here we go, I feel like a weird pied piper), so I tamed and saddled it, utterly failed to name it because I don't care. Within minutes someone was asking me if I wanted ostrich eggs, and dang it, I hatched 2 ostriches and named them Xev and Zev, and they were super cute as chicks running around the village.
Well, any kind of player activity attracts aggressive mobs, so next thing you know, I've got whole gangs of werewolves and silver skeletons hanging around, and the horse kept getting out and running off, which sucked because it was actually useful, so I caved and started thinking animal husbandry. Protection. If you've ever tried to get a passive mob into a corral, you know it can get pretty ridiculous, so after several attempts at building around the horse and trying to push and pull it in through gaping holes, I got the bright idea to look up its pet ID and just tp it into the corral. Worked like a charm. And then I tp'd Xev and Zev into the goat pen, and then tp'd the rabbit over to this village so I could watch it hop around, and then I thought, Hey, I have 2 horses now, I can tp the other one here, too.
Keep in mind I successfully did all these things without a hitch, and that tamed pets are coded not to despawn. So this other horse didn't show up and didn't show up and I finally got admin helping me, and after 15 minutes of following all the steps for this and that over and over, I was told that horse must be dead.
I went through many years of real life not reacting to real pet death before I finally broke apart over a chicken one year. I'm super aspie raised to shut down on triggers and never processed feels or cried, even when we ate my pets that I'd bottle fed from birth. And by eat, I mean exsanguinate, disembowel, and dismember with my own hands before they got cooked, so the floor dropping out beneath me and feeling devastated over losing an imaginary pet yesterday in a game really took me by surprise. I wasn't in the least attached to the pet itself, even loathed it in a messed up kind of way, but I'm Aspienado. A suspicious death of a pet I purposely named for someone in real life that was securely locked away in a protected place where nothing else was disturbed and only one other person knew about it (that I know of) isn't even the problem. I'm autism spectrum. Unsolved puzzles destroy me.
People around me in real life have noticed for years that I seem to be a cosmic target, like the universe makes it personal with me. I so rarely have a really good day that it can't help being obvious that I'll get 3 back to back phone calls out of the blue in a 5 minute time span by 3 different people in 3 different situations having drama crises when I'm actually happy and about to do something enjoyable, and then the rest of my day is completely shot. This has happened so many times that I expect it, I'm never surprised by it, heck, I even plan and pack for it. I'm always ready for my day to be ruined. This makes it easier to just roll with it and not be a whiner. My psychologist has called me a doom and gloomer for holding a view I call optimistic pessimism, which is basically assuming my day will suck in every way possible and then everything looks so much more fantastic when it doesn't that even the most mediocre day feels wonderful, right?
So losing the pet itself doesn't bother me. The idea of some kind of sabotage doesn't bother me. What bothers me deeply is that this is cosmically personal because it's just way too coincidental that none of my other pets have ever just disappeared like that, and I may never know why. Who cares if it might've been a code glitch, it was that particular pet. I would much rather find out a friend killed the horse out of jealousy (I can respect that, and it would make me feel loved) than be left dangling with no answer and always wondering why that pet. And it's actually pretty funny, because that is exactly the pet I would stand back and watch die if something attacked it.
In case you parents out there are wondering about your aspie-autie kids, THIS is how our minds work in relationships. The whole point to Aspienado is giving neurotypicals access to the inner workings of a neuroatypical mind. I am inconsolable without an answer to a problem bugging me, and it's very difficult to move on from that. This applies across the board to every synchronous (or coincidental, if you insist) relationship innuendo I've ever been through.
In the meantime, whatever awkwardness arises from this weird happenstance will probably be in the way in my head, and I'll have to valiantly keep stepping around it because I've been practicing not dumping and whining about my 'petty' obsessions that wind up exasperating people so much that they never talk to me, and I just remembered I forgot to buy bacon this week. *facepalm*
Real life tugs at me. Made a big bowl of salsssssa yesterday out of our first batch of tomatoes, maybe Bunny today (not sure yet), no idea what else. Mostly don't let these meds convince me I'm frustrated for any good reason, it's just my body feeling irritable and my poor brain is a rather innocent bystander. The idea has been forming over the last couple of days that I want back off the neurontin, though. I cannot take another year of trying to super control blood pressure spikes being caused by a med that isn't actually saving my life but just making me more comfortable. It's a curious interplay of sacrificing bits of this or that for fine tuning a definition of comfort in a body that can never truly be peacefully lived in. It's a matter of taste- which torment do I prefer? What degree of peace am I willing to kill bits of my existence experiences for? If I'm hanging onto the edge of a cliff, and something is stomping on my fingers, do I want to hang on feeling numb or feeling stomped? Because either way, what I'm doing right now isn't how I'm going to move away from this spot. I wasn't even hanging onto a cliff like this until after I changed up the meds. Ah, the philosophical conundrums that crowd into the moments between the stomping and slipping a little more.
No hard feelings. I close my eyes and remember that sweet first week on neurontin, and then turn to face a new dawn without a horse.
That would be a great ending, but now I'm going to bore you with the contour job I was working on, looks celebrity Ozarks, lol. No idea yet if I'll finish it up inside.
Ok, time to figure out what breakfast will be without bacon. Might do a southwestern omelet with sour cream and cheese because we've got all that salsssssa.
This song has been on my mind for days. The only good version is this cover. I'd have loved seeing a full song choreography in the vid beneath instead of just a teaser.
Why that horse is important is Easter egged into this post.
