I had no idea that this comic would be as relevant to the national political scene as it turns out to be; I thought I just liked the idea of monkeys demanding things by banging their silverware. But it turns out that I am prescient, maybe psychic. The world is in a state of disrepair, and everyone’s trying to steal your coffee.

The main thing on my mind this week is still Paul. He was getting so! much! better! last week, only to take sort of a downswing on Sunday, so I brought him back to the vet. Apparently eyes are supposed to heal very quickly; they regenerate cells at a surpassing rate. And since Paul was still all squinty and miserable, something had to be done.

Let me tell you, I never thought I would willingly hand my dog to a person who offered to peel off a layer of his cornea, but that is what I did. The remaining scar tissue was too thick, an impediment to healing, so the vet knocked Paul out and cleaned it off (to recap: peeled a layer off his eye), and then drew a bit of blood, centrifuged it (or whatever one does) to extract something that I’ve been allowed to metaphorically liken to stem cells, and now I’m putting drops of that (his own blood!) in Paul’s eye every 2 hours. He is seriously pissed at me.

To make it up to him, I gave him quite a lot of chicken yesterday.

I don’t really have a new and pithy insight to match to this story; I still feel Paul’s fragility as a living creature, very much, and I also feel like part of my brain got chopped off and permanently allocated to Worrying About Paul. He is a very good boy, and I am taking care of him as well as I am able to. I hope it’s well enough.

In other news, Ron Slate posted a very nice and insightful review of Invitation to a Bonfire this week (hi, I would still love it if you’d buy my book!), and I had the extraordinary pleasure of talking with Robin Kall of the Reading with Robin podcast yesterday—my episode will go up next Tuesday!

So the world continues to turn, sometimes towards the sun.

(PS: as much as I wish I’d invented mustachioed monkeys, the monkey depicted in the comic above is an emperor tamarin; they really exist.)