You know what goes into sausage, don't you? Why I'm a heartless bastard when it comes to pet pictures.

If you think trigger warnings should be a thing, I'm going to discuss, in part, how we get meat.  You have been advised.

Seriously, if you don't want to hear details about cutting along the dotted lines, you should leave now.

I didn't really get attached to pets when I was younger, and even now I'd much rather watch videos of dogs falling off things than of dogs being sooo cute (#12 totally restored my faith in humanity, though).  Mind you, I like dogs, cats, etc., and they tend to like me, but butchering day forces a pragmatism that precludes much emotional investment in animals.  No, I never butchered a house pet (wow, that got dark real quick, you sicko), but taking livestock from living thing to packaged cuts of meat colored the way I've looked at all animals for quite a while.

Growing up rural, Overture: Stay in the lines

Not actually from back home, but fairly representative of most county roads

Rural Ohio in the early 90's was a pretty orderly backdrop for a teen's life. Roads that connected the places you started from with the places you were going to all ran in straight lines, north-south or east-west, letters one way and numbers the other starting from the northeast corner of the county.  This orderly grid system made navigating very simple for 16 year old me, as I only had to know that there was a party on, say, Road 5 between G and H, in order to find my way there with about 8 friends in tow.

The occasional diagonal road was given a bottom-of-the-alphabet letter, and short spur roads (sometimes paved, but often only gravel) got an alphanumeric designation (F-6, I-9, you sunk my Battleship) depending on where they fell on the county grid. Those spurs were where we ended up many nights; thirty-odd cars on the roadside with knots of kids standing, talking, drinking, smoking, dancing, kissing, and occasionally fighting under dark skies to the tune of car stereos blasting from open trunks. We lived our nights on the straight lines between other straight lines.