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Hello and welcome—or welcome back—to Mystery Date! From 2014 to 2017ish I wrote and sent an email newsletter every weekday. I've tried a couple of times in the intervening years to resurrect this thing in one form or another, but nothing really stuck, and so we find ourselves here in Halloween Month 2025, getting awkwardly reacquainted via this newsletter-blog hybrid.
The last time I tried to re-launch the newsletter was in the early days of the pandemic. I can tell you almost exactly the date, because very shortly after sending the last one, our beloved fifteen-year-old dog, Jude, got suddenly sick and passed away. It was also the week of George Floyd's murder and the subsequent protests, so both the wider world and our little corner of it felt like they were dissolving in grief and anger, and the thought of writing anything felt sour and insufficient to what I was feeling. In the following weeks, I thought about continuing, but every time I did, I'd find myself without adequate words, as well as a profound and pervasive sadness that has, at least insofar as it relates to our dead dog, been diluted by time, but still stings whenever I think too much about it.
Jude was, for both most of his life and the initial run of Mystery Date as a Tinyletter publication, an only child. While he sometimes lived with other dogs in various places that my partner lived between 2005 and 2016 when we moved in together, it was a cohabitation rather than a familial bond. This changed when in late June of 2018, we adopted a chihuahua mix on the potential euthanasia list from the Chesterfield Square Animal Shelter in South Los Angeles. We had hoped to re-home the little dog we named Oswald, but ended up re-homing ourselves by moving out of the shared house we were living in in Glendale, and into a great little apartment in Long Beach where the four of us thrived.
When Jude passed a little less than 2 years later, we grieved, but we also thought Oswald was lonely without his brother, which led us to adopting another dog from Chesterfield mid-pandemic. We called her Tess, which felt like the right compromise between honoring Jude (at least in naming convention) and not making her a replacement for him. She and Oswald got off to a rocky start, but have come around to being very comfortable with one another despite the fact that she is four times his size and doesn't seem to like any other animals, though she's enthusiastic about people.
This is all to say that you will likely have to endure pictures of the two current Mystery Date dogs, Tess and Oswald, as well as the occasional reminder of our Canis Emeritus, Jude, for whom we still hang a stocking on the mantle at Christmastime.
