You're listening ad-free on Amazon

Music.

Just a reminder that Big Mood,

Little Mood with Daniel M. Lavery happens twice a week.

Slate Plus members get an additional mini-episode or Little Big Mood every Friday.

Sign up now to listen at slate.com slash mood.

Music Hello and welcome back to Big Mood Little Mood.

I am your host, Daniel M. Lavery, and with me in the studio this week are several guests,

all of whom I'm very excited about, one of whom I'm perhaps more excited about than anything else in my life.

In no particular order, the guest service follows.

Zach Budrick, an environmental journalist, crime novelist, and wife guy in the D.C. area and co-host of the relationship podcast, Stim for Stim, and Charlie Stern, an artisanal zookeeper and matchmaker based in Brooklyn, New York.

They're a photographer, a poet, an essayist, and a coordinator and connector

of all things in people. They co-host the podcast, Stim for Stim, with their cockatiel

Paris Geller and friend, Zach Budrick. That gets me to the part where I'm really excited. Charlie,

you're here with a couple of birds. I know this because when we all logged on, I said,

I think I hear birds.

And you couldn't see them at first.

So you could hear Paris, Paris Geller.

He has fans.

He has his own fan base within the Stim for Sim fan base.

But I saved the reveal of Mr. Bird, my geriatric rescue, in an anti-plucking shirt that he has to wear because otherwise he

will make himself naked. And it has little strips of felt affixed to the front so he can pluck to his

...