Alfie is Lonely, Frustrated

Oh, hey there. I like to sleep on a child's piano. Is that strange? I sleep alone, now is it weird? When do we get to weird? Let's just get there, okay? I'm so sick of the derision I imagine roiling in your eyes like potatoes in a pot of boiling water. 

Rage potatoes.

That's where I am today, I guess, metaphorically anyway. Figuratively.

But let's be fancy and make the potatoes the small and varied type - the blue and the red and the finger shaped. Roiling, toiling, what was it I was saying?

Oh yeah, hi. It's summer. Hot. Sticky. Got a haircut (furcut?). The top of this child's piano is cool. It settles my addled heart.

Addled for these reason both: MR, the prison guard, she's found out how I was jumping the fence in the backyard and now I'm confined to its limits: the cat I saw when fence-jumping, now I can only see her when she deigns come to me.

Which isn't as often as I'd wish. I call her Sharon - don't know her real name. She is small and she is feral. Mostly grey with some calico across her face. We roll and we play and MR frets I'll catch something from her.

Ugh, typical bourgeoisie BS. Because the cat is homeless, she must be flea bitten and sick. Because she is feral, she must be crude, rude, a big, bad dude (oh, heavens, where did that rhyme come from? Readers! My malaise is affecting my very language. I didn't realize the situation was so dire!).

I need to get it together. 

There's another reason I sleep thusly, and I'm kind of ashamed to admit it, but here we go.

Yeah, these guys. Bear-Bear and Dribble-Doggy.

Unlike MR they don't judge my Heathcliffesque adoration of Sharon - they don't judge my desire for chicken meatballs - they don't judge my new furcat (haircut?) - they simply allow me to press against their softness and dream of grey and calico.

And, why should I be ashamed! It's Luco and his elitism, MR and her ignorance, the other animals and their beastliness.

No. No it's not. I'll be honest.

It does something to my idea of myself when I'm locked up, trapped, forced to nap like a prisoner in this air-conditioned living room. I want to feel the cool of the morning grass against my belly. The heat rising from asphalt in palpable waves. To drink the blood and the guts of lizards too slow for my claws, too sun-dazed to resist me.

And I want to do these things with Sharon.

We could eat rage potatoes together beneath a gleaming super-moon (Sunday, 6/23/13, folks).

Bear-Bear and Dribble-Doggy get me. They understand me on a fundamental level. They must - otherwise how could they so perfectly anticipate my needs?

They know I need to dream and to dream and to dream.

And to feel less alone.

The Many Alfies of the Internet

The Internet is, maybe you know this already, a weirdo kind of place. Maybe I'm a weirdo-ish kind of cat, but the Internet, it appeals to me. To my sense of myself as rather very much larger than life. And, I mean, don't we all feel this way sometimes? That we must be bigger than this moment, than our own ability to comprehend the everyday. That we transcend the mundane.

It's not just me, right? Anyway.

So I found this Web site, PhotoFunia.com (well, a FB friend of MR's, Colleen M. Dougher [read her excellent blog about South Florida art) made her aware of it, and she told me about it, and I got Luco off the computer long enough to mess around with it a bit), and basically I love it. I can live new lives, represent myself to others as I see myself in my brain and in my heart and in my superb dreams.

And listen. No, I've not been imbibing wine. I haven't. I'm just... Relaxed. And energized. Excited. The below series of photos and what they manage to communicate about my innermost makes me happier than the last time I read Wuthering Heights (just finished it up last night). Call me Heathcliff, friends. We can all drink to that.

Not that I'm drinking.

What was that? I felt a tentacle of ice wind its way down my throat. Was that a note of derision in your voice? Of disbelief.

Prevaricater I am not, and I will tell you this: yes, I enjoy a fine Merlot, and no, the movie Sideways didn't make me fall head over heels over head for Pinot - it's just rather too dusty for my palate. Which, please, do not interpret as juvenile. For one I love other French wines. I love champagne. It's just the Pinot does nothing for me.

Anyway. So you see, I've told you this: I've tried wine, love it, sure, but this isn't a drunken confession of asinine mind-wandering. No. I've been driven to distraction lately by my need to feel as though I more fully fill the air around me. To feel as though I'm being taken seriously by my prison-mates and my admirers.

MR's father, well, he moved out, and he was my only amigo in this desolate place.

Listen. Don't judge me. When you've been alone as long as I have, when you've been dragged from one house to the next and then threatened with abandonment again (sort of as soon as you're settled in a place) due to "bad behavior" or some such nonsense (I fail to see the cause for irritation at my gato agua, if you will, when it's spritzed gently around the house), and then you meet a man who you feel really, finally gets you. And he's gone? Well.

There was only some Pinot left on the counter and you know I hate that Pinot, so no no no, I didn't have much more than a sip, a swallow, I wouldn't say I've been drinking.

There was another soul I loved dearly, and I can barely speak her name. MR's mother. We were also parted due to circumstances beyond either of our control.

And now I rot here, in this prison of pests who do not appreciate great literature! Or at least who do not appreciate Wuthering Heights, which if they don't appreciate that, the very idea that they even know how to read is suspect!

Oh, I could weep.

What was I talking about?

Yes, yes, I found this Web site, MR found this Web site, I mean, Colleen M. Dougher found this Web site and I love it. Let me give you some examples of the many and wonderful lives I lead in my glorious imagination. Come, be free with me in a world devoid of regulations and parameters. Together we'll become more than we ever could've conceived of before.

We'll be truly free.

Here is the picture I began with. Handsome, right? Doesn't hurt to be beautiful when embarking on myriad new evolutions of the self!

I think this one is inspirational. Add it at the end of a poem. The poem would be elegant and never over-wrought. Imagistic. Something like:

Slow, I lift my head

it smells in here of cat nip

but it won't be found

Imagine what that man is thinking: My god! The sheer power of aesthetics! Here, a cat, finally, who has become a kind of tinder inside my bones. The warmth of his beauty will keep me through the winter.

Fame! Imagine what amazing actions I've taken to get on the cover of the Annandale Advocate. Maybe I saved a child from a burning building. Perhaps I kept a world power from declaring nuclear war. Or I invented a cure for each disease.

Perhaps I climbed a ladder. Saved a mewling kitten from a too-tall tree.

And here! What an interesting movie these kitties are watching. Why, it's me, Alfie, as Heathcliff in my directorial debut remaking Wuthering Heights to be more accessible to a modern audience. Ah, they're thinking, this is the best screen adaptation we've ever seen. Give that cat an Oscar.

Like I said, I've not been drinking, really, but if I had been, this would be the wine, friends. Chateau d'Alfonso, 2013, a refined vino if ever there one was.

And with all the vampire craze of recent days, I thought why not get in on that. So I did. And who more debonair than me? More lovely and more seductive than Alfonso Tupelo.

Yeah, I can't think of anyone either. I love how the Internet lets me transform. How it helps me communicate my true, multiple selves.

How amazing, this age we live in. That I can experiment with such abundance.

Even if it's really mostly isolating because I'll never have the courage or the ability to act out these identities IRL. Even if I can't actually even open the front door and exit this prison. Even if, in the end, I'm a poor, sad player, performing my lines, and badly, to an audience of nil.

Even if, even if, you don't love me anymore.

Even if I make bad Don Henley references for no apparent reason. Gah. Excuse me. I'm going to find that terrible Pinot and go back to bed.

Out, out, brief candle!

Secret Meena (aka Fremlin)

I feel sometimes like a secret.

A cat can be a secret, can't she? And what am I if not that, loitering in doorways, scratching at windows I'd be too afraid to leap out of. I prowl the hallways at night, unable to keep myself from wailing I am lost, I am lost.

What compels this? What clockwork in my heart grinds to life?

A secret, abandoned. Like four and twenty blackbirds I exist just below the surface of surveillance. I coast, I hum, I caterwaul (and damn my feral lungs for their clamor); and am unnoticed.
 

So I might say I love you, Christmas tree, I love you and by this mean nothing, for who hears but the glitter approximating snowflakes dusted across my forehead? Who notices besides the artificial village?

I'm the maid in the garden, aren't I? And the blackbirds bear down on me.

But why should I seek to quiet this swelling feeling? This expansiveness barely contained by, let's say, pie crust (if you don't mind my fascination with a nursery rhyme - it's just so gruesome, so cruel - an apt, if brutal, metaphor for injustice eternal).

It seems to me I ought to feel hopelessly alone. And I do, but I don't. Perhaps just not hopelessly so. I do sometimes feel abandoned, yes, and I began this post by informing you a cat can be  a secret.

But here I am also an apex. Of what I'm uncertain, but of something. It bubbles within me. A potential. And in streaks the hope, out the lessness.

 

I am small or I am large and yet it persists regardless. Happy Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanza. Happy happy happy happy. A word maybe stranger than we understand. Originally it meant something more like lucky.

Am I lucky? Am I abandoned or am I found or am I both or neither? Does it matter what I call myself when I stalk the darkness? Who is this moaning creature who has become unmoored within herself? 

Let the wildness roam. Let the feral speak. Let it pour from my lips like breath.

I will find solace here in this fake village. I'll move in, make do.

And you can visit. Ask me why I've changed my name, my home town.

You can bring tea. You can sit with me here. Do something with this pocket full of rye. And find the king and find the queen and save the poor maid - me? - who, like you, toils under the falsehood she is anything other than as artificial as this newly painted snow.

And yet we are something far more than lucky; the fact that we even in this moment exist is extraordinary. How rare we are, and how infinite. How alone and how interconnected. We thrash ourselves to insomniac frenzies and feel desolate, but these tantrums are fractals of experience - my grasping is your pulling is my scaling is your falling is my attenuating body is your breadth is my love is your love is my love is your love is existence repeated in winding strands alike to glinting tinsel on a tree.

And whether my nose is snatched off in the beak of a blackbird, I know you and I are both flecks of gold and silver. Transient. Illogical. Wild.

We are each a kind of crescendo.

 

Insta-Luco

Apparently I have an Instagram and that is where these pictures have come from. No one asked me if I wanted an Instagram, but there you have it - my life. My distinct lack of control in all-that-I-do. And so I feel I must explain, you see, as these pictures involve so much artifice.

Life is a construction, as are our personalities (I am an INTJ on the Meyers-Briggs test, "The Scientist," if you can believe the results), but we must show our hands when those constructions come to obscure the tiny vibrating strand of truth that is authenticity.

Authenticity? Really? I apologize. It is either that the photographic effects the prison guard has used have intoxicated me, or it is all the grading that has unraveled me like a spool of thread. Either way, I am not quite here in my head.

And the world has become a rather dizzy place.

I haven't posted, reader, in two weeks.

It is another semester and the prison guard needs my steady paw. My scrutiny. She needs any help I will give her, honestly, because at the moment it seems as though she could build a house of these papers-to-be-graded and move into it.

I really must be dizzy to believe her capable of building a house-not-a-prison.

What was it we were discussing?

Ah yes, authenticity. These photographs seem to me to move too far from the real-Luco. The actual-me. They cross some unclear boundary and become something-altogether-else.

Perhaps I myself become Hipster-Luco.

I do not even know what to say in this moment that crushes my heart like a mouse in its vice grip; I yearn for a long bike ride on a fixie-with-no-brakes to my local organic green market so that I can pick up some fresh made rutabaga pickles and house-smoked bacon; my body moves against my will toward the door, towards Outside; do I own argyle? Can I find a cardigan that would fit my damned feline form? And my body moves me and I am moved; let me play the ukulele and listen to Gangnam Style while maintaining my composure, but still making insightful, witty remarks.

And this picture? I know how the prison guard defaced me. It was MS Paint.

My blood is a wave flooding the shore.

Do not be confused, reader. I apologize for my lapse.

Do not fear, I am your Luco, only. Although I understand in a thunderous way the appeal of rockabilly, flannel shirts, wide-framed glasses, and tights.

I am Luco, hipster, embracing my identity; for if identity is a construction, then it may be built and shaped, torn down and rebuilt; I am be the Scientist today and the Philosopher tomorrow. Maybe one day the Romantic?

Who knows how we change in every moment we exist - how each thought, gesture, television program, Web site, and picture affect us; how every billboard and park bench, bumper sticker and Youtube comment alter us.

We are changed each time we interact. We change each time we move toward or away. Each time we reach or do not reach.

And this day too we have the ability to become someone new. Even if we are reborn to merely grapple again with our own pathos. Bathos? There is something encouraging in this, although it also seems strange to me, and frightening. We should take more care with all we do.

 

Before we die and there is no more chance for change.

To His Coy Luco

Today I am reading homework responses for the poem "To His Coy Mistress," by Andrew Marvell. The poem was published in 1681, which I find hard to believe, much less conceive of. 1681? It seems perhaps a different dimension.

What would I do in 1681? Mouse, I suppose, or dart desperately from booted feet. There would have been, of course, no outlet for my lamentations, my creativity, my grasping at shadows.

How did creatures do it? Existent avant l'Internet?

You might have noted the wine, the glass which reads Paris (an obsession, I will admit - the cemeteries, churches, nightlife, ennui, le metro - Paris, je t'adore).

And perhaps I have had too much of it, but really, Marvell? He writes (a strange aspect of MLA, is it not? The use of the present tense so that the written word, no matter its age, is constant, alive. We are always of and in the moment): "My vegetable love should grow / vaster than empires, and more slow" (11-12) as he attempts to convince his maîtresse effarouché to, you know, "like amorous birds of prey, / rather at once our time devour" (37-18).

He is so, pray pardon the expression, lame. I would love you forever, blah blah blah, but we are going to die one day, so love me now in a carnal way (ah, see? I am a poet approaching Fremlin's caliber now).

I do love "vegetable love," however. It makes me swoon a bit. Perhaps I would have been convinced by his syllogism. 

But what must the maîtresse effarouché be thinking? Does she feel special, or does she see that  Marvell is manipulating her, that whispers of "though we cannot make our sun / stand still, yet we will make him run" (45-46) are meant to win her complicity and (although maybe I am simply a lonely cynic) nothing else?

Does she believe their love blurs time, speeds life, perhaps even feeds existence itself?

Is it really only one or the other for her - tenderness or manipulation - could it be both? And, you know, I do not believe I can read another of these responses - I am too perturbed at Marvell to take him seriously at the moment.

Perhaps I shall take this wine more seriously instead.

Please. I need just a moment to gather myself.

Marvell, you crazy carpe diem lover, you are right, let us "roll all our strength and all / our sweetness up into one ball, / and tear our pleasures with rough strife / through the iron gates of life" (41-44).

"Rough strife?" "Iron gates?" Is Marvell hinting some kind of BDSM thing here?

No, I jest!

The wine is not helping my homework-headache, it is not easing my solitude, it is not gentling my tiger's heart; if anything it is singeing my "every pore with instant fires" (36). Alack! A rare kind of fire this, and intense. I certainly feel less serious than I would want - a lesson: take wine too seriously and it will seriously vous fera bête.

I should get back to grading, back to reading. Give me some Daphne Gottlieb or even Sylvia Plath (maybe my favorite line in all of poetry: "Love set you going like a fat gold watch" from the poem "Morning Song"), but I shall instead finish this glass.

Why not? Even though Marvall was consumed by natural lust, and I may lust thusly no longer since my "fixing," still I might make my sun run. Yet I might abandon myself to this moment, and none need convincing save my own gullet.

 

Carpe vinum.

Luco & the Teddy Bear

In a fit of something like empathy, the prison guard dragged out this stuffed animal to try and soothe me, she said, to make me feel less alone.

To make me feel less alone. Because at a fundamental level, whatever she tells herself, she knows and I know and you know that we are all alone.

Alone in our thoughts. In our experience of life. I look at this stuffed animal, this teddy bear, and I am revolted, but perhaps you look at it and you see something else. Something sweet, something to hug close and cherish. Perhaps you look into its beady eyes and see your own face reflected and this is like a hand to hold.

Not me.

Reflected back in its beady eyes I see torment. Anguish. The bathos of not-being. Although maybe I am sentimental. Expecting too much from fluff and nylon and cotton.

I would like the prison guard to look at me and to know me, to know that this sort of thing, this teddy bear is not going to quell my suffering. Is not going to light in me love.

That it, instead, sows the opposite.

I find myself filled with disgust. Revulsion. Sad trick, this, stupid gesture, it - teddy bear a lit match to my skin, smoke in my eyes.

If I wanted company I would seek it. I would not do as I do which is to lie here and pretend the animals do not swarm me. Which is to lie here and not listen to Sir Alfonso's bumbling recitations of Wuthering Heights from memory (it goes something like this "I've just returned from seeing my landlord, that weird guy who's going to be a total pain") for the thousandth time. To lie here and read Sartre's Why Write:

"[T]hrough the various objects which it produces or reproduces, the creative act aims at a total renewal of the world. Each painting, each book, is a recovery of the totality of being. Each of them presents this totality to the freedom of the spectator. For this is quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its source in human [animal] freedom."

Can this be applied to the bear? Is he the product of some creative act? He must be, if he exists-but-does-not-exist. Sartre continues:

"But, since what the author creates takes on objective reality only in the eyes of the spectator, this recovery is consecrated by the ceremony of the spectacle - and particularly of reading. We are already in a better position to answer the question we raised a while ago: the writer chooses to appeal to the freedom of other men [animals] so that, by the reciprocal implications of their demands, they may re-adapt the totality of being to man [animal] and may again enclose the universe within man [animal]... the writer, like all other artists, aims at giving his reader a certain feeling that is customarily called aesthetic pleasure, and which I would very much rather call aesthetic joy."

This teddy bear, reader, does not in me birth an aesthetic joy. Does it you?

I shrug away from it. I shudder and growl. Still it persists. Still it glares at me, all beady-eyed (as previously established! I apologize if I, in my terror and boredom, repeat myself. My nerves, reader, are frayed).

Oh, how I wish it did soothe me. But I am ever troubled. Ever struggling to straddle despair and my greed to communicate - an ambivalence seemingly irreconcilable. Sartre writes: "To write is thus both to disclose the world and to offer it as a task to the generosity of the reader."

Reader, be generous. Reader, it is you who, although I am bereft, although I am misunderstood; although I weep alone and often; it is for you I write. It is to you I send my deepest respect. Love, even.

And it is you only who quickens in me the thought. We are all alone.

But we are alone together.

Fremlin Writes Poetry

Rare the day I speak to another cat. And this house, prison, animal processing plant, whatever, is full of them. Brimming with felines.

They avoid me.

their opprobrium

heavy as rotten mangoes

ferments in the sun

Opprobrium, yes, but over what? Why and wherefore their judgement? Luco says I am cranky; I say look you in the mirror, Lu. Mingus tells me I am clingy, and yet he noodles all day in MR's bed, rolling supine so she may scratch his belly. The new cat, Mr. Not As Of Yet Mentioned, Alfonso Tupelo?  He is, perhaps, the worst, probably because of his good natured doggishness. He gives me long looks and then swats at my face, bellowing in his deep cat laugh voice something about my being too uptight.

Me? Uptight?

And even if so, okay, fine, I guess I can see that to a certain extent. But this opprobrium? I tell you, reader, it is palatable - I knead at it upon waking, chew it with my kibble, rub the side of my face against it as I fall asleep.

their opprobrium

as light as dust particles 

vertiginous, soft

it is everywhere floating
in afternoon radiance

and we breathe in, in
these microorganisms
in these faults like smoke

Is it my age? My many infirmities? My sorrow sans Luco's drollery (I jest, friends) - is that it? Is it these or something else that quickens in them such reproach, such disgust, such repulsion, aversion, nausea, loathing?

Or is it something else? Have I committed some crime of which I am unaware? Perhaps I ingested the very last bits of cat nip or slept too long on the carpet. Maybe I scratched my nails too often and too hard on the scratching post. Is it that they read my thoughts and mine from them my secret contempt?

Is it that they somehow see past my smile?

the taste of feathers

and still those warm hands find me

I am not alone

every animal

startled upon waking up

is something wild

their opprobrium

evaporates into clouds

and will rain on them

Mingus, my lover,

who does not know he is mine

and yet still is mine

I've found poetry a comfort, if you can't tell. Luco says it's masturbatory, but, I mean, come on, he has this whole blog thing. Tell me, which of us the bigger braggart, show off, solipsistic fool? 

Ah, but I don't count him a fool. I'm angry, I suppose. And hurt. Some nights I step two, three paces outside the Tubby Kat Door and stare into the kitchen just waiting for someone to come to me. To press a kind hand against my forehead. To murmur sweet anything into my ears. To cradle and cuddle and coddle. Just a little.

I know I'm an old lady, but I'm a bit of  a romantic. I've always been this way.

And I've always been alone.