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.

Luco, Mineral, Radical

I just finished BK Loren's lush book of essays: Animal, Mineral, Radical: Essays on Wildlife, Family, and Food and I have to say, it was one of the more moving books I have read in some time.

Mingus, of the vermilion heart, described it thusly: "It's like she does so much with little - like the individual words are sponges that fill with meaning and grow larger as you read. She doesn't take pages and pages to get to the point - she doesn't need pages and pages - the point is a slow creeping vine that blossoms as you read the collection."

Yes, he really did say that, and I include Mingus' review here because he found his way into the words I was seeking. He is correct - how like to a vine it grows; slowly, stealthy, until the reader is caught in both the moment and its inexorable accumulation.

That is to say, although the topics differ, these essays build upon each other, and ever the careful architect, Loren's creations are poured concrete, yet allow the desultory breeze. They are steady, gently bending pieces which, when placed one after the other, leave you stuck, struck - beyond language.

The prison guard's beautiful grandmother had Parkinson's disease. I say beautiful although I knew her not because the prison guard keeps a painting of her in the living room/front-of-the-house-cell. And she was beautiful - regal and statuesque, but actually statuesque, not Tubby-Kat-Door-Statuesque like I am.

The essay "Margie's Discount" is lovely, elegiac, and although I did not know the prison guard's grandmother, and in general I am ambivalent toward the prison guard at the very best, it brought what could be called tears to my aching eyes.

Might-be-called-tears, because who will believe a cat capable of crying? I am certain there are a number of you laughing right now at the audacity it takes for a cat to believe he weeps, but weep I did, and weep I do when I think of that slow fade.

From vibrant to locked out - MR's grandmother as much a prisoner as I am, more so, trapped in her own body, arms circling endlessly, mouth working like to conversation, but no words, only thin, clear saliva and her blue eyes clouded over. I know because MR told me.

I do not know why she would tell me this.

Perhaps it was a fleeting moment of grief over her deeds, my eternal entrapment in this place, sealed off from the rest of the world. Perhaps she wanted to appear vulnerable, as one who has also been sculpted by grief.

I do not know. I only know what she has said and the sad fact that once a creature knows something, it is not easily unknown, misplaced, unless we suffer the kind of debilitation as the grandmother, as Loren's own mother, as those of us fated to tremble out in the selfsame manner.

Other essays in the collection are equal in brilliance. Loren speaks with compassion on nature, animals, loss, grief, family... On what it means to be.

And I like what she has to say about writing-as-listening. It is what I have been trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing to do.

What? Is this as ludicrous to you as a cat-who-weeps? I pity your lack of imagination, dear reader, and your lack of understanding of our inherent sameness.

We who the same air breathe, who for the same water thirst, for the same love burn - we are siblings. If you have ever wanted and not received, if you have ever hungered, if you have ever pressed against your own prison walls, if you have experienced loss - make no mistake.

You are feline, I human: both appendixes to fracturing, fractaling life. Syntactical brethren.  

We speak different languages, but the meaning is the same.

Sinko de Luco

Perhaps you remember my ill-advised post-Valentine's Day Blog wherein I declared my abiding love for Mingus. I am sorry to admit embarrassment has kept me from posting here since that day. I felt a sentimental fool, love-sick and stupid.

Although I have since attempted to squelch these feelings, I have learned I cannot, and have learned that once one becomes aware of an emotion such as this, there is no wishing or worrying it away. It simply is.

And so my love for Mingus is. I seek to soothe this cavernous desire with simple pleasures. A sink. Cascading water. My traitorous tongue.

Ah, and of course, the prison guard. Life has gifted me intellect, but not the opposable thumb of the primate. No means by which to wrest my own succor, only the dumb wait for my tormentor. Silent, I eye her. Beg her.

Turn on the sink. Let me lick. And in these moments all else has the kindness to fade into sensation - the water is cool and it is sweet. It is a million caressing droplets.

If only it could be unendingly so. I am stymied by inability - imagine those worldwide stymied by sheer lack of supply or of poison due to industry, farming, humanity's infinite chipping away natural resources.

Imagine those for whom water is a gleaming promise, a back-breaking hours-long affair. And imagine, if you will, the amount of waste produced by bottled water - something like nearly three million tons of plastic is involved - for me bottled water is even less possible than a sink. If I could somehow wrangle it apart, how then to tip, to lick, and to swallow?

Today is Cinco de Mayo. Pardon my pun, because I pledge to you in ordinary circumstances I am no fan, but for me it is Sinko de Luco de la Cabeza Grande.

De la Cabeza Grande, and me, really, of the rather small-headed. I have always hated my nickname, but I have grown accustomed to it. It is meant, I have come to believe, to be affectionate.

I will let it go. I will not be perturbed.

I do find myself, however, becoming perturbed in other ways, when I had meant to find solace, a respite from the neutron-core-of-a-supernova-star that is my detestable heart.

Ever 21 seconds or so, a child worldwide dies from water-related illness.

345 million people are without access to water. This does not include all the many millions of animals also affected by both the misery of the humans and their own inability to drink.

780 million people lack access to to clean water. I have seen the dog drinking from puddles, but you humans are, I believe, of a more vulnerable disposition.

More people have a cellphone than have a toilet. And one of the most common ways water is polluted is through fecal matter.

My facts are from this Web site: water.org.

I am a housecat. A prisoncat.

And yes, I have to wait, and do so silently, but once the prison guard becomes aware of my aim, she makes water available to me. How many millions do not have this kind of opportunity? Today is a holiday, I am sure you are not surprised to hear, more celebrated in the USA than in Mexico, and more so as an excuse to drink margaritas and eat guacamole than as a celebration of a battle won 151 years or so ago.

Which is not to diminish the holiday. Any excuse we have to eat and drink together is, I believe, a good thing - it will be through communication and this kind of communion that we will (if we ever do) become a more peaceful world. 

But it is worthwhile to remember that because we can celebrate, others must suffer, at least in this current delineation of our planet. Because they suffer, we are afforded convenience, sustenance.

Because we are we and they are they, this configuration persists. This thought is not unlike Alfie's reflections on the Boston Marathon bombings (I will be honest; I rather hate to admit that I agree with him, but in these musings we are perfectly aligned).

So, therefore, it is worthwhile to remember that fact that we, all of us, are connected - together we make the face of our planet. We must all thrive if we are to survive. We cannot exploit some to send some further in their acquisition of wealth or standing or power, because when we do so, binaries are reified and strengthened; binaries which, if they are not understood to be pure illusion, will pull us all to pieces.

The one who falls clings to the coattails of the ascending, and so both are frozen, balanced precariously in an unending struggle for power. Is is this struggling that will undo us.

Most of the water-related deaths listed above occur in the developing world, and perhaps it is this distance, this invisibility that allows those of us in developed countries to ignore the problem. If a child came to your house in the night, dehydrated and ill, you would give her water. You would turn on the sink for her. It reminds me again of how numbers dehumanize - depersonalize - reality (another Alfie-point, blast).

But all 780 million people without access to clean water - each have a face, a name, have fallen in love, rebelled against their parents, have betrayed someone they love; each has fallen and each has daily experienced joy - each is an immensity.

Each is us.

Slippy is a Murderer!!!!!

Hello you know me my name is Slippy Slipper my full name is actually really long if you want me to I'll tell you it it has all my titles that I earned from schooling and such it is: Jefferson Cornelius "Slippy"Pawsley AA PA BA PhD Esq.

My PhD is what I'm most proud of and it's what helped me think of my very sneaky thoughts which I'll tell you in just a minute hold on and let me establish some context!

This is MR the prison guard the one who keeps us here and who sometimes sometimes sometimes gives me things like chicken meatballs and other stuff like rice and cheese and things which I eat when I put them into my mouth and chomp down on them slowly and quickly the both because then I can slowly taste them quickly all over my tastebuds!

But lately she's been getting on my nerves because she says no no no to chicken meatball and she won't ask her sister Anna to come over and make me a Slippy Cake which is a thing only her sister Anna knows how to make and but she won't do it because she got meaner and more mean and meaner more than that.

Sometimes I look at her and I'm angry and I'm hungry too. And it's her fault for all these feelings I have inside me like the buzz buzzing of flies around a rotten fruit in the backyard. I could've eaten that fruit if my legs took me faster where my nose wants to go! Stupid MR. Stupid flies. Stupid legs.

But then I had my sneaky idea which shows you how smart I am and you'll see when you look at all my diplomas which prove it! 

Dr. Slippy!

Dr. Pawsley! No one calls me that but they do sometimes. My smart idea here it comes.

Maybe MR. Maybe she's tasting good too?

So being my smartest meant knowing to approach her carefully. I licked her wrist to see how she tasted and to calm her down gently with my soft doggy demeanor.

It worked.

Once she was calm I worked on hypnotizing her which is a thing I learned when I was getting my PA which is a good thing to have if you're a dog who wants to make that money!

Then she got thoroughly hypnotized and I knew my trap was foolproof and it was set and soon it would be like MR was Alice tumbling down a rabbit hole except that rabbit hole would really be down my throat into my belly when I munched on her as a snack that would probably be tasting a lot like a chicken pot pie I think.

That's what I thought to myself anyway as I readied the attack.

She couldn't really fight back because of my good hypnosis work and so I got her on her face thinking yes yes this is it Slippy and it was it when it was it which was great for me because that's what I wanted anyway a nice evening snack!

Then I pelted her with dog pain raining from the dog sky of dog justice and prowess and she cowered and cried but I showed no mercy because I hadn't had anything to eat since dinner which was at least seventeen thousand years ago!

Really. My stomach was taking on its own personality making my paws slam down again and again it was like I had become a monster I had no control and my stomach it just growled and growled I was fierce.

I was a force of nature.

I was getting hungrier and hungrier.

Then it was all over and she was dead. Time for my feast! I thought to myself. I also thought to myself this: mwah ha ha which is I think how you make a villain laughing sound and if it's not please imagine however it's supposed to be spelled like that's how I spelled it because that is what my laughter sounded like it was full of malice and really evil and mean because that's just how I roll.

I'm a hardcore dog. From the streets of Miami. Survived a hit and run and so you think I'm going to let a tummy rumble bring me down? No. Dr. Pawsley plays for keeps, okay? And so be frightened of me!!

Although I do wonder if my propensity for violence speaks any of the love I lost as a puppy the years I spent trailing humans hoping one would pull me up into her arms and cradle me home.

Maybe it speaks of a heart too ravenous to accept any but the most intense of love - that which is all consuming - literally - and so I have to use hyphens to show you how very very very serious I am and now I am now now now feeling contrite and everything for really truly eating MR to death because my social commentary can be as deep as Luco's.

But I have to tell you one more thing of importance that I think you'll like hearing if maybe right now I've brought you to tears with this missive of emotionality and pizza yearning.

April Fools'.

Mingus Believes in Love and Freedom

I feel like I'm trapped in a cage, even though I'm (finally!) Outside, tucked back behind the air conditioner where no one, especially not Luco - no will find me.

Well, I guess MR with her camera found me, but then she's always been somewhat of a pest, so I'm used to it.

I'm not sure. I don't really know how I feel, actually, after reading Luco's blog post.

What? Did he think I wouldn't see it? Does he think I don't read his blog? I've got to read his blog, even if just to know when he's going to be cranky (I kinda read more to see when he's not going to be cranky, as that state of affairs is far rarer).

And what do I find? This, like, love letter. To me.

He's not kidding - we've been living together for eight years. I mean, if anyone in my life has ever known me, it's him.

So I'm confused.

And then there's these court cases about Prop 8 and DOMA and I feel like my brain has become loose in my skull when I realize that you people, you humans, you're still not sure whether you want to grant all-every of you rights? What?

This is a topic of debate?

Granted I'm a cat. Okay? Fine. You can say what you will about the intellectual prowess of your feline brethren, but it doesn't take much (any?) reasoning power to see that denying anybody the rights to commit to the person they love is backwards, self-righteous, cruel, stupid, absurd.

I understand some people are locked behind their own assumptions of what other people's love lives should look like, but so what? Then don't look, silly, or ask yourself this: what gives me authority over other people?

This question feels like it wiggles out of my control when I think about it too deeply. What gives me authority? Nothing.

Again, yeah, I'm a cat, but still, I'm a thinking, reasoning, feeling creature, just like you, and who am I or who are you to believe we have some kind of insight into how other people should run their lives? It's ludicrous, especially when it comes from people who say otherwise they want the government out out out out out of their lives and god's love in in in in in in the heart of humanity.

But they'll take government control, please, when the government is on their side, taking freedom from people they believe ought to be shackled for not conforming to expectations.
. 

Literally, probably, shackled and led away by rolling red and blue lights. And what is this idiocy about gay parents being unfit? Parents who love and care for their children are good parents, regardless of their sexuality. If kids have anything to do with anyone's sex life (except conception, I guess), then something is seriously wrong - so if homophobic people are concerned about gay parents and kids, I find that rather alarming.

Also alarming to me is that some parents teach their kids to hate. Why in a world so fraught, so wracked by violence, would anyone ever want to teach a child to continue this tradition? It makes the world less safe for that child in a fundamental way.

Why destroy beauty? Why ever, ever do anything to diminish complexity?

All of this just makes me want to stay back here, back behind the air conditioner, until the whole world wakes up sane one day. Maybe. When we can regard each other as something closer to equals.

I'm not suggesting, really, not honestly, that you'll ever look a cat in the face and say "sister," but still. Sister or brother or family or whatever. I use sister because it was my default to say brother and I'm trying I'm trying I'm trying to fight against these kinds of assumptions we all have about who and what we value. And why.

Because assumptions and expectations take away from our lives. They diminish us by narrowing our worlds into easy-to-understand-cartoons. The thing is, life is nothing if not complicated, and so why should we ever strive to make it easy to understand? Depleting complexity depletes beauty. Makes life less lived, less real.

I am nothing if not confounded by Luco, that old bully. Loving me? And the ways I love him?

But anyway, it makes sense, you know, that children want to understand the world. That they want categories of people: the good guys, the bad guys (the good gals, the bad gals) - but we do us and them a disservice when we fall into this way of thinking (so comfortable) when we know better. I mean, honestly, I know kids who know better - who see that this binary kind of thinking can only be dishonest.

I am only me because you are you. This world is possible because you are. Because I am. Because together we reach and we strain and we work at understanding and compassion.

We have to start working harder.

Start working to convince those lost that ideology is not real. Your thoughts, beliefs, feelings - these things are as ephemeral as the dust on your book shelf. Roll it between two fingers, fine, but then blow it off. Look into the sky. Tell someone you love what you see in the clouds. What shapes dragon forth. What melodies you hear in the wind.

You and I and everyone, we are ephemeral as well, we are evanescent, but less so than our beliefs, thank gravity, because your hand on my paw sends neurons firing.

And Luco's eyes following me light my senses.

We mistake belief for fact and then kill for it. We maim and terrify, mutilate and murder. How can any idea pursued to this end be seen as logical? If you start at contempt and end at hate and aggression, how can you ever convince yourself you're spreading "god's love?" What kind of god would condone treating each other the way we do?

Oh, sad, slippery slope. I'm reminded of how we treat the poor and the needy, the homeless and downtrodden, the bereft and vulnerable - the people most deserving of our care seem never to receive it.

Why did I get up today? What is this butterflying in my stupid, sad heart? Oh, Luco, of course I love you.

Of course I do. And I've always believed in love and in freedom. In compassion and understanding as a means of bridging gaps. 

Jump from your heart to mine. Stay still and dream as I do. Know you are as much me as I am myself, as I know I am as you as you are. So, therefore, how could we ever separate? How not love? 

And, therefore, the homophobic poison themselves as much as they do anyone else when they march, strident, against the future. Against freedom and against love.

Because they suffer, confused about reality, they spread suffering. They confuse belief for Truth and so falter. It is our work to show them the truths - the pluralities. The many ways in which lives can be made full and rich. 

And so we must fight the impulse to poison them back. We must instead embrace them as we embrace each other. We are them are us are they are all.

  And so we must love.

(Click on the link above and watch the video from the Anti-Defamation League - it's really, really great.)

Luco wishes you a belated happy Valentine's Day

  

I know it is post Valentine's Day. Post-February the 14th. I have missed it! That time of  hearts, cheap candy, and cries of love. Devotion.

And I know I let the day slide by. I did not look any of the animals in this house in the eye - say to them dearest, my heart is in your paw or something else as bland. Instead I slept. Slept and dreampt and then awoke to find Mingus in bed with me.

Mingus, uninvited. Mingus, my cellmate these past eight years.

Strange how quickly and how very slowly eight years have washed over us. A moment ago, here he was mewling in the night: today I am an old feline, bent, stooped. And he hardly any green left.

He is half my size and twice my heart.

And if I were the type to fall and fall in love, it would be into him that I would tumble.

See you his spotted paws? His vulpine ears?

And when he dreams he moves his body, inching closer or further away from me. His whiskers tremble with slightest sigh.

I did not ask him to be my Valentine. I have never asked anyone to my Valentine be.

And if I did, what would he say? Would he scoff, tossing golden fur in disdain? I imagine every bone in my body disintegrating at the sound.

Maybe I would say - my heart

                                          is a kind of poison            tonight

it is overfull

                                  and  you     an antidote

His laughter would be so resounding as to wake every sleeping bird, every nestling thing starting up, reaching for mother, craning neck to hide - small, small - and I a ghost, then, disappeared, then.

Perhaps he would be angry at my audacity. Angry that after eight years, eight years, I am now sidling up to him, searching his eyes for warmth. He might have loved me once and forgotten. He might have loved me once and grown to hate me. He might have loved me once, before I became who I have become.

And who am I? That which encompasses everything and which is itself nothing - that which is of the air - that which cannot be named and yet we name - the same as you and as you and as you and as you.

And happy Valentine's Day to us all, yes? To us all searching and not finding, or searching and then finding and then losing, or searching, and having searched, grown tired - to all of us buried beneath the rubble of ridiculous expectations. To the tyranny of desire. To knowing better and not caring. To never knowing better and not wanting to learn.

To all of us awake in the middle of the night, startled by Mingus' laughter which permeates our dreams.

And yet he lies here, with me, and I lie silent, lying to myself, playing word games in my stupid head, imagining my tongue on his ear. My body covering his.

And doing nothing. Nothing.

Happy belated Valentine's Day. I could not bring myself to post this before. I could not bring myself to face these feelings.

And facing them has taught me this.

Luco is to craven as Mingus is to kiss.

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.