shelby and maddy (madison), walnut CA…

tiny one-room apartment, but it was temporary

it’s funny seeing these old pictures again. I wonder if this is what actors feel when they see movies they’ve made long ago when they were young. I remember I used to have a crush on meryl streep from movies like “the deer hunter” and “kramer vs. kramer”, only because she kinda looked like a slightly less attractive movie actress version of Lauren back then. I wonder if she ever looks back at those old films of hers. there’s a line in steve martin’s memoir “born standing up” where he recalls a lovely young woman he had a brief trist with back when he was in his twenties. he asks rhetorically, “was she beautiful?” and answers, rightly, “we were all beautiful, we were young and in our twenties…” or something like that. I’m paraphrasing. anyway the point is, this wistfullness – people always make such a big deal about how close we are genetically to chimpanzees, like 98% or some shit. oh yeah? do chimps get fucking wistful when they see old pictures of themselves when they were young? fuck no.

shelby and maddy

this here’s shelby and maddy, or madison as she preferred to be called. shelby’s still with us, as fucked up crazy as that sounds. she’s 19 years old, toothless, deaf, slowly going blind, but still chugging along and meowing loudly, saying “I’m still here, bitches! now gimme some albacore tuna…”. or else, remember that scene in “blade runner” when rutger hauer goes to meet his maker at tyrel corporation and says, “I want more life, fucker.” it’s possible that’s what she’s yelling, too.

in walnut, CA

maddy’s no longer with us, unfortunatey. she survived california, came with us to colorado, made the trip all the way to estacada, OR and loved it there, and moved with us to oregon city where we now live, but after about two years here she disappeared. Lauren thinks she might’ve been taken by a coyote. I fucking hate coyotes, after ben and maddy, as you might expect. I know they gotta eat, too, but I’d prefer they eat mice and rabbits and shit and not our goddamn cats, or anybody else’s cats. but it happens.

my gorgeous wife

we adopted them from the same animal shelter we got blue from. we had actually brought home a different cat with maddy, an older calico, but he was much too aggressive toward her so we had to take him back and adopt someone else. Lauren had picked shelby out from a litter with a momma cat in a cage together, but when we went to collect her, we had trouble identifying her again ’til Lauren was sure she found shelby again. scary, but we were sure. whew! knowing what we know now there actually aren’t too many things from way back then that we’d do different. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky in that regard. last night I couldn’t sleep again so I spent the better part of three hours looking at old video clips of our cats I’d uploaded to youtube. sort of the same thing as this here, uploaded for the same reasons I mean…the same propensity among human beings to make things mean something, to say, in the mortal words of lame-ass hoaxter joaquin phoenix, “I’m still here”; actually, more accurately, to simply say “we were here” and that, whilst we were, we had cats with us, and they were happy.