what I am most grateful for in all the world…

…is also what I am most envious of, and that is our cats’ unshakable certitude that their perfect happiness among us will never ever end.

maddy at our taft hill road rental house

dogs, cats, animals, and “personhood”…

shelby and maddy, fort collins apartment

at some point these cats stopped being cats and became people…

when I was a sophomore I took a metaphysics class in philosophy and my professor, Dr. Dallas Willard of USC, challenged us one day to define what a person was, what constituted a person, a human being. the topic under discussion was identity, and he was making the point that evolved society over the years has had politicized moving targets that legally defined what it meant to be a person at all. the most obvious example of this moving target continues to be the abortion issue. at what point does an embryo become a person and thereby earn the legal protections that come with that categorization? the pro-lifers continue to insist it’s at the point of conception. the pro-choicers continue to insist that personhood isn’t bestowed upon the individual until they are born. Dallas Willard posited the possibility that actual personhood doesn’t occur ’til you’re about maybe 5 or 6, or possibly even older, his reasoning being based on how we define what a person is. of course it’s a question we all take for granted, and possibly we’re the better for it, what with our busy schedules and people waiting to take our coffee and lunch orders. but what makes a person a person?

blue, fort collins apartment

naturally the discussion got the class all heated up, which I guess was also part of the point from a teacher’s POV, and we endeavored over the course of a couple of hours to try to define what personhood meant. long story short, it largely came down to when the being in question was capable of 1. self-awareness, 2. engagement with others (family) in a largely intuitive relationship, and 3. communicating and acting on self-interest. of course this led to all kinds of shouting and arguing over defining each of these points…philosophy classes can either be incredibly fun and exhilarating or crushingly tedious to the point of wanting to kill yourself. but anyway.

madison (maddy), fort collins apartment

I remember one spring I had gone to CA from CO to visit some friends and go to a wedding and then go backpacking in joshua tree, and one of the friends happened to have recently adopted a cat, a little tortoise shell boy, and I got to really enjoying playing with this cat I didn’t know but who I came to know over the course of 24 hours and whose memory once I got to joshua tree and inside a tent by myself in the middle of the night to miss very much and as a result made me bug out of joshua tree at like 5 in the AM in the dark with a flashlight over a compass following a bearing to try to find my car with pretty much no sleep so that I could hit the road that much sooner in order to get back home to my own cats and wife Lauren, that when I finally got back home and saw our cats, I was shocked to realize that, oh my god, they’re actually cats(!) because I had gotten so used to not thinking of them as cats but as people, as our babies, as friends, and the experience of befriending a stranger cat, my friend’s cat, something I hadn’t done in a long time, on the trip had reminded me that, oh yeah, our guys really are cats, too.

shelby, fort collins apartment

the point I’m trying to make here is that, yeah, I think cats, dogs, horses, captive wild animals like dolphins and seals and orcas and elephants, pretty much any mammal that for better or for worse establishes a human-animal bond or at the very least a relationship of some kind based on hopefully some measure of respect and kindness, eventually wins or earns some real measure of all 3 of the prerequisites we managed to identify in Dr. Willard’s class that day like a hundred and fifty years ago back in los angeles. and in the case of the cats who happen to be members of our tribe, Lauren’s and mines, I know for a fact that they meet all three quite readily on pretty much a minute-by-minute basis, for which we’re constantly grateful. because they remind us they’re more than just cats, to us. they’re people, persons, with all manner of what we ascribe as worthy of protecting and honoring and respecting and loving and all that good and gooey stuff. hell, they’re more people-ish than most of the assholes we read about in the news every day. fuck lindsey lohan if she can’t get her shit together.

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.

walnut, CA and ben the cat…

ben the cat

ben was a neighbor cat who was neglected and ignored, so lauren took him in. he was amazingly affectionate, slept on  a shaded corrugated metal roof next to the horse stalls in the backyard of lauren’s 1-room apartment when it wasn’t too cold outside, and would have come with us to colorado if he hadn’t been taken by a coyote or great horned owl.

another hot day in walnut

walnut was a great little community. everyone had horses there. there was a park with a corral, and a trail that wound through the small suburb for the residents to ride around. I remember a huge hill as well abutting the neighborhood completely covered in mustard plants. the only downside was how hot it would get during the summer. weeks on end of 100+ days. not good for laurens who don’t sweat, which is why she looks so miserable in the above photo.

lauren and ben, walnut, CA

lauren took to feeding him and caring for him, and he took to lauren, sleeping in the apartment and hanging out all day long, so we asked the neighbor who he technically belonged to if he (the neighbor) wouldn’t mind if we adopted him (the cat), and he said ‘fine I don’t care’ which made us very happy indeed. I think it was just a few days later he disappeared. we walked all over walnut for three days following the trail and through the mustard plants looking for any sign of him, but of course we never found anything.

panting cats freak me out

here’s ben panting and taking a break from play in the shade. anyway, losing him hurt like hell, but somehow losing him to a predator like an owl or coyote made it different, slightly easier to take somehow. this is hard to describe. some weird humanistic impulse to use nature, what jack london (a titanic asshole, btw) called ‘red in tooth and claw’ and the barbaric cruelty of how there has to be a predator-prey relationship at all, as an escape, a defense mechanism of sorts. but it’s definitely fucked up, IMO. I mean, why do we have to eat? if we didn’t have to eat, we wouldn’t have to war over resources. actually that’s stupid, we’d still find other shit to war over probably. but getting to a point where one realizes one take up space in this world is not an easy thing to swallow, so to speak. and some people, once they hit that wall, aren’t able to climb over it and justify their own existence. it’s why we went vegetarian for almost 8 years. (though we continued to eat eggs and fish. thank you scott pilgrim for that brilliant scene with the ‘vegan police’.)

out of focus ben

anyway, ben was wonderful and sweet and we wish he could’ve come with us to colorado. he would’ve loved the long walks we took around the gravel pit with blue, misha, sophie and beau-beau.

what’s this I hear about another goddamn wolf hunt?

sonomabitch.

they call the department “Wildlife Management.” since when did fucking wildlife need management? how the hell did the wilderness and all those wild animals ever get along without our goddamn ‘management’? such utter and total bullshit.

I was at a book reading / signing in a CSU auditorium one night as the local independent bookstore’s representative selling books for an author by the name of Rick Macintyre. he used to be a head ranger at yellowstone national park. he’s written extensively about wolves, in particular ‘A Society Of Wolves.’ the reading was attended by about a hundred undergrads, some of whom were my students, who all shared a love of animals and wolves in particular. ranger Rick started the lecture with an anecdote about how the biggest threat to hikers in yellowstone aren’t wolves or bears, but wild packs of poodles. pretty much from there on he had the audience eating out of his hand. the lecture culminated with the recounting of the saga of yellowstone’s first reintroduced pack of grey wolves and the horrifying end of the lead female who was shot and killed by a rancher who’d then tried to hide the evidence of her body but kept her head in a shed. he was tried and convicted and fined, but that was as far as it could go as is always the case in those sorts of cases. and he had half the audience bawling their eyes out, including me. and they came up to my sad ass afterwards to swarm my table to buy all the books I’d brought with me for the reading to get signed by ranger Rick before he took off, and I’m trying to take payments and write out receipts with snot running down my face, and practically everybody’s crying, and it’s fucking chaos but it’s great somehow.

I don’t know the facts on the ground. but I do know that fucking wildlife management, ranchers, hunters and generic assholes just can’t ever just leave animals be. they can’t just leave them be. it’s not in ’em, like, genetically or some shit. and it fucks me all up to see headlines like this, but I won’t read the story. too damn painful and angrifying, which I’m supposing is what a lotta blogs are all about. that, and to simply say, ‘I’m here, I’m still here, I was here’ etc. that’s pretty much what this here’s about, once I get to chronicling all our cats’ lives with us over the years. same deal with all the damn YouTube cat videos I’ve been uploading. to just serve as testimony, after we’re long gone I suppose, that we were here and that we loved each other, me Lauren and our little family in the woods over the years. but before I get back to doing that, I just had to jot a few things down of my memories of ranger Rick and that night on campus in fort collins when he had all us bleeding hearts crying our eyes out for a couple packs of wolves trying their damnedest to make their way in the fucked up world as it is. some things never change.

here’s what I know so far…

I wrote this a while ago. like, a year maybe

here’s what I know so far: almost all cats, whether some will admit it or not, enjoy having their hind feet massaged and tickled – you can tell this by how they spread their toes apart when you do it; many cats, if you pay close enough olfactory attention while holding them, have a distinctive smell around their shoulders that’s very similar to certain baked goods, namely blueberry muffins (Blue) or homemade chocolate chip cookies (Beau-Beau); some cats, like Misha and Petaline, have a “happy” run, not unlike what fawns do when they go “gamboling” across golf course fairways, while others, like Arlo, do not (and it’s not because Arlo is surly – he is just a very serious-minded, intense little cat); Arlo, the youngest and smallest of our guys, may be the reincarnation of Captain Hilts as played by Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape” and, despite the 6-foot fence now surrounding our property complete with hardware cloth and rabbit fence overhangs, metal flashing wrapped around tree trunks near the fence line (to prevent him from climbing and then jumping from tree-to-tree to get over the fence – no joke, we’ve seen him do this), rabbit fence canopies around every tree along the perimeter and anchored- and cement-secured chicken-wire along the bottom, still manages to escape on a fairly regular basis, pretty much at will; like Chuck Norris, Arlo doesn’t sleep – he waits; when Arlo “naps” by the rosemary bushes near the front fence line perimeter, what he’s really doing is bouncing a baseball against the wall a la “The Cooler King” biding his time; not all cats will bite you during wrestling play (Beau-Beau, mouth agape, never did, not once, unless you intentionally hid your hand beneath a blanket or towel – then he’d go to town); all kittens, whether they are siblings or not, will grow up very close and affectionate to one another whilst they are kittens, and then they will grow apart; some cats will grow up to have a very plaintive meow (Tyler), some will develop little more than bird-like chirps that freak you out every time you hear them (Misha and Petaline), and some will only mouth feline vocabulary with little more than what sounds like a human’s interrupted sneeze that barely manages to escape their secretive jewelry-box vocal chords (Blue and Shelby); every kitten loves albacore tuna, roast chicken or turkey, and roast beef, but not all adult cats do, surprisingly; almost all cats at some moment will make you feel intellectually as well as spiritually inadequate, retarded, or simply not up to the task; a lot of “cat people” will equate this above phenomenon, for some inexplicable reason, with the experience offered by elements of Eastern philosophy or religion, which frankly is insulting to their (cats’) immutably unknowable, Zen-like nature and ability to be in-the-moment-at-all-times; the term “cat people,” with no due respect to the horrible 80s movie in spite of the uber-hotness of Natasha Kinski, is typically received by said people as dismissive and insulting, even if the utterer doesn’t intend anything of the sort or isn’t immediately aware of it; doesn’t matter, don’t fucking call us “cat people”; all cats, at one time or another, will contract upper respiratory infection, which will require twice-daily dosages of antibiotics; almost all cats will also contract a urinary infection, requiring same; having the foresight, at 18, to marry Lauren, who would become an exceptionally gifted veterinarian, totally rules, for a lot of reasons; a kitten’s purr is loud enough to keep you from falling asleep; losing sleep to a kitten purring ain’t no thang; every cat (but not necessarily every dog, though I’m sure dog lovers would be pissed to read this and would vehemently disagree) has his or her own absolutely unique and unknowable “name” for the moving, speaking, food-, water-, and affection-providing object that is “you” and, if you’re a couple, your partner/spouse, that will forever remain an unknowable mystery to anyone except the cat or dog in question; the idea, or in my case “fact,” that such a name exists that is connected to me, is referential of me, and yet is absolutely inaccessible to me, is extremely delightful; cats have more facial expression muscles than dogs do – I read that somewhere; it is therefore possible, in fact becomes very easy, to read an unfamiliar cat’s facial expressions, and thus his or her emotional state, after spending just a few minutes with him or her; most people in this country still refer to their cats and dogs as “it”; once you attain proper pronoun-ness with your animal companion(s), it’s kind of like reaching level 70 in World of Warcraft or surviving the “veteran” setting in Call of Duty 4 – you can’t, and refuse to, go back, even risking uncomfortable weirdness and quiet ostracization by your own species by insisting on correcting other people in random social settings if they refer to their cat or dog as “it”, at least around you; you risk same if you, as a couple, elect to not have human children and, into your 40s now, end up being kind of a dick about it in said random social settings, going so far as to claim it (the not having children bit) a “green” decision about reducing carbon footprint and whatnot; bragging about not having to pay for cat college to parents with children in real actual college with not-to-be-laughed-at tuition is neither funny nor charming; if one is stressed, forcing oneself to spend more time with cats actually works to relieve stress, but wishing one could transform into one’s cats, even for a day, does absolutely no good whatsoever, because it doesn’t work; there is no such thing as an indoor cat – that’s total bullshit; yes, cats are superior to dogs only in the literal sense that they are a superior species, i.e. closer to their wild ancestors and therefore less domesticated fucked-up by human breeding practices that, well, just fuck dogs up, physically and mentally, for the most part, and this is purebreds we’re talking about here; a more diverse gene pool is better than a less diverse gene pool, which is why, to quote the great Eddie Izzard, “it’s bad for cousins to marry,” which is why, again, cats (non-purebreds, anyway) are superior to dogs, in general; there are few things in this world more satisfying than a) a world-class meal, b) sex with a hottie, c) watching a cat/kitten (or dog/puppy, if you prefer) dreaming about running, d) watching TV, and e) having access to all-of-the-above for almost a quarter century now; if you look very closely at Petaline’s eyes, you can see her heart-rate; seriously, the whites of her eyes actually pulse, it’s kinda creepy; Lauren’s eyes are hazel shot through with amber, with a spot of greater amber concentration in her right iris just below the pupil; Arlo has the same pigment anomaly, also in his right iris, in the same exact spot; Blue loved being cradled and gazing up at the coniferous canopy; Beau-Beau loved me, hunting in fields of tall prairie grass, and going on walks of over a mile through the abandoned and verdantly reclaimed gravel pit that abutted our 10-acre rental property in Fort Collins, Colorado, in that order; Kody loved Lauren, running through the grass, and medium-rare rib eye steak cut to bite-size pieces, in that order; Sophie loved sitting on a lap, any lap, licking the juice off of a cut orange, eating a lot and sleeping – being a former feral cat as a youth, she’d “retired” young at Best Friends by the time I found her and basically let herself go weight-wise afterwards, but really who could blame her; Tyler loves Lauren, Lauren and Lauren, in that order; there is no way to predict, let alone manipulate or affect, if, whether or how anyone, feline, canine or otherwise, will love you the way you imagine that love to feel; in spite of this, it is entirely possible to learn, as a child growing up, what the emotion of love feels like from a cat or a dog, especially if you grow up in a crap family, provided you’re able to have a cat or a dog long enough to get a glimpse of what that feels like; it’s also possible, later as an adult and because of having had the formative experience of learning what actual love feels like from one’s relationship with a cat or a dog growing up, to later in life have certain idiosyncrasies of how one then goes on to define and expand on the experience of love between humans, like with a spouse, and I’m not talking about anything weird or creepy or sexual here, you frickin pervert; in fact, that exact formative experience can very profoundly end up affecting how one then goes on to define and expand one’s experience of life entire as well as how one derives real and lasting meaning throughout that life, which is why I’m trying to write some of this stuff down; as I’m trying to write this part in a coffee shop in West Linn, goddamn lame-ass Phil Collins’ “Pseu-pseu-pseudio” (how the fuck do you spell that anyway? and no, there’s no fucking way I’m looking that shit up) is playing in the goddamn background, remorselessly sodomizing every eardrum in the joint; if you are an artist, regardless of your medium, trying to create art about your cats is not advisable; if you are a writer, doubly so; the existence of the word “sentimental” in English does no one any good, particularly for those people who have a propensity to feel and express human emotion freely and often; whenever Kaylee looks at Petaline from a distance of closer than ten meters, you can actually see the sophisticated infrared night-vision targeting system in her eyes locking onto Petaline, with a big target reticle red and flashing rapidly along with an audible alarm going off in her head in cat-speak sounding the equivalent of “target acquired…”; the same thing occurs in Petaline’s eyes whenever she sees Apple; ditto whenever Tyler makes the mistake of crossing Misha’s path; the only explanation we have for this phenomena is, if you were a cat, wouldn’t you?; the body-english of a cat digging in his/her hind feet and toes into the dirt and wiggling his/her butt just prior to pouncing on either prey or fellow housemate cat looks pretty much exactly like Derek Jeter twisting his right ankle and digging the ball of his right foot’s cleats into the dirt of the batter’s box at Yankee Stadium during the second-and-a-half it takes for the opposing pitcher to wind-up and release the baseball, appearing, to Jeter’s POV and line-of-sight, from directly behind the pitcher’s baseball cap, assuming the typical pitcher’s delivery mechanics and not some Hideo Nomo-esque “tornado” sidearm delivery; Derek Jeter’s career batting average against Hideo Nomo is .184 (actually I just made that up, I have no idea what his BA is against “The Tornado”); Kaylee’s attack success percentage, commonly referred to in the wild as “strike rate,” on Petaline is about 90%; Petaline’s against Apple is about 5%, but that requires a lot of work on our part; Animal Planet, while admirable for their existence and work, can seriously be harmful to your health; the same goes for the hi-def Blu-Ray disc set of the “Planet Earth” documentaries by those British guys; I’m serious, you can get PTSD from watching that stuff, which is why I tell people who bring it up to watch it, if they must, with the volume turned off, all due respect to Sigourney Weaver, whom I adore as an actress and sci-fi movie heroine; people who suffer from animal-related PTSD have, as a result, at least the small solace of a pretty reliable ethical code and moral compass that provides the closest thing to Kantian truth, while at the same time a negligible and often wavering effectiveness at self-preservation; cats, because they are less tame than dogs and closer to their wild ancestors as mentioned, will eventually come to the realization, under the right circumstances, that they may indeed love you, but in fact do not need you in order to survive; realizing (and seeing) that one of them has come to this realization can be painful, but is mostly wonderful and celebratory for the cat’s attainment of a greater sense of self-hood; yes, we humans are flawed creatures, but to speak of flaws qua flaws is to miss the point – it is more meaningful to say humanity is, like everything else, simply no more or no less than what it is; yet what seems actually capable of being genuinely flawless is the love and emotional bond a human can share with a companion animal, and the reason most often cited seems to be that that love is in actual fact genuinely unconditional; yes, all human love is conditional, and all human relationships, no matter how deep and wonderful and blah blah blah, inevitably fall short of that standard of unconditionality, but that’s not to say they’re inferior in kind or quality to the human-animal bond; on the contrary, human love is necessarily conditional and imperfect, but that’s kind of what makes them all the more special and unique and worth fighting to keep; my only point here is that dogs and cats are capable of loving you absolutely and unconditionally, regardless of whether or not we’re ever fully capable of returning the same as much as we might like, being the flawed, hyper-self-aware and insecure beings that we are; and the presence, awareness and appreciation of actual unconditional love in one’s life can condition a person in a particular way that does something to that person’s understanding of love and relationships that significantly differs from the understanding of relationships one typically expects between family and friends; euthanizing an animal in pain may end suffering, but scars you for life; euthanizing an otherwise perfectly healthy animal will definitely fuck you up; it is possible to feel less pain, but not no pain at all; this can take many years to realize, but we are not here to save anyone; in point of fact, we are not even capable of saving ourselves – but, like the discussion of human flaws, that’s ultimately beside the point; after that, one is left, as usual, back at square one, which is the business of figuring out how to live in the meantime; and lastly, it is possible, indeed necessary and unavoidable, for the heart to break several times over and heal itself as best it can several times over, so long as there’s breath left in you.

okay! properly sloshed and soooo ready for bed at 8:15 pm…

blue on her blankey doing battle

my favorite pic of blue of all time – on her favorite blanket, biting lauren’s hand.

you know what I love? I love seeing old black-and-white movies and seeing scenes with dogs, cats, horses, other animals, who happen to be in the scene with the actors at the same time. maybe they’re interacting with the actors, maybe they’re incidental to the environment, whatever. but I know that that dog or cat or horse meant something to somebody, maybe not just the animal wrangler on set but other people maybe not necessarily connected with old hollywood; that they had a name, a unique personality with his or her own proclivities, and I like to imagine a pretty decent life. unless they had the misfortune of having to play stunt horses in westerns. that would’ve been horrifying. but the dogs and cats probably had good and happy lives, with people who cared for them and looked after their well being. but still, animal welfare wasn’t what it is now. and I like to think years from now animal rights and animal welfare, and just our awareness and respect of the human animal bond, will be even better than it is today.

blue and me in colorado

and finally we get to the happy stuff…

an early pic of my girl blue

whew!

after figaro we waited a while. a couple of years I think. I hadn’t been ready for the dogs, we hadn’t really been ready for figaro. this time we were ready. it felt like we were starting to become the people they deserved. this is blue. she was from the covina animal shelter, at the bottom of the hill below san dimas. not sure why we went way the hell out there to find her, but we did. she was the only tabby kitten out of a litter of all black cats. all the other kittens stayed by momma’s side, but when lauren and I entered the room she was the one to climb all over the cage, yelling to be let out. and she had blue eyes as a baby, hence the name.

my name has ‘blue’ in it, and she’s the reason why. lauren and I changed our names on our 10th anniversary (for the hell of it, but really because she didn’t feel kin to her family and I sure as hell didn’t to any of mine) and by then blue was probably six or seven and I loved her a ton, so I thought, fuck it, I’ll name myself after her. she was healthy, happy, loved, crazy fun to play with, and lived 16 years with us through LA, fort collins, CO, estacada, OR to here in oregon city.

it’s like they’re in orbit somewhere ’til they end up in our lives.

box game

the whole time lauren and I were struggling to break free from our roots we were in the process of trying to change the people we were as a result of the people we came from. we all do that. and, in fact, we never stop changing and evolving. but dogs and cats, if they’re happy and loved and allowed to become who they are without impediment, pretty much get there by the time they hit their teenage years. blue’s only struggle was dealing with being alone for long stretches while I was at school or work, but once we left california, she was ‘done’ – done becoming, changing, whatever. all our cats, I think, have gotten to that ‘done’ point of being able to be who they are – to hunt and play and just be a cat, safe and secure – pretty early in their lives. and that’s been solace when we’ve tragically lost someone, that at least they got to fully express who they were during their time with us, however long or brief. even if we never reach a ‘done’ point of ultimate expression, it’s a comfort to know that they do with us.

blue was my bestest pal for a long time, from when I was 21 to 37.

you’re not allowed cats in university housing…

there's figaro on the left, requiring Lauren's protection

and so we skip several years ahead to our first cat, figaro, a male tuxedo stray mutt. these are the only photographs we have of him. (we had some others but they’re lost; a shame, too, really; they were of him cradled in Lauren’s arms after he’d had a bath – really cute.) there’s Lauren trying to keep the neighbor cat from picking on him again. these photos were taken outside my summer campus housing at USC, cardinal gardens, between my sophomore and junior years.

Lauren trying to keep him in the apartment

that means Lauren’s either 20 or 21 here. holy shit…

my brother found figaro hiding underneath a parked car at his school parking lot one day, separated from his mother and meowing like a motherfucker. (if you object to profanity at all, holy shit is this the wrong blog for you.) at the time he was so small he could fit in the palm of your hand laying flat. he couldn’t have been more than two or three weeks old. I happened to be visiting when my brother’d rescued him, to do laundry probably, and seeing as it was pretty clear he didn’t really want to keep him, I brought him back to my apartment.

I was about to make a discovery about raising cats, it turned out, at the grocery store. a clerk I talked to about kitten food recommended KMR, a synthetic kitten nursing formula you can buy in a tin, with just a dusting of wet food occasionally to get him weened. rather than bottle feed him (that skill I didn’t develop ’til way later) we just let him lap the KMR up off a dish. I don’t know if it was the age at which I entered his life or if the KMR had something to do with it, but he imprinted onto me. he followed me around everywhere. he slept with me, slashed my hands and wrists so bad during playtime as to leave scarring that worried classmates and strangers, let me hold him interminably, and even tried to follow me to class a few times.

he was content being indoors when he was younger, but the older he got the more pissed off he became about being kept inside. he was supposed to be an indoor cat, because you’re not supposed to have cats in university housing and it was rumored the school policed up any cats found on campus housing property and took them to the pound, but he constantly escaped whenever the door was opened. eventually we managed to find an uncomfortable equilibrium where he was either indoors most of the time when I was in class or outside with me when I wasn’t. but he hated the supervision, and my roommates didn’t catch him up every time when I wasn’t around.

by my junior year, he was around 8 months old and living with me and three other guys in another apartment still in the cardinal gardens complex. he still managed to escape now and then, and when we wouldn’t let him out he would claw at the door and complain incessantly, causing one of us to break down and take pity and let him out again. I think this was a mistake. one thing I would’ve done differently is I would’ve had the presence of mind to get him neutered, but back then I didn’t know shit-all about anything animal-related. my only experience had been with sasha and shiela years before, and there it was mostly, as painful as it is for me to admit, out-of-sight-out-of-mind mixed in with moments of cowering and crying as the old man plied his cruelty. Lauren always lets me off the hook, saying I didn’t know better and that I wasn’t the person I became or wanted to be, that living in tyranny held no power to either protect them or not behave in a manner that, as countless psychological studies talk about, was typical of abused children. I’m less so inclined, but whatever. Skipping…

I honestly don’t know how else I would’ve done things differently. certainly the neutering would have calmed him down some, I should think. I know he would’ve kept on complaining, but had I, we, been more disciplined about keeping him inside, we might’ve been able to keep him with us longer. at least long enough for us to have gotten out of campus housing and moved to a proper apartment in the boonies, like the place we eventually found in walnut, CA.

at some point figaro either got in a fight with an infected cat or, as the veterinarian tried to tell me, I think, to help ease some of my pain, he was born with leukemia, contracted from his mother (it occurs to me I’ve never asked Lauren if this is even possible and she’s never volunteered). so in the end figaro was with us just past 1 year, right around the time I was moving out of cardinal gardens.

again, as with sasha and shiela but for different reasons, I wasn’t ready. not in where I lived, what I did for a living, what I knew about caring for animals, who I was. the one place I was ready, it turned out, was in here (pointing to chest). I didn’t go out and adopt figaro. I just didn’t turn away from a situation. I like to think that most people likewise don’t turn away, but in a city like los angeles I think most people can’t help but feel like they’ve got too much on their plates already. I still regret the way it turned out, but I don’t regret not turning away.

second & third instance: sunset & vine, dogs, prostitutes…

my passport

my family came to the united states in 1974, when I was seven and my brother was six. we grew up in hollywood, CA. that was some fun. instead of attending school my friends and I ditched vine street elementary and walked the handful of blocks up to hollywood boulevard to watch movies for .50 cents. I saw ‘star wars’ over forty times and nearly flunked the 4^th grade as a result. we’d sit with our backs to the wall of the cinerama dome on sunset and watch the prostitutes get picked up, and whenever one did we cheered our heads off ’til they cursed at us and flipped us off which only made us cheer more. one of them tried to spit in our direction across the hood of a john’s car once but the spit ended up landing on the hood, lacking the requisite trajectory and psi to clear the car, which resulted in the john extricating himself and engaging in an argument in the middle of sunset about the spit on his hood that hadn’t been there but a moment before when all he’d wanted was sex with this poor, angry woman. this went on for a while, as I recall, with the john pointing at the spit and the woman pointing at us. at which point we ran.

alrighty then! lest this turn into some insufferable bullshit confessional memoirish nightmare – because the world needs another one of those like it needs another offshore oilrig to fucking explode – I’m now going to skip past several years because, well, frankly, they really sucked. suffice to say that the old man turned out to be a bit of a dick, the moms took off, he took it and everything else out on us, and the end result was my brother and I grew up either terrorized when he was around and angry when he wasn’t. there were consequences, let’s say.

our first dogs! we’re 11 and 10 here, I think. that’s me on the left with shasha and my brother on the right with shiela. brothers and sisters. but we weren’t ready. we weren’t the people they deserved yet, and so they didn’t have the life they should’ve had. there were moments, sure, but with the old man being what he was, it was mostly terror and sadness.

we just weren’t ready yet. we lived under his roof, for one thing, being still children, and we weren’t aware yet that we had the option to grow up to be something other than what we saw. they eventually died of cancer and heartbreak within a month of each other before I left for school. that was a mercy, that they weren’t left utterly defenseless. and even though I know I loved them, I also know that love was deeply flawed, that I didn’t really know what it was or what it meant yet, not really. and yet, still, they gave in return exponentially to what they received. because they were dogs.