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.

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.

first instance

my father’s family hails from somewhere in north korea from before the war. once war broke out, soldiers came to my grandfather’s house and shanghai’d my father’s oldest brother, my uncle, to join the senseless fight in its invasion of the south. afterward, my grandmother and grandfather took it upon themselves to escape the north through the mountains and get the family as far south as they could, lest they lose more sons.

I bring this up because it’s the only story I have that was evidence, during the whole of my childhood in Hollywood, CA that my father once possessed a humanity and love of animals, that there was a source to my eventual path.

at the time of their escape, my father owned a german shepherd dog, a female, whose name’s long been lost. they couldn’t take her with them on the journey, and so they left her with a neighbor of theirs to whom they had also given their home. as they were leaving, this dog cried and bayed and did everything she could to break the neighbor’s hold on her to catch up to my father and the only people she’d ever loved as they began their night’s trek. my father, who was 10 at the time, tried to go back – not to return alone to the house they’d just abandoned to a neighbor at the outbreak of war, but to retrieve his dog, this girl german sherpherd. but of course they couldn’t have taken the dog with them on their journey south. sacrifices enough had to be made, sacrifices none of them had known were coming, if they were going to successfully escape the war-obsessed north and survive the journey intact.

he told me this story just once, and to this day I don’t know exactly why he told it to me. what had promted its memory or the occasion of its telling. it’s a mystery to me still, why, after the man he became and the young man I became as a result and had to fight like hell to emerge from whole had set fire to whatever remained of our relationship, that he would tell me of this one instance when, as a child, he, too, felt love for an animal who he knew loved him regardless, but who he had to nevertheless betray.