Discontinuing Dinner: Avoidance Methods, (Re)defining Cat Food Expediency, and the Role of Ambiguity in (un)Professional Discourse

These cats don't let me sleep. Why does it need to be this way? A precision in language cuts both ways, like a spade or what the seventh grader called it, "a garden hoe" knowing full well double speak implications and the pathologic memory of seemingly agent-free class clowns. Cuts the tools and the reader, we couldn't arrive at precision without smaller and smaller infinitely unsatisfying delineation of language. This is the work, so to speak. And so to speak what moves us forward can also like the classic argument against gun control, it's not the gun that kills people but who pulls the trigger, an uncertainty between what is purposefully and what is needlessly complicated within distinctions motivations get lost, though experience may be able to dig through the litter box what makes good "scholarship" proves no difference, Persian or American tomcat. Generosity not just in how much chicken paste scooped from the open tin but in value, nutritional and otherwise inedible, unable to understand if properties of deliciousness, habitual, or demanded by wery wery cute little furry little fuzzies.

That is to say there are expectations beyond the sun rising but every morning and it's impossible to sleep past six and maintain neutral relationships with both animals and the expectations of animals knowing they are hungry will be hungry and will continue to sniff as other, objectifying thier relation to the human ear. Through verbal cues discontinued and rarified impulses of walking softly never pressing but presence alone delineates consciousness and an end to dreaming. Big yellow eyes, yowling, or the little brown one habitually vomiting before the day begins as a biological function or dysfunctional pet owner relations that yes, we do have the power but not the motivation. The job of some to get the others to do the work or in the case of creature with no thumbs a life or death necessity spurned as motivation, not avoidance of associative necessity or a lack of affective filters. A leading ambiguity can lead into generative succession but when the methods work in the other direction meaning signifies other meanings and we are lead into the specific conclusions and to reiterate, this is the necessary work if one is to work against uncertainty towards a vertical accumulation of capital always at a moment on our way towards the next.

We're torn between wanting to communicate with animals, the expectations of the animals, and the facticity of not having ingested any cat food of the sort. That to pick up an animals and throw it off the bed will not necessarily prevent said animal from returning to the scene of instigation and picking up where it left off. As with ambiguity, that it too can be equally used and abused much in the same way as perpendicular cross-talk and it's no wonder we're still hungry or always hungry as our standards will always be in disagreement so long as questions of "is it time to eat yet?" are articulated outside of both the body and the academy. There is not a single shoelace for cats to wear and have no use for tools and those they do know such as claws and ears and cute faces are extensions of bodily desires. Ambiguity hides laziness of thought while precision disallows access, either due to mismatching discourse community or bioengineered apple-ness looks good tastes like nothing. That the scholar is able to make these distinctions between baloney and insight just as the poet delineates between genre fed cliche and experienced reality. Cats do not differentiate between dinner and breakfast but are equally persistent in both and know despite cat food breath and smallness of stature the power of presence and what engagement entails. There is just as much ambiguity in precision but it operates on a different unit dependent solely on when you ate last. To sleep well is to build a machine to feed these animals at a specific time and they make them, I've seen them, and I'm going back to sleep now.

Holy shit am I busy. One day when I wasn't so busy I asked one of my professors what the pedagogical purpose of being so busy was, and I didn't get an answer. Probably because the answer was something related to sorting, and weeding out the people who have a hard time keeping up. Twenty percent of people who begin PhD programs finish. Eighty percent drop out. It's a cold world. Meanwhile, the heat came on in my apartment. The cats are happier. I'm happier. Dear Margie, Hello, it is 10:16 PM. I need to finish another three hours of work for tomorrow and I'm already late. Bye.

The end of week four. Fifty-six weeks to go before I take qualifying exams. It's getting easier, schedule wise. On Tuesday I woke up dreaming of categories and on Wednesday I woke up from a nap dreaming of reading. The physical strain of the academic work I hadn't anticipated but I'm settling in and by nine thirty on Wednesday night I experienced the strange sensation of having caught up with the day's work. I celebrated by eating some crackers and cheese spread and a week old episode of the Daily Show. This weekend I have two full days of work, preparing for teaching, preparing for Monday and Tuesday class, starting a paper that is due next week, and grading student essays. I would be happy to get a good start on three of the five tasks, but am slowly gaining confidence that if I don't, it will be okay. 

The cats are settling in and there is one sitting next to me as I write this. The brown one stopped puking and the black one started yowling, which means things are back to normal. They don't come to greet me at the door like they used to but that's probably a function of the distance between their preferred sleeping spot under the bed and the door. I gave them a stern talking to about their duties as house cats but they didn't seem take the lecture seriously. I miss writing like this in the blog or otherwise and right now, it feels good to be doing this. I finished reading the David Mitchell novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which was pretty good. About Dutch traders in Japan during the end of the eighteenth century, and mystery and intrigue. His narrative is constantly interrupted by the details and movements of the characters, and it was a book about moral conviction, its pros and cons. In the last week I've been reading, at night, in bed, Violence and Splendor by a philosopher named Alphonso Lingus. Here is one short essay from the book:

The Stone

On my last day in the Highlands of West Papua, a Lani man I came to know gave me his precious possession, a black stone some four inches long strangely marked with think white lines and thin white lines intersecting in the zones the thick lines squared off. It is oval in shape and smooth and nestles in the palm of my hand. He gave me to understand that he carried it with him whenever he left his compound to go into the jungle, and was giving it now to me to guide me on my onward wanderings. He had seen that every day I wandered about without any discernible objective or goal, and understood that I had wandered over the planet to New Guinea without any task or project.

Older white travelers would say that this stone is for the Papuan a fetish. What is it for me? It is not really a cherished souvenir of his friendship; in fact I can no longer remember very clearly what he looked like. Yet I am often drawn again to this stone; it summons me.

Cats! They came on an airplane thanks the efforts of Amy, Steven, Dara and Kamal, the pilots, baggage handlers, customer service representatives, gas station attendants, oil refineries, and coffee vendors. I left around 8, picked up Kamal and drove through severe thunderstorms to the Indianapolis Airport where the flight, coming in from Cleveland via San Francisco (the cats transferred at Cleveland) was about two hours late. But it arrived and though a little freaked out and tired and hungry, the cats were in good condition. Brought them home and the big black one got comfortable pretty quickly sicking his paw off the edge of the couch while the little brown one wanders around the apartment. And is still wandering Saturday afternoon the black one is sitting next to me. Just like old times and it feels good to see them, hold them, feed them, talk to them, and to have them here. We all slept last night in a fur/skin/blanket mound.

Essay On Change

The feeling begins before anything happens. It's a mindset that colors every word and interpretation. In a good mood, a clear mood, I don't follow the sparrow. It begins in the chest and scrunches every word that comes in or goes out.

One word for feeling is pretension, but it's a loaded word that applies to an interpretation of why the feeling exists. A better way to explain it is the assumption of the thing before the thing, ideas of what the world is without consultation.

Meditation is one way to disarm assumption and in a way, it works. Paying attention and learning to pay attention to things other than expressions of self. For every moment my attention is elsewhere, its not busy interpreting signs or generating meaning.

*

What is this relation between what I don't know and what I don't want to know? The fact that I devote time to putting off questions, playing games or making music or writing, a kind of busy work that keeps me from what?

Yet I remain on a Sunday afternoon. It's not about some incalculable distance but a few simple facts, my desire to be alive a desire beyond articulation. No words can alter its course through the body, and the best I can do is describe it.

Whereas purpose occurs concurrently with language. A hardening stance or a poem coming into focus. It is a course of action. Listening to music, consuming news, counting the number of ships coming into the harbor, all this purpose.

*

Pleasure becomes purpose but I get lost in my own feeling. There are entire worlds untouched inside us. Entire subjects we never think to mention. It's not fair to compare anything to what we have been through, but even desire can be segregated.

We perceive the one. Oneself in one's body, one's hands and one's thoughts. There is something god-like in numbers, but to think the one and the two and the three is universal, only guides us back to pictures of ourselves, standing in, our arms around each other.

I wonder what my statue would look like? Said the little girl to her father.

She held her hem at arms length and admired her shadow.

He did the same.