Sunday, September 29, 2013

Liz told me to be careful, not to assume that other people shared the same beliefs and assumptions as me. When I told Professor Peterson that I wanted to be a poet he recommend that I find a rich woman to marry. Steven said that love transforms, and my mom told me that a person should do everything they can if they love someone. Kawabata wrote that a slender neck on a young woman is a sign she has never been in love, but a long hair on the left eyebrow of an older man is a sign of a long life. The Bible (Ephesians 4:26) says not to let the sun go down on our anger, and CD said to put our anger into our work.

When I was a kid my dad told me that if you become an expert on one thing, no matter how trivial, you will be successful. Nate told me about a person he knew who made a living selling antique cast iron sandwich presses. Aaron told me to be direct. Stacy told me there was nothing more that I could do for my cat, and my landlord told me that there was nothing to be done about the enamel on the bathtub. Katy asked me why I needed confirmation to make a decision and I'm still thinking about her question. Susan told me that I didn't have to follow him.

Lacan identified the central inquiry of obsessives as "Am I real?" Goenka said just observe. John Cage wrote that if you're tired, go to sleep and John Locke wrote that we should learn to follow the tendencies of our minds. My uncle told me I should get out of California, most everybody tells me to get on with my life. Advice is the worst vice, said the man playing the devil in a movie, and that same summer in Oregon I got a job at a factory because that was all there was. If you dream it you can achieve it, said the Jesse Jackson quote printed on card stock. Bob used Know Thyself as part of his email signature. Michael said we can recognize the truth by what still has the power to shock us. Thalia said "It's hard to be ready."


Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Lorine Niedecker, from For Paul and Other Poems:

Paul
      when the leaves
             fall

from their stems
      that lie thick
              on the walk

in the light
       of the full note
              the moon

playing
      to leaves
               when they leave

the little
        thin things
                 Paul


Monday, September 23, 2013

My Other Cat is Not Rhetorically Effective

He wanders around the apartment looking for her. He yowls when I am reading on the couch. He yowls when I am eating at the dinner table. He yowls when I am changing my clothes getting ready for work. He yowls when I am taking a shower, and puts his paws on the edge of the tub, and looks at me, and yowls when I am holding a bar of soap in my hands. He yowls when I am sitting outside on my porch smoking. He yowls when I am talking to a friend on the phone. He yowls when I am washing dishes. He yowls when I come home carrying my bike up the stairs. He yowls when I clean his litter box. He yowls when I am sitting in the morning. He yowls when I get into bed. He yowls when I am standing outside talking to my neighbor, and we can both hear him, and he yowls when we are laughing at how loud his yowl is. He yowls when there is nobody around to hear him. He yowls when I tell him to stop yowling. He yowls when he looks for her under the bed. He yowls when he looks for her behind the door, or when he peeks he head up to see if she's on a chair, or peeks behind the stereo to see if she is curled up in the corner.

He is sleeping now. He does not yowl when he is sleeping. He does not yowl when I sit down to rub his ears or scratch his chin. He does not yowl when his mouth is full of cat food. He does not yowl when I give him a little bit of the food that I am eating. He does not yowl when I yowl at him. He does not yowl when he is laying on my pillow next to my sleepy head. He does not yowl when I pull the covers up to cover his cold and thin ears. He does not yowl when he is biting the hair behind my ears. He does not yowl when I take my shoes off and he rubs his head into the warm cavity where my foot once was. He does not yowl when I say, "Jinx man" or, "Jinky" or "Jiiiiinx" and smack him, like a man smacking a man, on the side of his sagging belly. He does not yowl when he is chasing a big moth or cicada that has somehow found its way inside. He does not yowl when I get up from sitting and find him still on the bed soaking up the warmth in the imprint of my body, and I mash my face into his neck and chest and feel him purring.

He is dreaming now. His legs are twitching and his whiskers are moving. It's hard to know what he thinks. It's hard to know what he knows. It's hard not to project what I feel onto him. It's easy to say, "I'm sorry buddy, it's just me and you now" but it's hard to actually live with this. Who will take care of the care takers? I love that question. There is no good answer to it. Only turn taking, and the unsettling reality that one creature cannot entirely be of one thing. That the roles we have to play are fluid. There is happiness somewhere in this understanding. Not here in these words exactly, but somewhere. How embarrassing it is to be so undone by a cat! I think sometimes to get another, to make this one curled up next to me stop yowling. But I think what I would rather have is a human. A warm one that I can make breakfast for, and say hello to when I come home, and sit with on the couch, in the silence of our respective worlds. One like Kitty Girl, who comes to me when I cry, or whistle; one who will let me kiss her behind her ears without a word passing between us. A sweet one to take of, to be taken care of. 

Sunday, September 22, 2013



Trust

If I would be walking down the road
you told me to imagine and I would and find
a diner kind of teacup sitting on its saucer
in the middle then I would feel so good
in my life that is just like mine
I would walk right up and look into my face
eclipsing the sky in the tea in the cup
and say, "Thank you, I have enjoyed
imagining all this."

                                       -Liz Waldner

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Monday, September 16, 2013

I need to pick up Kitty Girl's ashes from the veterinarian. Amy has expressed interest in waiting until Jinx dies so that their ashes can be spread together somewhere in San Francisco. The little coin from India that I found in the grass while waiting for the bus late February, that I've been setting in front of the totems that sit on my mantle, a totem for Jinx, for Kitty Girl, for other creatures that are important to me represented secretly in what looks like a random collection of objects; the coin representing a wish for good fortune, godless heathen that I am desperate for order and meaning cobbling together esoteric rituals from half remembered history lessons; I think I will put the coin with KG's ashes as a kind of payment to ferry boat man to get her across the river.

Amy told me that last Friday night, Kitty Girls previous owner, Amy's cousin, who took care of KG and Jinx from 1995 until 2006, without being told about what had happened, dreamt about KG. She woke up with a feeling of loss, and started looking at the SPCA website and found a cat that looked like her, and later that day, went to the SPCA to see if it was her (for some reason forgetting that she was in Indiana). It wasn't, but as she was sitting in her car getting ready to go Amy called her and told her that Kitty Girl died. Quote: "It was really weird because the cat I went to see sounded like her. I can't explain the feeling. I felt such a loss before I knew she was gone."

When I got back from the vet after putting KG to sleep, I was sitting at my dining room table, sitting there, and I heard an unusually loud chirping coming from the tree outside, and went out onto the porch to investigate, and there were a dozen little brown birds chirping, which I hadn't recalled ever seeing before en masse. I stood there for a while and watched and listened, and wondered if they knew something about the little brown cat who had moved on that morning. I thought about the swarm of black birds that showed up in the tree six months ago, right around when KG got sick (amongst other things), and wondered if all this was some kind bird-centric message from the gods. Opening and ending ceremonies.


Sunday, September 15, 2013



 

Sweet one. We will miss you.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Friday, September 13, 2013

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Drawing by Christian Nagler

Monday, September 09, 2013

Sunday, September 08, 2013

Jinx and I have had a quiet weekend. On Friday I took the day off of school and work and went for a hike. Saw a movie with Kamal and Saturday did a thorough cleaning of the apartment, did some school work and played music with Eric, hung a out a little with him and K. It's a bachelor pad now, our apartment, and we both miss Kitty Girl. 

Jinx has never been without her, or lived without other cats around. I worry about him, and he seems to be looking and listening for her. An uncharacteristic worry in his eye. How he will adjust, or if he can, is something I do not know. They had a long life together. Next to the dry food, I've always set out two plates for them; two water bowls. One half. Yesterday, 


This week is Kitty Girl tribute week. Pictures to follow.

Friday, September 06, 2013

R.I.P.    - Kitty Girl -    1995-2013
Who taught them instinct? Who taught the Raven, in a drought, to drop pebbles into a hollow tree, when she chanced to spy water, that the water might rise for her to drink? Who taught the bee to sail through the vast ocean air, to distant fields, and find the way back to her hive?
                                                                                    -Francis Bacon

Wednesday, September 04, 2013

My Cat is Rhetorically Effective

What is rhetoric? Sometimes I don't know, and sometimes it's hard to say, but a good working definition is that rhetoric as a field of study is the study of how language acts on the world, how words get us to do things. How being the key word. There are other definitions, but this is the one I find most useful. Kitty Girl also finds this definition useful though she has no facility for the production of words. However she does have a facility for language. Since March KG has been dealing with kidney disease. She's getting weak and thin and scraggly, and sometimes I wonder how long she has left. But she still gets around, meows weakly when I bring out the cat food, and sometimes displays signs of her old self, curling up on the end of the bed, or on my hip, or jumping on my lap while I write and say the words that I am writing outloud like I am doing now (she is not here at the moment). 

To care for her I inject her with a plasma solution every morning. Around 80 milliliters. I also add a substance called epakitin and an anti-acid to her twice a day wet food servings. She doesn't really clean herself anymore and spends most of her days under the bed. It's sad sometimes, but she still has sweet blue eyes, and she still smells good and is soft. And she still purrs when I hold her. Lately she has had trouble making it to the liter box, and the cruddy carpet square that came with my apartment and has been serving as insulation for getting out of bed on those cold Indiana winter days has become a mine field of little patches of cat piss. Gross, right? But that is what we're dealing with.

The kidneys, from what I understand, all us mammals have at a least a couple, process the fluids in our bodies. Everything we injest runs through the kidneys, where the kidneys absorb the nutrients or poisons or whatever, and basically clean this liquid and turn it into piss (which as we have all been told, is clean). Because KG's kidneys don't work, water goes in, but doesn't really get absorbed, thus two things happen: 1) she is constantly dehydrated (hence the plasma injections) and 2) she has to piss a lot because she keeps drinking water, and is always thirsty. In the last couple of weeks she has urinated directly in front of me a number of times, mostly on the carpet next to my bed while I'm laying in it. Not a lot of piss, but little spots. Everytime I say "goddamn it" and get out of bed, pick her up and take her to the litter box, get the towels and clean it up. In the last couple days, she has been pissing on my flip flops, which of course I only discover after I put them on, and I say, "goddamn it."

It all seems kind of hopeless and for the first time I'm thinking that maybe the time to put her down is near. Of course there is something entirely selfish and cruel about this, that this creature that has given me so much love and that I have loved so much, now that she is inconvenient, that I should just call the vet and be done with it. There are other solutions however. For example, getting another litter box and putting it a little closer to where she sleeps. 

Last night however, I figured something out. She jumped on the bed at four or five and I was dozing, but noticed that she was off the bed and again pissing on the floor. I picker her up and took her to the liter box. I got back in bed, and thirty minutes later she was pissing on my flip flops. I said, "goddamn it" and picked her up and took her to the liter box again. There was a strong smell of cat urine that I had only begun to notice because I had turned the kitchen fan off because the weather has gotten a bit cooler. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the little closet where the liter box lives stank of urine, and the reason was that the mat the box was on was soaked. I went to the internet, looked up how to clean up cat piss, went to the store, bought some baking soda, cleaned the closet, did a thorough cleaning of the liter box, threw down all kinds of baking soda, and the smell, when I came home from work/school today, was for the most part gone. KG had not peed on my rug today and I'm hoping that the reason she kept peeing was not because she had lost her mind, but because she was trying to communicate to me that her liter box was nasty, and that I needed to do something about it.

All this may make me look like a negligent pet owner, and I hope that you believe me when I say that I've been doing the best that I can. That said, the moral of my story is that KG is an excellent communicator. She knows how to reach her audience, and knows that if she continually pees on my shoes, she will get me to do something. Sometimes it must be hard to be a cat. Especially a sick cat. It's hard enough to communicate when we have words, but I wonder how hard it is when all you have is a leaky bladder, some broken teeth, and an old, scraggly body. They have no facial expressions, or very minimal ones. Their eyes don't tell us much either. They use their body, and their voice, and if you are Jinx, the other cat, you use your paws to poke at my arm or my face, to wake me up so I can make room for you on the pillow, so the both of us, together, can outlast the early morning cold. And so, this is a story of rhetoric. This is a story of how you get somebody to wake up and pay attention. Some of us are good writers, some good talkers, some of us are good at being cute, and some of us just have to piss on other people's shoes to get them to do what we want.

Tuesday, September 03, 2013



Walls

Walls are
relief in lifting
themselves. Let

you also
lift yourself,
selves, shelves.


           -Robert Creeley

Sunday, September 01, 2013

Sunday. It's overcast. Yesterday storms rolled through Indiana and it rained here briefly, a little lightning, but the red and yellow light bath as the sun was setting made up for any discomfort caused. Today I have to do some lesson planning for the oral English tutoring, type up some documents to make them official, and try and finish the reading for writing assessment. All so I can be in a good position tomorrow to dive head long into the reading for modern rhetoric, which approaches two hundred pages (at least) of not so easy to read writers like Bacon and Locke. I wish I could say that I was looking forward to it, or that I could feel anything other than dread while thinking about the rest of my labor day weekend / week. It's times like these that make we want to run away screaming from academia (of course this kind of workload and high standards is what makes the program such an excellent education). Plus my cat is getting sicker, starting to pee in inappropriate places, and I haven't fully recovered from my illnesses of the last three weeks. The beatings will continue until morale improves. The good news is that the plant that hangs in the window is doing well, the neighbors that live below seem to be moving out (along with their stereo), and none of my light bulbs have burnt out since July. May September go well.

But what I really wanted to write about today, other than making a list of my worries, is what I haven't been discussing, or until recently, admitting to myself; that despite everything that happened in the last six months, there is still a sizable space reserved for N (whoever that is) somewhere in my body. The question for me at the moment is if I can embrace some form of longing, or acknowledgment, while at the same time move forward. Or if the only way to quit is to go cold turkey. Which I've been trying to do: to repress/ignore the fact that I feel a severe shortage of "juju" / feel empty and sad, and that I should stoically "deal with it." Generally, this is the advice that I have received: it's time to move on, and I am in complete agreement. However in practice, I am not fully present here in the new semester, particularly when it comes to teaching. And when I sit in the mornings, or wander into my thoughts at the end of a day, all roads still lead to N. I think part of what I have been holding at bay is the fact that I still miss her, which stands in contrast next to the roller coaster of the last six months. The former I can make sense of, but the latter is still an open wound, and thus I  am in disagreement with myself about how I actually feel, which in turn, is a disagreement about what I actually want: to be angry, or to move forward.

Of course the right answer is to move forward, but I don't think that's entirely possible without more clarity. As a wise friend put it, "you don't need to forget about her, but it might be best to forget about the situation around her." Maybe so. The upshot of admitting failure, or that I am affected and uncertain, or that I was wrong, is that at least I don't have to pretend to be happy, or that I am the same person as I was six months ago. Thus, stretching toward one, non-political, version of freedom.