thou shalt have no other cats before me
Wednesday 9 June 2004 | I like a cookie
Thus says Nina, regally, with cool silent eyes, regarding us with hauteur from the butterscotch leather mini-loveseat where she has set up her mysterious operations of late. (Here she is with somewhat less hauteur.)
(My parents went furniture shopping last week, further decorating the living room in the style to which my father refers as Early American Bunkhouse.) The two kittens remaining have been doleful in the barn today, as it rained all afternoon; we could see them peeping out from beneath the haybales, looking longingly at the house—the source, they have finally realized, of people and entertainment and condensed milk. One is a fluffy long-haired mackerel tabby (girl) and the other is a black-and-white shorthair with a dot by its nose like a beauty mark (boy). They both still have blurry blue eyes and a tendency to fall over when grooming. My mom sent their mom to the vet for spaying, and decided to keep two kittens, postulating one for me and one to stay with Mama Cat and rid the barn of its many mice. So the question is, should I take the tabby to San Antonio with me when I go back on Friday? Or will Calpurnia merely have a similar reaction to Miss Nina’s hissing disdain? And what would Z. and I do with two yowling cats underfoot, crawling among the syringes and filter needles and saline tubing and droperidol ampoules at four a.m.?
These are the truly important questions.
Tonight I made salmon chowder and my mom ate some politely though my dad wouldn’t touch it. Butter and lowfat milk to make a white sauce while onions turn translucent in more butter and potatoes soften in broth, then it all goes in together with the salmon and the sweetcorn and black pepper. I somehow managed to make it too rich, too much broth and not enough water, but had a bowlful and now feel premenstrually ill, as well as achy all over like I’m getting a flu. The Librarian says I romanticize my physical discomfort. In a zazen/practice way, I think he’s right. And I keep thinking about what Herself says, that it’s a good idea to learn resilience against discomfort, good to practice with it now while it’s small so I’m not undone by it later. I’ve watched Maman be totally tossed away by relative minutiae and I know she’s right. I want to look steadily into my greatest suffering with as much presence and composure and willingness as I can muster.
I also feel squeamish and sore all over right now, in the mild whiny way which can totally distract one when one is in fact otherwise totally healthy. Berc.
And in other thrilling news…N. should call in the next couple of hours…I just sneezed, violently, nice sometimes not to muffle them into the berobed elbow…and the Possum had minor surgery, finally, as I restuffed his tail, which had gotten somehow squashed during his two-week stay with the Film Critic.
Then, I apologized to my mom, and admitted to her that I was just trying to control something other than the uncontrollable slow decline of Maman, and then I ranted for another hour or so about global warming and mass extinctions and agribusiness and rigged elections and military defense contracts and again how I’m emigrating if they actually put Ronald Reagan’s face on the freaking ten-dollar bill. They’d take off Thomas Jefferson for an actor?! That’s sick and wrong—he’s the freaking father of the country, dude! Yeah, but he had a black mistress, said my dad unexpectedly. We all stared at CNN, suddenly debilitated. Then Dad said, philosophically, I wonder what color Reagan’s mistresses were. We wondered why they hadn’t put Jack Kennedy on anything. (I guess he’s on a dime or something, come to think of it.)
We then watched True Grit over chowder and cornbread (Dad had a peanut butter sandwich). Glen Campbell died at the end just like always. Kittens sure are cute, though.
I wish I had something weighty and profound to contribute, but my brain feels like an unmolded egg custard. N. will get the full effect of just how unscintillating I can be when I’m 48 to 24 hours away from shedding my uterine lining. Let’s see how hot he finds me after tonight’s little tête-à-tête.
I don’t know what to say about Mandarin’s spouse’s total lack of reaction to Secretary other than I suppose not everyone can identify with the little story of—what did the Film Critic once call it? ah yes, “a perfectly kosher treatment of your run-of-the-mill pencil-pushing (and enthusastically sharpening) gig.” Unfortunately to look up that sentence I had to enter the FC folder, buried deep in old sent-mail folders where I can’t find it accidentally, because it’s like the room Bluebeard forbids his bride to enter, the horror-movie basement wherein one steps down into its dusty dark recesses only to find all emotional unholy hell breaking loose—you stumble back in fear and put your hand on someone’s dessicated rib cage—in recoiling from this you trip on femurs and turn around to run and wind up eyeballing a pit viper coiled up an empty skull—I’m telling you, it’s all Wes Craven in there—encountering sentences that once made your heart beat harder, sentences like “How much more composure remains to be lost? How long before I’m standing outside your window with a boombox hoisted over my head?” Oh, you little fucker.
Where was I. Ouais, her spouse. Well you know I have to confine myself on this topic, lest I turn up some night drunken on her front lawn waving the Possum, denouncing the spouse and ripping off my clothes in a confused declaration of passion. “Leave that Cornish wanker, my love, I know I can make you happy,” I’d plead inebriatedly, before passing out facedown in the flowerbeds, unmolested except by curious sniffing neighbor cats. Then when I wake in the morning and the spouse is standing over me asking brightly if I’d like some tea, I’d have to slink away in humiliation and never speak to Mandarin again and that wouldn’t be at all helpful in terms of being her friend. So you see…you see…you see I plainly have no idea what this paragraph is about.
Except, you know, I fucking adore her. And there may never be anything much I can do about it in this lifetime, having once had my chance and having blown it thoroughly. But I will hotly defend her right to be treated kindly and generously by her spouse, at all times, no matter what the circumstance. And I well understand, or anyway think I do, her whole feeling-apologetic-for-America thing—not that one particularly wants to apologize for it, because it’s mostly a freaking joke from start to finish. But that one feels put in this ridiculous position—actually, it reminds me of teaching World Plays last year and finding myself absurdly reactionary, just because I was trying so hard to convince the students that there was a reason I was having them read Chekhov and Ibsen and Euripides. So I’m coming across as Miss Defender-of-the-Dead-White-Males and this was so patently ludicrous it would have cracked me up if it hadn’t also been so deeply miserable.
I remember driving down Cerrillos Road a year or so ago in the Pontiac with M., and him being unpleasantly silent for an eternity and then finally saying the thousandth snide thing about all the businesses being drive-through and I cracked and we then had a surly fight ending with him saying What’s your problem, don’t take it so personally, I’m not blaming you, and me sputtering But every sentence you say is a criticism, why are you even here if you hate it so much, and him saying defensively Actually I really like America, and me disbelieving and him bitter and accusatory and it all being another nail in what has turned out to be our coffin. And now he’s an official Yank and I don’t have EU residence and who knows, maybe if Mandarin’s spouse doesn’t have his head examined any time soon, and maybe if I can freaking grow up and keep from slavering on her next time we’re in the same time zone together, she’ll even be my flatmate in the Golden State someday. I should be so lucky.
Speaking of time zones, our [former] blog is set to Pacific Time (not Mountain—an early courtesy I extended to her bioregion), which now means bl•gsp•t thinks she’s posting at, like, four in the morning, and neither of us are where we were; but I’m leaving it there. Let some part of us still be there. Let some part of us be not here.
Here. There. How’s that for present mind, present moment?
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