Monday, March 3, 2008

Hello.

I don't know what to write about yet, but everyone and their mother is blogging--yeah, that's so cliche to say, but it's true--and my other blog is too formal, and, hell, I'm a writer, and every person who thinks they know something about writing says all writers should blog, and I've suppressed that everybody for long enough and here we go, I'm succumbing.

So, what to write about. My cat died this weekend. I didn't cry as much as I thought I would. I think I cried more for my fish, actually, Charlie, who survived when his tank fell on the floor and shattered into thousands of pieces, and who survived when I scooped him into a ladle to clean the pickle jar that replaced that tank and he flopped like a mad(fish) and leaped onto the floor, and his sides went *squish,squish* and his little black eyes bubbled and huff puff and I yelled and I flopped around a bit too, maybe out of sympathy but also out of panic, and my stepdad came and scraped him off the floor. He lived a few more years after that, brave trooper, and that pickle jar took him from Florida to Maryland in a car filled with five annoyed people, two dogs and one (now dead) cat. I had a whole lot of respect for him, but even here I have disrespected him; his full name was Sir Charles II (though the Charles before him was Charlie and not Sir Charles) and that's certainly a more fitting name for such a warrior. Anyhow, Sir Charles II-but-really-I stared at me every day from his spot on my desk through my first year or so of college. When he died, that was the first time I ever experienced and the only time I have ever experienced death alone. Neither of my roommates was home, and his pale red body like all the blood was out was upside down so I ran his pickle jar to the community bathroom and woosh, heaven or sewage or sewage then heaven. Like life is heaven or sewage or sewage then heaven, or if you don't see heaven maybe it's just sewage.

Anyway, the cat was with us 12 years but he was happier alone. My stepdad and one of his coworkers found him as a tiny kitten on the side of the road in a paper bag with his sister, no mother in sight, and his coworker took the sister and his daughter named it Gravy, and we named ours Sonic, after a video game hedgehog. Then we grew up a bit and technology grew up and neither that video game nor that hedgehog was cool, so he was dubbed Max, and I don't know where that one came from. Maybe it was better because it was timeless. Anyway, Max was a loner, and when he wasn't alone he was wild, natural. His idea of a game was chasing me around the house, doing a loop through the kitchen and the living room was his favorite, while making an ungodly brrrr sound, like an ungreased motor, but when he caught me it wasn't a friendly nibble, it wasn't a pat or a paw but claws, right into the flesh. He gave me the only scar on my body, a long one on my hand that I've had for six years. I really think the whole time he was hunting and never playing. Sometime he appeared fallible, perhaps lovable, when he would leap onto our laps and knead our flesh with his paws and claws and suck on our shirts, like he would a mother's teat, but I think that was nature -- that was necessity and that was a fix and that was not love. I do not think he ever shook that paper bag out of him, like a soldier never forgets the foxhole.

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