Three years ago yesterday Nap died. I was Nap's human. Not a day goes by I don't think of him, I think of him every time I climb up or down the steps from my house to the road, he'd sit in my lap when I sat on the top step. Since then, two more cats who considered me their human have died, Momcat and Fleabus. I know few greater joys than being a cat's chosen human. We have three cats still, down from eight four years ago, and I like Stanley and love Rosie and love Olive but my wife is Stanley and Rosie's human and my daughter Olive's, they like me but
Every animal we've housed in the 39 years L & I have been together, cat and dog, found us and saved us, not us them, but no cat or dog has found us now in over a decade. I thought one had in Michigan earlier this April, a black kitten playing on the side of Tophith Rd near Munith, I stopped my car three straight days, it ran to me each day and purred in my arms, on the third day I took a box, on the third day it wore a collar and a tag. I still need rescuing. I'm a hot-mess. Iggy won't save me, not even today on his 78th birthday
Sideways too, I'm soaking in it, Madge. Will I be eating catfood in Magamerica before I can feed it to a cat that adopted me? Will I ever be able to go to a shelter and rescue an animal but have nightmares for years thinking of all the animals I did not take home, who plead with me with their eyes to save them? That won't save me. Neither will The Cure, but today is Robert Smith's 66 birthday, he's four months and a week older than me
"If the cultural landscape is nurtured and defined by the marketplace, the academy, and the web of monied foundations and institutions that make up the professionalized cultural economy, then there will always be a degree of inescapable dissonance for the leftist artist, and for the leftist writer and poet, like myself. But that dissonance is instructive or, at least, it should be. The coercive and conditional nature of the market, the academic institution, the prestigious foundation is designed to discipline the left-wing artist, and persuade them to construct a creative self that is ultimately conducive to and dependent on that capitalist, careerist terrain. At best, it simply tames or otherwise neutralizes any such dissonance. At worst, it enlists the leftist artist to construct a bastardized, supervised dissonance that instead survives, reinforces, and stabilizes the very structures that should be troubled. A dissonance that is decorative, observational, permanently underdeveloped, and loudly commodified."
"For this to have been a deliberate act — which it plainly was — consider what that means. A person within the IDF saw the news that Fatma’s film was accepted into Cannes. He/she/they then proposed assassinating her. Other people reviewed the suggestion and approved it. Then other people carried it out"
there is the story of how we met - beloved future spouse [not yet spouse - not even yet fiancee at that time] and i went to a friend-of-hers party - the cat, then a kitten, sat in my lap most of the night - the friend is catalonian, and had given the cat a catalonian name [castellano would have been 'pablo'] - pau's first human left the country just as missus charley and I began our wedded life together, so we started as the three of us - then the four of us when dinah came to our door - then three again, a different three - and now two - although p&d are at their eternal rest in the back yard and always present in blessed memory and in the password for the credit union account
2/in today's wash post: "“You are catching me at my most discouraged moment,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a research professor in climate sustainability who helped review the science in Francis’s writing. Ramanathan said he had long considered Francis a “beacon of light.” But one dire prediction after another has come to pass — sometimes faster than scientists had anticipated.
“I now think the fight against climate change is lost,” said Ramanathan, a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. “I see a huge vacuum, and I don’t know who is going to fill it.”
1/speaking of my late cat pau, as i have done before
ReplyDeletehttps://www.blckdgrd.com/2018/02/the-fashions-are-always-downriver.html?m=1
there is the story of how we met - beloved future spouse [not yet spouse - not even yet fiancee at that time] and i went to a friend-of-hers party - the cat, then a kitten, sat in my lap most of the night - the friend is catalonian, and had given the cat a catalonian name [castellano would have been 'pablo'] - pau's first human left the country just as missus charley and I began our wedded life together, so we started as the three of us - then the four of us when dinah came to our door - then three again, a different three - and now two - although p&d are at their eternal rest in the back yard and always present in blessed memory and in the password for the credit union account
2/in today's wash post: "“You are catching me at my most discouraged moment,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a research professor in climate sustainability who helped review the science in Francis’s writing. Ramanathan said he had long considered Francis a “beacon of light.” But one dire prediction after another has come to pass — sometimes faster than scientists had anticipated.
“I now think the fight against climate change is lost,” said Ramanathan, a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. “I see a huge vacuum, and I don’t know who is going to fill it.”