(Park, as in 'idling, motor running, polluting atmosphere without making any progress or going anywhere) (Which you probably already knew that)
My reading glasses, when I can locate a pair, seem always to be extraordinarily smeary, as though I store them in a glass of molten wax when they're not under something.
I no longer need to leave the bathroom faucet dripping. The cat is dead.
I need to call my friends in Pennsylvania -- the ones I'm always afraid I'll get a call about, saying they're dead -- to tell them that the cat is dead.
I'm wondering if the cheap honey I bought at the supermarket (because the Google map to the farm store was completely misleading), is actually honey, or just some oil byproduct imported from some foreign country, and liberally laced with corn syrup to make it palatable. This wouldn't be such a concern for me, if (a) this honey were still in the supermarket, aisle four, near the peanut butter, and (b) I hadn't sneakily resumed using honey in my morning coffee, which I used to do all the time, until about four years ago, when I saw my mother again for the first time in decades, and realized that, all along, she hadn't really cared about me in even the tiniest bit, and now she's dead too.
I certainly will miss the cat more.
In fact, as John decided that we should have Buster the Dead Cat cremated, once he was actually dead, and as Buster the Dead Cat was only outside on his own recognizance one time in his entire life, and didn't particularly enjoy that experience, as the outside is so freakin' big, and there's no dish of cat food, or handy dripping bathroom faucet to drink from, it doesn't really make much sense to bury him there, I'm contemplating a brief return foray into the entrancing world of glass blowing, to make an urn for his ashes, and all the cat hair I gathered, more or less unintentionally, in a bowl in the same bathroom as the dripping faucet, because while he had his head almost upside-down, drinking, I would brush him, over and over again, loving his red hair.... I'm kind of torn between a cobalt blue urn, or one in Roma red -- cobalt is kind of a no-brainer, but has nothing to do with a red cat, and Roma red is so delicious, even though it can tend to blow out unevenly. Plus I want the urn to have a blown foot, and I suck at blown feet, and they're virtually impossible to do alone anyway, so who am I going to get to assist me, so I can make a container for the ashes of a dead cat that used to drink out of the bathroom sink?
It's always something.
Glass. Glass feet. Glass bottles. Fake 'outsider art' dolls, made with glass wine bottles as the body, with gnarled wooden extremities and knotted cloth heads, which I can leave outdoors for a while so they look really crappy, and then take them to some flea market and wait until an antique dealer gets a load of them, and then I can sell them for tens of thousands of dollars, and make a bogus video of the artist him/herself (I wonder who can play the part? I wonder...), talking all ungrammatic-like, about how tough it is to get yer wife to crochet them doll laigs, when she's layin' there, a-dyin' of some durn sickness or t'other... Much more interesting than, say, faking Vermeers, and I still can't believe that art experts of any discipline could have accepted those bloated, suffocating paintings of Jesus and his followers at Emmaus as real Vermeers... And, could I go to prison for passing my own art off as the art of someone I'm just pretending to be? But I still make all the stuff anyway? Maybe I should make a few dozen dolls first, and pull the fake wool over a few antique-frenzied eyes, before I worry too much about legal niceties...?
Even though I've tried to convince myself that it's too late, that they chose someone else, that I blew the call-back audition, I'm nevertheless waiting for a call from the theater company in Somerset NJ, offering me the opportunity once more to play Judge Turpin in their February production of 'Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street'. Even though they've already picked someone else. And it's after noon on a Sunday, three days after the call-backs, and who's going to be calling people now, and besides, the other guy was so much creepier, in the best possible way... As I was putting myself through this particular wringer yet again yesterday, I think I realized that, of all the creative ventures in which I've involved myself, I think I feel the most genuinely grounded and entitled as an actor -- it still strikes me as unnervingly weird, that I actually know how to blow glass -- that skill seems as divorced from real life as would be the ability to levitate. If I could. Levitate, that is.
I bought yet another box cutter two days ago -- this, despite the fact that I have at least eight others, hiding in obviously clever and unexpected places around the house, and because I actually need to cut... some boxes! I also bought a pack of replacement blades, which it makes me feel especially clever, because I made sure I bought the blades that would fit the knife, instead of exactly the wrong blades instead, which I would never bother to return, thus giving the new box cutter something else under which to hide itself. I rarely if ever replace razor knife blades -- I worry about what to do with the old one -- surely some careless garbage man will have forgotten to wear his gloves that day, and cut himself, and get blood poisoning, and die in about six hours, leaving behind a stunned young pregnant widow and three school-aged children who will have to wear clothes they steal from dumpsters at the mall.... The responsibilities are endless. I also think that blades should really, by rights, last forever, and it's a sin to be wasteful, isn't it?
But now I'm ready to throw caution to the wind (plus, with over 150 lb of wax at my fingertips, I can easily create a dulling sheath for the dead blade, thus relieving me of the terrible guilt, plus I could never remember those kids' birthdays anyhow...), and change blades freely. As long as I can find the right screw driver, to open the knife, so the blade is accessible. And so it goes.
(Now, a moment of silence, while I pick at myself and think about all the things I'd really like to write about, but don't, because I don't think it would be such a good idea. I wonder if I could come up with a mental equivalent of wax, in which I could embed what I think are such inappropriate or unpleasant thoughts, so I could both rid myself of them, and avoid the risk of shocking or alienating or otherwise upsetting anyone who might read them. It's a terrible burden, being responsible for.... you.
I should probably eat something for lunch. I had a swiss cheese sandwich earlier, but I'm feeling empty again.
I hate feeling hunger, but I also seem to believe, on some deep level, that being hungry is a good thing -- that it's virtuous, in the sense of being anti-gluttony, and also, I think it reminds me of feelings I had as a helpless, nonverbal, but definitely non-silent baby. I think my mother was onl occasionally interested in me -- there's a photo of me, before I could walk, and I'm on the floor with a scattered deck of cards, and my sense is that for my mother, it would have been a toss-up, most of the time, as to whether she'd rather feed me, or play solitaire. So, feeling hungry seems, somehow, to feel like the necessary precursor to being taken care of -- and the hungrier I get, the more imminent is that attention I crave. Of course, when I was so depressed a few months ago, I kept on feeling hungry, and kept on feeling hungry, and kept on, until I had lost almost 30 lb, and really, no one ever showed up. Of course, I didn't stand around screaming either, like I probably did before I could walk. The squeaky wheel sometimes getting greased, depending on how big it is, and where the mechanic might have gotten to.
I think I might want to be done, for now. My mind seems to be wanting to wander toward wondering where I've stashed all my crochet needles, as I think I want to start making the preliminary rough sketches of my first bogus glass bottle doll, while only half-watching what I hope will be old black-and-white movies from the 30's, on TCM. Or, failing that, some grisly true-crime police procedural -- the tensions feel familiar, with the advantage that, unlike real life, in TV shows, they have to come up with the answers in under an hour. There are details and events and questions lurking behind my own personal and ancient tensions and mysteries, of which I may never become aware, or to which I may never discover the answers.
Maybe, with this idea not an uncommon one in my mental repertoire, next time I'll write about my version of heaven. Stranger things have happened, and certainly stranger things have been thought of.
Now I wonder if, instead of crocheting twine onto a wine bottle, I shouldn't drive out westward, and see if I can't find that farm, and buy some genuine honey. Before all their bees are dead.
© Walter Zimmerman 2014
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Friday, November 14, 2014
Smatterings...
Hmmmmm.
Well, according to my mental math, I'm down to about 703 days, in the countdown to my personal Biblical End Times. I've been less than dutiful, or faithful, or regular, or disciplined, about this blog, which I find I've been treating exactly as I would a dear old friend: I think about you all the time, but am too damned lazy to pick up the phone...
And it's not as though I've been sunk in some state of blissful denial, regarding My Personal Finality, et al. Far from it. If anything, I've been perhaps a bit too face-to-face with The Inevitable Last Date. I just didn't want this to turn, so soon, into a blog about cats. Because...
Buster the Dead Cat, which appellation I began using when it became clear that no amount of brushing or force-feeding or subcutaneous hydration was going to restore his kidneys, is now actually Buster the Really Dead Cat. As in, post-mortem, cold as a popsicle, stiff as a board, on his way to being cremated Dead. As in, the no longer peeing in the downstairs hallway, or pestering me to drink water from the bathroom sink, or walking around at night, howling meaninglessly at nothing in particular, cat.
I tried my best to be faithful, as almost any other pet owner would instantly understand. After it became clear that a daily session of being wrapped in a bath towel, and being laid in my lap, and having his jaws pried open, so I could ladle expensive, medicine-laced yummy cat food onto his tongue without shoving it into his lungs, was both pointless for him, and stressful for both of us, I fell back to the daily hydration routine. Which, I was relieved to see, required no bath towel (I did drape a dish towel across my knee, as his bladder control came into question), no prying, and no ladling -- just the quick and determined insertion of a honkin' big needle into the loose skin high on his back, and then flipping the stopper, to allow sterile saline solution to drip into his failing body, 100 cc per visit. He was almost always calm about it. Early on, he would even purr a bit, as I stoked his sides and tried to see how low the water level had sunk in the suspended plastic bag hanging from the ceiling in the sun room. Usually, he would start to squirm a bit, at just about the 85 cc mark, but sick as he was, and indulgent as I wanted to be, I was strict, in keeping him in place, until the prescribed volume of liquid was safely inserted beneath his skin. Besides, squirm as he might, he wasn't really strong enough to go anywhere, except maybe to fall sideways onto the sofa, and fall asleep on the nest I'd made for him, of t-shirts I'd recently worn, perhaps mistakenly believing that my scent might comfort him. It certainly didn't keep him awake.
He died in our bed, four nights ago, lying on his ad-libbed cushion of bath towels and hand towels and a wash cloth and a pillow case (he seemed to prefer the smoother fabric, to terry cloth), between John and me, as we slept. Earlier that evening, I'd held him on my chest, for a couple of hours, either stroking his emaciated sides, or resting a hand gently against him. Whether I was comforting him, or myself, I may never really know. What I do know is that it was difficult to believe, that Tuesday morning, that he'd really stopped breathing, finally, after nearly two weeks of no food intake, and near-total inertia. John checked for a heart beat. I touched Buster's ears -- that I always thought were so smooth, and darkened at the base, like a tree-ripened peach that shows you just where the nearest leaves used to be -- and there was no immediate twitch. His cold paws were limp.
Dead.
I'd decided, weeks ago, when the diagnosis was still fresh, that we would be burying him in our back yard -- I mentally pegged out a space, next to our redbud tree, a gift from our dear departed friend Irene, and which had been split in two, a few years ago, by a falling oak branch, but which had healed itself after I tied and taped it back together. It's a shame I didn't know what I was doing when I planted it. In any event, the plan was to dig a hole about four feet deep, inter our little red cat, and then fill the hole again. Maybe place a marker, if I could ever make up my mind what to use, and then actually create it, that is. I'd made mental note of where the mattox and the spade were, in the garage -- digging down through the underlying clay would be no picnic, I knew.
I also cleared a space in our freezer, as a temporary feline morgue, in case Buster died at a time that John wouldn't be able to attend the burial. Most of the frozen foods I simply crammed into another crowded space; the small packages of sausages I shifted to the fridge, where I let them thaw, and then tried to turn them into some sort of sad bachelor's dinner -- pan-fried links, with some loose meat squeezed from their casings, drizzled with maple syrup, and served with the remains of store-bought potato salad. As a meal, it served its purpose, in terms of clearing out freezer space. I added the uneaten sausage to a desperate batch of pasta sauce, which I hastily stirred up, and mixed with two other containers of left-over marinara, to make a barely acceptable companion for some squid ink linguini, which meal I gulped down while watching an old black-and-white movie on TCM, with Buster zoned out on one flat surface or another, breathing shallowly, his eyes dilated, the tip of his tail occasionally giving a little twitch. Who would expect, I wondered, that the impending death of an adopted house pet would have a material impact on my dining habits, for at least two meals anyway?
But John voted strenuously for cremation, which meant that I could forget where the mattox was lodged (actually, its yellow plastic handle makes it pretty easy to spot. Extrication is another matter), and not worry about getting callouses on my dainty hands, while digging and digging and digging, and cursing myself for insisting that the hole be just a bit deeper... Buster never liked being outdoors anyway. So I wrapped him yet again, this time in a plush dull-lavender-colored bath towel, and John drove us to the vet's office, where I stood for a few minutes with this inert bundle in my arms, as the vet's assistant talked dog food with a feisty youngish woman dressed in aggressively athletic attire. Then, we took Buster into one of the non-public spaces, and laid him on the chest freezer/morgue, to be picked up later and taken somewhere else for his final makeover. John quibbled a bit about leaving the towel -- he's never used it, so he doesn't know how uncooperative it's always been, in terms of actually removing moisture from a wet body -- so, before unwrapping Buster, I took off my dull red waffle-weave rugby shirt, which I've never liked that much anyway, because I was not going to leave my dead cat lying uncushioned and exposed on an old Amana chest freezer. Turns out, John likes the shirt more than he likes the towel, so that's how we left it -- a small oblong bundle of loosely folded terry cloth, that may or may not have had something inside it. I was a little weepy, and the vet's assistant gave me a bit of a hug.
Now I'm thinking of renting some glassblowing time, down in Newark, at GlassRoots, to see if I can make a blown glass urn for Buster's ashes, and also for the hair I've compulsively kept, from all those years of brushing him, while he was crouched in the upstairs sink, drinking the same water, from the tap, as I'd put in his bowl downstairs. Brush, brush, brush, while he lapped and purred, and every two days or so, I would pull all the cat hair out of the brush, and put it in a red plastic bowl I'd placed on the otherwise useless shelf that former owners had created, when they took out the original claw-footed tub, and built a shower. Only recently, due to a Facebook comment made by a former student, did I realize that I'd in fact accumulated a lifetime's worth of Buster's hair, in little bundles, packed into that dark red bowl. If it would spin, I might consider making some kitty fur drink coasters, but the urn seems a more fitting destination.
A blog about a cat. In spite of myself. In spite of having the following writing ideas: doing the NYTimes crossword puzzle, and the way it impacts the things I think about each day; a further breakdown of the remaining time, into hours and minutes, and musings on same; a kind of 'bucket list' of projects or goals I might have, for these last weeks and days -- even though the term 'bucket list' kind of makes me shudder; further musings centered on the daily crossword puzzle, this time focusing on particular words, or on experiments of a long-entertained writing project, of creating a story, which must incorporate every single word in the solved puzzle; different musings altogether, on what I might choose -- or not choose -- to do, during this last stretch of life; questions about what other people, reaching or having surpassed this watershed, do with their lives, and how do they face getting out of bed every day? Stuff like that. It may yet be that, with the melodrama of Buster the Dead Cat pretty much over and done with, I may actually follow one of these conversational paths. Stranger things have happened.
Now, though, I believe I'm going to take advantage of the splendid mid-November weather, and go out into the garage, to pull out the lawn mower and attach the cutting-collector bag (I've never used it), and see if, instead of raking all the myriad leaves piled up in our front and (to a deeper extent) our back yards, I can mulch them, and put them around the base of the ornamental cherry tree, and my newest addition to the landscape -- the old ornamental weeping cherry tree, which needs to have suckers trimmed from its main trunk, and the clumped black birch tree, which also needs to be trimmed of its lower branches, once we've had enough sufficiently cold weather, to make the sap run downward, and stop attracting birch beetles. I can't throw these trimmed birch wands away just yet -- as usual, the mere presence of these objects prompts visions of future art projects, the realization of which lies, in terms of scaled probability, somewhere on the outer reaches, along with having a second date with a Sasquatch, and taking a long weekend on a UFO.
Dealing with the lawn also gives me complete immunity from having to write any more of this -- instead, I can go back to imagining all the wonderful things I could be saying, if I weren't stuck, outside, raking the stupid leaves...
I think we may need to get a kitten.
© Walter Zimmerman 2014
Well, according to my mental math, I'm down to about 703 days, in the countdown to my personal Biblical End Times. I've been less than dutiful, or faithful, or regular, or disciplined, about this blog, which I find I've been treating exactly as I would a dear old friend: I think about you all the time, but am too damned lazy to pick up the phone...
And it's not as though I've been sunk in some state of blissful denial, regarding My Personal Finality, et al. Far from it. If anything, I've been perhaps a bit too face-to-face with The Inevitable Last Date. I just didn't want this to turn, so soon, into a blog about cats. Because...
Buster the Dead Cat, which appellation I began using when it became clear that no amount of brushing or force-feeding or subcutaneous hydration was going to restore his kidneys, is now actually Buster the Really Dead Cat. As in, post-mortem, cold as a popsicle, stiff as a board, on his way to being cremated Dead. As in, the no longer peeing in the downstairs hallway, or pestering me to drink water from the bathroom sink, or walking around at night, howling meaninglessly at nothing in particular, cat.
I tried my best to be faithful, as almost any other pet owner would instantly understand. After it became clear that a daily session of being wrapped in a bath towel, and being laid in my lap, and having his jaws pried open, so I could ladle expensive, medicine-laced yummy cat food onto his tongue without shoving it into his lungs, was both pointless for him, and stressful for both of us, I fell back to the daily hydration routine. Which, I was relieved to see, required no bath towel (I did drape a dish towel across my knee, as his bladder control came into question), no prying, and no ladling -- just the quick and determined insertion of a honkin' big needle into the loose skin high on his back, and then flipping the stopper, to allow sterile saline solution to drip into his failing body, 100 cc per visit. He was almost always calm about it. Early on, he would even purr a bit, as I stoked his sides and tried to see how low the water level had sunk in the suspended plastic bag hanging from the ceiling in the sun room. Usually, he would start to squirm a bit, at just about the 85 cc mark, but sick as he was, and indulgent as I wanted to be, I was strict, in keeping him in place, until the prescribed volume of liquid was safely inserted beneath his skin. Besides, squirm as he might, he wasn't really strong enough to go anywhere, except maybe to fall sideways onto the sofa, and fall asleep on the nest I'd made for him, of t-shirts I'd recently worn, perhaps mistakenly believing that my scent might comfort him. It certainly didn't keep him awake.
He died in our bed, four nights ago, lying on his ad-libbed cushion of bath towels and hand towels and a wash cloth and a pillow case (he seemed to prefer the smoother fabric, to terry cloth), between John and me, as we slept. Earlier that evening, I'd held him on my chest, for a couple of hours, either stroking his emaciated sides, or resting a hand gently against him. Whether I was comforting him, or myself, I may never really know. What I do know is that it was difficult to believe, that Tuesday morning, that he'd really stopped breathing, finally, after nearly two weeks of no food intake, and near-total inertia. John checked for a heart beat. I touched Buster's ears -- that I always thought were so smooth, and darkened at the base, like a tree-ripened peach that shows you just where the nearest leaves used to be -- and there was no immediate twitch. His cold paws were limp.
Dead.
I'd decided, weeks ago, when the diagnosis was still fresh, that we would be burying him in our back yard -- I mentally pegged out a space, next to our redbud tree, a gift from our dear departed friend Irene, and which had been split in two, a few years ago, by a falling oak branch, but which had healed itself after I tied and taped it back together. It's a shame I didn't know what I was doing when I planted it. In any event, the plan was to dig a hole about four feet deep, inter our little red cat, and then fill the hole again. Maybe place a marker, if I could ever make up my mind what to use, and then actually create it, that is. I'd made mental note of where the mattox and the spade were, in the garage -- digging down through the underlying clay would be no picnic, I knew.
I also cleared a space in our freezer, as a temporary feline morgue, in case Buster died at a time that John wouldn't be able to attend the burial. Most of the frozen foods I simply crammed into another crowded space; the small packages of sausages I shifted to the fridge, where I let them thaw, and then tried to turn them into some sort of sad bachelor's dinner -- pan-fried links, with some loose meat squeezed from their casings, drizzled with maple syrup, and served with the remains of store-bought potato salad. As a meal, it served its purpose, in terms of clearing out freezer space. I added the uneaten sausage to a desperate batch of pasta sauce, which I hastily stirred up, and mixed with two other containers of left-over marinara, to make a barely acceptable companion for some squid ink linguini, which meal I gulped down while watching an old black-and-white movie on TCM, with Buster zoned out on one flat surface or another, breathing shallowly, his eyes dilated, the tip of his tail occasionally giving a little twitch. Who would expect, I wondered, that the impending death of an adopted house pet would have a material impact on my dining habits, for at least two meals anyway?
But John voted strenuously for cremation, which meant that I could forget where the mattox was lodged (actually, its yellow plastic handle makes it pretty easy to spot. Extrication is another matter), and not worry about getting callouses on my dainty hands, while digging and digging and digging, and cursing myself for insisting that the hole be just a bit deeper... Buster never liked being outdoors anyway. So I wrapped him yet again, this time in a plush dull-lavender-colored bath towel, and John drove us to the vet's office, where I stood for a few minutes with this inert bundle in my arms, as the vet's assistant talked dog food with a feisty youngish woman dressed in aggressively athletic attire. Then, we took Buster into one of the non-public spaces, and laid him on the chest freezer/morgue, to be picked up later and taken somewhere else for his final makeover. John quibbled a bit about leaving the towel -- he's never used it, so he doesn't know how uncooperative it's always been, in terms of actually removing moisture from a wet body -- so, before unwrapping Buster, I took off my dull red waffle-weave rugby shirt, which I've never liked that much anyway, because I was not going to leave my dead cat lying uncushioned and exposed on an old Amana chest freezer. Turns out, John likes the shirt more than he likes the towel, so that's how we left it -- a small oblong bundle of loosely folded terry cloth, that may or may not have had something inside it. I was a little weepy, and the vet's assistant gave me a bit of a hug.
Now I'm thinking of renting some glassblowing time, down in Newark, at GlassRoots, to see if I can make a blown glass urn for Buster's ashes, and also for the hair I've compulsively kept, from all those years of brushing him, while he was crouched in the upstairs sink, drinking the same water, from the tap, as I'd put in his bowl downstairs. Brush, brush, brush, while he lapped and purred, and every two days or so, I would pull all the cat hair out of the brush, and put it in a red plastic bowl I'd placed on the otherwise useless shelf that former owners had created, when they took out the original claw-footed tub, and built a shower. Only recently, due to a Facebook comment made by a former student, did I realize that I'd in fact accumulated a lifetime's worth of Buster's hair, in little bundles, packed into that dark red bowl. If it would spin, I might consider making some kitty fur drink coasters, but the urn seems a more fitting destination.
A blog about a cat. In spite of myself. In spite of having the following writing ideas: doing the NYTimes crossword puzzle, and the way it impacts the things I think about each day; a further breakdown of the remaining time, into hours and minutes, and musings on same; a kind of 'bucket list' of projects or goals I might have, for these last weeks and days -- even though the term 'bucket list' kind of makes me shudder; further musings centered on the daily crossword puzzle, this time focusing on particular words, or on experiments of a long-entertained writing project, of creating a story, which must incorporate every single word in the solved puzzle; different musings altogether, on what I might choose -- or not choose -- to do, during this last stretch of life; questions about what other people, reaching or having surpassed this watershed, do with their lives, and how do they face getting out of bed every day? Stuff like that. It may yet be that, with the melodrama of Buster the Dead Cat pretty much over and done with, I may actually follow one of these conversational paths. Stranger things have happened.
Now, though, I believe I'm going to take advantage of the splendid mid-November weather, and go out into the garage, to pull out the lawn mower and attach the cutting-collector bag (I've never used it), and see if, instead of raking all the myriad leaves piled up in our front and (to a deeper extent) our back yards, I can mulch them, and put them around the base of the ornamental cherry tree, and my newest addition to the landscape -- the old ornamental weeping cherry tree, which needs to have suckers trimmed from its main trunk, and the clumped black birch tree, which also needs to be trimmed of its lower branches, once we've had enough sufficiently cold weather, to make the sap run downward, and stop attracting birch beetles. I can't throw these trimmed birch wands away just yet -- as usual, the mere presence of these objects prompts visions of future art projects, the realization of which lies, in terms of scaled probability, somewhere on the outer reaches, along with having a second date with a Sasquatch, and taking a long weekend on a UFO.
Dealing with the lawn also gives me complete immunity from having to write any more of this -- instead, I can go back to imagining all the wonderful things I could be saying, if I weren't stuck, outside, raking the stupid leaves...
I think we may need to get a kitten.
© Walter Zimmerman 2014
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