A most distressing situation

A most distressing situation.

I am at my wit's end. I have two outdoor spayed and semi-socialized kitties, one of whom has gotten herself into a terrible jam.

I have been feeding these kitties out on my front porch and my back deck, you know, to avoid squabbling over their meager portions. 

This practice has also attracted a few raccoons, possum, skunks, and a few other cats, all of whom I gently tell to get lost. Sorry, no room at the inn. I've adopted these two kitties, but I can't feed the whole outdoor animal population.

The raccoons are pretty stubborn, however, and they make their rounds despite my adopting the practice of not feeding after dark.

Recently, I made the mistake of leaving my garage door open at night. This has happened on more than one occasion. I feared that the raccoons would start living under my house in my labyrinth of horrors crawlspace. 

(I have two crawlspaces, actually, and one of them is a "deadman's crawlspace," meaning you may enter, but there is no way you can get back out before you expire from mold and fiberglass inhalation. Truly nasty.) 

I vowed to start closing the garage every night to prevent unwanted visitors from taking up residence in there.

One of my kitties is an avid hunter, so naturally, she went in to explore, likely on the trail of a rodent of some kind. When I shut the garage door the other night, I made the call for any kitties to make their way out before the door was shut for the night. If someone did get locked in, no biggie, I was going to open the door up in the morning anyway.

The next day, Stevie (that's the hunter kitty) didn't show up for breakfast. I wasn't worried. I figured I must have locked her in the garage, and I went to open it up to let her out. I expected to see a frantic, grateful cat rush past me toward freedom. But instead it was just quiet. I figured she must be sleeping off a nice rodent binge. She would emerge on her own timeline.

But she didn't show up for dinner, and I wasn't going to leave the door open all night, because of the raccoon thing, so, reluctantly, I shut the door for the night. Night two.

The next morning (yesterday) I opened the garage, and there was evidence that something had been banging around in there. A few things were knocked over, but not really raccoon level destruction. I found evidence of claw marks that were clearly cat generated on a piece of duct tape that was sealing the corner of my garage door.

Now I was fairly certain that it was a cat, so I went about looking in the garage, even peering into the evil crawlspace and calling out for her. We are on good terms, and she will let me pet her, but she's not one to come when called. That's my other cat, Spooky. She's practically a dog, running after me when I go check the mail.

Anyway, I wanted to leave the garage door open for Stevie, but when I attempted to do this, Spooky, the dog kitty, came bounding up and tried to get into the crawlspace of no return. I didn't want her doing that because there could still be a rabid raccoon hiding under there waiting to eat her, who may or may not have eaten my other cat, and I didn't want to lose two cats to the Bermuda Triangle. One cat disappearance was enough.

So, I reluctantly shut the garage door once again. I figured sooner or later, Stevie would emerge and decide she'd had enough of hiding out. Can't live off of rodents forever. 

But after another whole day had passed, with me intermittently checking the garage and calling out for her, all the while having to fend off Spooky, who really seemed intent on entering the crawlspace, I finally had to resort to setting my large animal trap.

I loaded it up with cat food and even a can of tuna. I have had great success in the past trapping and re-homing all manner of wildlife in this trap: foxes, possum, raccoons, feral cats, you name it. (Never a skunk, thankfully.) I set up a surveillance cam with night vision and waited for my first customer. I was still not certain that it was just a cat in my garage, but the evidence was leaning heavily in that direction.

Another day and night passed, and no action on the cam. The trap was untouched. Now it is the third day, today, and I am really worried. I knew Stevie had to be in there, but she hadn't made a peep. My indoor cats, sensing something was amiss, had done some yowling the night before.

This morning, I decided to explore the forbidden zone a bit further, sticking my head into the dead man's crawl. I heard a faint meow. It was Stevie. I couldn't see her because a lot of the floor insulation under there had fallen down. I grabbed a cane, and gently lifted a fallen section, and there she was behind it. 

I called to her softly, using my best "good kitty" voice, but she was having none of it. She skittered away even further into the gloomy, uninhabitable darkness. At least she could skitter. I lay there on the concrete, pleading, coaxing, offering food and water, but she seemed firmly set against the idea of approaching the exit.

I have moved the trap as far in as the camera viewing would allow, so I can monitor when and if she decides to approach the freshly placed wet food. I don't really want to traumatize her with the trap, but I also want to end this without further incident. I'm afraid that if I don't trap her, when I go to open the garage door, she will spook and run back into the crawlspace, prolonging the whole standoff. I can't leave the garage door open, for fear of losing another cat, or having a raccoon or other undesirable take up residence under there.

So that's where it stands now. Waiting for a poor traumatized cat to take the bait and get traumatized even further before eventually being liberated by me. I know the fire department has been known to rescue cats from trees, but short of removing my floor with a fire axe, there is no way a fireman is getting into that crawlspace. Unless they were a very tiny, very courageous firefighter, in which case, I'm sure their skills would be needed elsewhere, being fire season and all.

That's it. Thanks for reading. Please comment if you have any helpful suggestions. Or cold cuts. I know cats love those.

Later that evening, as I was washing my hands and just about to sit down to dinner, I heard some loud meowing coming through the AC vents in my downstairs bathroom.

I had been willing to play the waiting game, but her meowing under the house was pulling at my heartstrings, so I stopped what I was doing and went back into the garage, determined to do whatever it took to end this. 

I removed the cage and saw that she was a lot closer to the opening, so I sat down and had another go at negotiation. It was back and forth for a few tense minutes, both of us conceding just a little at a time. 

First, an apology from me. OK. Done. Then lots of promises of fresh turkey. And whatever else I had on hand. 

 

I placed a small piece of turkey on a plate and slid it toward her. She advanced a little, meowing loudly. She still wasn't comfortable with my giant frame in front of her, so I backed off. 

 

"Further," I could almost hear her thinking. I went completely out of sight. In an instant, so did the turkey. Down in one gulp. 

 

I knew it was just a matter of time and space at this point. I put down some more, this time closer to the outside. Soon she began eyeing the world outside of the crawlspace and meowing even louder.

 

"You want the garage door open?" I said, sensing she might take a chance and bolt past me to the outside world. Another demand met. 

 

I opened the door, making certain that the other cat wasn't going to make a dash inside. I wasn't down for a revolving door cat trick. 

 

She did as I had hoped and ran past me and the extra food, out to the glorious freedom of the evening air. 

 

"Yay, Stevie!" I gleefully proclaimed to anyone within earshot.

 

I went back in and sealed off the opening, closed the garage for the night, and placed the rest of the food in her usual feeding location on the back deck.

 

She followed me without hesitation and ran up to me for pats and whisker rubs. All was forgiven.

 

That's all folks. You may all sleep sound tonight. Stevie is free, fed and happy!

Universe 1, Andrew 0 -- A text that didn't send (thankfully?)

 

Hello again. Sorry about the tardy reply. I’ve been dealing with some weird stuff over here on the home front. 

I credit myself for being a mostly rational rather than magical thinker, however, some of the events of the last couple days have me questioning that. 

I tend to be a little skeptical of connections drawn between seemingly disparate events like:  “I lost my car keys, then I begged the universe, or God, or whatever, and suddenly they appeared in my left coat pocket”  kind of thing. 

Yesterday, however, I was shaking my fist at the sky (I can be a bit immature, I’ll admit) when a blog post I was editing disappeared from the text editor without rhyme or reason. And then something really weird occurred.

I’d been trying to stave off a stye that was threatening to ruin my week, so I testily opened the hot water valve in my bathroom sink to wet a washcloth for a warm compress. Middle finger still extended skyward and curses issuing forth from my mouth, I made it clear to the universe how I felt about how my day was going.

At the instance that I turned on the faucet, bright orange water poured out of the tap, like a home edition of one of the plagues of Egypt. The timing was so synchronous that I had to laugh… and tremble just a little.

“I take it back! I take it back!” I said to the universe, meekly.

The universe did relent, and the water began to run clear, the plague of blood water not returning. This has never happened before at my house, and (knock on wood) it hasn’t happened since.

The stye was still bothering me, however, and I made several eye doctor appointments because I have suffered with things like this in the past. (I’m not a walking collection of problems, I promise. Well, no more than average, I suppose.)

Anyway, my mood suffered as a result, and in my painful desperation, I looked up home remedies and stumbled across an old one that recommended rubbing a gold wedding band on the affected eyelid. I had been using warm compresses for several days, to no effect. 

I was skeptical, but after reading several reviews of this supposed hack, I thought I’d give it a try. I still have my old wedding ring from my marriage to my deceased wife. 

After just a minute or so of lightly rolling this golden cylinder around on my closed eyelid, the stye ruptured, and the pain was relieved. I sterilized the area and used a teabag to help relieve the swelling. This was only a few hours ago, but the issue is about 75% resolved, and my mood has improved greatly. 

I now somewhat believe in magic.

Why am I telling you all this? I don’t know, I just figured you deserved an explanation for my slow response time. I’m usually right on it when it comes to texting.

Also, please excuse the length of this text. I’m trying an experiment. I’m composing it in my phone’s notepad, and I’ll attempt to copy and paste it, to hopefully avoid sending out mystery words because of Tinder’s tiny, invisible text box.

Here are some links to things I have created, some recently, and some going back as far as 2005, when I used to be able to use ProTools to record some of my original stuff. I’m in a dry spell as far as creating original music these days, so I am mostly doing covers of songs that I liked growing up. 

Some of this stuff is kind of raw, weird, and I don’t know what, exactly. I just figured I’d throw it out there, and you can judge away. 

Let me know if these links don’t work, as sometimes you have to be a member. I’m not sure, but they worked for me.

https://soundcloud.com/user-256645391/sets/hoody-mix

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN6tc1xxaGw-uU1U_02O5GA

Anyway, hopefully, you will find some of it mildly entertaining, even if it’s not your exact cup of tea. Classical and opera it is not. 

It’s late, so for now, I will bid you a fond goodnight, good morning or afternoon, whichever it is when you receive this.  

----

I tried to copy and paste the above text into a tiny message window to send to a girl on Tinder who Superliked me and has texted a couple of times. It didn't send, and try as I might, the little button was grayed out, preventing that lengthy silliness from going forth. Umm...thanks?

I want to say here, for public record, that I must concede that the universe just might know what it's doing after all, and that these things that happen to me are not random, nor are they necessarily punitive or malicious. There just may be some kind of benevolent reason for which these events occur, tragic as they seem at the time to my drama queen sensibilities. Maybe, just maybe. 

I WANT to believe.

The stye really is 75% better, and although there's another one creeping up, it seems quite a bit calmer, and hopefully less painful. The first one was about to drive me to an early grave. No kidding. It was bad. We'll see what tomorrow brings. 

I'll be a good boy. 

Thanks, Universe, and goodnight!

A deleted post

There was supposed to be a post here, I suppose. But was it ever there? The universe decided to delete its entire contents as I searched for the perfect picture to adorn it. 

It was going to be a post about a dream I had the other night, in which I shared an intimate kiss with my best friend. All the emotions and details were fresh when I had written it down. It was the most exquisite dream, full of images which I will treasure.

Gone.

So, lesson for the day? Yeah, sure. Give up. It was just a dream, after all.

Just for that, no picture today, just petty, pouty text, of which I am not proud. 

I'm not proud of much these days, if I'm honest. 

I'm a collection of poor personality traits, physical defects and a walking encyclopedia of misdeeds. 

And I'm on Tinder.

Why in the fuck would I even bother? 

My contagion needs eradication, not advertisement. 

I am a jar of scabs.

FML.

A relative question

When my therapist asks how I'm doing, there is always a long pause before I respond: "I don't know." And then I launch into my 20 minute soliloquy, bitching about the various things that have been pissing me off since our last session. 

I don't know why I always feel compelled to start every statement with some version of this. I'm not a politician trying to evade taking a definitive stance. But that is exactly what I'm doing. "I don't know" is my mantra, and I cling to it as if it were an actual core tenet of my beliefs. Look back at the beginning of this paragraph for proof.

Part of it may come from my experience with the cult. In the 80s, I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the dogma of a particular Christian based sect. Individual thought was suppressed, verboten, and anyone who expressed any deviance from the statements and claims of Pastor Robert Leon (yes, I'm going to keep calling him out by name) was met met with rebuke, if not immediate expulsion. 

"We have The Truth," he would admonish, and he could back up any of his claims with a flurry of scriptural references before you could say "boo." After a while, his claims were just accepted as gospel, and references weren't even checked. 

His power lay in our acceptance of the idea that there was an actual truth with a capital T, and that it was contained in the Holy Bible, New American Standard version, to be precise. That was the most correct translation, after all, and he had done the research, so we might as well acquiesce, or there'd be hell to pay. Literal, eternal torment, with fire and brimstone. The whole bit.

I swallowed the pill, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth. Eventually, I found that this wholesale abandonment of critical thought and the unquestioned belief in a particular set of ideas to be untenable. Like a cat with a hairball, I vomited up the pill before it could fully take effect. Apparently, the Word of God was not agreeing with my sentient intestinal guidance system, so I quit the cult, leaving after a paltry 6 years of service. 

It didn't take to long to get back to the life I'd left behind. Back to the familiar hedonism of my teenage lifestyle, pot and alcohol and trying (unsuccessfully) to get laid. Except that 6 years had seen a lot of changes in my social circles and the world at large, and I'd missed most of the 80s. Oh, well, I didn't much care for Madonna or hair metal anyway. 

Why am I tangentially revisiting this period? I don't know. Ha. There it is again. But I do know. To give context for why I don't claim to know anything. For one, I don't want to be like that cult guy, so damn cocksure about everything, convinced that everyone who held an alternate belief was going to hell.

Fast forward many years, many experiences, a marriage, a career, the illness and death of my wife, and a brief but intense spiritual quest for answers, and I landed somewhere in the camp of non-dual philosophy. Here, everything is one, and nothing lays claim to being The Truth. For my descent into "I-don't-knowism," I blame Adyashanti, Alan Watts, Eckhardt Tolle, and others of that ilk.

Within our particular realm of existence, perhaps, some qualified, definitive statements can be made. (Insert your favorite truism here.) As for other realms of existence, I don't know. I'm living in this one. Your reality might differ. It's a shared experience, perceived differently from different angles. I wanted to trust science and physics, but then they came out with quantum mechanics, and we are back to fairy tales.

So how am I doing? I don't know. It's a relative question, at best, isn't it?

----

Definitive statements for the day: My right upper eyelid is swollen, red and painful. It has been this way since last Wednesday. It is the same eyelid where I had a chalazion, which is a kind of blockage of the meibomian gland that leads to chronic inflammation. See Oct 2020. I am only making this note so that later I can reference a start date. The last time, the condition persisted for months before it seemed to resolve after a steroid injection into that eyelid.

The last sip

That last sip of coffee. Everyone knows it’s the best. Well, the first is pretty good too. But it’s hard to engineer a second first sip once you’ve already had one for the day.

The last sip, however, you can engineer to repeat over and over with the aid of a thermos and a coffee cup. Make it a nice, personal favorite ceramic coffee cup if you can.

Simply continue to pour yourself single sip sized servings into the cup and "Voila!" Whenever you feel like experiencing the joy of draining your cup to the dregs and savoring that last little bit (as if it were actually the last) you can do so with impunity.

Knowing that there are a potentially unlimited number of these little moments still awaiting you in the thermos provides you with an additional layer of satisfaction and security. 

This blog post was brought to you by Maxwell House. This is a shameless attempt to garner endorsements from "Big Coffee."

Random bits from notes in the talkie thingy.

 

Give me Dramamine, my drama queen,
I need to escape from your Escher-sketched dream

You’ve got reality, all folded into a Tesseract,
And I am the Singing Butthole, I don’t know how to act

Papa ooh mau-mau, yap, yap, yap yap yap…yackety-yack,
And all that playground smack.

——-

Why you gotta be so
Pokey, pokey
Jabby stabby?
Iron jaw, furrowed brow
Mean person, mean person?

I feel my soul leaving my body when I’m around you

Not in a good way, mind you 

Like a tortured crab

In a pot that I don’t realize is boiling me alive.

Just a vague feeling that something is

Not right

——

Share the air…(From DBSA Guidelines)

Share the chair. Everyone who wishes to sit has an opportunity to do so.

Share the Jerr. Everyone who wishes to talk to Jerry has an opportunity to do so.

Shar the arrrh. Everyone who wishes to be a pirate has the opportunity to do so. No one person should monopolize the poop deck.

—-

Well, there it is. I think I should document the fact that I opened up this note in order to make a note, and, once again, I have completely forgotten what it was supposed to be about.

On the plus side, I just ran through a pretty good rendition of Wig-in-a-box. I don’t know where I’m going with these non-traditional gender-themed songs. I’m one of those people where if I like a song, whoever sings it, male or female, if I like the song, I don’t want to change it one whit. I try to stay as close to the original as I can.

That being said, sometimes I pick some doozies, and I cross state lines as far as gender and all that stuff. Take it with a grain of salt. I mean, we all have our different sides, so something about any of the songs that I might sing has resonated with some part of me at some point. Anyway, is that enough patter? I was told to work on my patter. I went home and made pancakes instead. I think I misunderstood.

——-

Text message not sent to Lynne: (alternate timeline averted)

I enjoyed our little jam session (and the conversation) yesterday. Thank you for indulging me. I’m just around the corner, so if you ever want to play music, or need help dialing in your sound system— or just hang out, it would be my pleasure and privilege.

I took the liberty of ordering the adapter cord for you. I hope that’s OK? I had to meet a minimum on Amazon to qualify for free shipping on something else. Anyway, I want to donate it to show my support of Clover and what you’re doing there.

I’ll let you know when it gets here so you can incorporate it in your setup.

Thanks again for the fun time last night!


——


Shows what I know

Going to go with the flow

random access to my

New way of thinking.


Gonna shine

Going to be on time.

Smile, if I’m inclined

and stop on a dime


Nobody’s gonna rain on my parade, not today

-42° in Yatzuk

Wherever the fuck that is

Sucks to be them 

——


Hamburger salad!

Hamburger salad!

He never really had to say it twice.

But he did so just to be nice


——

My love for you is not platonic. It is Plutonic, meaning that I love you from afar. You know, because Pluto is the farthest planet, or was, before it got demoted.