Kitten News

Of the six new guys, Albion and Frodo continue to show the most personality.  Albion is the odd kitten out, often sleeping when the other five are in pin-ball mode, bouncing around the cabin and off each other; eating when the others are all sleeping; and so forth.  Frodo is the adventurous one–first out from under the bed, first one out of the cabin.  Campbell–the calico tabby–is getting pretty adventurous, too.

I had thought they were doing well with the litter-box thing, but this morning I found LOTS of evidence to the contrary under the table.  Lots of little kitten-poops and puddles of pee.   Found out where Campbell’s diarrhea went. A little day-pack emblazoned with the Christian fish symbol was especially urine-soaked; discarded the thing.  (I had found it in the dumpster, and  just kept it as sort of a joke anyway.) Cleaned the rest of the mess up, sprayed with pet odor spray, no problem.

Last night, Silky and her kittens came around–just three now, number four has been missing for weeks  and is presumed dead.  Silky was my first cabin cat, but was deposed when Frankie, the cross-eyed siamese, showed up preggers on my doorstep last winter.(Silky and Frankie were enemies, now they have sort of an uneasy truce, can share the porch without animosity.)  Anyway, all of Silky’s new kittens are pretty much feral, never having been handled as young kits.  CC let me pet her as she (gender?) was eating.  Then I made a big mistake–picked her up.  Interfering with a cat in any way while it is eating  is a feline felony–contempt of cat–especially when the cat is feral.  I experienced numerous puncture wounds and scratches as she escaped my well-meaning but stupid attention. 

Thank goodness for Betadine and microfoam tape.

Announcing a New Religion!

One of the flashiest of the Jesus miracles was the water into wine thing, right?  (Never mind that any half-way competant stage illusionist could duplicate it.)  Turning water into wine was a good trick, godlike powers and all.  However, there is another life-form that can do this as well–yep, ordinary yeast (I bet Kathy already knows where this is going.) 

 So I propose a new religion–the Yeastafarians.  You will worship yeast and consume vast amounts of its by-products, just as the Rastas consume massive amounts of ganja.  As a form of worship.  Donuts will become a sacrament (no bagel-beaters need apply, however).

Elders in the church will wield massive breadsticks as signs of authority.  Mass will consist of lots and lots of beer and  stuffed-crust pizza.  Catholics have the Pope, cardinals, arch-bishops, bishops, and priests.  We will have the Poop, Orioles, Arch- Carhops, Carharts, and Alterboy Toys.

I am still working out the details.  Feel free to add suggestions–you may get  ordained.

Kitten Tales

Well, the six kittens that Frankie had under my bed have started to toddle out and explore the cabin.  First out, a Siamese I named Frodo–intrepid little guy (I haven’t sexed them yet, will refer to them in the male gender for convenience).  Next out was the gorgeous one, almost all white–named Albion (almost albino–get it?).  Them came a mixed brown/white/orange tabby or calico (I can never remember the difference) I named Campbell–he looks Scottish and soupy.  Then there’s Freaky Deaky, a striped guy who freaked when I picked him up.  Next is Randolph S. Catt (Randy for short), an orange and white guy with a white marking across his back that looks like a saddle.  Finally, there is New Jersey  (Jeff for short)– now that one really  requires some explanation.  He is sorta cinnamon-ginger, so I thought about Cinnamon (too cliche) and Cinnabun–(too cutesy) and Cinnamunson, New Jersey (out of the question)  That reminded me of Jeff Goldblum, one of my favorite actors, who played a character called New Jersey in one of my favorite movies (Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai).  Hence, New Jersey etc.

They are of course incredibly cute–later this week, I hope that SuSu will have photos on her site.  I keep the cabin door open a bit and use twelve-packs of sparkling water to keep them in, but they have been able to climb up on top of them.  And as I was getting ready to leave, Campbell was climbing into the litter box.  Sigh.  How fast they grow.  Love ‘em to pieces.

More later.

Update on the Update

I peeked in during the day, no sign of him.  Unless he is under the bed scrunched up against the wall or sorta curled up right in front of the door, the guy is out running around loose.  I wonder what he is doing for meds.

Next–when I am feeling better–an update on the kittens.

Update:  The Neighbor from Hell

Well, he is on another binge, but this time he is at least being quiet about it.  Started maybe a week ago, when I caught him sneaking around the back of the cabins toward his place with a half-rack of cheap ice beer (the drug of choice–along with meth–for the local losers).  He was barely coherant when he got the landlord to cash his welfare check that day.  The last time I saw him was this past Friday, when he was heading toward his cabin from the direction of the local liquor store, may have had bottles in the pockets of his fatigue jacket.

Last night, the landlady called me out, wanted to talk to me about him.  Hadn’t seen him for days, she wondered if he was dead.  I tried his door–the knob turned, but the deadbolt was thrown.  Checked the side windows, all the blinds were drawn. I peeked through the window in the front door, saw his empty unmade bed, couldn’t see a lot of the floor–he made have been on the floor, or under the bed. Later today I will check again.

Biggest question in my mind–if he IS dead, will I be able to scrounge his TV and home theater system?

The Case of the Burgled Bunny

For new readers, the strip of cabins and storage units where I set up my flea market stand is unkindly known as Felony Flats–or Ghetto Lakes.  This refers to the fact that many of the denizens are ex-cons, welfare moms,   professional loonies (that is, folks who at one time would be in mental hospitals, but who are sent out into the world with a pat in the head and a handfull of pills–they are usually harmless unless they forget to take their meds and/or go on alcohol binges–but I digress), meth freaks, and other individuals who do not have much role in, say, setting national policy on foreign affairs.  Shit, I am one of the most respectable epople there, which alone should tell you a lot.

I have a 10 by twelve foot cabin which I share with ten cats, so I don’t have much closet space–shit, I don’t even HAVE a closet. Hence, I have a lot of stuff stored on the porch–boxes of videos and books, a cube fridge, a typewriter, jugs of water, laundry detergent–stuff like that.  And although I have lived there for three years, no one has ever messed with my stuff.  This is partly because I live close to the offic under a big security light : partly because I make an effort to ingratiate myself with my low-life neighbors; and partly because, brain-damaged as they might be, most folks there know better than to fuck with someone who sells weapons for a living.

Last night, I got robbed.  Okay, not robbed–ripped off.  (There’s a difference–ask SuSu, Secretary of Space and Nitpicker General.)  And this happened while I was in the cabin and awake.  I have this cute little porcelin bunny I scrounged out of the dumpster one time, and he sits in the little yard next to my porch steps.  Other than the hanging flower basket and big flower pot on the porch (thanks to SuSu for these amenities!), everything else these is just utilitarian  stuff that has no place else to go.  Right before I went down last night when I went out to lock the car, I notived the bunny was gone.  The rabbit ran!  My bunny had been burgled!

I figured it pretty much had to be the work of a drunk, a loony, or an irresponsible kid–we have plenty of all three here.  Being a smidge paranoid, I wondered if this was some weird plot to fuck with my head, but figured the locals incapable of such subtleties of thought.  This morning, I mentioned it to Tawanna, the landlord’s wife.  She knew nothing about the lone lepus.  A bit later, I talked to the landlord, who laughed and showed me where it has landed, minus one ear, in the trash can.  It seems his three-year old had purloined it and was carting it around in a toy truck.  It fell out, the ear broke, and Mike, not knowing–or caring, evidently–who the owner was, just pitched it.

But I got my bunny back, and Mike provided me with a tube of Superglue to replace the ear.  The really cool thing is, one of my knife stands arrived broken.  The wholesaler will replace it gratis, but I won’t have to return it, since the shipping charge would exceed its value.  All I have in the way of cement is Elmer’s, which is not puissant enough for the job, and the Superglue will be perfect.

The Universe works in strange and mysterious ways.  Whenever I need something, I always get it, one way or another.  SuSu calls it being in the Flow.

Life is good.

I’m Mostly At Paradox Now

My dear seestor threatened to track me down and break my cat’s kneecaps or something if I didn’t post, so here goes.

Thing is, since I am co-mod of a forum at http//:www.paradoxsector.com  now, I spend most of my limited comp time there.  Right now, I am on a library comp I had to drive   over twenty miles to use.  But well worth it.

In other news briefly, I sorta solved the problem of the noisy neighbor by giving him a set of headphones to use.  He usually uses them.  My heart sank last night, when I saw him sneaking around the back with a half-rack of cheap beer.  But I decided not to sweat it and if he got noisy again, I would just turn off the electricity to his place and put a padlock on the circuit-breaker box.  Didn’t have to, though.

On Forgiveness

You go to enough 12-step meetings, you eventually hear a lot of the same stuff over and over again.  You know that one guy will talk about how he still craves dope, and another guy will talk about his unevolved, Piscean Age higher power, and so forth.  Kathy and I call these canned statements “tapes”–not that they are necessarily insincere, but that sometimes they sound a tad rehearsed.  One of my favorite tapes to play is about how, for me, abstaining from dope is the easy part of recovery.  After all, I say, I’m lazy, abstaining basically means doing nothing, and doing nothing comes easy to me.  This usually gets a laugh, even though it isn’t really true.  Doing nothing isn’t easy for me; I am happiest when I am working a 14-hour day gun show, schmoozing with fellow arms merchants, making deals on guns, and selling tons of knives.  I am unhappiest when I have periods of enforced idleness, such as when it rains and I can’t open up my stand.  But I digress.
  What I meant to go on to say is that for me, forgiveness is that hardest part of recovery.  I have a long memory for some things–you do me well and I will  not rest until I have paid you back somehow–you do me wrong, and I bear malice towards you pretty much  for life, and will not be content until I have fucked you up back one way or another.
  Anyway, the other night  my brain was on overtime–thoughts just kept rushing in, and I would have blogged my little head off if I had had computer access.  But one thing I thought about was this forgiveness thing, and I just may have  made some progress on that score.
  I was thnking about how my god does not forgive, because he/she/it/them has no need to forgive–that is, my god can be neither offended nor harmed by anything we puny primates say or do, so there is never anything to forgive.  Then I thought about how godlike we are–or at least can be, if we so choose.  I remembered wht Jesus said ( I am a tad uncomfortable quoting the Bible, since so much of it is BS, but now and then there are a some pearls among the persiflage), something along the lines of “Anything I can do, you can do better.”  Okay, I am being less than accurate–it was more like “All those things I have done, so ye can do also, and more.”  Something like that anyway.
  From there I progressed to the notion that we–all of us–can not really be hurt.  Sure, we can kill each other, diss each other, inflict physical pain on each other, ad infinitum–but the essential part of each of us, the soul,  is immortal and inviolate.  At the deepest and most essential level, none of us can really be harmed.
  From there, I thought about all the injuries I inflicted on myself and others, all the things I could not forgive myself for.   I have no right to speak for others and the indignities and injuries I inflicted on them, but I still have some physical pain and disability from drug-related mishaps I perpetrated on myself many years ago.  I used to spend a lot of time kicking myself about it.  Now I am more like, “No harm no foul, big deal.  My soul is still here, intact and immortal as ever, so no real harm was done.”
  What I attained with that epiphany was not so much forgiveness, as the transcendence of the need to forgive. Right now as of this moment, there is no one on earth I really want to kill, or even maim–and that, for me, is a huge step forward.

The Neighbor from Hell, Part IV:  The Final Solution(s)

Well, Bughouse Boy was at it again the other day, blasting his TV from around midnight and again early in the morning.  I yelled at him, he ignored me, I called the police.  Fifteen minutes later, the landlord yelled at him, and then it got quiet.  But not becaue the guy turned the TV down–the landlord’s wife got totally disgusted, went to the breaker box for the cabin, and shut off the power.  She showed me where it is, told me to just shut off the power if I had to.  So that is the final solution–dude acts up, I cut off his juice.  Very satisfying.

But I found another, temporary solution–last night–the same day the troopers came around in the morning  (for the third time) about his noise, I just went over with a big old frying pan in hand and whanged it against the cabin, making a very loud booming noise–:”Cut that shit out”  I requested politely.  No response.  So I whaled on the cabin again, yelled “Turn down that fucking TV, God damn you to hell.”  That got hs attention, he turned it off.

Four hours later, when it was late and I wanted to go to bed, he was at it again.  This time, I just whapped the window frame a few times with a broom handle and he got the message.  It was quiet all night, and quiet again this morning.

With luck, he decided to take all  his pills at once and is just laying in there quietly decomposing.

The Neighbor from Hell, Part III:  He’s baa-aack!

Yep.  Yesterday avening, he came walking back.  Either he got bailed out (possible, he has had visitors who seem solvent) or I was misinformed about the criminal charges.  He called me, said he was sorry about the noise. Now I will digress–although I am not without guile, I am without pretense.  I am neither  forgiving, nor “nice”, nor a  particularly “good” person in most of the conventional senses.  I do not claim to be otherwise. I make a good friend, but  a terrible enemy.  So I didn’t even bother making eye contact, tiurned my back on him, went back into my cabin.  Fuck him.

At least his return did solve one or two small dilemmas.  I had been thinking about getting a half-gallon of cheap vodka and putting it in his fridge so he would find it on his return and maybe drink himself to death.  Also, I was head-tripping about planting some drugs in his cabin for the cops to find next time they came around.

At least I won’t have to deal with his dog.  Someone else there got tired of her kids stepping in dog shit, called Animal Control and got the dog taken to the pound in his absence.  He has been spending a lot of time lately looking for it. 

In an ideal society, the dog would get a good home and he would be put to sleep.