Mallory's Camera

Valentine’s Day is actually an ancient Roman fertility festival called Lupercal that the greeting card industry jacked up on steroids & mass-marketed.

I bought my vibrator a card, chocolates, & flowers.

I also slept the whole night through, which is practically unheard of. And whaddiya know—the sun is out today! That sepulchral Snowglobe of Doom hunkering down on us lo this week past is lifted! So I am feeling pretty chipper today. Though shortly I must go out & sprinkle salt on the vast sea of ice engulfing the driveway.

###

Ellen had to put her dog down yesterday.

I offered to go with her to the vet, but Ellen is even more of a No Whinging Allowed! type than I am, so of course, she wouldn’t hear of it.

So instead, I told Ellen all about Milo, the most wonderful dog ever…



Milo was originally RTT’s dog. But, of course, RTT was the most horrible teenage boy ever & completely neglected him, so I ended up as Milo's caretaker.

In Monterey, we lived five blocks away from one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, and I took Milo down there two or three times a day where he ran & frolicked & had a particular obsession with large pieces of driftwood—bigger than he was!—which he would mouth merrily & try to drag home.

Milo journeyed with us all around the country when we traveled with the circus. And when we ended up in Ithaca & Ben walked out on me, Milo was the most faithful of companions.

Ben abandoned me with all the animals—two dogs, two cats, and a disabled box turtle. I was so destitute, having lost my business, my house, all my possessions, & all my savings, I could barely feed myself & RTT during the half-the-time I played custodial parent, let alone the pets. There was simply nothing I could do for money in Ithaca.

I knew the moment I left Ithaca, I would be able to find work again—except I couldn’t leave Ithaca because I didn’t trust Ben not to let RTT drop out of school. I had to get RTT through high school.

I’d found a house in a village called Freeville, 10 miles outside of Ithaca. The Cement Bungalo! Freeville was the Meth Capital of Tompkins County, but it was situated in a landscape of almost unearthly beauty, and so, my chief recreation—since I couldn’t afford anything else—became hiking miles & miles & miles every day.

I liked following the creeks to spy on the beavers. I became utterly obsessed with beaver civilization. Beaver lodges! Beaver dams!

Milo accompanied me, ever faithfully at my side. And the Meezer, my all but feral cat, would stalk us, trailing unfaithfully at a distance of 10 yards or so.



One thing about the companion animals in my life: They tend to die at moments just before my life is about to make an enormous change.

Thus, Edward Hopper and Dennis Hopper, my two angora bunnies, leapt so high they broke their spines in 1993, just a few days before I was to drive up to Clarion in Seattle.

Clarion in Seattle is where I met Ben.

Being me, I had some notion that I would cancel Clarion, hire a carpenter to make little bunny wheelchairs, & devote the rest of my life to caring for my little lagamorphian paraplegics.

But I got talked out of it.

###

I left Ithaca in 2012, less than a week after RTT finally graduated from high school.

All sorts of other things were happening, too.

Like Ben collapsed into an encephalitic coma, which turned out to be related to a virulent case of heretofore undiagnosed Hep C.

For a couple of days, it looked like Ben was going to die right then & there, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do because RTT was not starting at Syracuse University until the fall. Was I gonna have to drag RTT down to the NYC metro for three months? What a nightmare that would be! Because one thing I was absolutely determined was happening: I was gonna get the hell out of Dodge.

But Ben recovered (after a fashion), so phew! Crisis averted.

###

RTT found a home for Nimoy, the disabled box turtle.

I was going to take the two cats—Rutger & the Meezer—with me. But I knew I would never find a place to live with two cats and a dog.

So, I’d tried to get Ben to take Milo. And first, Ben said he would, but then in typical Ben fashion, he weaseled out of it. And I didn’t know what I was gonna do. I couldn’t abandon Milo! But neither could I stay in Ithaca.

But then, Milo was diagnosed with cancer.

I had no money to buy him chemotherapy, and anyway, it was unlikely the chemotherapy would have worked. The cancer was very aggressive.

So, the very last thing I did in Ithaca the morning I left was to have Milo put to sleep.
I had to do it alone. RTT & I, at that point, were barely speaking: I guess he blamed me for his father abandoning me. Ben was the parent who never said, No; I was the parent who attempted—unsuccessfully—to impose some kind of order & discipline on his life. Naturally, RTT always preferred Ben.

Milo lay in my arms as the vet injected the euthanasia, and I stroked him & told him all about Doggie Heaven, which is an enormous beach filled with big sticks to drag, and other dogs to scamper & play with, and the beautiful crystal-clear ocean to swim in.

Milo’s eyes were closed.

But just before he died, he opened his eyes, looked deep into my soul, so lovingly & compassionately that I could feel him blessing me.

###

The NDE description of heaven is a long white tunnel, filled with light, that you kinda wiggle through like a kid in one of those McDonald’s play areas.

When you make it through to the other side, all your dead family are supposed to be waiting with a big picnic lunch.

My family hated me. None of them are gonna be there on the other side of the white light with a basket lined in red and white checked cloth filled with celestial deviled eggs!

But Milo will be there. And the irascible Meezer. And pawky Rutger. And Dennis Hopper & Edward Hopper.

And together, we will all go to visit the beavers—-who in Heaven live in golden dams and speak English in the most mellifluous voices that resonate like the finest W.H. Auden poetry.

Sybyl came home from boarding with a bit of a limp, and when I press down on her rear haunches, the left leg is definitely weaker than the right.

No apparent discomfort. And though she is a little bit clumsier than usual, she is scampering around the house in no apparent distress.

But this is something that happened while she was boarding. I know this for a fact because the day before I brought her in for boarding, I brought her in for vaccinations and her yearly checkup. If her leg had been an issue then, they would have found it then.

I’m not pissed. Shit happens. I like my vet. I’m fairly certain this is a ligament sprain.

I Googled this adorable set of feline PT exercises:



But while I was Googling, I also ran across a list of all the Horrible Things It Could Be: deep vein thrombosis, kidney disease, etc, etc, etc.

So, now I’m thinking I should bring her back to the vet today if only to establish a baseline.

And they will, of course, recommend all sorts of expensive diagnostic procedures.

So UGH.



Back when I was destitute, the Meezer was forever getting into all sorts of misadventures.

She was the ultimate outdoor predator cat!

Every morning, I would find a dead field mouse or dead squirrel on my outdoor welcome mat—offerings from the Meezer. She wanted to keep me fed so I’d have enough strength to wield the can opener that opened her cans of Friskies.

On two occasions, she sustained life-threatening injuries.

The first was when she was sprayed in the face by a skunk.

The second was when some field mouse or squirrel fought back and ripped a five-inch laceration into her face.

Like I said, I was destitute back then and couldn’t afford vet visits.

So I treated both incidents myself.

###

The Meezer developed a chemical pneumonia following her misadventure with the skunk. So, I went to PetCo, bought some tetracycline—people use it to clean fish tanks—calculated the right dose for her weight, and dosed her with it for 10 days.

She was very weak. I kept her in my closet away from the dogs—when my husband abandoned me, he abandoned me with both dogs!—and syringe-fed her for those 10 days.

And lo and behold!

The Meezer made a complete recovery.

###

I sutured the laceration with fishing line.

I could tell the Meezer was totally out of it because she was a cat who erupted into hisses and growls if I so much as attempted to brush her. She was a long-haired cat; she needed brushing! But since she wouldn’t let me, she developed dreadlocks and ran around the Ithaca woods looking like a Rastafarian cat goddess.

She didn’t have much fight in her with the head wound, though, so I sewed it up the best I could. The stitches lacked symmetry but hey! The Meezer wasn’t gonna audition for The Real Housecats of New York.

Then it was back in the closet with her for another 10 days so I could smear bacitracin on her wound and repeat the tetracycline regimen.

She didn’t like that. I bought an elbow-length pair of purple rubber gloves at the Dollar Store so I could minister to her without being scratched to pieces.

And she survived.

###

The Meezer eventually passed away at the ripe old age of 20 after my life had managed to right itself again, and I was living in Hyde Park. By that time, I was able to afford trips to the vet once more, so the Meezer was euthanized.

Twenty is venerable for a cat: She was very frail, just one big puffball of tangled, matted fur. As the vet pushed the medication into her veins, she opened her blue eyes and looked at me.

I often think if that thing is true about the tunnel of white light and all your loved ones on the other side waiting for your arrival, the only beings waiting for me will be my companion animals, the Meezer, Rutger, Milo, Fritz.

Nobody else ever loved me.

For whatever reason, I seem singularly incapable of inspiring love.

The animals will be able to talk on the other side of the tunnel, of course.

“Humans suck,” the Meezer will tell me. “But for a human, you weren’t so bad.”



I spent the rest of yesterday Remunerating, tromping, counting butterflies, harvesting, and making pesto.

Honestly, I could spend 12 hours a day counting butterflies.

There are actually four in the photograph below:

Another awful day.

###

In the morning, I took Sybyl the cat to the vet. They’ll be boarding her while I’m in Sicily, and she needed immunizations.

In the past, L has taken care of her while I’ve been gone, but I’m thinking L has become a bit old (and yes, infirm) for that.

I’d priced the immunizations. Around $150.

But they wanted to do something called a “senior cat checkup.” (Senior? Sybyl is only eight, which would make her middle-aged in cat years!). And then because she’d caught that awful herpes eye infection from Rutger when I first adopted her, they wanted to do an eye examination with special dye, and a couple of other procedures, and the total fee for all this stuff was $350, which made me ulp.

They wanted to do bloodwork, too.

“What is the bloodwork going to show?” I wanted to know.

“Well, it will show if she has kidney issues or thyroid issues,” they told me.

“And how is that treated?” I asked.

With a special diet and dietary supplements, I was told.

I vetoed the bloodwork. I can do a preemptive special diet and dietary supplements without spending an additional $350, thank you very much.

They also told me that Sybyl needed dental work.

And prepared a price sheet for me—$1,200. But quite possibly more.

“So, when should we schedule the procedure for?” they asked me gaily.

“I’ll have to think about that one,” I told them.

###

During the worst of the three years, I lived in abject squalor in the Cement Bungalow, I was certain I was going to become homeless.

I did not become homeless. But I’m still not sure how.

The kindness of strangers was a huge factor.

And also, I gave up being proud.

Pride was a luxury item. I simply could not afford it. I simply had to accept the fact that constant humiliation and whining and squirming were my lot because they were survival strategies.

If I wanted to survive, I was gonna have to whine and squirm.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to survive. I didn’t like whining and squirming. But I had RTT to get through high school. I was pretty certain if I wasn’t on the scene, if Ben became the custodial parent, that he’d let RTT drop out of high school, and RTT’s life would be ruined.

###

As a family, we’d had a lot of pets—two dogs and a cat. When Ben walked out on me, he left me with the pets.

And I couldn’t get rid of them. Or maybe, I wouldn’t get rid of them. It wasn’t the pets’ fault my world had imploded. I’ve always had this semi-mystic thing about pets you adopt into your family, that you make a kind of covenant with them. The covenant is that you’ll care for them. For better and for worse. Just like marriage!

The cat was the Meezer (about whom I’ve written so frequently in this journal that I don’t want to describe her again. Suffice it to say she was borderline feral.)

The Meezer was the one member of the family who thrived that horrible year.

My chief recreation once I’d dispatched RTT (after daily screaming matches) to school was wandering the countryside with Milo the dog at my side. I’d become obsessed with beavers! I’d follow the beaver streams, study the dams and the lodges. If I was having a lucky day, I’d spy the industrious little creatures themselves. I’d hike miles and miles and miles and miles, following the beaver streams, and more than once, I’d hear an unfamiliar rustle in the deep woods, twirl around—and there would be the Meezer! She’d stalked me and Milo. Five miles, ten miles. It was all the same to the Meezer.

###

Twice during that awful year, the Meezer sustained life-threatening injuries or illnesses.

The first time, she got sprayed in the face by a skunk. Developed a chemical pneumonia. And became really, really ill.

I didn’t want her to die.

But there was no way I could afford to take her to a vet.

So, I decided to treat her myself.

Went down the hill to the Big Box pet store. Spent $10—which was a lot of money for me back then—on tetracycline, which the Big Box pet store sold for cleaning tropical fishtanks.

Tetracycline is a potent antibiotic, which is no longer prescribed because it stains teeth. It works on both humans and animals.

I titrated the therapeutic dose for the Meezer based on a guess of her weight. Isolated her in a closet away from the dogs. Dosed her and syringe-fed—she was too weak to eat—and lo and behold: She recovered. Was back to being her surly, unpleasant self in a week.

The second time, she showed up after a couple of days’ absence with a huge gash on her head.

This one was harder to treat because I actually had to suture the gash—which I did by tying her up in a sack so she couldn’t struggle with only her head sticking out and sewing the wound up with dental floss. (I figured dental floss stitches would eventually fall out as the wound healed—and I was right.) Had some tetracycline left over and gave her that as an anti-infection prophylactic.

She recovered that time, too.

And died at the ripe old age of 20, just four years ago, here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley.

###

I would have been proud of the results of my home veterinarian experiments except, like I say, pride was something I’d given up during that particular period in my life.

###

Anyway.

I did think of the Meezer as I was driving home from the vet with Sybyl.

I was crying—not hysterically enough to interfere with my driving. But still.

See, I don’t want to spend $1,200 plus on feline dentistry.

I mean, I probably could afford it, but let’s get real: I’d rather spend the money on a plane ticket to Edinburgh.

Does that make me a baaaaaaad cat custodian?

What did cats do before there were vets offering them trips to the dentist?

“Well, of course, you don’t want to spend $1,200 on a cat dentist,” L said when I got home, and we were discussing it. “I wouldn’t either. And that doesn’t mean we don’t love Sybyl.”

“I mean, even if I was making twice what I’m making, this is a world where there are people who are starving and doing without.” I was weeping again.

“You are not wrong,” L said cheerfully.

L has kind of a flakey affect but scratch that, and she is very sensible. Very grounding.

###

There was a tornado warning all day long. Mrs. Neighbor Ed was the one who informed me. She’s big in local emergency preparedness circles. “They’re sending all the kids home early from school.”

“Are there tornado sirens in Dutchess County?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said.

So, throughout the rest of the day, I stayed close to the casa. Remunerated. Watched the weather radar. Now the big thunderstorm cell was hunkering down in Delaware County. Now it was sidling over to Columbia County.

Hammered out a care plan for Sybyl: I’d invest in that high-tech litter that turns pink if the cat pee contains bad kidney cooties. I’d switch her preemptively to a safe-kidney diet. There are feline dental care solutions you can add to your cat’s water, and if she loses a couple of teeth before it starts working—well, then she loses a couple of teeth.

When the thunderstorm cell finally hit Hyde Park, it was anticlimactic. Half an hour of intense son et lumiere thunder and lightning. But no tornadoes.

###

This morning, it is sunny, bright, and not humid! Yay.

I’m still feeling a bit shaky. The world is a very insecure place.

But I can deal with it.

Well, I can tell you what movie not to watch the night before you have your 20-year-old cat put to sleep, and that movie is A Streetcar Named Desire.

Came back to find the Meezer greatly deteriorated.

Which is to say, she’s exactly the same, but while I was in the city, I’d forgotten how badly she’s doing.

“She came out when I went to feed her for the first few days,” L told me. “But then she stopped. I don’t think she’s touched her food in days. Of course, the other one, Rutger, is chowing down!”

“Eating from depression!” I laughed. “Yes, Rutger is a sociable boy. He doesn’t like it when I run off. And Meezer is not much company these days.”

“She’s shedding a lot, too. Huge clumps of fur all over your bedroom.”

“Yes, she won’t let me brush her anymore,” I sighed.

This leaves me with a difficult decision to make.

###

The Meezer is 20 years old. A veritable feline Methuselah!

She’s had a good life – or at least, a life that’s much better than the one she might have had had I not come into it.

Of course, the life she would have preferred to lead would have taken place in a barn where there were plenty of small rodents to torture and kill, and no humans to interact with.

She suffers me begrudgingly. She hunted up until a year or so ago, and would constantly bring me small gifts. Dead things. Mangiare! she was saying. You need your strength to operate the can opener!

She’d never have anything to do with other humans. Turned into one of those cartoon spitballs hissing and biting and scratching if another human tried to so much as pet her. Use of the past tense there is advised – now, she’s too weak to do much of anything but meow in protest.

Not her fault. She was greatly abused as a kitten; she came by her distrust of humans honestly.

###

After I unpacked, I picked her up. Tried to pet her. She leaped immediately from my lap.

I did lure her out from the closet where she’d been lurking. She’s now installed in the very bottom shelf of my desk, cleared of its masking tape and light bulbs and push-pins and such, where I can keep an eye on her.

I scurried off to market and bought her gourmet cat food, which she gobbled greedily last night. Afterwards, she came out to the cat fountain to drink, used her box to pee, made a big fuss over grooming her paws and face.

But this morning, she wouldn’t eat the gourmet cat food.

I get it.

She’s dying.

She doesn’t appear to be in any pain, but she also doesn’t appear to be taking any pleasure in her life.

###


I’m going to be traveling for half the month of May. Assuming the Meezer would even last that long, it would simply not be fair to L who looks after the kitties while I’m on the road to be put on Meezer Death Watch.

And the Meezer is not going to get better.

Unlike the chemical pneumonia that she got in Ithaca after a skunk sprayed her in the face when I nursed her back to health by syringe-feeding her and giving her tetracycline (which you too can buy at the local PetsMart – only they think you’ll be cleaning your fish tank with it), and unlike that horrible, festering wound on her head which I likewise treated with tetracycline and actually sutured all by myself (!), old age is not a treatable medical condition.

So, I’m going to have the Meezer put to sleep.

Probably next weekend.

I have to think practically here. I’m going to have to get another cat almost immediately so that Rutger will have company while I’m gone.

I’m sad, but you know: It’s all transience. I wouldn’t say I love the Meezer in the same sense that I loved Milo, or I loved Fritz, or I loved many of the other animals who gave me their trust and companionship over the course of my lifetime.

What I would say is that I feel a deep obligation toward her and great pity for what she went through in the first six months of her life.

Maybe that’s love. But not a sentimental kind of love.

We lived next door to the family that originally owned her. Their 8-year-old boy tortured her. I mean, literally. I watched but felt helpless to do anything. When that family moved out in the middle of the night – one step in front of the creditors, I assume – they dumped her. I watched her foraging in neighborhood garbage cans for three days before I finally decided to adopt her. At that time, I had two dogs, one cat, one snake, two children, a husband and a really demanding job, and I really doubted my capacity to stretch myself any farther. But I couldn’t bear the thought of that plucky little animal trying to make it alone. So I took her in.

That was nineteen and a half years ago.

Here’s a picture of the Meezer from happier times.

I dreamed the Meezer jumped up into my lap, demanding to be cuddled.

And this was such incredibly bizarre behavior for the Meezer, in dreams or out, that when I woke up, I immediately leaped from my bed to see if she was dead even though it was 3 in the morning.

I’ve had such visitations before, although usually not in dreams. More often, I see the person in what we laughingly refer to as everyday life. Last year, for example, I saw the Former Democratic Candidate being slowly driven in a black sedan up the Vanderbilt estate path on which I was running. I thought the sedan might be a Ford Crown Victoria.

“That is certainly very weird,” thought I to myself. Who knew that Doris was into funky old cars? Or that she was well enough to go for a drive?

The Former Democratic Candidate did not appear to notice me.

The following morning Ed forwarded me an email from the Hyde Park Democrats. Yep! Doris was dead. And she’d died at around the same time I’d seen her in the park.

Doris had been a passenger in the Ford Crown Victoria.

Damn! I thought. I wish I’d seen who was driving that car.

###

Anyway, the Meezer?

Not dead!

But I couldn’t fall back to sleep.

So, I did something you are never supposed to do if you’re seriously interested in falling back to sleep at 3 in the morning: I logged onto Facebook and began some free-associative stalking!

That sleazy, brilliant, Internet-famous lawyer I dated oh-so-briefly who may have been, in terms of pure technique, the best lover I ever had, has married at last! To a girl in her 20s, imported from Cambodia. I had lots and lots of orgasms with the lawyer, I remembered, but I kind of resented having those orgasms; I felt as though I was being wound, rather like a clock. The lawyer went on to become a dreadful alcoholic, lost a couple of prestigious think tank jobs but has earned his shot at redemption and happily-ever-after at last through his marriage to a good woman!

A writer I admire – whose modest successes include at least one New York Times bestseller, and who had once remarked to me, Oh absolutely, you can write a commercially successful novel; you have what that takes – had remarried. To a fan! A fan who is a professional psychic! (That part absolutely floored me!) His first wife, whom he’d always referred to as The English Rose, had died following a long, painful, humiliating battle with cancer. I’d never gotten the sense that their marriage was a particularly happy one although, of course, he was not in the habit of confiding in moi, so it’s not like I would have known. The haste of his new marriage surprised me. I guess he likes being married!

By this time, it was 4 in the morning, and I was on a roll!

I started stalking people I do not know, friends of friends – though the word “friend” hardly describes Facebook acquaintances, does it? And one wonders how long it will take for the word to be debased, for the Oxford English Dictionary to catalog it under its new definition: A casual social media acquaintance…

One person wrote a 2,000-word screed on the pain of being defriended on Facebook! I kid you not! Well. I didn’t actually count the words, but the thing was long.

The heartbreak. The suffering of not knowing why.

This, mind you, was not a person he’d ever met in real life. But he didn’t have a real life; he was an introvert and a depressive. All his socializing occurred on online. He seemed to be weirdly proud of this fact, or, at least, weirdly defiant: Yeah? Yeah? You gonna tell me something’s wrong with this?

And there must have been like 60 responses! All from people writing, Yes, yes, yes, my only social interactions are with online people, too! Oh, the anguish when people unfriend you on social media!

Fuck, I thought. How long again before climate change wipes out the human race entirely? Can’t come fast enough for me!

###

In other news, yesterday was the first Tax Bwana session of the season.

Complete clusterfuck!

The tax software servers in their secret Washington D.C. location broke down. Or rather – they didn’t altogether break down, but the software developed some sort of glitch making it very difficult to navigate between different parts of the program.

I figured it out! Yes, I did! There was a backdoor workaround I stumbled upon by trial and error. Go me!

But the rest of those volunteer tax preparers sat around discussing their golf games and whether IBM would shut down its Fishkill facility before they’d put in enough years to qualify for the good pension option. A veritable Dwight D. Eisenhower impersonator contest!

This filled me with fury! There were at least 20 clients waiting, some of whom had been waiting for hours.

“Do you want me to show you how I’m doing this?” I asked Tim, the site coordinator, who’s a nice enough guy but who was clearly in over his head.

“No, we’re going to reschedule the clients. Shut down for the day. But thanks. Clearly, you are magic.”

Clearly, I am.

For all the good it does me.

The Meezer is sick. Some kind of urinary tract infection.

In Freeville when the Meezer developed a chemical pneumonia after getting sprayed in the face by a skunk, I was able to nurse her back to health by syringe-feeding her and dosing her with tetracycline, which PetSmart sells for cleaning fish tanks.

Another time, she got quite the laceration on her skull. A fight with another cat? A fight with a bear? That time I sutured the wound with heavy-duty thread and smeared it with bacitracin. It healed just fine.

But I don’t know what to do for a UTI. And though I’m very fond of the Meezer, I’m not inclined to pony up $300 and probably more on vet bills. For one thing, I don’t have $300 to spare. For another, 9 million human children living in low-income families just got their health insurance yanked when Congress let the CHIP program expire without refunding it.

I get that the vast pet food industry would like us to think of our cats as “Fur Babies,” but I don’t think of mine that way. They’re not babies. They’re cats.

Except for wanting to pee obsessively and only peeing very small amounts, she seems perfectly fine. She’s not lethargic. Her appetite is healthy. She’s drinking the normal amount of water. She’s grooming herself. She’s spending a lot of time grooming those nether parts.

This makes me wonder whether she incurred some sort of mechanical irritation to those nether parts. The symptoms came on quite suddenly after she’d spent the morning outside. So, I dunno. Poison ivy?

Also, she’s as mean as ever – the Meezer is not one of your cuddly, adorable cats. In fact, a vet at the Ithaca ASPCA – a no-kill shelter – once told me that the Meezer was among the 10% of cats that they would probably put down. “She could never be adopted,” the vet said. “She’s too aggressive and violent with humans.”

The only reason I was able to nurse her back to health on those other two occasions was because she’d become so lethargic and ill that she couldn’t fight me.

Anyway, I have her in her carrier box in the middle of my study. That way I can watch her. I stocked the box with an old sweater, an old nightgown so she’d have a soft place to lie and even a garment to pee on if she felt so inclined.

It’s a very large carrier box and beyond a few plaintive yowls, she hasn’t really complained. She seems to like it, in fact. She seems to understand that it’s a safe space.

Lois Lane has put a Request for Home Cures out on the Hudson Valley Obsessive Cat Lady hotline.

And later on today, I will poke my head into the office of the vet who lives down the way. He was a pal of the Late Democratic Congressional Candidate, and when she and I met for lunch at the little Japanese restaurant next door to his office, he would often be lunching there, too, and would join us. Maybe he has some homecare suggestions. He’s a nice guy, an old hippie. I can’t imagine he would be too obnoxious on the Bring her in so we can make money off of it! front.

If she were a human, I would just be forcing huge quantities of slightly acidic fluids down her.

But you can’t do that with a cat.

The Meezer is 20 years old, so I’m well aware her days are numbered.

But while she’s enjoying her life – and for the most part, she does seem to be enjoying her life – I’m loath to give up on her.

“I once had a dog that traveled 250 miles to find me. Two hundred and fifty miles!” said Lois Lane.

She was smoking a cigarette in the parking lot of the one-time Arlington Library, now the home of Dutchess Literacy. I was standing just as close as I could to inhale the secondhand smoke.

“Really?” I said.

Lois Lane nodded. “Really. My parents - Well. When I was a kid, we moved ever six months. To keep one step ahead of the creditors. And I loved that dog more than anything. And one night – we were living in Poughkeepsie then, right near Garden Street – my father woke us up in the middle of the night and announced, Time to move! But we couldn’t take my dog.

“My father found him a home, With some people he knew in Connecticut. We drove Bear up there. I was crying every inch of the way.

“We ended up in Red Hook. And every week, I would call the people in Connecticut to ask them how Bear was doing. And they would say, Oh, he’s fine; oh, he’s having a great time. And then one night, I heard this scratching at the door, and I opened it up. And it was Bear. He was really skinny and beat-up looking. But it was Bear.”

“Wow,” I said.

“He had never, ever been to that house in Red Hook. He’d never even been to Red Hook!”

“Wow,” I said again. “What happened to him?”

“Oh,” said Lois Lane. She flicked her cigarette butt to the ground. “I shouldn’t have done that, right?” She scooped the butt back up. “My father shot him.”

“What?”

“Well, not then. Not right away. When I finally called the cops on my parents couple of months later. It was the very first thing my father did when he got out on bail. He shot my dog.” She shrugged. “And then I went into foster care.”

###

After class – more tongue twisters! discussions about Halloween and garage sales! a deconstruction of The Star Spangled Banner! dictation! – Lois Lane approached me once more. “So-o-o, I need your advice about Imane. There’s an issue –“

Turns out Imane has been a baaaad girl. Few weeks back, before she got her off-the-books job, Lois Lane had given Imane permission to use the Literacy Center phone to look for a job. Imane had followed up online applications she’d submitted at McDonald’s, Wendy’s. Lois Lane had not been keeping close tabs.

And when the phone bill arrived, there were $247 worth of charges for phone calls to Morocco.

“So Marisol” – the Literacy Center’s absolutely useless Director – “calls me into the office screaming. And I don’t know what to do.”

“Wow!” I said. "Wow" was the expletive du nuit, I guess. “Have you spoken with Imane?”

“Yes. I was very nice about it. I tried not to seem too threatening, to let her know I still liked her. But you notice she wasn’t in class this evening.”

“No, but she showed up to her individual tutoring session with me yesterday,” I said.

This misdeed was exactly the kind of petty hustle that I pulled all the time back when I was 21, 22. I tried to remember what my justifications had been: (A) They were old, they didn’t matter, and (B) They owed it to me.

That second one was most interesting.

“So what do I do?” Lois Lane asked.

“That’s a hard one,” I said. “Will Marisol take it out of your salary?”

“She might. If she does, I’ll walk.”

“If you walk, I walk,” I said. “The only reason I volunteer here is because of you.”

Lois Lane can’t really afford to walk, though.

“Well,” I said, “She probably didn’t realize the phone bill would be quite that high. I guess we tag team her. We take her on a tour of the fabulous Vassar campus and tell her, Some day, all this could be yours – but only if you stick with our program. And then we take her out to lunch – some place cheap! – and we lay down the law. What she did was a kind of theft. She’s got to pay that money back. Say $30 a week – She’s working; that shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I’d be glad to match the funds –“ said Lois Lane.

“NO! That would be a really bad idea. Imane needs to take responsibility for this.”

“Do you think she will?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “I can’t really read her. The culture is too different. I mean we’re Americans, and we’re old – to her, we’re not real human beings, you know? You can’t rely much on empathy at that age even with kids who do come from the same culture. No. Maybe we hunt down a copy of the Quran and read her the part about punishments for theft. I’ll bring my meat cleaver.”

Lois Lane and I laugh hysterically.

###

Also last night, my oldest cat, the Meezer, had another psycho episode.

She’s on Advantage II for fleas and ticks, but somehow the ticks latch on to her anyway. She’s a longhaired cat, and she won’t let me groom her, and her coat is matted with dreadlocks.

She’s been a mostly outdoor cat all her life: I let her out early in the morning; I take her in at supper time, so the coyotes won’t get her. Sometimes, she sleeps on my bed. Mostly, she sleeps in my closet.

Anyway, yesterday, she picked up an enormous tick -- not a deer tick; no worries -- which would have been very easy to pick off – except that when I tried, she turned into a snarling ball of absolute fury, latched on to my arm with teeth and claws, would not let go – I immediately smeared antibiotic ointment on the lacerations, so they didn’t become infected, but ouch.

And the fucking tick is still there.

The Meezer is 17 years old. She had a really hard kittenhood – she was regularly tortured by my neighbors in Monterey who were deadbeats with a lot in common with Lois Lane’s parents; they dumped her when they vanished in the middle of the night; and after watching her prowl the garbage cans for a week, I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and took her in.

My vet in Ithaca told me, “You know, she’s the kind of cat that No Kill shelters make exceptions for.”

He wasn’t kidding.

Her quality of life is still pretty good in many respects. She’s very sprightly as she patrols the perimeters of L’s property. She comes when I call her; most of the time, she purrs when I pick her up. I wouldn’t call this love or even affection, but I don’t know a non-anthropomorphic term to call it.

It’s about time for her to have her booster immunizations. So, I guess I bring her to the nice vet down the street – he named all his cats after Famous Jewish Intellectuals: Einstein, Freud, Marx – and then pick his brain.

Rutger, my orange kitty, who is more-or-less a dog in a feline body, does love me, and sprang into action when the Meezer had her psychotic episode, hissing and swatting at her. That’s what stopped her.

And he slept right next to me all night long. Protecting me.

Scalia’s death changes everything about the upcoming election in the U.S.

Where it was once merely the Forces of Light battling the Armies of Darkness, the election has now assumed Zoroastrian proportions: Matter struggling with antimatter, as it were, in an epic contest for control of both the visible and invisible worlds.

I may have to bite the bullet (shudder) and vote for (gag) Hillary Clinton.

Thing is Ginsburg was generally thought of as The SOTUSista Most Likely to Drop Dead in Office.

And she will drop dead in office – very, very soon.

(As a side note because I WUV dropping names, I must note here that Ginsburg was a personal friend of my late erstwhile mother-in-law’s.)

Which gives the next President an opportunity to appoint two Justices to the Supreme Court. And we can’t take the chance that someone will be elected who’s gonna roll back the progress we’ve made on abortion rights and affirmative action.

I adore Bernie Sanders, but that “socialist” label is too much freight for the average American voter to handle. They see it, and they immediately think, Stalin! and wonder whether they’ll have to line up for eight hours to buy 50 rolls of paper towels at Costco after he’s in office. I just don’t think Bernie Sanders is electable.

And The Donald would just be a huge fucking disaster. So Berlusconi-esque.

###

When I heard Scalia died on a hunting trip, I immediately asked, “Where was Dick Cheney?”

The joke was lost on the Millennials in the room.

I understand that the Millennials were similarly confused when Bernie Sanders went off on Henry Kissinger during the last Democratic debate. “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger,” Bernie declared, leaving the Millennials to go Buh? Wait! But you’re both old.

###

Not that I would go see Deadpool in a million years, but I understand one of the big jokes in the movie was about someone smelling like a pair of old lady’s panties.

Jokes about African Americans, Hispanics, women, gays, transexuals, and practically every other minority you can marginalize into a slice of the pie are strictly off limits, but it’s still open season on old people.

I suppose if I weren’t old myself, I wouldn’t care.

And this is why I loathe identity politics. It's always self-serving.

###

Meanwhile, I’m having a very tough time explaining to Meezer that it’s -9°F out there, so no, she can’t go out this morning.

The Meezer woke me up in the middle of the night, yowling.

I’m told old cats are prone to yowling for no reason at odd moments.

She’s 15 now. The one actual constant – besides my own always unreliable memory – that connects my old life in California with the life I’m living now. A bridge.

I suppose she’s gonna die soon. She doesn’t hunt anymore although she still goes out most mornings to patrol the surrounding acreage. Sleeps a lot more than she used to.

Anyway, the Meezer woke me up; I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I watched Amish documentaries well into dawn. Well. Not made by the Amish. Made about the Amish.

The Amish documentaries blended with my own weird hypnagogic musings. The Amish and similar cults represent collectivism at its most rarified, one might say. Certainly, if Homo Sapiens is to stay viable upon this planet, collectivism is the way to go. And yet, I personally loathe collectivism with every fiber of my conscious neurons.

Collectivism, individualism – neither has any innate moral value. Both are biologically determined drives. The Amish aren’t all that innately different from baboon clans in Kenya, except somehow they’ve learned nonviolence. I suspect their rigidly enforced social order is a behavioral infrastructure that evolved for the express purpose of enforcing nonviolence.

My penchant for individualism isn’t all that different from the behavioral preferences of cannibal orangutans living in the Sumatran rainforest. There are far fewer orangutans than baboons these days, which might make one imagine that individualism is a less viable evolutionary strategy than collectivism (except that orangutan extinction is mostly due to habitat erosion, which primate behavioralism plays no part in determining.)

Anyway, at 4 o’clock in the morning, while the Amish are discussing “shunning” via video-on-demand, it was impossible for me to find any real me in the scattered assemblage of thoughts, memories, preferences, desires that define me when the sun is higher in the sky.

I fell back to sleep and had one of those long, labyrinthine dreams with billions of kaleidoscopic details that I can no longer remember. Marybeth was in it, and her husband Kim, and we were on a huge estate that belonged to them – inherited money, I remember thinking. But at the very end of the dream, I stumbled upon the corpse of a very old man with glaucous blue eyes that were still open. He smelled really putrid. A bunch of little kids were dancing around him, making fun of him.

“Get away!” I said. I was mad that they were desecrating the dead. I thought the guy deserved some dignity.

Though as George Lass reminds us: Put them in a marble temple, stick them in a coffee can, either way, they don’t care. They’re dead.

I called 911. “I’d like to report a dead man –“

And then the corpse began to move. And I thought, Oh, shit. The guy is still alive. 911 is gonna be so pissed off at me…

Which when I woke up, I thought was a really weird reaction. I mean, it’s better to call 911 when someone is still alive, right?

Fuckin’ dream logic.