On Losing One's Pet [& One's Nerve]

[image: Bukowski & cat ]

I keep having dreams where my feet are on backwards.


Chatwin writes of the nomadic imperative.
If this were true then an essential side

of ourselves, this need to move,

would be eclipsed by notions of culture or home
or perhaps just buried so deep that we would not recognize how much we wanted it. It would explain a lot as far as human distemper goes--the mind & motion of moving persons. Denied.

I sometimes wish I was a man.
So I could swim inside my lovers.
Because what's this skin, really?
This cursory knowledge of hands?

Mother called last week.
First time I'd heard her voice in six months.
She sounded small & young. Like a lost
15-year old girl. A drunk one.
I asked about my cat.
There was a significant pause
before she said, "She
had an accident."

No animal is so capable of self-delusion as the human animal.

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

said Dorothy Parker.

Things We Think Separate Us From the Lower Animals:
Possessions, surnames, mailboxes, souls, engorged breasts, language, "reason," selves, the ability to invent, alphabets, mathematics, fire, extended memory, first& second order desires, wristwatches, original sin, circumcisions, shaved bodies, horrible tools, beautiful tools, necessary tools, orgasms, internal dialogues, cognizance of the absurd, epiphanies, indian food reheated, magazines, panic attacks, methodological skepticism, aesthetics, mid-life crises, fetishes, recorded histories, lyric poetry, years recorded on paper sheets, a box of vinyl records from a father, euphimism, declared majors, foresight, metaphysical projections, nostalgia, makeup, caste, class, precious jewelry, this thing they call despair, this thing they call hope, arguments for and against free will, first loves.

(things which do not really separate us.)


Cait's ex-boyfriend thinks I'm meek.
He says, You're a passenger. You just get that far-off look in your eyes all the time. I know people who are always moving, always doing, but they don't care about much. You care so deeply about so many things. But you don't do much. You're just in your head.
How can I explain to him that I am not meek?
That inexplicably, I've just always felt as though I am permanently on the outside of things?


What bothers me most about my cat is that my mother referred to him as a "she."


Gotta keep moving. Gotta keep moving.
But looking around, there's just nowhere to go!

notes on romantic miscellanea & ezra lb.

Ernest Hemingway taught Ezra Pound to box.

Today: M's depressive episode only lasted an hour or so. Rain and too much gray. He's been numbing the symptoms but not the root. I didn't cry. Seems unfair to get all weepy whenever he's hurting. Which is a lot. Increasingly. Enough on that. Things fall apart and reassemble in a maddeningly tidy sort of way. Coffee afterwards. Kept conversation light to avoid being crushed.

Slept on a parking deck.

Marveled at the hysteria that is The Super Bowl.

Book exchange. I bought M FearAndLoathingInLasVegas and he bought Pound's Personae for me. Asked me to read aloud to him as we drove. Spring...Too long...Gongula. For some reason, Night-drives always strike me as poignant.

(Rain, scattered light, sexual tension and modern tempers. What else is there?)

Bought ninety-nine cent mason jars. M admits he likes shopping with me because the things we buy become relics of whatever we put into each other. I thought on this for a while. Humans are the only animals that covet, acquire, and give meaning to unecessary things. It's really strange how we take objects and pour ourselves into them so that the vessel becomes indiscernable from the thing itself. Romantic miscellanea. Everyone building their own little histories out of mere things.


Oh and Ezra never did get that left hook.