His Excellency permits a brief photo op while inspecting the perimeter in March 2019.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who expressed condolences upon the passing of our beloved cat, Turkish.
May you all be in heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.
While we’re on the subject of Irish blessings, may I recommend Frank O’Connor’s “Requiem” to anyone grieving a fallen comrade? Father Fogarty, who did not yet know for whom he would be asked to say “only one small Mass,” speaks thusly:
“All I know from my own experience is is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means we had something worth grieving for. The ones I’m sorry for are the ones that go through life not even knowing what grief is. And you’d be surprised the number of them you’d meet.”
Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment), stood his final watch yesterday.
The old soldier was stricken suddenly and definitively, but the medics did their best to keep him here with us. In the end, we chose to let him go, and a fine strong wind arose in the evening to bear his spirit west.
The young Turk, playing with his absurdly huge, pink, bunny feet.
The Turk came to us in the traditional manner (“Hey, want a kitten?”), but with a twist. We’d only ever had girl cats, and back in April 2007, we simply assumed he was a she. Nope. The difference manifested itself in late May.
And he proved a wild boy. Rubber bands, paper bags, cardboard boxes, computer keyboards and the legs leading upward to them … nothing and no one was safe from Mighty Whitey, the Blue-Eyed Bully of Bibleburg.
This included our other cat, Ike, a.k.a. Chairman Meow, who was not exactly overjoyed to find The Great Leap Forward shaking the foundations of her People’s Republic of Oz.
Ike had come up the hard way, from the mean streets of Wetmore, Colorado, to the wilds of Weirdcliffe, where she survived a coyote attack that left her looking like she’d been shot at and hit, and then shit at and hit again. Life in Bibleburg was easy-breezy. All the predators worked for the government. Surely she could survive this latest assault on her person and dignity.
But in addition to her battle scars, Ike also had an enlarged heart we didn’t know about, and it abruptly did for her in October 2007, when the Turk was just eight months old.
“I hope we never die.”
In our grief, we immediately acquired another cat. Miss Mia Sopaipilla came complete with her own medical history (feline upper-respiratory disorder), but once she’d beaten that back we were all one big, happy family.
People without children probably attach outsized importance to their pets. As a teenager I used to enjoy a good heehaw at a neighbor couple who referred to their portly dachshund as their “child.” But I came to appreciate their perspective over the years spent with my own animals. Jojo, Fuerte, Bandit, Ike, Tina, Turk, Mia, and Mister Boo weren’t blood kin, but they damn sure were family.
It was funny. I chose Mia from the congregation of cats at the shelter, but Mia selected Herself as her personal servant. Herself brought Turkish home, but he attached himself to me, probably because I was the dude with the lap who was home all the time, knew where the cat food was, and could operate doorknobs.
Before Turkish came along, I’d never seen a cat like him, and suddenly I was seeing two of him.
Because the Turk’s outsized personality could not be contained by four walls and a roof. And so he was an inside-outside cat for a while. He climbed apple, apricot and maple trees, earning a new moniker (“The Rare and Wonderful Albino Tree Weasel”); scaled the garage to strike a Peter O’Tooleish “Lion in Winter” pose; and even brought home a dopplegänger once. Swear to God, the two cats were identical save for the eyes. Turk’s were a striking blue that made Paul Newman’s peepers look like pissholes in a snowbank.
His vertical leap was marvelous, so much so that a neighbor had to relocate her bird feeder because despite the tall fence separating our yards, it had suddenly become a cat feeder. Whoever said “white guys can’t jump” never saw the Turk grabbing some sky.
But after the big fella came home with an expensive war wound, that was the end of that. He and Mia still went out, but only on harnesses, and under strict supervision.
All I ask is a tall sink and a window to steer her by.
That was OK, kinda, sorta. The house in Bibleburg had a ton of windows, and Turk came to appreciate a relaxing sprawl on the back of the couch, or atop my drawing board, where he could keep an eye on the street.
The long kitchen window was another favorite spot; from there, he could spy on the neighbors, Marv and Judy, and enjoy an occasional drink from the faucet, his favorite source of refreshment. Now and then he’d simply curl up in the sink. Turkish Vans are famous leapers and swimmers, and ours certainly had the family affinity for both.
Once the Turk was no longer at liberty to roam as he pleased, he settled for watching what we called DoorVision®.
The downside of becoming an indoor cat? Weight gain. His Anatolian ancestors may have been champion open-water swimmers and high jumpers, but our big, big boy developed into an all-American couch potato. It was a struggle to keep him under 15 pounds (Mia, a smaller, more active cat, weighs 11).
When we moved to the Duke City in 2014, the big galoot started giving hints that he would not be what Herself calls “a 20-year-cat.”
He developed arthritis and some muscle loss in his once-powerful hindquarters, which made it tough for him to get to his beloved sinks and windows. Happily, his new digs had two sets of sliding glass doors, so he could still inspect the perimeter from ground level.
Chronic constipation reared its ugly head, but was brought under control with a light dose of stool softener. Then, like Mister Boo before him, Turkish developed bladder stones, which happily required only a change in diet rather than surgery.
Also like The Boo, The Turk had a profound lack of faith in the medical-industrial complex. And he was not shy about airing his opinions on the topic. One was inclined to pay close attention to these diatribes, because a pissed-off 15-pound cat with teeth like a young Dracula and paws like tennis balls studded with X-acto knives is not something you want to turn your back on.
Waiting for a snuggle.
If the Turk occasionally got a cursory once-over during a regular checkup, it was because the vet didn’t want to have him sedated by a robot orderly just to be able to sneak into the exam room. Also, it’s hard to practice medicine in body armor.
It’s a pity that his doctors never got to see his softer side. True, the voices in his head were not all friendlies; more than a few of them came from outside the wire. And he had been known to actually bite the hand that fed him.
But he relished a short snuggle in the bed nearly every morning and evening. And he loved performing his dance cycle, The Roll of the Happy Cat, on some sunny spot on the brick pavers.
So why should yesterday have been any different? But it was.
The day began with rolls and happy cat and breakfast and ended with an injection in emergency care, after an operation to remove an unidentified mass from the Turk’s spleen. It had ruptured. There was internal bleeding. Kidney failure. Part of his pancreas had to go, too. He crashed three times, the last time as we discussed heroic measures and likely outcomes. Brain damage. Cancer. Diabetes. Dialysis. Pancreatitis.
We said, “Enough.” We said our goodbyes. And we went home without my friend, my comrade, my big, big boy.
In the night, I went to a place where the Turk lounges in a backyard tree, drinks from a faucet, and performs the Roll of the Happy Cat in a perpetually sunny spot. The breakfasts are large and endless and nobody gets fat. Snuggles come with.
But they wouldn’t let me stay. And I woke up crying.
When I went to bed early on Super Tuesday it seemed Texas was trending socialist.
This was obviously a hallucination. I was critically low on endorphins after 11 days without exercise, thanks to a broken right ankle. And I was slightly crazed on antihistamines, the junipers, mulberries, cottonwoods, willows, and elms all having sprung to hideous life seemingly overnight.
Even while thus impaired, I knew a Texas Democrat could pass for Republican practically anywhere else, and the thought of that crowd going for Comrade Eeyore in the primary seemed the product of a disordered mind. You know. Like Ronald the Donald winning the last presidential election.
And sure enough, it was. Daffy Uncle Joe bounced back while I tossed and turned, slobbering all over my pillow and freezing my nuts off in the guest bedroom, because somebody around here has to get a good night’s sleep before going to work in the morning, and that somebody is not me.
Sure, Texas has embraced a wide swath of eccentrics. Kinky Friedman. Ted Cruz and his beard. Molly Ivins. Louie Gohmert. Actually, Ted Cruz’s beard deserves a mention all its own.
Ted Cruz’s beard.
But Comrade Eeyore is a cranky old socialist from Brooklyn. The thought of him prevailing in Texas over Joe Stalin, much less Joe Biden, put me in mind of the 1980s Pace Picante Sauce commercial featuring a bunch of cowboys playing cards and talking salsa.
“Why, this stuff’s made in New York City!”
“New York City?”
Of course, Pace Foods Ltd. would be snatched up a few years later by the Campbell Soup Co., with headquarters in Camden, New Jersey. Not New York, but close enough to take the bloom off that San Antonio rose.
But by then Texas was preoccupied with developing products for export that were even even feebler than bottled picante sauce. I refer you to George W. Bush and Rick Perry.
And Ted Cruz’s beard.
Speaking of the coronavirus, which we were not, is anybody else revisiting apocalyptic tales like “The Andromeda Strain” or Stephen King’s “The Stand?”
A random quote from the latter popped into my head this morning. While collecting chickens to feed her visitors, Mother Abagail notes, “The only thing dumber than a broody hen was a New York Democrat.”
Maybe so. But I don’t know why she’d want to restrict the dumb to New York.
Daffy Uncle Joe and his backers are dancing a jig over his performance last night, and yeah, it truly was the sort of comeback-kid narrative that has veteran political reporters writing hack bullshit like “comeback kid.”
But let’s keep in mind that the states where Unc’ prevailed were largely ones where the Hilldebeast got stomped like ants at a picnic in 2016, when it wasn’t just Democrats and broody hens voting: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina.
And if the Anybody But Bernie Caucus proves victorious, and Daffy Uncle Joe becomes the nominee, well, sure, we’ll be spared the easy shots about socialism, Fidel, and honeymooning in the Soviet Union.
But we’ll also have the United States Senate working as an arm of the Republican campaign, trying to beat ol’ Joe to death with his own son.
I get it. Charlie Pierce says “a large part of the Democratic primary electorate is hungering for a president that it can ignore for four or five days a week.”
But how do you sell that empty suit with aviator shades to the customers who weren’t buying in 2016? Or 2004, or 2000? The ones who wondered why a woman couldn’t get a fair shake, or were surprised to learn that “socialism” is one of Carlin’s Seven Words, or bought all the tripe about how Hillary was the Devil and Gore was a geek and Kerry was a Viet Cong spy?
Kinky Friedman already tried “Why the Hell Not?” and “How Hard Could It Be?” And “Bemused, Not Batshit” isn’t much of a bumper sticker.
• Editor’s note: I was going to do this as a podcast, but my brain seems stuck in first gear and there’s smoke coming out of my ears. So, um, no.
• Editor’s note revisited: OK, so I did it anyway. This one’s lo-fi even by my casual standards — I used an ATR2100-USB mic, and skipped the Zoom H5 Handy Recorder in favor of recording directly to the MacBook Pro using Rogue Amoeba’s nifty little app Piezo. Editing was as usual, in GarageBand. I sucked it up despite illness and injury because I’m fixated on doing a podcast a week for no particular reason.
The air hereabouts is of a very low quality indeed today.
Jaysis. As if the banjaxed ankle weren’t annoying enough, now the trees are conducting biological warfare against my tender sinuses.
I’ve actually been compelled to take drugs, and not the interesting kind, either. Blaugh, etc.
Last night I slept mostly not at all, and between that and the drugs I’m having trouble staying focused on all the Super Tuesday doings, beyond noting that the Anybody But Bernie Caucus is forming up right smart.
Crucifixion? Good. Out of the door, line on the left, one cross each. Next?
He’s not just a Good Old One. He’s a Great Old One.
We’re getting down to nut-cuttin’ time, folks. I say go big or go home.
Asked whether her candidate would be suspending his campaign and endorsing Daffy Uncle Joe, spokescreature Shub-Niggurath replied, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! No further questions.”
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