(Nelson, the gentle giant)
I have recently become the provisional provider for three dogs and three cats, at two different houses. Some friends are out of town. I am staying where most of the animals reside, and there is another dog in need of my care across town. I will be running from one place to another this morning, and then back again, measuring out dog food for their bowls, dispensing morning medications, making sure that they are all adequately loved and petted and encouraged to eat with tails wagging.
I don't mind it. It is nice to feel needed, loved.
Maybe I will become a male cat-lady, a spinster, an animal hoarder.
Is it possible? I suppose there would need to be some sort of sexual reassignment involved. Not just for me, but for all of the cats also, etc. I don't know if I could live in a house with 50+ cats and have them all be different genders, particularly with what I had just gone through. We would need to institute some rules. I suppose making them all female might be cheaper than trying to go the other direction. I'd have to look into it.
What a phrase: sexual reassignment. And jeezus, what a horrible thought... inflicting some half-baked sexual reassignment program on a bunch of poor cats. It is still too early to ponder such diabolical tangents.
The Feline Solution.
Yikes.
Where is all of this coming from? Ah, I see now, it was the phrase "male cat-lady." It sent me into a spiral involving group sex change operations for unwilling cats and kittens. I doubt there even is such a thing, though I don't see why it wouldn't be possible, for the right price. The most difficult part would perhaps be getting their consent. It would require some deft legalese and the acceptance of a paw-print signature.
I don't know. Seems like a horrendous waste of time, among other things. It might be easier and cheaper to just exclusively accumulate cats of a certain gender. It would keep me out of Dutch with PETA, too.
Didn't the character, Alex, from A Clockwork Orange kill a cat-lady? Wasn't that what finally got him in trouble, so that he had to go to behavioral reassignment? I wish I would have thought of that sooner. I might have somehow tied that in to this lost screed.
Let me try this post writing thing again:
I have set my sites on a new goal: financial freedom. I want to be debt free within two years. I'm not sure how it happened, but I fucked up. I ended up with a bunch of debt that I never wanted and does nothing for me. It just sort of crept into my life while I wasn't paying enough attention. Now it has me by the throat.
Not any more. I am on guard against it now. I have a plan in place. It's not going to be easy, and it will take me about 10 months before I can even get to a point in which I can start taking big swings at it all, but there is a future out there somewhere, waiting for me to be free.
I try not to live with regrets, but it didn't have to be this way, truly. None of it did. But now it is this way and there seems to be no easy way out.
It is insidious, how easy it is to get in debt, and how little you get for it, and how difficult it is to escape.
When we are young we are told that we can do whatever we want, we can be whomever we wish to be. Very few bother warning us that one sure way to prevent yourself from achieving either of those things is by willingly becoming a slave to debt.
What the fuck am I talking about now, and why? Cat castration was better than this swill.
Starbucks opens in 20 minutes here, maybe some sweet caffeine surging through my veins will focus my thoughts some.
I awoke on my friends' couch this morning and I sit here typing these words like a fumbling curmudgeon.
Give me one more chance, readers. I promise I'll find something to giggle about before it's all over.
Okay, Starbucks coffee has made its way into my system now.
Here goes, my last chance:
I stopped drinking about two months ago. Almost two months ago. I got tired of waking up and feeling as if my head was filled with used kitty litter. I don't miss it, in general. It is in the specifics where it sometimes becomes a minor issue. Much of my social life was centered around drinking. The local pub was a regular place for me to interact with others. I liked going there daily and having a few pints of beer.
Now, I am left with no regular outlet for normal human interaction. I mean, I know that there are things to do out there but I have yet to pursue them. I spend a lot of time reading, waking up in the early morning hours and then documenting that here, etc.
I went to a few meetings that were dedicated to abstaining. Those people are obsessed with alcohol. It's nearly all they talk about. They insist that they have a disease and that they are powerless over it, and yet also recovering from it. But no other disease, I don't think, requires such obsessive attention to its denial. Imagine if the only way you could cure yourself of cancer was to gather together and discuss its presence in your body, previous or present, and then collectively agree that cancer must be avoided to be beaten.
Odd, that. But maybe it works. I do not pretend to know all of its secrets, even after years of informal research. What is interesting is that a drinker accumulates many opinions on drinking through the years. Those opinions are only welcome to be shared if you are still drinking. Once you have stopped, then sharing them among non-drinkers is the sole place for your opinions forever afterwards. I find that division of thought and discourse on the subject to be an odd one.
If you stop drinking you will notice strange things about people that you used to drink with, just as they are certainly noticing the changes within you. Nobody has seemed to really mind it here in Sonoma, yet. In NYC that was not the case. I stopped drinking once for about a month and it seemed to be a personal affront to some. A few of my close friends nearly panicked at the mention of it. When I decided to start drinking again I did not step gently into it. I chose to jump in with both feet and quickly sunk well past my head into the depths. I ordered a pint of beer and a whiskey shot, to start. Beginner's luck. Many hours later that night I had found my way towards other, sobering intoxicants.
I hadn't decided to jump in that deep, truly. I had only decided to jump in. It is not like swimming, or riding a bike. It is more like swimming or riding a bike drunk. It takes a fair amount of practice just to survive. You never excel, you only marvel at your ability to approximate. Few others are impressed.
Cops, etc.
It was a lesson learned, for me. I assume that it might be similar to how vegans feel after years of not eating certain foods and then ingesting some. They describe the sickened feeling they have in their abdomens, as if they have been poisoned. Mostly imaginary, I'm sure, but real enough to them. When you base your life on denouncing something it becomes nearly impossible to be honest about it. In that same way the opposite is also true. To love something or someone blurs your ability to know it or them as others do.
I have no idea how long I will go without drinking. The idea excites me in a way that the thought of continued drinking never quite did. But nobody, I don't think, counts how many unbroken months and years it's been since they've been drinking. For some reason those who stop do. That is troubling.
I do not want to be a calendar watcher. The forward march of time is not a victory for me.
One thing I very much do look forward to: I want to wander around Christmas parties telling people that they drink too much, rather than just showing them what that looks like. Loudly announcing, Oh, I'll just have a soda, or juice. Do you have any coffee? Listen, if anybody needs a ride home because they've drunk too much of that poison alcohol, please, dear god please, let me know… I'd be more than happy to drive you home. I'd hate to think that I let any one of you be slave to your own demonic impulses….. etc. etc.
Yes, I find sobriety almost as loutish as drunkenness, with some.
Between cat castration, financial debt, and inebriation cessation I have run out of topics.
Email me privately if you'd like to know my secrets.
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