sometimes when I put on a little too much makeup
drink a little too much
and smile in a certain way
in the fuzzier hours of night
I see her face in mine
at first a shock but then I welcome it because
I find
it’s the closest thing
to bringing her back to life
from the dead
sometimes in the afternoon sun
I catch my black cat
out of the corner of my eye
in the magical recesses of periphery
and I see instead my
dead
black
cat
gone for over a year
slinking toward me
her claws tapping the cold kitchen tile
fat
slow
and so endearingly ordinary
looking for solace from
the grating existence of all people on earth
the source of her eternal anxiety
or maybe seeking out
just one more cheek scratch
before taking her final leave
How about NOOOOO?
Sometimes when I’m bored, I actually bother to leaf through the coupons that come in the mail. Today, I encountered the coupon pictured above. This food is so preposterous I don’t even know what to say. Are they aware Japanese people invented udon and also MSG? How can you possibly open a legitimate udon noodle restaurant and simultaneously advertise for NO MSG and NO gluten? Give me a fucking break. I can already imagine how boring, flat, and ridiculous this food tastes. Stewing udon broth in vegetables will never, ever, ever, ever give it the same flavor or depth as broth stewed in meat. Period. Impossible. No.
The whole demonization of MSG is junk science anyway, probably stemming from racism against Asians. Oooh I ate Chinese food and got dizzy! Shut up. The billion Chinese people eating MSG regularly don’t seem to have your imaginary MSG allergy. How do you explain that? Your stupid sensitivities are made-up, just like many gluten and carb allergies. For most people, it’s not a fucking allergy. It’s an aversion. There’s a difference. You aren’t “allergic” just because you refuse to eat something based on your blind adherence to the latest retarded fad diet. Allergic is when you eat something and swell up/stop breathing and possibly die. Did you asphyxiate or die from eating MSG or gluten? No, so you are not allergic.
The coupon advertises it is “Voted the best Vegan BLT in California by PETA” which is completely meaningless. If PETA people don’t eat meat, they cannot possibly know how shitty vegan BLT’s or vegan ramen udon are. These are the same people who compare eating pork to the murder of Jewish people during the Holocaust, so their opinions when it comes to meat are hysterically biased. Also, this is to say nothing of the fact a place that serves both BLT’s and Udon noodles cannot possibly be a good restaurant. This is some seriously infuriating hipster bullshit.
Cops have been in the news for murdering innocent people, raping women, beating their wives, and killing dogs. Most recently, goats have been the target of law enforcement. Because you know, heroes in blue certainly can’t be expected to behave like normal fucking human beings and deal with animals in a non-violent manner. Barking dog? Shoot it. Hissing cat? Shoot it. Don’t know what to do with stray kittens? Shoot them. Somehow, mailmen, door-to-door sales people, and girl scouts can navigate the dangers of domesticated pets without resorting to deadly force, but cops can’t seem to fucking figure it out.
A Portland farmer was upset because an asshole cop killed his goat, which had inadvertently escaped through a hole in his fence. The farmer came upon the cop and his poor goat, who was bleeding and gasping for breath. The cop was not embarrassed to actually state, “‘Yeah, it was either me or the goat” because he was intimidated by the goat’s size. Maybe if you can’t fucking handle a goddamn goat, you should not be allowed to have a gun or be a fucking police officer. The owner of the $1,200 goat from New Zealand who sounds like he smokes a lot of weed responded, “Man, there are 7-year-old kids that deal with these goats. Infants that deal with these.”
There you have it. People deemed America’s heroes are more cowardly than children and infants.
In other news, a more recalcitrant goat attempted to headbutt police officers who were encroaching on his marijuana patch, but was (surprisingly) not harmed during the drug bust.
she was walking and the paper bag was ready to tear out of her hand from the weight of the hard rain and daydreaming she absorbed the whole cosmos of the winter day into the folds of her brain, streams of hot hatred searing through sulci and gyri until she walked through the double doors of home
found her place before her computer and received communications in cold flashes from an old high school friend who had killed over 50 people in Iraq. because of the lack of tone she could not tell if he was bragging or repenting but she suspected he enjoyed it and thought of his nondescript, beady eyes, slightly pock-marked face, slender frame, easy demeanor, as she knew him before, and shuddered until she closed the laptop lid and infused into a quiet suburban memory.
she had stars and moons in her pocket and a dull tomorrow which promised to lose itself in a mad Los Angeles rush, broken light slipping through cracks of graceless nights, vanishing with feckless abandon and levity into the thinnest dust on its final course
and he had dead bodies rotting eye sockets and a putrid childhood left in a foreign land.
There was the distinct morbidity of childhood, then before she knew it, she was knocking on heaven’s door with a baseball bat in one hand a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other. How nice that you believe in an afterlife and will have a warm home basking in the glow of god waiting for you when I continue to be lost, burnt, stubborn, clinging to vacuous resolve, stale romances trailing close behind. The scent of the night before is still in her hair and the beautiful Greek god saw her cynicism running down the length of the closet mirror. She was the most reluctant witness to the pieces of the day: cheap guitars, fake aspirations, imaginary men.
Here she thought she would find his closeness, everlasting regression, and sweetest harmony written in stardust by the purveyor of perceived eternity but he was not there, and in his place was only a fanatic disintegration.
She had ended gracelessly in an anti-climactic fade, swimming in her own ashes so she had no choice but to welcome futility. She hypothesized that sleep is parallel to death.
Winter broke her like a disease.
That night, someone confessed to wanting to be an actress and fucking minors. Does it make you feel younger? She asked. Tonight, our wrinkles will be deferred by cheap whiskey, this magic bottle of fluid gold. They wasted time because they did not know.
There was something romantic in her mythologic desperation, the sword in her body and her premeditated funeral pyre but the modern parallel was wrong boys wrong times, pathetic and humiliating mistakes. She fell to the waves of his hair breaking on her fingertips and became perpetually afraid and thought that when her bones had disintegrated into the earth he will have died in her thoughts an infinite number of times.
They yelled at each other in the hall and she said it would be his loss. Almost asleep, he murmured that he was up against a wall and had nothing to lose. She tapped on his chest, demanded to know what he meant but he was silent.
Still,the sunshine liquids diluted to a romantic translucence made waves in the head, the concrete pond became an ocean, and in the fluidity of night they rolled heads and senses and fell unconscious together, pleased with oblivion, pleased with each other, and awoke to monotony disguised as something novel. She dreamed she was 14, fearing her petals would be cruelly torn off.
Just a brief note on ultrasounds. I’ve had 3 at this point, and I am grateful for medical technology, because I am prone to worst-case-scenario horror fantasies of the most paranoid sort. I’m usually pretty good at quickly and rationally talking myself out of these, but nevertheless, they can intrude upon my more logical thoughts at any time.
The ultrasounds I had done at 8 weeks, 12 weeks, and then 20 weeks have been immensely reassuring, because as stupid as this sounds, despite my belly growing rapidly larger by the week, it does not otherwise feel like something is growing inside of me. Like what if the fetus is totally dead, and this belly expansion is actually due to ingestion of too many tacos and donuts? My arms and legs are expanding too, so maybe I’m just getting fat. Totally plausible. I’ve read stories about women whose bodies continued to grow and mimic a healthy pregnancy for several weeks, despite the fetus having no heartbeat.
My friend who is also currently pregnant felt the fetus move at 14 weeks, which is early, but I’m at 20 and have felt nothing. It’s dead! No, it’s not, but the thought crosses my mind, which is why these ultrasounds are sort of amazing. At 20 weeks, seeing the fetus clench her hands, suck her thumb, and watching her renal arteries pump blood was a major relief.
My mind can get carried away, however briefly, with all kinds of unreasonable fears, so until they have a cure for neuroticism, ultrasounds and technology are here to save the day.
I consider myself emotionally balanced most of the time, though I am prone to sentimentality over cats and rage over matters involving violations of human and civil rights. I think pregnancy has slightly magnified these tendencies of mine and today, I came across a moving story that encompassed both of these issues. Cats, human rights violations, and pregnancy were a trifecta that really pushed me over the edge in this case.
The Guardian shared a story of an unfortunate refugee family who had to flee Iraq due to circumstances of violence. They could not imagine parting with their family pet, a beautiful white cat (though I am partial to black ones), so a mother, five children, and their beautiful white cat named Kunkush left Iraq and headed to Greece together in November of 2015.
100,000 refugees arrived on the Greek island of Lesbos that month, and according to The Guardian video (below), “Kunkush was scared and got separated from his family.” This statement is written in big, unmistakable letters in this compelling video of human and animal resilience. The family had to move on, since Greece was merely a brief stopover point, and they did not yet know where there final destination would be, as is often the case with victims who are displaced by war.
Kunkush was located in a village nearby several days later, and was picked up by a veterinarian. After two months, a volunteer traveled with Kunkush to Berlin, and a search for his family began.
It turns out, his family had relocated to Norway, and in February, Kunkush was reunited with his family. This video (you have to watch it) is so incredibly touching, as it shows the loving reunion between Kunkush and his family after a long and seemingly impossible journey. The mother can hardly wait to get him out of the carrier, and once he is in her arms she cries, “Kunkush, my life! My darling!” as she kisses him. I almost fucking cried at work watching this damn thing.
There is nothing more beautiful than a happy ending like this; a family forced from their homes under tragic circumstances finds a new home, and their beloved cat makes it home to them under the most improbable of circumstances. You can read more here.
Yet, for every miraculous, beautiful moment, there is some ugly, vile, person with cow shit in the place of where their heart should be to tear it down. The story was posted by And My Cat on Facebook:
While many enjoyed the story and shared positive thoughts, many of the comments were imbecilic, egregiously ignorant, and reprehensible. For instance, Exhibit A, Rita Maji DeLisi, a royal cunt who enjoys Ohio sports commented, “Sad…pathetic owners leave pets behind. Get yourself a statue next time. You don’t deserve the love pets provide.” Another equally cunty Facebook user apparently agreed with her and liked her garbage post.
Not to be outdone, Exhibit B, Corrina Peacock Ashley stated, “They shouldn’t have left him!!!” and Exhibit C, Bettyann Brunette Lilley called the family “pieces of crap” and “fools” for leaving their fur baby. That’s right; in reaching an unprecedented low, Lilley actually called children fleeing from war “pieces of crap” and “fools” because they lost their cat. It is truly un-fucking-believable.
First, maybe if Rita’s military was not bombing the shit out of Iraq and murdering civilians over there, this poor family probably would not have had to fucking flee to begin with. It’s easy for compassionless, disgusting north Americans to judge a family under these circumstances while stuffing themselves full of Doritos and Pizza Hut in the safety of their own homes, which have never been damaged, destroyed, or even threatened with foreign bombs or troops.
Second, it’d be nice if these fucking idiots would do the world a favor and learn to read. The video clearly indicates the cat was scared and ran off. He was not abandoned for fuck’s sake. If they were capable of reading even at a second-grade level, they would have learned from the video that Greece was not this family’s final destination. In all likelihood, they did not have legal status to stay in Greece indefinitely as undocumented aliens and search aimlessly for their runaway cat. Rita is possibly the type of American who supported Trump and his abominable wall and seethes with hatred at illegal immigrants, but she somehow expects this family to overstay their legal welcome in Greece to search for a fucking cat. Does this make any goddamn sense?
Even if the poor cat were in fact abandoned, is it too much to ask to have a bit of sympathy for a family literally fleeing for their lives? Let’s not forget that refugees drowned in Turkey and even Lesbos, where this family landed, and cats are not known to be the best swimmers. Maybe at that point, the family was relieved Kunkush had at least run away on land and not died. It’s easy to judge another human being, but no one really knows what they would do if forced into the same situation of war, violence, and displacement. But I suppose that’s far too beyond the mind of North Americans living their revoltingly militaristic and supercilious lives, marked by extraordinary obesity in both a metaphoric and literal sense – the overindulgent, masturbatory corpulence of the self-righteous American manifests itself both mentally and physically.
In sum, fuck these people.
