May 18, 2008
Signs and Tokens

I am feeling confident again because little signs and tokens are telling me that my instrument is coming back into tune with the universe. And when I am in tune with the universe I open myself up to its magic. And the signs and tokens portend life's magic at work; I speak of the magic of coincidence.

For years I lost the magic of life. [I love that phrase,"the magic of life." It seems like it's a rough translation of some French phrase, something like my favorite French expression, "raison detre." ] But on Friday night I was hanging out with the neighbors after work and after a stop at the animal store, and D informed me that the man who invented the laser had died that day. He showed me the Google home page, whose daily-morphing header that very day, Friday, had featured "Google" spelled out in lasers. Then he showed me the biography of the man who invented the laser. And I was amazed by the whole thing because what I had bought at the animal store was a laser with which I had hoped to divert Quentin and Andy.

I found it shocking to note that I just that very night had bought, without knowing about the laser inventor man or his death, my first laser! What were the odds? I wondered. At least lottery-winning, I figured. And so, with just that little crumb of wonderment I was able to rekindle my belief in the magic of life and feel that surely this must foretell the coming of good things.

For Quentin and Andy, who got their first taste of the laser some time after midnight when i finally tumbled up to the third floor, it was like "Close Encounters." It was as if they'd been lifelong Christians and Jesus had come. I felt weird fucking with them that way. I realized it was the first time I've ever manipulated their reality so fragrantly, introduced an element of unreality into the world that they've come to know, totally disorienting them and absorbing their attention. I felt guilty about it, but on the other hand it was so much fun.

In the darkness the only light was the red laser light, and Quentin and Andy followed it everywhere, over sofa, up wall, across room; and I realized that by directing the laser beam at Nico's sleeping form in bed I could induce the cats to run at and jump upon him.

Nico was momentarily awakened and without delay gott wise to what I was doing and so brought an end to the experiment for the night.




"One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."
May Sarton


April 16, 2008
"John Adams"

I saw the sixth part of "John Adams" last night, the delightful seven-part HBO miniseries which concludes next Sunday. It's quite a stirring production. In the sixth episode the Adamses moved into the brand new White House. Mrs. Adams (played to the hilt by Laura Linney) surveys the still-under-construction seat of American power and, observing the half-starved slaves doing all the work, asks what good can come of such a place. Later, when John Adams (an uglier-by-the-week Paul Giamatti) hopes aloud to the missus that only wise and honest men will inhabit this big white house, the irony is palpable--and not just a little painful.

Just as this series pulls us so convincingly into our country's past, the prism through which we are viewing it--that of our own tragic present, in which the executive branch has been overtaken by fools and villains who have, in turn, led the nation into an unnecessary war that continues to inflict fresh wounds through which the prosperity of our future generations bleeds out--is subtly evoked.

While the entire John Adams presidency was covered in a single episode, it would be a mistake to dismiss the second president as less than heroic. Adams's chief achievement, according to this episode, entitled "Unnecessary War," was that he kept the United States out of a war with France, holding his ground against hawkish cabinet members he'd inherited from George Washington and a bloodthirsty population that was calling for war. Had he gone into this unnecessary war, he could easily have taken a second term. But by sticking to his guns--or in his refusal to draw them, I should say--he loses the election and becomes the first one-term president.

I'm with one-term.


February 26, 2008

Bringing Up Babies

It's Jason Dearen Day, and I have taken a personal day to celebrate the simple fact of living, as well as to rest after our recent Oscar Sunday dinner party.

Quentin, one of the two new cats, has an unquenchable desire to get up on my desk and walk across my keyboard. I set him down, but he jumps back up again, refusing to take the hint. He is still rather kittenly, somewhere just under a year old. I like to think that both he and Andy, the other of the new cats, were born sometime around when Alice was passing away, that for a moment their lifetimes overlapped, that the then and the now are in fact contiguous, which of course they are anyway. It just feels good to be able to envision the circle of life so neatly.

It was almost six months before we decided we wanted apartment animals again. And I was reluctant, partly because my heart still ached for Alice and otherwise because I have always had cat allergies and thought I might stand a better chance of recovering my sense of smell in a pet-free apartment. However, our propensity for cheap sentimentality proved insurmountable--when January rolled around it brought a case of cat fever, and on February 2 of this month, Groundhog's Day, the long itch was scratched as we adopted two cats from the 4th St. tee-shirt shop that doubles as a cat rescue.

These two were among thirty-five or so adorable cats, all seeming full of love and heartbreaking need. When I first went into the shop, alone, the dude there showed me Andy first. Andy is a Russian Blue. He was the loudest cat there. He was screaming at me. "Watch this," the dude said, opening his cage (the cat's) and letting Andy leap out and up onto the dude's shoulders. After a while of this the dude left me in the room with the cats and Andy climbed on my shoulders, and I knew that his name was Andy. And in fact I called Nico right away and told him he would have to come and see this cat whose name was Andy.

When Nico finished work, he met me downtown and I brought him to the tee-shirt shop and introduced him to the dude, who escorted us back into the cat room. Nico began sneezing almost immediately; apparently his allergies are worse than mine. We took pictures of the cats we liked best and adjourned to the Boiler Room, where Alec the bartender set us up with our usual vodka cocktails and told us about his two boy cats.

The photos were taken on Nico's iPhone, and there were about ten cats we'd photographed. First he deleted the bad shots and then we began to consider in earnest, based partly on aesthetics and otherwise on emotional instinct, what of these cats we should invite to live with us into our 50s. Ah, there was the rub for so many months as we considered the possibility of a new cat: if this cat lives as long as Alice and we ourselves survive another 18 years, we won't have to go through another cat death until we're in our 50s. And the thought of that, this measurement of my life by cat lifetimes, just floored me. That perspective, that vantage point, terrified me. The Big Picture. And so I said, "No, I don't think I want any more cats" until January, when I said, "Maybe," and until February second, when I said, "We'll take these two."

For alas, it was too hard to decide upon any one, especially since I felt irretrievably attached to Andy already and Nico had decided he could not live without the incomparably cute face of the sneezy little grey and white cat whose adorably patterned face was the stuff of kitten posters. (Indeed it was not long before I would see Quentin fail in an attempt to leap up onto the bathroom sink, catch the basin's edge and hang by his claws in an impressive attempt to pull himself up, instantly calling to my mind the "Hang in there" kitty poster from I guess the '70s.) "Could we get two?" we wondered, and Alec extolled the virtues of having two cats, foremost of which was the fact that you never have to feel bad leaving them alone.

A couple hours later we're in a cab heading over the Brooklyn Bridge with Quentin in one box and Andy in another. And then we're home, and the kitties are released, and Andy hides behind the DVD player and Quentin is sociable and even willing to roll over on his back and let you scratch his tummy. By the next night they're curled up together on the sofa, and within a couple of days they are playmates, chasing one another from kitchen to bedroom and back again, leaving not an object upright as they go. And we have animals in our apartment.


September 20, 2007
I'd like to thank the Jol Oversight Committee for allowing me my nearly three-month extension on the date that I was ordered by the committee to commence coughing up my New York Minutes to the Cubby Grand Inquisitor in charge of my case so that he might here post them.

The dying and death of a cat is not an easy thing to undertake, and I do sincerely want to thank the committee for its overall really understanding attitude in the midst and in the wake of my dompa's* kitty's demise.

I know I am way down in the polls for my extreme negligence in upkeeping my little corner of the Cubby's online universe, and I wish to publicly thank the committee for its extreme coolness in this case.

Anyway, Holden Green was assigned to my case and then spirited away to some "secret mission" that only Huck Forest knew about. I suspect it's another Lo Chang Cambodia thing again.

But Holden was so beautiful. It seems like I never got a really good look at him. He was just in and out like a bird on vacation, and he didn't really become the main character in my life that I'd hoped he would. Now I'm supposed to do this with little other incentive than the regular Cubby abstractions.

Well, I'll do my best to keep updating here, although I'm not convinced it'll do any good.

Oh, and one thing I really want to say is that we should end the war now by whatever means necessary.




* my cutened version of "domestic partner."


June 24, 2007
I was assigned a CGC, or a Cubby Guidance Counselor, after the recently established Cubby Department of Observations followed the advice of a specially constituted panel set up to study my productivity in recent years and executed a Cubby Intervention on my behalf, which happened today, coincidentally the day set aside by the Gays for the celebration of Gay Pride, which I think should be changed to Gay Esteem.

It was a star-studded affair, with Mr. Fantastic, the Reverend Myrtle, Huck Forest, Max Schiller, Suzie Potsniff, Jamie Nellyman, Ponyboy Newson, Roscoe Cash, Sr., Trixie Kennedy, Silvia the Soothsayer, Tanner Pieskin, and Slush Machiavelli the wrestler all taking time out from their busy schedules to come together for one afternoon in my very own living room to tell me that i had better get it together quick, mister, and honor the year Cubby 10 before it becomes history. Kathy Barra wasn't there, but she sent a telegram from Zurich indicating the same basic point.

And so I was assigned my CGC, a guy named Holden Green, who seems to me so far to be a pretty "cool head,' which I like in a guy. And he's cute, which is helpful when one's trying to get used to the idea of having to work into one's busy schedule a weekly encounter with a bureaucratically appointed overseer. At least he's hot. That makes it worth the pain. Anyway, part of my Cubby Therapy is that I have to keep my minutes up to date, something I haven't been able to do for years.

Why I have not worked is another question altogether, and the reasons are being investigated now by the Jol Oversight Committee, the same people who staged the intervention and thrust me into the companionship of Mr. Green. But as the protagonist of my life I think I am well qualified to elucidate the reasons myself, and indeed the committee has asked me to testify before it later in the week. I'll be asked on the spot, in public, to recall minute details of my life and remember conversations that I just had with people the other day, the very ones I've been having so much trouble recalling clearly. In fact, I find myself remembering snippets of conversations but not knowing who my partner in conversing was. And then I try to remember who I saw that day, but it's just so difficult.

Anyway, I just wanted to thank everyone for the concern and encouragement. You've surely been great friends, those of you who are reading this, and I appreciate that. And I guess here goes...