No one nowhere, no how...

My neighborhood is ghostly and has been like this all week. Outside, it's cloudy and polluted, so the sky is weirdly white, like those photographs of skies in China. The air is muggy and close, so in the early morning bits of fog hang close to the grass. And it's silent here. There are no dogs barking, no cars gunning, no skateboards whirring on the streets. No sharp children's cries, no sounds of neighbors calling to one another. People are either in their houses or gone someplace. When I leave the house to get cigarettes or cat food, there's no one outside to wave to or smile at.

Today, on my way to Walgreen's, I saw one of my neighbors walking her dog. She's really a distant friend of my husband's and never remembers me. Still, because I'm very fond of her snowy Alaskan malmute, I always wave when I see her and she usually smiles back, if uncertainly. But this morning she was talking on her cell, and didn't notice me driving past.

Where are they? Where has everyone gone?

This week, in the mornings, when I pause at the doorway to let a cat in or out, the silence has been as palpable as a rainstorm. I feel it around me, this sensation of quiet and stillness. There's no one here. No one. Where are they? Where has everyone gone?

Driving back from the drugstore, I came up one of our more manicured streets. On a well-clipped lawn, but back away from the street, I spotted a bottle tree. Bottles of all colors: clear blue, transparent green, shining brown, and glittery red were poked onto the ends of its branches. To keep the spirits in, I've been told, rather than floating free.

Where are they? Where has everyone gone?

Maybe that's what's happened. All our sounds and presences are caught, trapped in a bunch of bottles on San Lorenzo Street.

Go figure.

Where's the outrage?

I think I've just read this one time too many: Where's the outrage? Today it's Robert Scheer in The Huffington Post who wants to know, and I'm inclined to say, Right in front of your face, you fucking fool. During these damp years of The Current Occupant, as one fresh hell after another comes to light, a blogger or a columnist will rise up with his moldy question, Where's the outrage? Along with this unanswerable, I've also heard, Where are all the Vietnam protesters? as though we've been in deliberate hiding, unwilling to give up our fat-cat life-styles, or as though both fury and protest are in perilously short supply.

Lazy and apolitical as I am, I've managed to log in the hours writing various congresspeople, sending furious emails, perusing online info, working on anti-Occupant blogs, and marching. I can't begin to imagine what the activists are up to. And still I hear the bleat, Where's the outrage? I suppose these people are visualizing the massive protests of the sixties and, seeing no equivalent, imagine the American public happily accepting one ghastly revelation after another.

I'd like to point out that those impressive demonstrations against war and racism were years in the making. Organizers worked in the South during the 1940's and 1950's preparing the way for later overt actions in the 60's. The Vietnam conflict had gone on nearly ten years by the time there were mass protests. And while war resistors and civil rights activists got a lot of newspaper space, there was no popular consensus that these were good ideas. People were beaten and killed for asserting their First Amendment rights. The economy was better too. College students didn't have to work every spare second to knock down an enormous tuition payment, one bread-winner per family was still the rule, and the social network was intact. People had more time to gather in physical groups rather than virtual ones.

There's plenty of outrage around today. More than enough I'd say. The forms it takes are different than those forty years ago. Outrage is being spun through citizen journalism, blogging, and on-line community groups like The Daily Kos. Given the slack state of the economy, the necessity for two or even three jobs per person, it's pretty damned amazing what's sprung up in this short a span. It takes time, as I mentioned in my last blog, to absorb and then reject The Big Lie and The Worse Truth. It takes us time to find one another. It takes time to mobilize. It takes what it takes.

But the outrage has been there right along. You need humility to perceive it. And more humility to realize you're not the only right-minded guy in the universe.

Robert Scheer, I'm talking to you.

Big Lies, high crimes, and scot free...

Vincent Bugliosi has a post in this week's Alternet on the possibility and/or likelihood of prosecuting George Bush for taking the country to war under false pretenses, adding his voice to many others. Much as been made on the cravenness of the US Congress for not holding the president to account, on the lack of outrage on the part of the American people, and the propensity of the media to print only trivia. And while Bugliosi, I am sure, makes a case with his usual gritty enthusiasm, I think he misses the point. He (and a host of others like him) gravely underestimates our citizens' intelligence and the scope of the problem.

But this is not a political blog. If it's about anything, it's about words, their magic, and whether we should believe them or not.

Early on, in this whole war debacle, a child of three could have seen through Bush's unholy eagerness to make a case for war, particularly a case for war with Iraq. You had only to view the size of the protests against it. Even then, millions and millions of people had already seen through that frail tissue of lies used to justify war against a bad country, a tyrannical leader and its mostly blameless citizens.

But then, 9-11 had occurred, and it seemed terribly important to do something. Everyone agreed on that. We had to do something, didn't we?

My only comfort on 9/11 was that I'd already lived through much worse: the assassination of JFK. Since that black day, the worst in my particular life, I've watched with a sad interest how long it has taken us to accept that on November 23, 1963, a lonely man with weird historical delusions shot John F. Kennedy through the head. A whole number of folks have never accepted that. Surely, such a momentous event would have immense organizations behind it: right-wing Cubans, the CIA, the mob, and a then-vice president. Surely, a single socially inept man couldn't shoot a president. Surely, though, he did.

In Granta, issue 93, there is a photo essay on para, tetra, and quadrapalegics. What is most striking about this essay are all the homely ways a life can be forever changed.
These people were hideously crippled because, variously, someone put down a heavy weight wrong, slipped in a wading pool, placed an ornament on a Christmas tree, slipped while shopping, fell in a parking lot, or dived from a boat.

It is only in novels, stories, movies, and comic books that everyday evil is plumped up into something large, frightening, and accompanied by rolling peals of organ music. The reality is usually small, innocuous, and pleasant-enough to slide right by.

And that's why George W. Bush will never be dragged up before the Hague as he no doubt deserves. It will take this country many tearful years to accept that a sociable if dim-witted US president lied to an entire nation for reasons of vengeance and greed. The lie was too big for one small man, we thought.

But that's how evil is. It's always small.

At first.

Hanging out your ass...

Something my husband once said to me vis a vis my first blog, "So this is what being a writer means. Letting your ass hang out." To which I shrugged, I think. I can't remember. Today, I don't think that's what being a writer means. Far from it.

This afternoon, I read a post about a young girl with a video on YouTube, who talks about being raped, and about her inability to talk to anyone about it, except the faceless hordes on the Internet. Sadly, I believe her. But this is also an example of letting one's ass hang out, and I don't think there's much wrong with that. Problem is, it opened her up to stunted musings from the faceless horde, none of which were pleasant to read. I hope she felt some relief in talking about her ordeal, but I suspect she didn't. I suspect she came away vastly more confused, if not more sorrowful.

This video opens up some interesting questions about the glut of artless information available on the 'net. There are those who expose everything about themselves in their blogs. I've read a few of them with the avidity I reserve for true crime books, and car crashes on TV. It's my own laziness in full throttle. Artless info demands nothing of us except that we consume it.

Artful information requires some distance to write and some effort on the part of the reader. Once again, I'm very glad for my years of art school. There I met perfectly horrible people who made sublime art I admired. Very soon, I learned to make a quick division between the person and what he did.

I go into this, because I've just read a review of Martin Amis' latest book of essays, The Second Plane: Terror and Boredom. Michiko Kakutani writing for The New York Times dumps all over Amis, mostly for being wrong-headed, but says nothing about the quality of his wrong-headed writing. I agree with her that Korba the Dread made little sense to me, and that every time Amis tackles an historical event he winds up tied in knots. Amis is a stylist and the point of him is how he writes, not what he writes.

Amis is an important novelist, an uneven short story writer, and a marvelous literary essayist. He's a fine example of artful information, with the emphasis on art. And art is not about raw facts on the printed page, but rather art concerns language. And it's only the use of language and form which can hold information up to the light. Only in that can we find any bit of wisdom.

With the torrents of information assailing us, sometimes I think the Internet is the verbal equivalent of corn fructose: fattening us up but leaving us hungry.

We're starving in the midst of plenty, but fatter than hell.

Careless love...

I've been reading an article about Doris Lessing, which noted in passing how much she hated her mother. I started reading Doris Lessing when I was very young and, like so many of my age and time, I thought The Golden Notebook was a lot more life-changing than it turned out to be. I went on to read many of her books and while her novels seemed to be big lumbering hectoring things, I developed quite a respect for her short stories. And I think it was in these that I noticed a repetitive theme of mom-detestation. I didn't think much of it at the time. Who hasn't hated her mother at some point?

And I suppose that's my point. Mom-loathing is an adolescent fancy. As we age, have adolescents of our own, and are loathed in turn, we become more charitable. As it happens, I never had children but I passed through the hate-to-love cycle nonetheless. After my mother died, it occurred to me how little of her life had really been occupied with children...eighteen years out of sixty-eight total. Not so many, really. I suspect that her emotions about me became far less than those I invested in her. Nonetheless, I can say quite happily now: I loved my mother.

Along with hating her mom, Lessing seems to have had an equally jaundiced view of her parents' marriage. It certainly sounds like a sad, dried-up, and defeated one, which she appears to blame on WWI.

I don't know of any war that isn't its own Vietnam for that time and place. My grandparents were both involved in The Great War; my grandfather was a marine and my grandmother worked in the War Department. They not only survived it, they were nuts about each other until their last ragged breaths. And it was utterly obvious that they were deeply, romantically in love with one another. My parents were the same, although their marriage didn't survive. Still, even remarried, they always spoke of one another with longing. In fact, as I think of it, I can't think of anyone in my family who didn't marry for love, and for most, the love was passionate. It's rather remarkable.

When I married the first time, it was not for love but for escape...escape to an adult life, an escape from my family for many reasons. That marriage lasted long enough for me to realize I'd made a devil's bargain. Looking back now, I wonder if there's any relationship more destructive, more prone to wither the soul and freeze the heart than a loveless marriage. I got free and then, after a time, surprisingly, I fell in love for real and had the good sense to marry him.

It's my opinion that only love heals, that only love changes us for the better, and only love defeats fate. And yet, it's an emotion that's mostly acknowledged with dopey Hallmark cards, gold-plated jewelry, and an occasional dinner out. It's considered an extraneous emotion--nice if you can get it, but don't hold your breath. Still, looking at Doris Lessing's stern face and reading her sour words, I know love is as necessary as air or light.

But then, I was lucky in my inheritance. And she wasn't.

The crying game...

My last post reminds me how Charlotte's Web clobbered me as a child. I couldn't even finish Black Beauty. The death of innocent animals always wrecks me. Even when I was small, I hated to cry, hated the way it made me feel. I never had the sense of release I've heard about from other women. I was always left drained and exhausted, tossed and bruised like a reluctant survivor.

For the past few days, I've cried and it's been okay. Cutter Bob was a wonderful cat and he deserves my grief. And like other tears of real sorrow, these slide down my cheeks easily and hotly. I don't begrudge a one of them, but they bring me no ease. I'll be sad for a while.

For a long time, as an adult, my tears were usually about anger rather than sorrow. Shouting and yelling was considered unbecoming in a young woman, whereas dissolving like a wet Kleenex was considered okay. The cultural paradigm of that was, of course, utterly self-defeating. My weeping was interpreted as the reaction of a fearful spoiled child, rather than a rightfully angry woman. Knowing that only made me cry harder, and feel more terrible.

I grew up during a time when women were expected to cry, snivel, and cower. Not too longer ago, while confined to bed, I watched a ghastly movie made sometime in the very late 60's or early 70's. When I say it was about a hippie commune versus a vicious motorcycle gang, you know all you need to know. Of course there was a scene where the commune was invaded, and the cyclists chased all the hippie chicks as they worked in the garden. What struck me was that the women simply trembled before these greaseballs; they begged, and wept rather than glancing around for a good-sized rock. But then, that's what girls were supposed to do.

But in Two Lane Blacktop, made in 1971, Laurie Bird gives an uber-realistic performance of what hippie chicks were more likely to be. She's rude, frontal, mouthy, funny, impulsive and doesn't make nice. It's a minty fresh portrayal in a non-mainstream film, so women mostly continued to sob, flinch, and grovel until the nineties when they started to slug guys in the chops--not much of an improvement.

Sometime, though, maybe thanks to Laurie Bird, I had the freeing thought, Why cry? Why should I have to snivel? I wondered. Why couldn't I snarl back in the face of intimidation? And from there, I began getting angry.

From there, I started to live out loud.

Requiem for a heavyweight...

Late last night, when I went to check on the cats, I found I couldn't push the back door all the way open. It's very dark in our back yard and when I glanced down, all I saw was a tail curved on the step. It was my cat, Cutter Bob, horribly injured. He gave a rusty cry and I shouted for my husband who was reading in bed.

"It's Cutter!" I yelled. "He's hurt. We've got to take him to emergency." Luckily, we live in a large city, luckily there's an emergency vet.

Carefully, oh God, so carefully, I slid a bath towel under him and, between the two of us, my husband and I got him inside, and laid him gently on the floor. "Stay with us, boy," my husband whispered, while I ran to the computer to get the clinic's address and phone number. My husband called to me, "I'm going to put my clothes on."

But when we returned and bent to him, Cutter gave a last long tremor and slipped away from us: something he had never done in life.

We think he fell from the roof, a straight drop to the concrete back step. As I wound him carefully in the towel, I realized his neck was broken. Like my husband and myself, he didn't view himself as being older and heavier. He still hunted, chased off other cats, and jumped to his favorite window sill. But he was 68 in human years and I had to begun to notice that sometimes he fell.

He was the last kitten born to our tiny cat Lola, nearly a kitten herself. She had three kittens in her one and only litter, all males. I watched as the first two were born, and then, figuring she was done, I went to bed as she purred and licked her two scraps of orange and black fur. I had just laid down when I heard her calling and ran back in. Another black kitten squirmed beside her, infinitesimal and mewling.

That was how we met, Cutter and me.

My husband named him. That year he was working in Houston; the week the kittens were born, he drove home to inspect them. He squatted down by the nest I'd made in the knee-hole of my desk. His eyes lighted on the lively short-haired black kitten, blind and deaf, like all newborn cats, but still he shoved and rooted more energetically than the other two. "He's a cutter," my husband noted approvingly, "he'll be Cutter Bob."

Like all our cats, he wound up with many names: Cutter Bob, Bob, C-Bob, and The Man, and he answered to all of them. From the very beginning, he was curious about The World, his world, the one contained by our yard. When we first brought him outside with the other two kittens, he scuttled about wildly, sniffing the grass, batting at twigs, feeling the wind, tasting leaves, all the time making his wild strange bird-like cry.

"Look at him!" my husband laughed, "he doesn't know what to do first." And Cutter didn't. He wanted to eat, smell, and feel the entire earth all at once. He was like that his entire life, always quivering in excitement, crying sharply to be let out. Then, once outdoors, he rolled in the dirt ecstatically, shoved toads with his nose to make them jump, explored our climbing ivy, raced across the roof and caught rats with a ferocity that made me gasp.

Despite their miniature mom, all the kittens grew to be big cats. Cutter was a sleek and shining black, with golden eyes. At night he was hard to see. At twilight, before I turned on the lights, more than once I nearly sat on him as he lay curled in my desk chair. He loved to lie length-wise on my legs, facing towards my ankles, and occasionally gnaw on my feet gently--something he considered the height of hilarity. He'd glance back at me, his jaw slightly dropped, and give me a cat grin. In return, I sang him Elvis songs since he always seemed like an Elvis-type cat to me.

Besides Elvis tunes and dirt baths, he delighted in patrolling his yard, kicking the ass of any cat who wandered through it, and catching lizards. Recently he had lost his two upper fangs, and I concluded he'd give up hunting, since he couldn't deliver the killing bite. Then, last weekend as I was walking to the car, I heard a rustling in the ivy and Cutter emerged triumphant, his mouth stuffed with leaves. I watched as he dumped the leaves on the ground, and put his paw carefully on the newly-caught lizard.

When he was not quite a year old, he shinnied up our neighbor's tree and couldn't get down. Miserably, he wailed for us. My husband, Cutter's mother, and I trooped over to the tree, stared up at him, and called but nothing worked. We stayed for over an hour, trying to coax him, but maddeningly he retreated to even higher branches. We left, figuring that he'd make his way down, but the next morning he was still there, still yowling. Calling animal rescue and the fire department only elicited jocular remarks about no cat skeletons left in trees, he'd find his way down etc. And so, after my husband had gone to work, I climbed up the tree, holding a five pound bag of dry cat food, which I shook at him temptingly. Still, he backed away from me, mewing pitiously. I sat in the tree until 5:00 without success, and the next morning I sat in the tree for another eight hours. On the third morning, a neighbor stopped by, said, "I thought this only happened in cartoons," then ran up the tree like the country boy he was, scruffed Cutter, and handed him to me.

I don't know the point of that story. Maybe it's that he was a cat you'd sit in a tree for and feel like an idiot, even for eight hours at a whack. He was special.

Cutter Bob was our friend, our life's companion, and he delighted in every day of his life.

Now I have to say goodbye to him. I'm not sure I can.

Run free, my boy. My best boy.

Run free.