How to Care

No one cares when your cat is dying. They might vaguely care if it’s your dog. But not a cat. Especially a big, grey, swaggering Russian Blue, with beautiful green eyes, and a terrible vocabulary full of curse words and tirades. Someone who could sit and eat, and eat some more; who wanted donuts, and potato chips, and had what we thought was a beer belly from a former bad owner, who left him at a kill shelter; and the six veterinarians who missed it, or misdiagnosed, or didn’t want to diagnose, because he was after all a big, grey, swaggering kitty with bad language and the temper to use it.

And when you finally meet the veterinarian who doesn’t mind the cursing and says, “he’s all bark isn’t he?” and holds his big round tummy gently and says, we should look into this, it’s too late, and no one cares. Especially those abominable veterinarians who didn’t know or didn’t care to investigate. 

But I care. And I care if you care. And I’m always willing to sit and listen to people cry from too much caring, because what else is there on this planet? 

Because when you pick that big grey swaggering kitty up from where he’s been laying on the cool moss in the fading heat of a desert day, and this cat, who took a year before you could sit next to him on the couch without him having words about it, and slowly came to be this slow, carefully stepping up your legs, tapping a hand ever so quietly on the counterpane to come out from under the bed, and he said oh that’s nice, and stood on your chest and said, maybe you’d just rub me behind the ears and that feels nice, and this cat; the cat, who was that cat, who you just picked up from the warm earth, where he’s been sitting just listening to the afternoon, because it’s his own private fortress of safety and sanity, having once been on the edge of the kill shelter not so long ago, to be that cat and you pick him up and lay his now thin boned body across your shoulder, gently, so as not to crush him or cause pain, because he can no longer eat but a tiny mouthful before it’s too much, and having lost five pounds in 4 weeks, and the vet who blithely sent him on his way after sucking the spirit right out of him, and it’s this cat, and he doesn’t say a word and just leans into your shoulder and you gently rub behind his ear, and he just says, oh that’s nice, maybe if you’d just scruff my chin a tiny bit where they had to draw my blood.

And I suddenly realize, just like that little boy will never again be the same swaggering, big grey kitty, even if we shave his tummy and do the ultra sound, and see why his spleen is enlarged, or if it’s a mass, or if it’s the slow kind, or the fast kind; and just like that moment where you went right instead of going left, with that man you remember from so long ago is gone in the dust of bad choices, it is still the Joseph Campbell joyful participation in the sorrows of the world; I can’t fix it, but I can let my heart go to the pure joy of it all. 

Because that’s all there is.

You live with this life and death expectant circle daily. I’ve experienced it with a few humans, several much closer than others, and many animals. The miracle of life is not life itself, but that the big source, which drives all our cycles -love- love is never dimmed by sorrow or any other hurricane that is thrown at it. Even time races forward, and sometimes stands still and can be bent by events, but love is constant. 

It is one of the most underappreciated constants in this world, because we generalize it with so much pith and weddings and garbage and emojis, when it truly is the heartbeat of it all. 

I think that must be what joy truly is, the vacuum black hole of the human spirit, and the gravity of life, death, and life again, in the space and time of the infinite. 

I don’t have a clue, but I won’t stop loving, and loving with all my heart, just because it hurts so much to say goodbye. 

***

And it may be that no one cares, and that grief, when you truly allow yourself to grieve, (which is hard to do and people shun it, because it’s uncomfortable to be around, so instead the non-listener will just tell you to be quiet, although what they say will sound like rhetoric and philosophy) is very difficult to feel and no one wants to feel it or ever say goodbye. Yet grief gives us gravity. We are the source of our own goodbye.

And then it slowly gives way to an empty floating feeling and, ironically, philosophy and rhetoric and humble generosity and gratitude. And there is a great swelling pride, not too different from nationalism, and suddenly you throw your arms wide to the world and say, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores,” and you have to realize that was the sentiment burning in the first nationalists when they wrote the big documents that started our country. 

They too had lost lives, and more life, and loved ones, (loved ones) and threw their arms wide to this country and said, let’s make something, regardless of the wrong doing to the current (native) inhabitants, and more wrong doing, and what is now centuries of wrong doing to all race, creed, gender and identity, and all the penance no man or woman will ever make up for in a lifetime, regardless of who they are or how they came to be here, but it is that feeling that birthed (this country’s) freedom. They cared.

Nationalism was in fact nothing more than love; of people who had lost, and now too floated on that strange sea of peace that comes after the huge storm of great loss. They cared. I care. And it makes me wonder, where is the care in these nationalists of today, who storm the castle like giddy kindergartners raiding the school lunch fridge accidentally left unlocked. Where is the care? Where is the care when a virus sweeps the country, asphyxiating people in their own mucous, and people say, “it’s just old people, they die anyway.” Where is the care? 

This is America. We were born, as a nation, to care. This attitude of uncaring is not American. And these fellow Americans should not only feel shame, they should feel guilt, as they lie in bed at night, taking pick axe to our country’s capital as if they were entitled with anything more than a complete lack of care for the country that gave them life, that gave them freedom, that they are gleefully tossing across the table to the enemy, with the same buoyant  insouciance as the veterinarian, who said, see you next year! 

And no one cares—

But I care. 

And I dare you.

I dare you to care.

Steely Kitty Boy August 2022

Matthew Henry Cargill

MHC 5/13/1969 - 7/31/2019

My brother, Matthew Henry Cargill, “The Boy,"“ Sedro Wooley, WA 1998

Sunset

"If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, (it) becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It's like eating candy for the soul. Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn't mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you're just never the same."

~David Foster Wallace

"The Doctor Will See You Now"

"Call immediately. Time is running out. We both need to do something
monstrous before we die. "

— Message from Ralph Steadman (to Hunter S. Thompson)

"I don't get many letters from Ralph. He is not into small talk. But the
few that eventually reach me are always serious. His recurrent themes
are Death and Degradation, along with a lust for money so wild and
raw that its intensity would shame the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley's
Lover.

Russell Chatham is the same way. Artists never write letters unless
they are desperate, and by that time their brains have seized up. They
lack the pure logic and focus of the literary life, and their eyes are
rheumy with drink.

I have had trouble with Russell before, and with Ralph for most of
my life. They are rich and famous artists, two of the major talents of
their time — but they would have long since been legally put to sleep in
any properly organized society.

Instead, they are paid huge fees for their twisted works and they are
honored all over the globe. Ralph lives like a caliph in a 44-room castle
about an hour south of London in the fashionable county of Kent, and
rides now and then to the hounds.

Russell carries a platinum American Express card, drives a Cadillac,
and lives generally in the style of Sam Coleridge — an existence that not
even his friends understand.

They are both shameless Sybarites, far gone in wanton abuse, but
who am I to make judgments? We all have weird friends. Some call
from jail at four in the morning and others write ominous letters.

I drove down to the post office the other day and found only two
envelopes in my box — Russell's and Ralph's, both of them crazy with
anger. I turned Russell's over to the sheriff, but Ralph's had the tone
of a serious medical bulletin, and it seemed to need a reply.

Dear Ralph. I finally got your letter from the intensive care ward at
Maidstone Hospital, but it was dated 20 March 85 and that was a long
time ago, considering that you mailed it from the very lip of the grave.

You sound like an old woman, Ralph. I'm tired of your bitching and
whining. Just because you got drunk and almost died is no reason to
come jabbering at me about royalties and the meaning of life.

Never mention either one of these things to me again, Ralph. Your
questions are dumb and ugly, but so what? We will take them one at a
time:

1) There are no royalties on anything and there never will be. It is
an ugly situation. My attorney will be in touch with you about the money
and the slander problem.

2) This gibberish about the meaning of life is a senile cop-out. You
are a full-blooded country squire, Ralph, a man of tweeds and art. Your
neighbors don't want to know what you do to those animals that you
catch in the spring traps; and they certainly don't want to think — when

they see you roaming your hedgerows at night with something that looks
like a shotgun — that you have six fingers on each hand and your mind
is a raging inferno of contradictions.

They would have locked you up, Ralph, if they thought you were
desperately crazy . . . and they will, if you can't get a grip on yourself.

Take my word for it. Don't give them a handle. I know that man
Narley who runs the Maidstone Pub, and I've heard the crude gossip
he spreads. He is definitely not on your side.

But don't worry, Ralph. I have the answer. My own life has been
exceedingly strange, of late. I went through one of those giddy periods
where I believed what people told me, and naturally it ended in grief.
I went over there, as you know, to do the Playboy/feminist-porno story,
but I ended up deeply involved and was arrested almost constantly, for
reasons I can't explain to you now, due to the numerous pending court
actions.

The Night Manager is running a bit behind schedule at this point,
because of my weakness for journalism. In addition to all my other jobs,
titles and responsibilities, I am now a sort of neo-syndicated columnist
for the San Francisco Examiner, the once-proud flagship of what was
known as "The Hearst Empire." Young Will, the heir, has decided to
make it "a thinking man's newspaper for the '80s," and of course I am
out on the point.

Why not? We have Warren on the night shift, whipping the police at
all times, and I suspect there is life in the project . . . which means, of
course, that you will have to fill one of the "Artists in Residence" slots,
a high-powered four-week gig that will cause you to move to San Fran-
cisco and actually work for a living for a while. You will be sent out on
routine assignments like an ordinary journalist and your work will be
treated like offal, but I think you can overcome it and perhaps do some
unusual work.

Let's look at Groundhog Day for your opening shot. We will get you
a flat in the Avenues, my old neighborhood, and your first assignment
will probably be the trial of Charles C. Ng, an alleged mass sex slayer
from Calaveras County who will soon be deported from Canada to stand
trial here in Fat City ... or maybe in some rural jurisdiction where
they will treat us like decent people when we roll into town like the
Joad brothers.

You will have to trust me on this one, Ralph. I know it sounds strange.

But in fact it might even be sane. I have an acrobat's sense of these
things, a higher and finer touch.

So pack your bags and get ready to work on Groundhog Day. We
will have a strategy conference at the Beach Boy Cafe and then we will
creep out in the fog and do our filthy business. Welcome to the next
generation."

excerpt, "Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80s," Hunter S. Thompson

A Farewell to Arms

"He was a very nice boy. He was going to marry me and he was killed in the Somme."

"It was a ghastly show."

"Were you there?"

"No."

"I've heard about it," she said. "There's not really any war of that sort down here. They sent me the little stick. His mother sent it to me. They returned it with his things."

"Had you been engaged long?"

"Eight years. We grew up together."

"And why didn't you marry?"

"I don't know," she said. "I was a fool not to. I could have given him that anyway. But I thought it would be bad for him."

"I see."

"Have you ever loved anyone?"

"No," I said.

We sat down on a bench and I looked at her.

"You have beautiful hair," I said.

"Do you like it?"

"Very much."

"I was going to cut it all off when he died."

"No."

"I wanted to do something for him. You see I didn't care about the other thing and he could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything. I know about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn't know."

I did not say anything.

"I didn't know about anything then. I thought it would be worse for him. I thought perhaps he couldn't stand it and then of course he was killed and that was the end of it."

"I don't know."

"Oh yes," she said. "That's the end of it."

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

DFW

"The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for the universe inside you, all the endless in-bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it's only a part. Who wouldn't?"

"Good Old Neon," David Foster Wallace

always speak your truth even if it's against your self

"Taking responsibility means recognizing that you’re the one who can now begin to recognize those patterns (which until now have remained hidden and automatic) and start to do the work to change them – which is really just the work of honouring and (literally) embodying your own, true, authentic self. Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to bring us back to ourselves, to what’s really important. For some people that takes the form of a loved one dying or a horrible accident. I know this may be hard to accept right now, but you might want to consider the view that your disease has actually come along to bring you back to yourself. The great spiritual teacher A.H. Almaas talks about 'a part of you that loves you so much that it will make you suffer greatly, to teach you – because what else can it do? That’s its job.' "

~Dr. Gabor Mate

Summer 2003

The dreamy blood red basin slowly went down the drain.

So this is the place

this is the place I live she thought,

and died.

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I am large, I contain multitudes." -Walt Whitman

"future shock "

Granted, I write a blog on a social network, but the intellectual property problem of social networking is that social networking has turned emotions/likes/life stories/personal narrative into the ultimate fetish commodity. Soon, with the help of bit coins, silk roads, onion-ed security footprints and fingerprint i.d. shopping, we will be able to attach a value-based number to this isolated emotional currency; there will be links to bank accounts with incremental percentage points of monetary value paid out for every like/feeling/narrative/personal story/photo/and inadvertent advertisement via trends on social networks.

support the ones you love

"Because she knew he wouldn't mention this afterward; she knew he wouldn't take it as a sign that she was losing her nerve or was in too deep. There weren't many people in this world who would let you be vulnerable and still believe you were strong."

Veronica Mars, “The Thousand Dollar Tan Line,” an original mystery by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham, pg. 188

bound by blood, not bloodlines

from Web MD:

"The original meaning of the saying “blood is thicker than water” is that family ties are the tightest of all.

• YOUR ANSWER: True

• CORRECT ANSWER: False

Actually, it’s quite the opposite. In Middle Eastern culture, blood brothers -- warriors who share blood they shed in battle -- are even closer than biological brothers. An earlier expression is that blood is “far stronger than the water of the womb.” Historians think wealthy Englishmen may have bent the meaning to stress the importance of bloodlines and keep money in the family."

kilgore trout

"Trout lives in a rented basement in Ilium, about two miles from Billy's nice white home. He himself has no idea how many novels he has written--possibly seventy-five of the things. Not one of them has made money. So Trout keeps body and soul together as a circulation man for the Ilium Gazette, manages newspaper delivery boys, bullies and flatters and cheats little kids.

Billy met him for the first time in 1964. Billy drove his Cadillac down a back alley in Ilium, and he found his way blocked by dozens of boys and their bicycles. A meeting was in progress. The boys were harangued by a man in a full beard. He was cowardly and dangerous, and obviously very good at his job. Trout was sixty-two years old back then. He was telling the kids to get off their dead butts and get their daily customers to subscribe to the fucking Sunday edition, too. He said that whoever sold the most Sunday subscriptions during the next two months would get a free trip for himself and his parents to Martha's fucking Vineyard for a week, all expenses paid.

And so on.

One of the newspaper boys was actually a newspaper girl. She was electrified.

Trout's paranoid face was terribly familiar to Billy, who had seen it on the jackets of so many books. But, coming upon that face suddenly in a home-town alley, Billy could not guess why the face was familiar. Billy thought maybe he had known this cracked messiah in Dresden somewhere. Trout certainly looked like a prisoner of war.

And then the newspaper girl held up her hand. "Mr. Trout--" she said, "if I win, can I take my sister, too?"

"Hell no," said Kilgore Trout. "You think money grows on trees?"

***

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

So it goes.

***

Billy Pilgrim parked his Cadillac in the alley, and waited for the meeting to end. When the meeting broke up, there was still one boy Trout had to deal with. The boy wanted to quit because the work was so hard and the hours were so long and the pay was so small. Trout was concerned, because, if the boy really quit, Trout would have to deliver the boy's route himself, until he could find another sucker.

"What are you?" Trout asked the boy scornfully. "Some kind of gutless wonder?"

This too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.

It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.

Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

***

Trout lost his argument with the boy who wanted to quit. He told the boy about all the millionaires who had carried newspapers as boys, and the boy replied: "Yeah--but I bet they quit after a week, it's such a royal screwing."

And the boy left his full newspaper bag at Trout's feet, with the customer book on top. It was up to Trout to deliver these papers. He didn't have a car. He didn't even have a bicycle, and he was scared to death of dogs.

Somewhere, a big dog barked.

As Trout lugubriously slung the bag from his shoulder, Billy Pilgrim approached him.

"Mr. Trout--?"

"Yes?"

"Are--are you Kilgore Trout?"

"Yes." Trout supposed that Bully had some complaints about the way his newspapers were being delivered. He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.

"The--the writer?" said Billy.

"The what?"

Billy was certain that he had made a mistake. "There's a writer named Kilgore Trout."

"There is?" Trout looked foolish and dazed.

"You never heard of him?"

Trout shook his head. "Nobody--nobody ever did."

***

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut; middle of Chapter 8

the rain

People accuse me of being contrary when I say I love this weather, but I don't mind. It's not overcast, it's tropical balmy. It's soft, bunched-up, pearl grey, Maui overcast. It's not grey, it's Paris grey. It won't rain, but if it does rain it will be something soft and transparent. I've worked 12 hours in the rain, I've slept in the rain and today I don't mind the rain, because I know I can go home and put on clean, dry clothes and open the window and listen to the rain; if I choose. I may choose to go for a walk in the rain. I might enjoy getting soaking wet just because I can get dry again and it will be easy; as easy as going home to where I live, where I can afford to live, where I rent a clean, dry space all my own where I am free to be. Where I have stocked with food and blankets and bed, where I have built in space and time and my own. I don't mind the rain, because I can do all these things, and still get soaking wet and still be okay. It is just the rain. I have loved the rain since the summer we cut the hay and it was lying flat in the field to cure when it started to rain. And it rained. I remember my father coming into the kitchen and starting a fit something awful because it was raining on the hay and it was the end of the world (and it might have been for us at the time. To lose the hay crop meant we would have to buy hay and hay was expensive for all the animals and beds to feed; even I understood this as a small child and understood this import and that that was why my dad was so upset.) Still, I remember standing in the kitchen window, listening to the storm above me, staring out at the rain, and thinking, "but Daddy it's only raining." And I felt bad for the rainy day because it was so beautiful. We lived in Washington state and when it rained it rained. I remember looking out into the yard and it was so green it hurt. The apple trees, the pear tree, even the old scrappy little prune tree that was always trying to die, were green and bright and budded and bending over in the rain to accept the rain. The grass was too long and looked like a horses main, standing up in thick green tufts. The sky was heavy and leaden and dark, and in the window I could see reflected the bright, clear primary red of my favorite sweatshirt. It was like the earth was seething and breathing thick blood-dyed color. I have been in love with super saturated color ever since. And with the rain. So no. I'm not being contrary when I say I love the rain. I want to lie down in it and let it soak me to the bone until my blood threads with the trees and my skin dissolves into the dirt and I wash away from it all. I want to be like a ribbon of water threading through a river, made of rain, made of me.

more early american literature

"I have said a good deal more here on what ought to be than on what is: but God forbid I should appear to say, "I know what ought to be, and this is it." But it did and does seem better to shout a few obvious facts (they can never be "obvious" enough) than to meech. The meechers will say, Yes, but do you realize all (or any) of the obstacles, presuming you are (in general) a little more right than merely raving? The answer is, I am sure I don't realize them all, but I realize more of them, probably, than you do. Our difference is that you accept and respect them....Oh. I am very well aware how adolescent this is and how easily laughable. I will nevertheless insist that any persons milder, more obedient to or compromising with "the obstacles as they are," more "realistic," contented with the effort for less, are dreamy and insufficiently skeptical. Those are the worst of the enemies, and always have been."

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, pg 308-309 James Agee

"This Happened"

I met this girl once, or anyway I knew of her or perhaps I thought I knew her or maybe I just hoped to know her, and you would ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up, or at least what she hoped to be when she grew enough to live by her own decisions ‎(though we wouldn't say all that) ‎and she would say, "Oh I am going to see the world," as if that was a profession. I saw her once many years later and she seemed like the same girl, or at least she did to me if the light was right. I asked her if she had seen the world and she said no she had not and I asked her why and she seemed lost at the train station trying to answer; for a reason to find an excuse for the choices made and not made, of living in no outside of a yes, or at least that's what it seemed like she would say about a life not yet entirely lived, had she answered.

 September, 2003

‎

‎

‎