The big thing here lately is my new cat. Yeah, I know. But she (I think she) strolled in at about 4am last Saturday morning. I was awake, sorta doing something, probably getting this PowerBook set up again (got it a year ago or so and it crashed hard, waited until now to resurrect it, etc) and suddenly there's this reasonably large animal slinking past in my peripheral vision, holy shit what is it? There's a skunk around here, I can smell it on occasion, I'm glad there's a skunk, but once I'd left my door open and I was upstairs and I thought the smell got terrifically strong, oh no, I thought, perhaps it came in! So I went downstairs and closed the door. Then I thought Jesus Christ, maybe it did come in and now I've locked myself in with a skunk! I opened the door again so it could get out if it was really in there (that is to say, in here) and crept around downstairs VERY CAREFULLY, as you can imagine, thinking oh great, what if I encounter a skunk in the bathroom and it freaks because I've cornered it and you know what happens then. Could be extremely bad. Could be life changing. Fortunately, there was no skunk and I was OK with feeling stupid for creeping around so slowly to find out if there was. So I closed the door. Whew.

But I still leave the door open some nights so the cool air will come through and the polluted smoke-besotted air will hopefully go out. And that night, Friday/Saturday, here's this actual animal suddenly going right past me about oh maybe six inches from my leg as I'm sitting on my infamous couch (as I am at the moment) and godalmighty whatever it is could BITE ME! So whatthefuckisit already? I'm a little jumpy at 4am, I admit. Especially when some unknown life form, possibly hostile with large teeth, decides to drop in.

All this takes place in 34.2 nanoseconds, of course, and then I see oh it's a cat. Thank God. Cat looks basically like this, though this is not a picture of the actual cat that is now living here with me and that I talk to all the time and who is now sleeping on the nicely upholstered black velvet chair seat about six feet away from where I am now typing typing just keeping in touch you know...

I've been feeding her all my stash of tuna fish, which as of tonight is totally depleted (will she stay? does fish matter?) and some Black Forest ham, milk, and the occasional splash of half and half. Cat seemed famished and skinny, but quite affectionate and playful, though now I think she's a little wary of me because I have played some tricks on her. Tonight it was the old shoelace-is-a-snake routine, they always go nuts for that one. But she knew I was making the snake crawl away and after a while I could tell she knew I was fucking with her head and she went out for a couple hours. Where? How do I know. She never tells me where she's going. Just like a woman. No I'm going down to the bar. No I'm going over to my sister's. Nothing. She just splits and I'm left wondering if she'll come back this time. So far so good, but I'm worried about not having any more tuna -- she loves the hell out of it. White albacore, she should. And we finished off the last of the ham yesterday, so I don't know.

But last night, holy shit, it was like Wild Kingdom in here. First she comes in yowling. It's a different noise than she's made so far so immediately I'm wondering what's up with Kitty. Pretty quick I see that she's brought in a vole (your basic field mouse) which she has conveniently first killed dead as a doornail. Oh, you caught a mouse. Excellent. Great. Yeah, why don't you put right there under that desk behind that giant stack of books so it'll rot and leave an indelible stain on (not to mention irremovable stench in) the rug. Yeah, right back there. Good Kitty.

After she loses interest in the non-moving former small animal, I retrieve it by the tail, contorting myself to get back into this impossible space where she's dropped the thing, and I toss it outside. Maybe the skunk will like it. OK. Where was I? I go back to reading this really fine just-published book called Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis by Eli Zaretsky, who I'd never heard of before, but wow, who is this guy? Knockin me out over here. I mean, this is so right on for the sort of stuff I'm going to write about one of these days, or for what's ailing me, or shit I dunno something. About how Freud was the Calvin of the second industrial revolution, the latter being something I know something about, used to write passionately about, stuff I never published anywhere. A long and never finished tirade against that hoser Daniel Bell and his book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, which was all too right and all wrong at the same time. Techno-elitism at its unselfconsciously arrogant best. So you can imagine that I'm pretty stoked about finding some seriously intelligent leftist analysis that situates Freud in the shift to a consumerist mass-market society. And I'm spacing out thinking about this and looking at the cat in that way you do when you're spacing and not really looking at anything because you're thinking wow Calvin is to the Reformation as Freud is to Fordism wow. And I notice the cat is the wrong color. My eyes must be fucked up because Kitty looks black now. Oh wow holy shit it's another cat! There are two of them in here and what the fuck's going on? Is there going to be a fur-flying-everywhere-spitting-clawing catfight, or a wildass feline fuckathon? I'm up, I'm saying words no cat would understand anyway. The black one runs upstairs. Kitty bolts out the door.

Hey, are Mac's supposed to crash all the time like PCs do? Because this Mac is crashing total blackout no warning just a bunch of English German Japanese saying oh well you're fucked you just lost everything better reboot better luck next time. Thanks. I had to retype half that last paragraph. From a failing memory. But never mind. This was supposed to be about Good Things. So forget I mentioned that Apple totally sucks as far as I'm concerned at this particular point in time, as Nixon might have said leaving for Beijing to sell out Amerika for some giant Coke deal. Yeah better luck next time asshole.

As you can imagine, my concentration was at this point rather disrupted by the events of the evening. And I couldn't just shut the damn door and go to sleep, because Kitty was out and the Black Marauder was hiding somewhere upstairs. I didn't want to face thinking it through. What must be done, that is. I avoided it for another hour as I tried to read while falling asleep 58 times in the same paragraph what is this shit saying anyway what autonomy democracy homosexuality my god there's no end to it is there and what's this about Fascism Ezra Pound the Cantos in Chinese the War the fin de sickle & hammer no I'm asleep again there wasn't anything about Ezra Pound. OK. I get it. I get up, go upstairs, do the sneaky room-to-room search for the black one. There is no black one. Hmmmm. Well, I guess that's good then, right? I go downstairs just in time to almost intercept Kitty coming home at all hours now, and with another mouse! This one still partially alive no I don't want to think about it. Kitty is playing her grisly game of hah-hah-I-kill-you and I'm thinking she won't really eat it, will she? She seemed to have no interest in eating the other one after it stopped moving. But this morning, or when I woke up, which was more like 2pm -- I mean, Christ, after all that -- I barely managed to snatch up Kitty and hurl her out the door before she could regurgitate what was surely the remains of the second mouse.

So yeah, it's been pretty active around here lately. Thanks for asking.

Other good things. One of you who shall remain unnamed dropped 50 bucks on my PayPal button. Yay! I eat and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes for another day or three. And I found out I really did buy BBedit a year ago, and not just download the demo version, and the nice folks at Bare Bones Software sent me the serial number so it's mine all mine again and I'm glad because BBedit really is the hands-down best text editor for the Mac (I write, saving every two words now) and I do miss TextPad fiercely. And another kind person gave me -- gave me, you understand -- this incredible (really is too) app called NoteTaker, which is wow man killer cool. Something like something I once designed in my head before there was any of this amazing (yes, I'm still amazed; more every day) web infrastucture to support it. Plus I found out (by making a phone call I've been putting off for a month) that the stuff that was in my Honda when they repo'd it is still at the repo place and yes I can come get it later today (I was going to get it tomorrow, but that was yesterday) and this means I will have the glasses again that I need to drive at night, which last night I realized were more needful than I thought as I drove Selene to some x-random birthday party through a deluge of rain and premature darkness caused by tornado and one-inch hail warnings. Think for a second about what a number one-inch hail would do on you out in the middle of some fuckin pasture if there were no handy trees or bunker emplacements. Kill you is what.

So now that it's tomorrow already and I really meant this to be just a short note of thanks to all of you for being such wonderful friends and seeing me through what has to be the godawfulest motherfucking stretch of my already weird-enough life, I guess I should end here and get some sleep before I go down to Denver to the repo place. The girl on the phone was surprisingly friendly and sounded nice, so I want to look my best.