Next chapter of the cat saga..Me and Noodles

There were diverse and many alley cats mewing and nuzzling on this street, before the Cat Massacre of 2008.  Out door cats without owners, they were friends to  many people on this street.  They had fine personalities, and were robust.  Ramon was the closest of the feral cats to this household.  He and I communicated easily.  And there was a friendship between Noodles and he that went with a common, divided species.  Cats know what social stratification is.  This is one of many reasons they are so much more successful than most people.

I heard some of their conversation, through the screen door, one July.  It was something common and urgent.   Hushed, and heartfelt.  My cat is both humanitarian and a cynic.  It's a trait that grows in rocky soil, like most traits here on the North Side.    Noodles came to the screen door and tapped, and the two cats filed in as quick as I could jerk latch and knee the lousy door open.   They went directly to the kitchen table, and took seats at the round Formica.  I followed.

"My family and I subsist on woodchucks and oppossums.  We are fortunate.  There are rodents everywhere.  We eat well...:"

"Ramon would eat Punxatawny Phil, if he got a clean shot at him," Noodles jocularly interjected, and we took some time to laugh freely.  It let go the tension.  There was urgency to get on with.   "We are proud and independant creatures, are we not?" Ramon lowered his head, so not to make this request a challenge.

 "Why, Ramon, you've been nothing but a fucking wonderful next door neighbor all these years," I said.  We paused.  He continued.

"Noodles tells you keep large amounts of canned cat food here, in your home."

"Of course, Ramon, I said."  Noodles monitored the interface.  "If you are in need, I am certain we can assist."

"You see, normally we live off the land, but my great uncle has contracted colitis.  He can not digest our rodents.  He needs canned food."

Well I love the way simple solutions to trouble  can be so mutually rewarding.  In no time at all, we were trading beef chunks in gravy with cheese for dead wood chucks.  I never would have guessed they were so tasty  chicken fried.    It was that incident of illness that started us all eating together.  We adopted communality.

Me and Noodles....the cat saga

 Ramon was such a good natured outlaw.  A slow moving, powerful feral cat, many sizes larger than average, he and my own kittie held court on the front porch, with regularity.  I would overhear through the screen door their kinship.   My cat had all modcons, as our Brittish pals might say, and  Ramon  lived in a crack hovel abondoned years ago, with his family, his cats, as broad as rainbows arch.  He would visit, and we would spend time down the street, with the zillion feral cats.

Not hardly typical of my beloved Noodles, she waxed nostalgic the other evening.  Noodles speaks fluent English, born of feral cats not two litters back from that dicy way of life, half wild, not at all averse to a relationship.   I think she's found something new in herself, knitted from experience.    Some ethnic American  gangsters are known to find their herritage through this same process.   But a cat cannot be a criminal.

A feral cat is outlaw.  The difference has been explained by many as an outlaw didn't choose to be on the outs.  People can be like that, and cats certainly.   Noodles, my sleek angel calico, was reserved and guarded, yet fluent, about her lost companion, Ramon.   "We are outlaws for speaking the truth," I once heard the kohl black alley cat confide to Noodles.

"Speaking the truth."  I liked Ramon.  A cat of few words.  "Killing a robbin, or some gringo's parakeet is something that we must do.  Have you known me to be a sadist?  Was anyone downtown sweating the fate of their prime rib at  the Duquesne Club?  We are  proud, bird-eating outlaws."

Reviled for snagging lunch.   And for spreading rabies.   "Need I remind that  founding fathers spread syphillis," Ramon would say.  "More people die from roller skating accidents than from us." he mused.  And the vast numbers of feral cats was provided for in all the decaying homes the city confiscated and left to rot.  What fine city planning we had, when Tom Murphy was in office.

It was sometime in 2008 that the back hoes came.   The crack houses were demolished, but not before arch urban treachery.  It was reported on the news.  Propaganda.  Feral cats with rabies.  Near where people's brats play in the street, thus there is concern.  More items on the news.  The no-kill animal shelters would be finding homes for the feral cats.  But the cats were massacred using traps and poisons.  It's cheaper.  Faster.  This North Side 'hood is not a place that squawks.  We don't cry to authorities.  We let the good old boys play their tricks.

The other night Noodles was saying the pink jagged scar that ran down Ramon's face, and the way his one broken whisker strayed from the other  fierce, downward black hairs , reminded her of Al Capone. I could see the resemblance.  There were  many cats lost to the massacre, many looked like Ramon.  He was fertile.  That cat spoke with us.  Noodles shared her recollections, sitting up on the futon under the reading lamp.  then we retired.  She snuggles better than most cats.

Personal Stuff

There are some really poor shmoes out there. These guys and gals suffer borborygmus. An on-going, noisome, condition in which the guttsies makes noises. Draining and churning sounds, in succession. In my case, it can be heard from across the room. Like it matters, there is no physical pain, just the discomfort of knowing I sound like a laboratory instrument turned all the way up. It's a bonafide social handicap, for which there is no known treatment, and which isn't recognized as serious enough to win you a charity parking space and special license plate. There are coping strategies that aught to get at least a doggone bowl of soup. I gave myself a nick name. I'm Gurgles. My new name is Gurgles.

"Don't be shy"-I say to the woman behind the cosmetics counter-"I came to pick up the perfume I ordered. Yes, it's Gurgles. Gurgles Hineschmidt."

"Is this gallon of Rex Derriere for you, or is it a gift, if I may ask, Gurgles?

This woman was my type. Stern and tall. I'd let her rip out one of my kidneys with a can opener if she needs it to sell for a fix. But at the moment, I had a huge statue-shaped bottle of fragrance to navigate. I'm going through changes. Coping mechanisms. I'm determined to pull off an egg basket of them.


Lately I've been shortening 'supposed to' to 'spozta,' with a long 'O,' of course. It's a linquistic moral decline. From the social stresses.

I believe people have organic needs to improve their slump. Everyone slumps. Then there is some damp resurrection, with more energy with which to cope with people and places. When people generalize like this, and name themselves after borborygmus, you can say they would make a crappy personal friend. I usually do.
Independent of annoying stomach noises that can go on for hours. I'm 'spozta' adapt to having alien sounds. And figure out, same as everyone else, including non-borborygmus sufferers, how to get along with people.

There are believers and non believers in musk. The former are my scented kin. It is possible to neutralize sound with smells. Has to be the right one. I'm smelling a lot of it because the gorilla shaped gallon bottle of Rex Derriere is hard to keep a grip on. There's a pool of it soaking into the center of my Oleg Cassini lounging PJs. Damn. But transfiguration is going just fine.

Woke up this morning like Robert Johnson finding his guitar out of tune. Before I even made coffee, I darted out of my cot and went right to the glass likeness of King Kong, or some facsimile of a commanding, superior ape, which is how Rex Derriere is marketing his fragrance. Maybe the ape looks more like Mighty Joe Young. In any case, I stole a whiff of some of it at the perfume counter last year, and don't think this monkey water don't draw game. I splashed a load of the unguent on the old puss. Then I sat back in my gigundous brown Barcalounger, and let the smell drape itself around the olfactory gluttons for pleasure.

Well, it's nearing time to head out, for once, after about fifteen years of being a hermit. There have been a series of decoder rings in my life, bought from comic books and Popular Metaphysics, that were spozta provide some form of relief, even if only from boredom. There were herbal products said to make the organs ride unicycle on a tight rope, smiling. Exercise gadgets that make the body a temple, since it usually, in most people,is a red lights district. But it's the way I smell that is going to make all the difference. Time for another splash from the great gallon. 

Say, I was just playing a few licks on my Flying Vee, when this bat flew in the house. Ominous SOB. Comes in. Perches right on the stopper on the bottle of Rex Derriere. Smart move. How am I going to get at the intruder without smashing eight thousand dollars worth of scent.

While I tried to let the bat make the next move, I went over to the eight track tape player I'm using, and pushed in a real old tape I have of Nico singing "My Funny Valentine." It is, after all, that funny holiday. Funny as borborygmus.

Bonus Haiku

dreary convenience store

stale coffee falls dead
industrial cream creeps out
hand pump dispenser

Finding New Spiritual Practices

Late In Hamarama

A religious treatise can be  a tiring thing to have to compose.   With the television on, and a salacious inflow of ads on the  perifery of my netbook, a rerun of Leave It To Beaver and some pop-up ads  for condoms and lubricants are working in league to distract me, in spite of how well and thoroughly I considered a chubby wide matter of the spirit.

I've said it a bunch of times:  Some Seth or Waldo invented all religious dogma and ritual.  Unless I'm dead wrong.  Unless everything known about the supernatural came from something other than crazy, fucked up people, as of this 21st of January 2014,   dreamed up, drummed up or cooked up same as fairy tales.  Or else one black-covered book or other is telling the stone cold truth, to the exclusion of all other accounts.   If I'm packing good sausage this fucking cold Tuesday,  my thesis is that anyone can fabricate their own cotton-picking rites and ceremonies.  I dreamed up Hamarama because ham is cheap during the winter holiday seasons.  It made sense to combine the abundance of meat with an elemental tendency to celebrate, and/or give thanks.  Using Christmas as an example, this kind of shit might catch on, with  publicity.

And then it gets even more abstruse.

Heaven help me, I'm worse than Catherine Deneuve, in Roman Polanski's too creepy fim, Repulsion.  Worse because I can't take the luxury of being clinically insane.  And what I did isn't really all that heinous.  But it could seem so.  Confusion is exacerbated because people are ever so more favorably responsive to Catherine than to my much abused poor self.   Blonds have more fun, she's blond, I'm swarthy.  She's a flesh statue.   I'm one of many men you see waiting for the bus on freezing winter afternoons, blending in with the slumdwellers.  I'm  dysthymic.  Thirsting for beauty.  Applying the spirit of invention.

I got my third ham this period of Hamarama,  in the last  holiday trimester during the Feast of Cheap Ham, which starts before Christmas and goes on for as long as it lasts.  It lasts for as long as the price of picnic hams stays at the reduced rate of 99 cents a pound.   During Hamarama I cut the food bill by eating mostly ham.   This orb of pink meat, with leg bone up center, was just over seventeen pounds, which has been typical of store brand pig portions this year.

I've chosen to eat ham, thin sliced, but otherwise as it came, pre-cooked, from the grocery store. Ham sushi.  Seems more decadent then when fried.  It's under consideration.  Might or might not be included in the dogma.  It's my dogma, and I'll be darned if it's going to have a life of its own.  I need some control, in this life.

poem: Motoring

there's a world of losers waiting to rob you of joy
late model van with food supply of cello-wrap cakes in stacked boxes
screech of rear door slamming while beefcake fills pantry
Sterno wine rack
slant six motor in truck color of cirrhosis
Brylcream stash and extra for the thinning pompadour
kept alright with a mesh back trucker cap
no crumbs in the follicles
no rest stops 

New Year's Aims

Everyone has the inalienable right to play with words.   It is more inherant than the tendency to play with one's food.  But it is the former fleck of conduct that made Winston Churchill a famous wit.   While dull witted blather is associated with brain damage.   A compelling case, not so?

I invented a word, and am longing for the recognition that is supposed to come with discovery. It is the property of 'ballsoutness,' of working in a 'balls out  way,' that needed a term with which to wend it's pendulous meaning.  A dear friend passed recently, a man who had lived his fifty nine years in a very balls out way.  No name dropping just now, trying to be more sensitive, per recent New Year's resolution.  Still have the sticky eye secretions gluing the swollen canthus, from the drinking bender, that comes with flipping the calendar year.  But the much honored decedent had unique ballsoutness, and his life is being fictionalized, in an off track shot at writing a novel about blue collar life in Pittsburgh.  On an unrelated note:

Armani:     I noticed the Armani look in magazine ads and in some of my favorite indy flicks, and instantly, the world divided between people who had the look, and assholes.  This harsh judgement is temporarily suspended for the project mentioned above.  Less judgement and more description is what's cooking on the hot plate.  Dress daring.