Thank you to Kevin and to John for supporting this project with their hard earned money. I have enough self-regard that I want to be paid for my writing, and yet, each time a real human being does pay me for my writing, I have deep feelings of inadequacy as if I’m undeserving.
If you want to support this project, you too may have the pleasure of making me squirm with my conflicted feelings of gratitude and unworthiness.
My grandfather called every cat
he ever owned “Boaze Kitty”, “Boaze” for short. They all had names he never used. The cat he had for most of my youth was Samantha. All cats are part ninja, but Sam was ninth degree blackbelt. Our family had a running joke that she was grandpa’s imaginary friend. My uncle Jeff maintains to this day that he never saw her.
Grandpa Dave was among the strongest
influences in my life. He was stern, short-tempered about aesthetic concerns, and vicious in his drive to win all competitions. He was also the most gracious competitor in loss I’ve ever known, believing if someone beat him, he’d failed to perform well enough, therefore accepting radical responsibility for his own deficiency.
He believed in aliens and angels, and I never asked him a question he refused to consider with care. He and Chewy died eleven months apart, leaving me devoid of men to emulate.
Above my head, at my desk,
here in Oakland, I keep a stack of twenty Mead Composition Notebooks, each filled with journal entries. I journaled daily from 2003 to 2010, so that seven-year period is uniquely vivid in my recollection but no less fluid for all that writing. I still can’t tease out when in years, or even chronology-to-other-events so much of my life happened. Am I unique in how poorly I recall the sequence of my own life? Perhaps I’ll blame it on drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll.
I lived with my dad
for a few months in the summer of 2005 following my DUI. One night, late, I sat out on the front stoop at his house, smoking a cigarette. It’s likely I was feeling self-pity and regret for any number of reasons, but it’s also likely I believed life was about to improve. Optimism is so deeply engrained in me, I can’t imagine a life without hope.
It was a summer night in the season of my Christianizing. I rededicated my life to god and vowed to get on the straight and also on the narrow.
As I recall, it was a Friday, which means earlier that evening I’d hopped the bus and rode down to church for a Celebrate Recovery meeting. There I’d recently met Bob, who would later be the best man at my wedding. Bob had a sex addiction. He once told me he’d learned a method to enhance orgasm. To this day, I can’t think of any reason to enhance the experience of orgasm, so maybe I’m lucky, or perhaps I have a secret skill.
Between becoming familiar enough with Bob to discuss butt plugs and theology and meeting him for the first time, I spent a lot of hours at coffee shops, and church, and at Bob’s trailer in the trailer park. Visiting Bob at his trailer marked the first time I’d ever knowingly associated with trailer trash. Cultural scales fell from my eyes because of Bob. He was friendly, and professional, and passionate about god-stuff, a kind of man to admire, and even then, I was short on men worth admiring—being myself, quite unadmirable.
So, but that night on the porch,
having returned from Celebrate Recovery where I’d confessed my sins and sang god songs with hands raised, and sipped percolated coffee with Bob and a handful of alcoholics and reformed gays and other such degenerates, I sat on the porch. My cigarette smoldered on a pleasant breeze. Out of the midnight dark a grey medium hair cat approached. Unlike many cats you find outdoors, she was brave and affectionate from the start. Until starting to write these words today, it never occurred to me that she belonged to a neighbor.
I snicked at her, and she came to me. After petting her for several minutes, I took her in my arms. She liked being picked up, and purred. (I should say, I didn’t check her gender, but I would later take her to the vet and have her spayed, which, considering that, perhaps she was feral, but not meant for the cruel outdoors.)
Few things in life are binary, and most actions we take require a cascade of considerations, but if I had to boil my choice to adopt that gray tabby to one thing, I’d say I was looking for someone to care for, because I felt wholly powerless, and I was tired of everyone taking care of me and useless with no one I could care for. I know now I wasn’t ready to care for someone, but I can’t change the past.
My dad’s wife claimed
to be allergic to cats. It shows a lack of charity that I disbelieve her to this day. Maybe it shows a speck of discernment on my part too, though, because that night on the porch, I decided to take the gray tabby in, and I brought her down to my room in the basement. Yes, I was the adult son living in his parents’ basement.
For about a month, that cat lived with me without my dad knowing or his wife breaking out in hives. During that time, and soon after I’d taken the kitty in, I snuck a litter box, food, and a water dish into the house. When I brought kitty in for a vet appointment, I registered her and officially named her Boaze. She drooled when she purred, and she liked to chase her tail. If she ever meowed, she did it like a tree falling in a lonely forest, so we’ll just have to agree that it never happened.
Bite-Sized Plus Odds & Ends
My goal is to keep this weekly post short enough you can read it in a grocery store line or in line for lunch at your favorite fast casual dining spot. So many of these dispatches may resolve in the middle of things, which is the case this week. I’ll bring you the second part of Boaze Kitty & the Trailer Park next week.
In the meantime, I’ve got a new book about to drop. Some of you may own it already in digital format, but I’ve finished the final edit, and commissioned the cover.
If you like psychological thrillers about family dysfunction and reincarnation, this might be the book for you. I’ll have links to it soon. In the meantime, here’s the cover.
I know tastes are subjective, but I’m really into the art on this one. The deeper you look, the more you notice. It’s so subtle and yet so flipping bold.
Until next week.
Love,
I want more Booze stories... and yes that book cover is beautiful!