School Shrink

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“Cindy, I want to talk about you trying to hurt yourself this morning.”

Miss Bailout, the school psychiatrist, isn’t really a trained doctor. She just got tired of teaching logic and math to bears who really needed health and guidance.

“Um, Miss Bailout, I didn’t really try to hurt myself. I was just conducting an experiment and using myself as the guinea pig.”

Miss Bailout pauses to study Cindy’s body language carefully to scan for more information than spoken text which – she has learned – is relatively easy to fake.

“Cindy, you ran up ANWAR Hill and jumped a passing oil truck. This experimentation explanation isn’t going to convince your parents when you get home, and it doesn’t convince me very much either.”

“Oh my god! Don’t tell my parents about this!! We just moved to our fifth igloo in two years, and dad’s coming out party really freaked my mom. This could drive them over the edge!”

Miss Bailout nods and smiles professionally: “Don’t worry. The school doctor says you don’t even need any medical follow-up. Except… well, except I think you should have some psychological follow-up, and that’s why I called you in to my office. Tell me what motivated you to risk your life to scare a truck driver.”

“Okay. Well, last week, we learned in Modern World Problems about how humans destroyed the world and got attacked by all the other animals as they were all going extinct. So that got me thinking: what if we polar bears do the same thing? What if we get so enslaved by our own daily routines that we forget about the really important but banal facts of life? What if we get so scared of nature and of dying that we end up destroying the earth with our technology and consumption?”

Miss Bailout scrunches up her eyebrows and pulls on one of her long whiskers. “Well, I guess that could happen, Cind. But even if this does happen – and I hope it doesn’t – how could jumping onto an oil truck and laying across the windshield help prevent it?”

Cindy speaks quickly, as if she has been writing a manifesto. “If I can show everyone that I’m not afraid of dying, then maybe everyone can see that it’s alright to die, and so they’ll let everyone and everything else… live.”

The school psychiatrist scribbles something into her black velvet binder.

After a long pause, Cindy hands back her youth distress questionnaire: “Listen, Miss Bailout, I just want people to know that fear is worse than anything you can be afraid of. Humans, with all their fears and defenses, were just dinosaurs part two.”

Miss Bailout rises from her seat and walks towards the door to let Cindy out. “It’s true that humans and dinosaurs were similar. But not us, Cindy. Dinosaurs didn’t have guidance counselors like us Pee Bears!”

**Miss Bailout makes the volleyball team’s Pee Bear sign with three fingers**

The Bank of Ho Chi Minh

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American TV’s Effects

A lot of people wonder why so many Canadians – 30,000 or so – volunteered to help the USA terrify Vietnamese farmers out of their own home-grown communist system. I’ve often wondered about this myself. But I just finished reading a blog by a vet from Halifax, Nova Scotia that helps explain why these Canadians willingly went along.

It turns out that what a lot of people don’t know about that anti-Asian pogrom is that the Vietnamese actually started it by bombing Halifax with experimental chemicals. This was in the late 50s. Brutal Vietnamese chopper pilots – stoned on LSD and government-spiked coffee – dropped canister after canister of flammable, poisonous, and neurotoxic products smack dab in the middle of the city. And they deployed these evil poisons even though the people of Nova Scotia had done them no harm.

All Powerful Elite

The Vietnamese at the time had a totalitarian war machine. Their mighty soldiers – perhaps the best equipped and best brainwashed on earth – had been lead to believe that Nova Scotia was planning to take over the world, and this would mean that the people of Southeast Asia wouldn’t be able to live free anymore. They learned this by watching movies and listening to radio.

Of course, we now know that this was Vietnamese bank-funded propaganda whose intent was to lure local cannon fodder off to Nova Scotia to seize control of the banking there. For anyone paying attention, the many Credit Unions bombed as military targets were an obvious clue. But most people were so caught up in the wartime frenzy of burning flesh and burying family members that they didn’t notice all the money people slipping in and out of limos.

Alas, the bottomless pit of money that is the Bank of Ho Chi Minh can always buy the latest tech in propaganda and brainwashing. The Vietnamese soldiers were so psychologically altered by their basic training and their mass media consumption that they no longer saw the people they were killing as Haligonians, Canadians, or even as people. Instead, they referred to their victims as snots – as in “nasal discharge.”

On her CB radio, a Vietnamese-speaking nurse overheard Vietnamese pilots shouting things like “Pair of snots at 4 o’clock!” followed by the sound of a bomb falling, and then laughter. Her theory was that S.N.O.T. stood for “Stable Northamerican Opposition Target,” but I’ve never seen this independently confirmed anywhere.

Happy Endings for everyone

In the end, the Vietnamese Army lost their war against Catholicism (that’s what their soldiers were told they were fighting against). But in destroying all the Credit Unions and killing all the political leaders of the province, the Bank of Ho Chi Minh ended up controlling the provincial economy anyways.

And that’s probably why so many Canadians volunteered to fight these people on the other side of the earth: to protect Credit Unions.

Wallpaper Sample Books

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(dedicated to all fathers)

My dad’s store makes me think of the rubbery smell of vinyl and the pain of paper cuts. The only time I’m allowed to go there is when I have a doctor or dentist appointment. When this happens, I have to wait there for a ride home. No choice.

I’m ten and in Grade Five, and I just had my first multiple dental fillings. Boy, was I scared. It’s hard to face normal life events like this when you have no older brother or father to say he’s been there. I never know what to expect or how to react.

My old man had all his teeth pulled out in his twenties, but I never heard about why or how. I guess a lot of words must have gotten pulled out along the way as well.

Right before the appointment, my mother assured me I’d be fine (her exact words: “Stop bein’ such a jeezus sissy!”). The dentist ended up snarling at me and calling me a baby because I cried in pain at the needle. Dr. Hickstein’s hands shake like a petit mal epileptic seizure and I think he tore my gums to shreds during the freezing-slash-interrogation part of the fillings appointment. “You’re a baby!” *slash!*

So now it’s 1 pm, and I’m injured and weak at my father’s shop, and I start to tell him about the experience. “Shut up and go sit in the front of the store,” he tells me with a hint of anger before I can finish the story. I keep forgetting it’s still World War Two: dental secrets can sink ships.

So, I slowly get up – embarrassed to be treated like a dog in front of human strangers – and sadly limp to the front of the store with my tail between my wegs. This is the furthest part of the store from the office – an outpost, almost in the display window. It’s raining, so no one is walking by.

For the next four hours, I look at wallpaper sample books all by myself: patterns and textures and colors and shapes. I guess I’m supposed to be learning that work is boring and lonely. Only one customer walks in during the whole four hours. As a form of solitary confinement, looking at wallpaper samples for four hours is probably worse than watching TV in a bungalow for the same duration.

Every once in a while I hear my dad laughing along with others coming from the office. I wonder what they’re laughing about? I wonder what subjects the men are talking about? Will I ever know what to say to other guys?

Patterns and textures and colors and shapes.

After a few years of these treasured educational visits to the store’s wallpaper counter, I decide to become a graphic designer whenever I grow up. My father laughs at my first attempt at imagining being a grown up, saying with playful sarcasm: “When I was 15, my guidance counselor said I was gonna be a paint salesman.”

The burn of the sarcasm helps me understand my low place in the universe.  I will forever be the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story - like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

The Hockey Game

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(dedicated to all fathers)

A few months before I turn nine, I find Dad home on an early Saturday afternoon. That’s weird cuz he usually has sports and stuff when he’s not working or running errands or on business trips or on his way to deliver milk.

Even weirder – he’s looking for me! He wants to take me somewhere in the house. My pulse starts to race cuz this kinda thing never happens to me. My father wants to hang out with me – spend some time. It’s like the Children’s Wish Foundation. Does this mean I have leukaemia?

He takes me down the basement into his small trophy room, past the shelves of plastic Dollarama-style trophies honoring his accomplishments in the golf, hockey, baseball and pingpong fields.

Next to his hero den, he has a hockey net and two sticks all set up. He pushes a stick in my hand while beaming a proud smile like Mother Teresa, and asks me to take a shot on him while he plays nets. I take a weakling, girly shot at him, and he lets it easily slide in for a goal.

“Nice shot. What’s your name again?”

This is bonding or something, so he lets me get a few more shots in. Feels like I’m improving. I can already control the stick a bit better than 60 seconds ago. I think this might be…

And then it’s over. The phone rings, and he’s gone like a summer hailstorm. Saved by the bell.

It turns out that my three minutes of fathering was inspired by a ten-minute speech from a guidance counselor at my school the night before. At a Parent-Teacher Night, Mr. Pendergast told my mother: “Qatzel fears guys his own age and older. He has virtually no male-bonding skills.” And that’s how I got my one hockey game in with the old man.

Looking back, I think that guidance counselor really made a difference in my dad’s life.

The next day, my sister and I played Barbies and imagined a big, happy world made up entirely of fashion designers and hairdressers. And that’s how I became the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story - like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

The Qaturday Audience

Who is it, and what does it want?

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The Qaturday Audience needs distraction to mask the everyday moral repulsion that is a permanent feature of modern society with all its hateful technologies and social rules.

Qaturday provides an outlet – a third place – for the audience’s awkward sense of not living a dignified natural existence. It provides the robotic social-climber with an instant nature fix, without demanding that he alter his modern behavior in any way that might actually help other animals (and his own species) to survive with dignity. In this way, Qaturday is like binge eating to forget about a weight problem and cholesterol: it’s only therapeutic insofar as denial is.

The Qaturday audience is lonely and lost, and finds solace in the monotonous voice of mass media, in the zany meaninglessness of Qaturday images, and in the static helplessness and cuteness found in each pic. Helplessness is an accelerant for feline cuteness, and this elation comes in a rush of empowerment, so helplessness is something humans like to project onto their domestic animals. They enslave their pets, thus rendering them helpless… for maximum cuteness and maximum thrills. Pethood is about human thrill-seeking and not interspecies coexistence. Human societies are organized on the pet model as well.

Pet owners project their own helplessness onto their housepets by forcing these captured beasts to live vicariously for their masters’ pleasure. Since this is the miserable state of most humans of all classes, a little controlled role-reversal at the end of the day feels soothing – harmless revenge on a creature that God probably intended for humans to torture anyways.

There’s never enough time for the complexities of philosophy or of thoughtful education among the Qaturday Audience. The  zero-attention-span of the 9-5 caffeinated workaday requires some kind of distraction from real life/non-fiction. So the time-starved cubicle-bot seeks out Qaturdays that provide cuteness, zaniness, and an adequate dose of irony to conceal the incompatibility of the juxtaposed images. And all of it instantly and with the illusion of thought behind it.

These cats don’t know what they’re saying to the Qaturday Audience. Much like their homo sapien audience, these cats have been programmed to have “opinions” that have nothing to do with the actual needs or instincts of the featured cat models. The Qaturday Audience recognizes itself here, but only on a sub-conscious level. On a conscious level, the Audience is completely unaware of anything except its fabricated “need” for entertainment and cuteness.

And it is in this artificially implanted “need” that Feline Cuteness Hegemony finds a willing host to set up a base from which to conquer your independent thought.

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The Qaturday Mail Bag:

Q: Isn’t caturday just pix of cats with funny words added by human beings?

A: This is like asking if Las Vegas is a city where you can play cards. Yes – but it’s much, much more.

Q: What if the words in the caturday aren’t even funny?

 A: There is an important paradigmatic difference between serious caturdays, and unfunny ones. The unfunny ones are often unserious as well.

Q: What is Qaturday?

A: Qaturday is the fusion between mankind and its animal origins.

Q: What does Qaturday demand of the audience?

A: It demands that its audience abandon most texts and most of its fake history in favor of a return to nature, to instincts, and to letting the environment decide things, rather than trying to change the environment.

GW and BW

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Kirk’s cat Issy has two sons who were born only three minutes apart. Little GW and BW look a lot alike, and as kittens, they were identical except that the cow patches on GW are grey, while the ones on BW are black. This is how they got their names: grey and white GW, black and white BW. That the grey one, GW, is older is just an accident of nature.

One Friday after Home Economics class, Kirk and I drive out to Big Pond to pick up some of the most insane marijuana we have ever smoked: Rapeseed Bud, it’s called.  “It can fuck you up pretty bad,” Sidney Normandson told us at the high school dance.

After picking up a measured ounce of Rapeseed Bud from a dealer in a church basement, we drive for a short 30 minutes and pick up Sidney, and then drive the hour back to Kirk’s place and fire up the power-hitter.

A quarter ounce later, we’re all trashed, and Kirk goes into an acute body stone watching the Expos play the Yankees on television.

GW and BW are sitting cherub-like next to Sidney, when suddenly Sidney gets a hypnotized look in his eye, jumps up and walks out into the kitchen really focused. The curious little cat brothers follow him into the kitchen.

In Home Ec., we’ve just discussed the difference between nature and nurture, and heard the teacher say that upbringing could change someone’s mental and physical development. Since the two cats seem close to identical, Sidney explains to me that he is going to torture one and spoil the other, and see if it really makes a difference. It’s like an experiment – science.

He looks so concentrated and stressed that I don’t dare try to stop him even though I find this experiment really sick. There’s just no point in resisting his psychotic need to control: I don’t have as strong a character as he does – even Kirk and I acting together can’t make him budge.  Whenever I disagree with Sidney, he calls me a wimp or a faggot and then threatens to hit me or humiliate me in public. I don’t want to be on the receiving end, so I go along.

Even though he’s wasted on the Rapeseed Bud, Sidney’s mind is knife-sharp. He spots a blow dryer and a bag of high-end kitty treats sitting on top of the fridge next to a case of empty Pop Shoppe bottles.

With Kirk still engrossed in the ballgame, Sidney drops some savory treats onto the kitchen floor, and both GW and BW go running together.

Sidney intentionally throws them separate treats. And as soon as the cats are far enough apart, he attacks GW with the blow dryer yelling things like: “I’m gonna kill you, you little slut!”,”Soooh-eey!” and ” You’re not worth shit, you pissbag!” followed by a few long minutes of : “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!…”

He leaves all the treats in a pile in front of a fatter and fatter BW and then chases GW around the kitchen yelling “Antichrist! Antichrist!” and then cornering him next to the sink. He plugs the blow dryer into a wall socket, turns it on high, and points it right at the cat’s ear. Wrrrrrrrr! GW curves his back, hisses, and tries in vain to beat back the hot air with his little paw. I’m paralyzed myself, just like GW, and my paws are about as strong as his when it comes to fending off Sidney’s hate-turbocharged charisma.

Through the entire kitty nightmare, Kirk watches baseball and notices nothing else. “Bottom of the fifth, and still no score….”

Finally, the experiment ends with GW running outside and hiding for a few days.

As soon as GW runs away, Sidney pops his smiling head into the TV room and says: “Hey Captain Kirk, want some crackers and cheese?” For Sidney, crackers and cheese are the cigarette afterwards.

“Yeah, I’m getting major munchies,” Kirk lazily replies smiling a dumb, affable grin.

This is the start of a beautiful thing for both of them, and every time Sidney visits with some Rapeseed Bud, he gets out the blow dryer and chases GW while Kirk watches TV.

To this day, I’m not sure if baseball-body-stone Kirk has figured out how GW got to have such a special personality. He probably doesn’t know or care why BW is so relaxed and confident, while GW – post blow dryer – is a skinny loner who rarely seeks the affection of other cats or people.

Sidney used to fear his father who must have beat him up pretty bad for him to give it back to GW so hard. And now the two formerly inseparable brothers – GW and BW – have no contact with one another though they used to sleep in the same cardboard box…

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Defending the Gay Homeland

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The Gay Homeland is fighting for its survival and perhaps for the existence of homosexuality itself!

The super-precise Dildo rockets that landed in Seattle, Cairo and London last weekend were not an unprovoked attack, as many homophobic media sources have claimed. The flattening of hetero-terror centers in these cities was a measured Gay Homeland response to the bitchiness emanating from these three capitals.

Since the day of its creation, the world’s only Gay Nation has been under attack by the forces of homophobia and hate. Following the signing of the Paul Lynde Act at the UN building  – straight terrorists began plotting as they sipped stale drip coffee.

Within months, heterosexists from Arabia and Europe began to claim “sovereignty” over the few square km of the earth’s surface reserved for Gays to live peacefully among their own kind.

Meanwhile, European straights have thriving cultures in Germany, Poland, Russia, North America and Australia, while the Arab straights belong in Jordan, Egypt or Syria. Agreements have been reached to help transport heterosexist tribesmen who find themselves at odds with the wonderful Gay State they find themselves trapped in. The Gay Homeland is a world leader in both human rights and refugee relocation.

Cleansing the Gay Homeland of straight assholes is not discrimination. Over 12% of the Gay Homeland’s population is non-gay, and while this number includes many babies, it also includes many refugees from the straight world who have come to bask in all the fabulousness.

The desert campground-style cities that have been provided to the 2.5 million straights awaiting relocation to somewhere more suitable have been referred to as “concentration camps” by straight media outlets with an agenda of hate. The straights in these camps live better and look better in video than most straights do in Our neighboring countries.

So when voting on proposition 78 – cutting military aid to the Gay Homeland down to a dangerously low US$89 billion per year – think back – to the first time someone threw a rock at you for kissing your new girl. Or the time you crawled out of the bushes to find that someone had slashed the tires on your small convertible.

And hey, wouldn’t you want your best friends standing beside you if you were the free world’s first defense against beach blanket bingo?

On March 12^th, vote “I don’t think so” to Proposition 78 !

A guest column by Gay Homeland Coolness Minister Rock Abercrombie and the NO committee for Proposition 78

The Greatest Love of All

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It’s the hot spring of A.D. 16. Free Market Jesus – a sophomore at the pricey Sons of Gods Boarding School – reads his award-winning essay to the junior class.

FMJ: I’m a type-A, Alpha male overachiever. My virgin mother always told me I was meant to do better than anyone else. And as I slowly mature like fine wine, I’ve grown to prefer the dynamic and risk-filled adventurism of my corporation to the dull monotony of my surroundings. I love my corporation. Let me tell you why.

My corporation gives me the power and independence I need to really excel. And when I love my corporation so much that it makes others squirm, I get even more esteem and glamor. By submitting to the collective self-interest of a small group of people, I become the embodiment of my dreams and live out the novel that my subconscious mind has written for me to activate.

Currently the corporation I love is on trial for contaminating drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa. But we here in the corporation know we’re not guilty.

How is it even possible – let alone probable within the shadow of a doubt – that such a benevolent job-creating corporation as us could do nasty things to potential human resources? Maybe these Sub-Saharan complainers – who I never seem to run into at the mall, the club, or anywhere else – maybe these Sub-Saharans who don’t have well-paid jobs with the corporation are just jealous that we do. And I don’t blame them for being jealous; I’d be jealous in their place too. But jealousy can’t pay for clean drinking water now, can it?

The world’s losers mustn’t forget that the corporation tells us all that we need to know to do the things that are most beneficial to all the corporations we cherish. Without these large and successful corporations, who would we orient our earthly routines around? Our surroundings?

**crowd boos**

Our instincts?

**As crowd begins to boo again, teenage FMJ lifts a diamond-studded hand up to hush their paid-for participation. Then the applause sign comes on, and everyone claps as he disappears into a puff of periwinkle smoke with a strobe light accentuating an I heart my corp logo**

Nameless and Blameless

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Mrs. MacIsaac has never had her female cats spayed or the males fixed. Instead, twice a year her brother – a wiry bruiser we kids call Uncle Brute – takes away the “extra” kittens.

Where he takes them, no adults will say, but Billy says he puts them in a garbage bag with rocks and throws them off the bridge near his house. I find this hard to believe; Mrs. MacIsaac has always been known for her kindness to animals. And humans too. So I figure Billy just says this to make his family sound tougher than it really is: working class bravado.

But when Uncle Brute shows up one Sunday to pick up a pair of fresh kittens, I stick around to see what happens.

On the TV that afternoon, there’s a boring documentary about the ethnic cleansing of the Acadians. In a way, I’m glad there’s nothing interesting on like WWF or a Bronson movie because it means less distraction from the kitten drowning we’re about to experience.

Brute arrives about three o’clock in his red pickup wearing a New England Patriots cap and oversized Moosehead tshirt. He already seems a bit drunk as he stumbles out of his vehicle, but  Mrs. MacIsaac nonetheless offers him a few beers for his nerves. After drinking the first one, he can barely stand up. His eyes start darting aimlessly around the room, and his speech is slurred and loud – which means we can hear every word he says from the next room.

“I’m too fucking drunk to drive, Wilma. Just bring me a friggin’ bucket,” he says to his sister, Mrs. MacIsaac, who never curses herself.

My pulse starts to accelerate so I focus on the tragedy that is unfolding on the TV. As Uncle Brute prepares the bucket… Governor Cornwallis has just brought in New England settlers to scalp the local natives  – the Mi’kmaq.

“Never mind the fucking basement! I’m taking this jeezuz bucket right into that goddamn living room so that everyone can see it with their own fucking eyes!” he shouts, a water-filled bucket in one hand and two pink kittens in the other. The kittens’ eyes are still shut while Uncle Brute’s are wide open and glaring.

Father LeLoutre has just told a crowd to burn down their farms  Then a New England Planter destroys a dike and more Acadian families drown. Then three commercials: dandruff shampoo, Toyota Camry, and Oxfam.

Brute sets the bucket down between my chair and Billy’s. We’re both in our early teens and sort of curious about things like Satanism and cruelty. But Billy’s little eight-year-old brother Herbert and his friend Peter are also sitting in front of the TV next to the bucket. They aren’t curious about cruelty at all. They’re Disney kids. Nervous little Peter hides his face behind the corner of the multicolored afghan he’s sitting on.

But there are holes in that afghan, so all of our eyes are on Uncle Brute’s hands as they submerge the tiny kittens for a few minutes. Even though the TV is still on, I can’t hear the sound anymore. I can only see Brute’s skinny tattooed arms holding the kittens underwater, and hear the silence in their tiny voices.

After about three minutes, Brute raises the lifeless blobs of pink fur up out of the water, as we all sit breathlessly waiting for the triumphal conclusion of our first live animal sacrifice. But as soon as Brute brings them out of the water, they start to cry like little babies. They continue to cry until Uncle Brute puts them back into the water, and this time, for a much longer five minutes.

On the TV at that moment… Robert Monkton has just lead a band of New Englanders up the Saint John River to kill the few remaining Acadians hiding there.

When Uncle Brute pulls the tiny furry bodies up the second time, they’re very, very dead, and we’re all relieved. In a way.

One sleepless week later, Mrs. MacIsaac has all her females spayed.

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The Scabbish Practice

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Suburban roots

The year was 1976 and he was still a child: the patriarch of Scabbish Practice Victor Simmy fell and scraped open the palms of his hands playing Frisbee with his seven-year-old cousin Purdy Peddy.

This palm-chaffing moment is referred to as The Scraping in the texts, and this event provides a focal point for Scab faith.

Scab followers keep the palms of their hands in a state of perpetual infection with open sores to remember all of the unnecessary pain that Victor suffered “but in the end, overcame through power.”  
(Events, Chapter 12, 18-46)

A Day in the life of Solar

Solar is a normal, healthy Scab and peels the scabs off the palms of his hands every night before his prayers and frisbee ritual.

Since his Scraping at the age of seven, he’s had a blacklight poster of a scab on the ceiling above his bed which he stares at while listening to Scabra music before going to sleep. He often dreams of finally being free – of finally having a life without palm scabs and pain.

And with each year, he detests Purdy Peddy more and more as he stares at his hands.

Customs and culture

The Scabbish – followers of Victor Simmy – can often be spotted traveling in wheelchair caravans with members who have lost the use of their right leg. The wheelchairs are for followers of the many subsects that have the right knee scarred at marriage and then  spend their married lives dousing this leg scab with contaminants. These festering knee scabs can get so infected that amputation is often required. The faithful amputees are called Leg Heroes and spend their adult lives living fairly well off of public grants for their sacrifice.

Scabbish people – like Solar in the above example – usually display blacklight posters of scabs in each room of their luxurious mansions, and it’s considered blasphemy for Scabs to name a child Purdy or to associate with people with this name or the family name Peddy. Cultures who use these names are considered unclean by many Old Skool Scabs.

Remembering the Scraping

Visits to the Scab Museums and Scabbish Victimhood Libraries help reinforce the link between the Purdy Peddy’s of the world and the non-stop pain that comes from the loss of a leg or from the everyday use of painfully scarred hands.

And because this trauma is relived over and over, there are many manifestations of secondary trauma including: paranoia, gluttony, violence, and other anti-social behavior.

Followers are taught that Purdy Peddy is ultimately responsible for these flaws.

Translating Caturday

Letting the cat out of the bag

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Let’s deconstruct narratives and decode some of the hidden subtexts in Caturdays that have been posted in this series and other catcentric media vehicles!  As the raw material of our inquiry, let’s look at different Caturday genres and try to identify some of the various layers of meaning.

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Mainstream Caturday

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Here in this contemporary mainstream Caturday – the brutal first-string message is that the viewer has a maturity level of between 10 and 14 and is feminine. This is because the medium has its roots in the Internet posting habits of Japanese girls. The teenage origins makes the cute and silly layer of meaning of Caturday the most obvious, and it’s also the most essential layer for maintaining a consistent link to the Caturday style.

But between the layers of ironic text, is kitty warning us that it really doesn’t need our dumb, misplaced sympathy?

Maybe this subliminal attack on our self esteem – after the Caturday context has already eroded our common sense – is meant to prepare us for a life in the working class, the most abused in a modern industrial society. Prepare for senselessness and meaninglessness!

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Orientalist Caturday

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This Caturday ridicules the tribe-o-centric/trade-o-centric  Orientalist representation of Arabs and Muslims in Anglo mass media. Notice how religion and oil are mixed together to construct the unlikely narrative of religious extremists coveting their own oil. Would this oil be needed so that their religious iconography can cry giant tears?

Muslims don’t have religious iconography to cry oil, but many comfortable people all over the earth seem to value their transportation myths more than survival itself. The elephant in the room is that it’s actually the Caturday audience’s motor vehicles that are the gods that need all the oil. And corn. And land. And air. And meow.

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Predatory Imperial Caturday

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Feline Cuteness Hegemony is back! The tiny, insignificant viewer is portrayed as a mouse who is staring right into the face of the media-tycoon hegemon who would consume him. Never blinkz evokes an all-encompassing mass media, and it hints at the totalitarian aspirations of a proto-barbaric ruling class.

Cat elites are proto-barbaric in the sense that they pit their working classes against one another in pointless wars and befoul the entire earth with pollution and deforestation in order to put bones through their noses.

This kind of metaphorical situation is literary construct. Cats and mice almost never have this kind of dramatic face-to-face contact outside of housecat media.

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Consumer Caturday

Caste stratification and representations of ethnicity are issues in this pop-culture-reference-filled tribute to hyperconsumption and vanity.

The graphic design work evokes an advertising-driven culture of gluttony, superman worship and private ownership.

The word share is intentionally misspelled Cher adding the vapors of another pop narrative to the mix.

The message is that the earth is a big, wet breast when you’re the cat god’s favorite kitty.

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Caturday Fusions

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This is a hybrid political/apolitical Caturday.

In its attempt to be poignantly political and yet insipidly silly, it is possible that this lolcat macro has morphed into a novel form of communication, adding yet another pretentious layer of meaning to a hitherto empty discourse.

By portraying garish amounts of wealth as kitschy and vapid, the seeds of a transformative revolution have been germinated in the language of Japanese-girl Internet spam.

The wings with which to fly into the warm embrace of the truth have been crafted from the feathers of giggly pillow fights.

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Turn to Stone

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.

Six years later in Modern World Problems class, Cindy sits at the same table as Van and Suvee while Miss Glaciermelt talks about the last years of humanity; the Pre-Post-Humanity era.

Miss G: “As the climate changed, the ocean’s chemical composition mutated, and the ecosystems of the earth started to fail. And then many of the non-human animals started attacking humans. Even their pet dogs and cats – their fluffy domesticated hug slaves – started hacking their masters to death with their claws.”

Van and Suvee have heard Cindy’s squirrel-feeding story many times at skipping tournaments, so this story sounds familiar to them.

The teacher is talking directly at the three girls now, as if she knows that they’re all thinking about those squirrels. Cindy, completely lost in the nightmare of her flashback, has a charcoal-rock stare in her eyes. She blinks hard to chase away the bad memories.

Miss G: “Tell us, Cindy, how many squirrels would it take to kill an average-sized polar bear?” Miss Glaciermelt stops and bites her upper lip with her lower teeth.

Cindy’s face pales and a frown takes shape as the skin droops off her skull. She is starting to experience the same squirrel terror that she felt that night with her dad in front of the rusty old Sam Walton statue.The teacher leans on Cindy’s laptop and rolls her eyes:

Miss G: “Text me when the flashback’s over.”

Miss Glaciermelt – a former drag queen who got operated and became a female high school teacher – is the most indiscreet teacher at Saint Teddy Consolidated. She seems to be reveling in Cindy’s panic attack – rolling around in Cindy’s pain to try to cover the smell of her own fear.

Miss Glaciermelt

The lecture continues, but Cindy’s completely tuned out and thinking about the squirrels that time in the park. Squirrels finally went extinct in her freshman year, at which point her frightened mother famously said, “Good riddance!” Cindy cried for three months,and almost failed Grade 10 because of this thoughtless remark by Orca. Parents don’t always understand the fears of their own children – they’re only bears themselves.

Cindy finally reemerges from her flashback, and scrambles to put together a decent question to make up for not paying attention earlier on. She needs participation points this semester because of a C- on her mid-term.

Cindy clears her throat:

Cindy: “Um, Miss Glaciermelt, today’s lesson has been problematic. I mean, isn’t it strange how the humans are always the bad guys in our Modern World Problems class. What about the other species, like us? Weren’t we just as invasive and greedy as the humans were?

And also, why are we so obsessed with human sushi consumption? Isn’t this just a reflection of the polar-bear-o-centrism of our texts? I don’t think raw fish ever made up more than 1% of the human diet. What other polar bear features do we superimpose on these creatures that – now that they’re extinct – can’t represent themselves?

This entire lecture reeks of what Ed-bear Sayeed calls Humanentalism?”

Miss Glaciermelt freezes. Has Cindy been reading her parents’ college textbooks? How could a 16-year-old girl know so much about orsopocentrism and post-colonialism?

Miss G: “Thank you, Cindy. You may have a valid point.”

Queeny

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.

1985

Sometime in my early 20s, my little brother Freddy picked me up hitch-hiking from the beach. He was driving a low-riding lifestyle convertible, one of the four vehicles he kept on the road during the hot summer of his nineteenth year.

Feeling lithe and snarky after a day of swimming and sun, I start to complain about having been turned into a lithe and snarky homosexual by my angry,  micro-managing mother.

He pulls over and threatens to make me walk: “Maybe it’s just you. Huh? All mom did to me was growl. Mothers growl. I came out alright. I’m alright.”

I came out alright. I’m alright. As he slowly turns to deliver these biting words, the sunlight hits him and a red crust the diameter of a beer bottle becomes visible in the stitches and dried blood in the middle of his forehead.

I sigh and promise to behave, and we get back on the road.

Twenty minutes later, as we drive by the Botrop’s house, I notice that they have a new dog. Their former pet – a police-trained German Shepherd named Queeny – almost decapitated Freddy one evening a few years before.

the dogbait years

1974

When I think about it, I can’t believe I walked by that dog every day when I was 12 and 13 when I was the neighborhood paperboy.

The Botrops were German, and my family were “French.” Almost no families in my suburb were “English” though everyone spoke English and watched American TV.

“German” herself, Queeny should have attacked me and killed me. But instead, she just growled and kept her back riding menacingly low every day as I passed by with my canvass bag full of second-rate political propaganda.

Maybe Queeny figured I was too easy a target, and decided not to risk her predatory honor by deflating a skinny gay paperboy with one fang.

Little brother wasn’t so lucky.

1979

When I was 17 – the last year of my closeted homosexuality -  Freddy demonstrated the unrealized potential of Queeny. Late for supper one winter evening, 14-year-old Freddy walked into the house looking like a horror-movie zombie.

The open, dry gash on his neck was the size and shape of a golf ball cut in half. His exposed flesh was white and fatty, but the gash wasn’t that noticeable because the rest of his face and neck were also grayish-white from fear. His bleached skin and blank expression made him look like he was having a nervous breakdown. He also had a hard time speaking, like he was fighting for air or to focus.

It turns out that Freddy had cut through the Botrop’s yard on his way home from street hockey carrying a hockey stick on his shoulder just like guys on TV do, when Queeny jumped  him and disarmed him with a slice of her sharp jaws to the lower neck.

It’s a good thing Mr. Botrop never strays very far from the living room liquor cabinet or Freddy might have been more seriously disarmed. Drunk Hanz Botrop came out mid-attack and called off Queeny before she could finish the job.

How did I manage to get past that instinctively-hostile death jaw every day and deliver the hated newspaper? Did Queeny hate my little brother even more than he hated me?

Maybe it was just Freddy. Huh? All Queeny did to me was growl. German Shepherds growl.

I got out alright. I’m alright.

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The Honeybee Liberation Movement (HLM)

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year 0

Although I’m not a honeybee myself, I have always sympathized with their cause. You see, I’m what they call an organic gardener, and I have had the distinct misfortune of watching in horror as one of my neighbor’s insecticides killed off most of the bees in my community for a few summers.

Eventually, the bees came back. But it wasn’t the same bees, and I never really forgave her for her callous use of foolishly dangerous modern poisons.

year 1

When I heard that some particularly motivated bee leaders were organizing a liberation movement, I quickly volunteered to help out in any way I could.

The internationally-renowned Honeycomb Museum was made possible by the bee liberation movement. Bees now have the time and resources to practice their art and build fantasy structures.

It’s not always easy for non-bees to empathize. Many bees find the daily pollination of flowers (for other species’ benefit) mind-numbingly dull and bee leaders complain that it leaves them with no time for self expression. This often leads to the kind of bee alienation that Buzzy Friedant writes about in The Bee Mystique.

Bee activists point to the fact that their community doesn’t need to pollinate to survive. In fact, a new GMO thistle hybrid that bee scientists are developing will give honeybees all the nutrition they need within inches of their hives. They will never have to pollinate for others again, or to stray far from the safety of their private hives.

year 3

I was thrilled when I heard the bees had stopped pollinating. I wore bee power tshirts to work because they had finally broken free of their enslavement to the honey-industrial complex. They were no longer peckin’ petals for the man – as the song goes. I used to hum that song when I worked at the fish plant.

year 7

As other species started dying off, pro-Bee PR went into overtime, explaining that these other species had been overpopulating the planet anyways, and we were all a lot better off with their reduced numbers. These species were often parasitic for bees, so extinction was portrayed as a mixed blessing in bee media.

year 9

When the extinctions started affecting the thistle that bees now depended on for their own survival, bee scientists decided to give the entire operation a second look. Of  course humans are already extinct, which is a shame -  but there is hope that at least bee-kind may be saved from permanent erasure by some kind of future bee technology.

Squirrel Express

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…

“Daddy, what’s a pinner?” asks Cindy between gulps of simulated soy-milk.

“Cindy honey, I thought you were asleep. Did you hear Mommy and Daddy telling college stories?”

“Daddy, can we go to the park and make sure the squirrels are alright?”

At her elementary school that day, Cindy and her class watched a documentary about squirrels and how they might be the next victims of climate-caused extinction. According to the Squirrelologists in the video, permanent winter was proving to be more deadly to their survival then the century-long rainy summer that preceded it.

At recess after the movie, Cindy heard other bears skipping and chanting: “How many squirrels did the weather kill? One million… Two million… Three million…” She went behind a tree and cried.

“Okay, honey. If you’re that worried about those poor little furries, how about if we go feed them in Humanity Memorial Park?”

Cindy hugs him. “Oh, Daddy! I’ll get dressed right away!”

…

..

Rusty looks in the refrigerator for something that squirrels might like to eat and finds cranberries leftover from a Xmas tree decorating party.

As Cindy whisks down the stairs, Daddy hands her the bag, and then they slide down the ice hill all the way to the giant, broken statue of Sam Walton at the entrance gate of Humanity Memorial Park.

As they enter the park, a few very lean black squirrels pop their heads out of trees to see what’s going on.

Cindy sees a single squirrel approaching cautiously, opens the bag of cranberries and begins to toss them – one at a time – on the ground. She leaves lots of space between them so they don’t fight.

Within minutes, there are a dozen squirrels circling around the two polar bears. A few minutes later, there are hundreds.

The gang of hungry squirrels starts to hiss and lunge at the bears’ paws. Cindy tries to scream when a squirrel scratches the fur off her the middle toe of her left paw, but she’s too frightened to let enough air escape. She stands there – frozen – unable to close her mouth or run.

“Daddy, they’re… everywhere. I’m really scared.”

“Don’t worry, Cind. We’re the mightiest and most blood-thirsty animals left on earth.”

“Daddy, they look more everything-thirsty than us.”

Rusty and little Cindy throw the rest of the bag of cranberries onto the icy ground and run home where they bolt-lock the door and put a refrigerator against it.

FMJ wins the Nobel Prize for Marketing

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…

Celebrity intellectual Tish Steinberg – the seductive spokesmodel of the PETA think tank – ends her three-hour presentation with this:

Tish: “All of us at the Morality Institute are proud to present the results of our year-long study! Our team of world-class Fashionologists have concluded that mammal nudity leads to civilization-threatening levels of immoral and destructive behavior. We urge all responsible governments all over the free world to immediately restructure their societies by making clothing mandatory on all mammals within their borders.”

For Passover Textiles, every sheckel of Morality Institute funding was well invested. In the next few days, all the newspapers the corporation owns will print the findings of this highly respected think tank, and Passover Textiles will be made the official animal-clothier of cities, towns and wildlife refuges in every city with a McDonald’s.

Back in Jerusalem, Cynthia is worried about scheduling.

Cynth: “But Jesus, how in the world are you going to appear at a fashion runway with PETA fund-raisers in Hebron at 3 pm, and then fly off to receive your Nobel Prize for Marketing two hours later? That leaves you approximately five minutes to take off, land, and get your hair prepped for the presentation ceremony. Shouldn’t you at least warn Norway that you might be late?”

FMJ: “A star doesn’t warn. A star sets the agenda. They can wait an hour or they can kiss my ass.”

He practices his speech.

FMJ: “Someone at the sauna suggested that animals are sinful and that their young probably get harmed morally by seeing their parents and siblings’ sex organs. Five minutes later, I had PETA on the line with a billion-sheckel offer…. And now, here I am, accepting this prize for Marketing – and for marketing something as potentially lucrative as ethics, I might add.”

Cynthia interrupts FMJ and hands him the latest edition of the Alternative Hebrew Times. Bernie Silverberg has been using his editorial space to accuse the Nobel Prize jurors of being “shallow social-climbers who are kissing a pariah’s ass to move up in the world of Academia.”

Bernie concludes: “many of the judges are probably pining for a cushy PETA think-tank position of their own.” Recently, in a shocker story, Bernie’s newsmagazine reveals that the head thinkers at Free Market Jesus’s privately-owned tank make more money than the presidents of many of the nation states they monitor and influence.

FMJ: “Bernie’s just sore because I don’t advertise in his low-volume rag. I could own his fucking toupee if I wanted it. But I let him rant on and on about me because…well… his is a kind of publicity that even huge bags of money can’t buy.

His editorial bitching just makes me look more human to my loyal followers. I just hope he shows up to my Nobel ceremony tomorrow so that it gets all the press coverage it deserves…uh…that I deserve.

God among men. God among men…”

And with that, FMJ flicks his pastel-lilac cape and hops into a Mazda Miata.

Theodore

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…

We were a postwar family – both my parents were born just before WW2. And taking a page from the veterans of that massive war who came back damaged and in desperate search of social isolation, my parents relocated to a prefab suburb of trailer-quality bungalows on massive lots. “A place where you could throw a ball,” I heard a neighbor’s father say.

Our barracks was just like our neighbors’ barracks, and we’d all wait by our picture windows for our dads’ tanks to roll into the driveway at five-thirty each day. What else was there to do when you weren’t throwing a ball?

Our main enemies were the lawn weeds and insect infestations of the suburban cartoonscape. We heroically doused these parasitic insurgents with the latest army-issue biopoisons, when we weren’t chopping them up with the noisiest machines we could buy on credit at the hardware megastore.

The human animals in our house were all expected to maintain stiff upper lips because this is what helped the English-speaking good guys to win all their nasty wars against foreign evil. Sometimes this protruding lip turned into a snarl, and there were times when my mother reminded me of Johnny Lydon of the Sex Pistols.

Once our French-Canadian grandparents died, hugs and kisses in our Anglicized household were limited to X’s and O’s as a cutesy sign-off on personal letters. It was as if our parents were rationing affection to prepare us for real life, where “real life” meant World War Two and the hunt for Germano-Japanese scalp.

a remnant of ceremonial burial in post-war suburbia

…

Into this suburban military compound of emotional marasmus fell little sister Charlene. The baby of the family, she started out in life getting non-stop hugs and kisses from affection-starved older brothers and sisters like myself. But as she got older and less cute, all the sibling affection dried up in favor of sarcasm and psychological torture.

We honed the art of cold, distant personal relations while watching TV with our parents and interacting with the people in the identical bungalows around us who were watching the same shows.  Hugging became something nostalgic that nowadays, only actors do.

Instead of accepting our natural human vulnerability and neediness, we learned to be poker-faced schemers so that we’d win our own personal wars. Prepared by New York TV writers for the adult lives we would eventually drive to, we were then ready to face any Nazis or Soviets we might come across at the mall.

Charlene grew increasingly desperate for affection as she neared nine-years old, so my mother temporarily suspended the house-ban on pets and allowed her to get a small gerbil, “as long as you clean his cage and I don’t have to look at him.”

About two weeks after she brought Theodore home from the pet shop, Charlene woke up screaming because she had accidentally crushed him in her sleep.

When my mother came out of Charlene’s room that morning, I asked her what happened, and she looked at me with a firm gaze and said, “Theodore’s dead.” It was like getting bad news from the front from a concerned corporal.

That same day after school, my mother held a military funeral for Theodore in the back yard, and her and Charlene  –  the only attendees –  fashioned a cross out of sticks, and buried him about three inches deep in the chem-tech lawn.

She got a new gerbil a week later, and killed him exactly the same way. I later found out her M.O.: Late at night, the noise from the nocturnal rodent would wake her up. Vulnerable and semi-conscious, Charlene would then take the helpless creature out of his cage, and start to hug him very gently until she fell asleep …on top of him …silently crushing him to death.

By the fourth gerbil, there were no more tears shed, and the ceremonial burial was replaced by the sound of a toilet flushing and my mother saying, “so long, comrade.”

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Nature and Feline Systems

The Political Economy of Qaturday

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INTRO  INTRO  INTRO  INTRO  INTRO

With giant clumsy paws, we collectively shape our world…

There are many directions that kitten technology can take. But here, I will only look at two possible tech styles: one which characterizes the current feline world order, and another that offers a return to health for the colonial victims (virtually all of us) of this same globally-enforced Leviathan of fake.

Hyperconsumptive colonizing societies (hiss! hiss!) maintain a style of technology in which nature is constantly pillaged (after being theoretically separated from the feline race by texts), and this is done in order to increase abstract metrics like population figures and resource consumption per cat. I call this instrumentalist and propaganda-addicted paradigm nature-minimizing.

A second and, I think, wiser direction for tech, would be to minimize the significance of those numerical abstractions in order to maximize things that could be considered natural. So the second style of tech could be called nature-maximizing. (prrrrr… prrrrr…)

I am using the words minimize and maximize to simplify an incredibly complex relationship between the feline race and the environment around it, and I am doing this in order to keep this essay relatively brief. I deploy the word nature to describe a style of relationship between cats and other living things that can be sustained for as long as possible. Maximizing nature – for the purposes of this essay -  also involves maximizing the time the feline race spends interacting with it, both individually and as a species.

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ONE  ONE  ONE  ONE  ONE

…

Tech Style One reduces the presence of both nature and of natural cat life. Our own cat behavior is made rigid in this tech style and our biological existence is altered to serve an abstract numerical agenda. Our purr is gone, replaced by a lawnmower engine.

Military-style deference to authority replaces more natural feline relations, both in the many nature-destroying wars for numerical abstractions, as well as on the homefront plugging away in industrial shops and sterile office mazes or gliding along the suburban grid in a hermetically-sealed machine. Natural ways of moving through and interacting with space are replaced by the robotic and socially-isolated gestures of the commuter. Natural cat empathy and communicative sharing of ideas and experience is drowned out in a din of strategic lies with a power-seeking agenda.

As this technology is perfected, naturalness is reduced to near zero as both the environment and the daily routines of cats are stretched to their survival limits. Everything starts to fall apart, and social capital declines rapidly as meowing gives way to  hissing and flying fur.

A lot of wealthy societies and castes exhibit admiration for this kind of tech, or at least commercial media makes it seem like the wealthy admire this style of tech. And that narrative pushes all cats onto the conveyor belt of consumption. What reinforces the link between the rich and this tech style is the unequal division of labor and misery which punishes those who are not born into the elite.

This tech style is where we are now at this point in global history. The nature-pillagers have triumphed through most of history by pillaging other feline societies in much the same way that they strip-mined the environment, forever in search of shinier and shinier flea collars, spreading their hyperconsumptive pillaging model all over the tattered globe. This is the colonial capitalism model. Liberal Democracy is also found here, with a few socialistic bells and whistles to make it seem less heartless than raw economic tyranny.

_______________________________________________________

TWO  TWO  TWO  TWO  TWO

…

With Tech Style Two, as little effort as possible is expended. But, as we all know, cats need to hunt between catnaps, so they spend a lot of time lounging in the shade, but must expend their own effort to eat or mate.

This doesn’t mean that there is less personal effort than in Tech Style One. Nature-maximizing is far more egalitarian than minimizing, so everyone has to expend some physical, some mental, and some social energy. In an egalitarianist system, every cat is required to use their own body and mind in order to economize the collective effort. The effort that is minimized with this style is the total resource consumption of cat-kind, which translates into less effort by the natural environment as a whole.

The nature-pillaging colonial model provides a labor-free and hyper-status existence for a decadent and flea-collar obsessed elite, but they are always – by necessity – a minority. In the nature-maximizing model, every cat sweats a bit so that no one overconsumes the products of someone else’s labor. Slavery and exploitation are forms of nature-minimizing (destroying feline existences) and have no place in Tech Style Two. Dogs can be made to enjoy being exploited, but this kind of behavior is definitely not cool for cats.

It is in providing the labor himself – each and every cat – that everyone suddenly has a stake in reducing consumption to that which is necessary to have a good life. Not a glamorous life full of g-force thrills, endless bowls of vintage catnip, gilded cat-litter boxes and aimless world travel; this kind of cat existence can only be maintained by economizing nature through slavery-of-the-many and resource pillaging. Instead of this unnatural segregation of life opportunity (division of labor), nature-maximizing can offer everyone a good life with equality and healthy amounts of social capital.

Not only would this reduce the strain on the natural environment, but it would also return catkind to pre-political lives that involve cooperation and equality. With this nature-maximizing style of tech, it would be most forms of competition that would go extinct, rather than the feline race itself.

There are still many cat cultures that exhibit an admiration for this nature-preserving style of tech, and many individual cats living within nature-minimizing societies recognize the superiority of nature-maximizing.  But these nations/individuals are almost never the wealthiest or most powerful. Pillaging makes powerful, and thus, has spread like cancer. Nature-minimizing Great Kitty Powers had an easy time pillaging societies that were still maintaining the infinitely more sustainable nature-maximizer style of tech. Until now.

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MEOW  MEOW  MEOW  MEOW  MEOW

The friends, family, and employees of this blog entry support a transition from Tech Style One (our current disastrous path) towards Tech Style Two. We posit that protecting our life support systems is far more important than actively pursuing numerical abstractions. It’s time to let our claws out once again, and re-learn to chase our own mice, and only the amount of mice we need to get our daily calorie requirements.

Little Fella

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…

The MacIsaac’s camper trailer is dark brown and white with chrome accents – the perfect color scheme for hiding dirt and mold. But I don’t think Kipper’s barking at mold. He barks at shadows all the time, but it’s overcast today and the shadow under the trailer isn’t really moving, so there must be something out there. Or maybe I’m just dazed from all the low-grade pot we’ve been smoking.

After about 10 minutes, when his buzz starts to recede, Billy goes outside to empty a few cat litter boxes – the MacIsaacs have 17 cats and six active cat litters in total – and I go outside with him just to check out why Kipper’s barking.

I crouch down. The smell of wet dirt under the trailer helps explain the soggy piece of toilet paper lying in the shadow. I can’t believe Kipper has been barking at an inanimate object for what seems like an hour.

But wait. That isn’t a piece of dirty toilet paper. It’s… oh my god. It’s a beige kitten that’s been abandoned by its mom! Why would a post-partum cat abandon its own little kitten? Don’t they need to feed their kittens just to ease the pain from the milk pressure? Isn’t this instinctive? Time freezes for a few seconds because I can’t process what I’m seeing in front of me.

I have to bend over to get a closer look, my heart-rate doubling as my mind focuses and my emotions go red hot. The kitten, like me, has round bulging eyes. But his little eyes won’t open for a few weeks – if they ever open at all. And though his eyes are closed shut and the kitten is silent, I can feel his fear – his deep and unrelenting fear.

I rush him into the house and wash the dirt and placenta off his shivering little body in the kitchen sink. He looks sort of homely and morbid: like an abandoned biology project. But he’s moving and warm – alive.

Not knowing what to give him to eat or drink, I wet a piece of paper towel with milk and let him lick it a bit, which he does. He starts to move in a way that demonstrates that he is, perhaps, willing to live, but only if someone helps him. If someone will just pick him up and do what they’re supposed to do naturally, this kitten just might survive – he just might want to survive.

…

An hour later, Billy’s mother gets home from her job at Zellers and I explain what happened. Having raised a few dozen kittens in her time, Mrs. MacIsaac puts my mind at ease as I leave their house to go home to my own – my teenage emotions forever changed.

Eventually, one of the other mother cats at the MacIsaac’s – one who had just had kittens of her own a week earlier – adopts Little Fella and he starts to feed regularly and often. Within a week, he’s as healthy looking as his older cousins whose eyes have already opened as they stumble outside their homemade kitten pen.

Little Fella is always a step behind these siblings, and his biological mother – who is the grandmother of the kittens he is nursing with – seems to have completely given up on mothering. She just paces around in circles meowing for a few weeks, and then calms down. Perhaps she was just too old or too frail after all the other kittens she’s had in her lifetime. Or maybe she had problems of her own when she was a kitten. I have no idea.

When Little Fella got older, he didn’t really act like other cats. His best friend was Samo, the neighbor’s Chihuahua, and Little Fella would always jump up on people and lick them on the face as if he was a dog himself. He rarely meowed, and seemed to love human beings and want to be loyal to them. He liked to chase cars with Samo and even wagged his tail when he saw his favorite people.

Perhaps there’s a lesson here for all cats: mistreat your kittens, and they might reject their own community. I mean, wouldn’t you do the same if your own community had left you to die?

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Bestmount Bears

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Orc: “I am totally walking in there right now with this beer!”

Orc is losing her cool in the icy lineup of cologne-drenched punk posers in front of Club Glace on Stanley Street. Having to wait on the sidewalk before she can get into the club to dance and drink gin always pushes her into existential crisis mode.

Rusty interrupts her call to arms.

Rusty: “Hey, you were the one who couldn’t leave residence until your curls were firm enough. I told you we’d have to wait in line if we got here after eleven.”

Orc’s curls are important. Many hours of her life have been spent pursuing full, rich white curls like Annie Bearito has on television. That the curls on television are the product of lighting effects and special hair treatments that only last the time to shoot a scene … this is not important to Orca. What matters is getting the exact same results in real life as she has witnessed on TV.

Orc: “Oh Rusty, I totally don’t give a shit about anything anymore. Let’s smoke another pinner. I hate fucking waiting outside like this. I totally feel like cattle waiting to be culled.”

Rusty: “What’s the point of smoking pinners if you are going to smoke a dozen of them, Orc, sweetie. Let’s just get out a blowtorch and do some knives, why don’t we.” Michel Foucault eye-roll as he whips out a pre-rolled pinner.

A shortish female bear with green fur overhears the conversation and cuts in.

Nathalie: “Hey, are you two from Bestmount?”

Bestmount is an elite, inner-city suburb of Yukon Bay. It’s built on the side of the mountain on top of some of the last remaining blue space in the city. It’s high end in just about every way.

But instead of feeling like he’s been complimented, Rusty takes this as an insult, and goes straight home on the monorail without saying another word, leaving Orca and her friend Flora to share the just-lit pinner. There is just something about being mistaken for the upper classes that makes Rusty worry about melting ice and who is eventually going to take responsibility for it.

It sure isn’t going to be him. He’s just a furry white trash polar with nice proportions – not some hubristic rich bear with visions of world domination.