On the Nature of Daylight

This is going to be a rambling post, and I’m not sure where we are headed. The map flew out the window and the GPS isn’t connected. I guess we’ll see where we end up when we get there.

The title is from a Max Richter piece that I’m listening to as I write…

I’m a bit of a cat fan. Most people who read this and know where I live would assume I’m referring to the Kentucky Wildcats. But I’m really talking about the furry kind. I had a great buddy in Scooter for a few years. He and I became close. He was the only animal I’ve ever treated for a mental health issue. Scooter developed an anxiety disorder that caused loss of hair for a while, but we got that sorted out in time. I had enough conversations with Scooter that I ended up writing a novel about a guy and a cat. I wrote it under a pen name for a few reasons, mainly because I didn’t want the book to used during my competency hearing.

Scooter left us a couple of years ago, his body just couldn’t take it anymore. He was and is irreplaceable.

But time has a way of softening resolve, and empty spaces long to be filled. So a little over a year ago we made room for a new addition. Butters was a rescue. An orange, small domestic short haired cat. We had been looking for a while, and the moment I saw Butters I knew she would be coming home with us. She has been grateful from the beginning. Just about a half bubble off center (as the stereotype for Orange cats suggest). She’s very conversational and VERY drawn to routine.

In a family of multiple people, there’s always a question: Who’s cat is it? We got Butters for Mother’s Day, and there is certainly a part of Butters that belongs to Emily. But I’ve been using a feedback loop with Butters since the beginning, so Butters and I have a deep connection.

What is a feedback loop? With a cat? Well, I’ll scratch her chin or her back a certain way, and let her tell me whether it was right. Eliminate the pressure or locations that are wrong, and before you know it, she has me well trained. For instance, Butters rarely likes her stomach rubbed (there’s one exception). She likes her ears rubbed between two fingers, lightly. And by her tail she prefers a light stroke versus a hard stroke. Under the chin she likes two fingers, lightly scratched, but a harder pressure between the shoulder blades. She has told me all of this. Not with words, of course. Only an insane person would actually expect a cat to talk. But only 7% of our communication relies on words.

What has developed from this feedback loop are two things:

In the morning, every morning, we do our “figure eights.” I sit in the chair and we have about five minutes of choreography where Butters gets a good morning start. There’s about four parts to the figure eight, and I won’t bore you with the details. But I’ll tell you that every figure eight ends with Butters flopping on her back, her belly exposed, where she enjoys a brief, light belly rub.

In the evening, when I get home from work, after I eat my dinner, and after I change into my sweats, Butters will ask that I cross my left leg over my right, and she will climb into my lap and watch TV with us. Left leg over right is her preference, as she can lean to the left. She drops her head and dozes there, having no interest in the show on TV. She will tolerate a right leg over left, as she know it’s my choice and she’s in no position to make demands. But that’s not her preference. If I do right leg over left she’ll drape her body over my right thigh and lay her two front legs on either side, digging the claws in ever so slightly so as to remind me of her lag leg over right preference.

And so it goes. That’s our routine. She also prefers to work out with me in the basement, but I don’t allow that on push up days, as she likes to jump on my back when I do push ups and I work out without a shirt on. So on non-push up days, she’s welcome in the basement.

Emily has been asking for me to either get my vasectomy reversed or get another cat. So I’ve been looking for cats.

After a few weeks of near misses, we found a kitten in a shelter. Aspen was three months old, thin as a rail. She’s white with blue eyes. Ears full grown; she looks like her dad may have been a ferret. We brought her home last week for Emily’s birthday. It was the first time I ever heard Butters hiss.

Butters is three times the size of Aspen. So we didn’t let Aspen out of the carrier right away. Butters was beside herself. I don’t know any specific cat curse words, but Butters was using all of them. Include the cat equivalent of the “C word,” whatever that is.

We haven’t done figure eights since the Aspen Invasion.

Butters is warming slightly over the last day, but she is still shifting between Denial, Anger, Depression, and Rage. Acceptance is a country for which she has no passport. Butters looks at me like I’m covered in stripper glitter. “How could you???”

I should have seen it coming. Twice a month I visit my mentor, Banks. During that time, I get to visit with Zoe, a long haired domestic. Zoe either likes me or has just been taught to be polite; either way, Zoe and I spend a few minutes getting acquainted. When I get home from that visit, Butters is pretty keen to let me know she knows I’ve been whoring around. But I’m not bringing it home, so she’s content to let what happens at Banks’ stay at Banks’.

So without warning, and definitely without permission, we have altered Butters’ world. The ground is moving beneath her feet, and we’re just going to have to give her time to sort out this new reality.

There’s a new cat medication I’m thinking about trying on Butters. I think I’ll start her on 2 milligrams of “Don’tChokeAHoe” and see how that goes. There’s been no feline violence, yet. We’re keeping our fingers crossed. Change is hard, isn’t it?

Shifting Sands…

Jesus said that a man who builds his house on sand is foolish. I grew up learning that story. Build your house on the rock! Obviously, if you build you house on sand then things change regularly and unpredictably. Wouldn’t it be better to not have your house tilt on a whim?

But my house has always shifted in one way or another. Now, a person might say that shifting is because I didn’t follow directions back then (or now). You would be right about that. But I also notice that the directions back then are different than the directions are now.

Our neighborhood church was awesome in 1975. I felt at home and close to God. But in the years to follow even that church had its own shifting sands. And that has been mirrored throughout the country. I didn’t know how much the culture was actually impacting the church. I just thought anything that was taught or shown to me there was rock and not sand. Many years later, as I figured out that maybe God wasn’t a man (my pronouns for God are they/them, and if that pisses you off then you might just be a republican pretending to be a christian), and that maybe men and women were equal, and that having a female pastor might actually be a better idea than having a male pastor, and that Hell might just be a tool for behavioral compliance instead of an eternal place of punishment, and that maybe the Apostle Paul was married once before, and that the occupants of heaven might include those we have tried to “win over” in the past, and that Jesus never suggested a church building, and that dancing and drinking and gambling were not sins…well, I could go on, but you get the picture.

So even a place that advertised itself as a place made of rock turned out to be shifting sands.

So when I look at Butters these days, I say, “I feel you, sister!” I’m surrounded by shifting sands and prevailing winds. My dad is no longer my dad. My mom is a shell of her former self. My home is transitional. My children are growing up. And even though I’m exercising every day of the week my body is giving into the demands of gravity and time.

These shifting sands for me created several days, maybe a couple weeks, of nightmares recently. I usually sleep pretty well, but then something changed. Night after night I fought something wicked in the universe. These dreams were so intense that I would still be fighting when I woke up. I’d fight the pillows or the comforter for a minute until the curtain between dream and reality finally dropped. I didn’t know what was causing it. Until one final dream gave me some insight.

In this one dream, due to all of the creatures I had battled, I had sustained quite a laundry list of injuries. In this particular dream, I experienced a head trauma at the hands of a three headed dragon that had teeth the size of an elephant tusk. I won that fight (how did I do that?) but as I checked my body for wounds I noticed the bones in my head were moving. I thought it was a skull fracture. So I went to a doctor where she examined me and gave me a diagnosis. The doc said the human skull is made up of seven plates and that mine had been separated and were no longer connected. She said to give it time, that they would heal on their own. She called them tectonic plates. Then I woke up.

It dawned on me as I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes that the human skull does not have seven plates, but five. And they are not called tectonic plates. But the Earth does have seven plates, and they are called tectonic. And these earth plates have a tendency to rub against one another from time to time, and we know this is happening because that’s what causes an earthquake. Once I understood it, the dreams stopped.

So I am experiencing my own personal earthquake. Me and Butters. And probably you, too, if you’re paying attention. So what are you supposed to do in an earthquake?

Get somewhere safe, and be still.

Butters and I went to the basement together last night. Not to work out, but to start doing figure eights again, but in a different place. In a place where things are the same as where we left it. Where we can’t be bothered by dragons or kittens.

It was good for both of us.