Cat away

    I had my cat, Raymond, put down at 8:45 this evening. After taking him home from his regular vet at 2:00, where I'd taken him because his breathing was bad, we hung out and napped together on the couch. I did, anyway. I woke up to find his breathing clearly distressed, worse than before. I took him to a vet ER at six o'clock. They did a work up and X-rays. The gist was that he would be dead in a few months at best and those months would be bad to start with and increasingly shitty with frequent trips to the vet and invasive procedures. 

    Advice to those faced with this dilemma: Think of the animal first, you second. Give the animal more weight.

    I held Raymond, kissed him, talked to him. A gentle death via a nice doctor who asked, when it was over, if she could hug me, to which I said yes, but please don't knock me over when you do, which is a concern of mine since having my leg amputated fourteen months ago.

    Now I have all the after things to do. Putting away his bowls, litter boxes (I had two), toys.

    Such misery. I don't plan on trying this again. I'll stick with the fish in my koi pond from here on out.

    Raymond and I had two months and eleven days together. There were enough good days for him (and me) that I'm glad I did it, I guess, but how is it that after such a short time my heart is breaking?

How to get rich

1. Find a way to make something useful out of cat diarrhea and vomit
2. Clone many of the 9.6 pound cat I got from a shelter two days ago
3. Feed the cats and watch them stop after eating three ounces of food
4. Gather the two pounds of diarrhea and vomit each cat produces over the next thirty-six hours
5. Roll in piles of money like a kid on a sugar high playing in leaves

My cat, taking a well-earned break from vomiting and crapping on rugs.

Dog walk

Pets are wonderful. At their best they lift your spirits with unconditional love. At their worst they remind you of the primitive, selfish parts of you that you, being human, struggle your entire life to conquer or at least suppress. (Or they're throwing up on the carpet. Never a hard surface that'd be easy to mop up. Always a rug or a carpet. Always.)
I had pets as a boy. Nothing exotic, the usual animals you'd find in a suburban house in the 1960s and 70s. Dogs, cats, gerbils, fish, turtles. As a teen, I wanted to be the cool guy with a boa constrictor, but when I found out you had to feed them live animals I demurred.
I never had a pet as an adult. 
Partly this is because I moved around more than most and, even when I was in one place for awhile, I was never sure where I'd be a few months from any given time. (I had hopes, dreams.) Partly it's because I lived in cities and I couldn't imagine having a dog or a cat that stayed in all day—or longer, for most cats—the small apartments I could afford to rent. When I was a kid you'd let your dog out in the morning and he'd (we always had males) run around all day, sometimes longer, if he smelled a female in heat. The dog would come back tired but happy at the end of his time in the wild. Everyone did that back then. Leashes were things you had to hunt for if you had to take your dog to a vet. (Sometimes quiet afternoons would be shattered by the awful sound of fur-covered bone getting slammed by the die-stamped steel of a car, followed by a shriek and a series of yelps that could have been anyone's dog; no one could tell because it was a sound they made only then. Sometimes it was your dog.)
Another reason I've had no pets since childhood is that my feelings for their suffering from ailments, injury, or age hurt me more deeply the older I became. The opposite should be true and maybe it is for people who form strong connections to their partners and children, but those are things I never did.
Two animals have died while I've cared for them and the grief I feel even decades later hurts more than anything else. The memory of deaths of people I've loved gives me a dull, empty ache. With animals, the memory induces a sharp pang that makes me draw a breath rapidly.

Me walking the dog.

Right now I'm taking care of a sister-in-law's Corgi and I'll be doing so for the next four days. I've done this several times before and the dog and I know each others' routines well. She hasn't been with me for over seven months because of the operations I've had that have failed to keep a terminal illness at bay, but she remembers all the little rules and customs I follow. She knows which door I'll use to exit the house, where I'll put her water and food, whether we're going to visit the back yard, walk around the neighborhood or, joy of joys, go for a car ride. When I get up from the desk or couch she knows whether I'm going into the kitchen to do something food related or to another room for another reason.
Animals aren't psychic, but they know things. Dogs' sense of smell is so beyond anything we can comprehend that it might as well be psychic. 
After a few drinks, I hold the dog close and say, "Do you know how sick I am? Do know when I'm going to die?"
She wriggles, says nothing.

Three cats

The Complete and Total Loser and his siblings grew up with more pets than they can now remember. Here are three of the favorite cats, which all lived with the Loser at the same time:

EDBD: Female calico. Lived to be 18. Died in 1986 while the Loser was living in Asia. He'd said goodbye to her before leaving. When the Loser's brother was a sophomore in college, in 1973, he rented a huge moving van and loaded it with his and several others' furniture to drive it eight hours to the campus, making a nice profit. EDBD snuck into the truck to explore and went with them. She was pregnant at the time. She lived on the campus in a noisy frat house until October 18, when a friend returned her. Once in the house, she went to the spot under the stairs where she'd had kittens before, and gave birth to a litter of six that night. Question one: How did she know when and if she was returning? Question two: How did she control her labor?

Percy: Male Persian. When the Loser and his mother went to choose Percy as a kitten, the woman who gave him to them said she'd given him that name, which was short for "personality" because, she said, he was "chock full of it." Usually, the Loser and his family liked to give their own names to pets, but it fit Percy so well they kept it. He was one of those animals that just seemed to get it. Once, the Loser was lying on his parents' bed fiddling with a blow dryer while Percy lay on his chest. He turned the blow dryer on, Percy bolted across the Loser's face, and the Loser still has a scar near his philtrum. Percy was found dead in the basement a few years later, at age four. The Loser never found out what killed him.

Harvey: Male Siamese. Harvey was named after the play, which was put on by the Loser's middle-school class around the time they got him. He lived to be twenty-one years old. Lazy, grouchy, but a good cat. Gentle, affectionate. The Loser's mother backed over him when he was nineteen, fracturing his pelvis into several pieces, yet he made a complete recovery. 

Children's Letters to The Loser #1

Dear Complete and Total Loser,

My name is Amy. I am eight. I have a cat named Tiger who is very bad sometimes. No matter what I do, he still does bad things. What should I do with my bad cat?

Sincerely,

Amy

Dear Amy,

Do nothing. Your cat is an animal and when we anthropomorphize we often do the wrong thing. What you see as "bad," Tiger sees as natural behavior. When you play outside you probably kill many insects by stepping on them without even realizing it. In your view, you're just doing normal things, but in the view of other insects you are a cold-hearted murderer. If you punish Tiger you will end up feeling guilt years from now, guilt that will be as searing well into your adult years as if what caused it happened only days ago. And if Tiger changes at all and stops doing some bad things, it will be due to fear and anxiety. You will be better off putting the objects of Tiger's actions out of harm's way.

Your friend,

The Complete and Total Loser

Dogs (Poem)

A cat can be a wonderful pet,
Clean and quiet and small.
It can be the best thing to get,
If your apartment isn’t tall.
But a dog can be the living end,
Loyal, steadfast, true.
So he’s called man’s best friend,
Just the guy for you.
Unlike other critters he feels much joy,
He jumps and dances and smiles.
How good to say, “C’mon, boy!”
When walking those lonely miles.

Future Pet (Poem)

When it comes to liking the household pet
I’m good with cane- and feline.
But thinking of which one to get
I’m waiting before to choose mine.
The brave new world of gene splicing,
Should give more options for us yuppies.
It will be oh so enticing
To see litters of pitties and kuppies.
Half cat, half dog, that’s what I’ll pick,
A friend both loyal and mysterious.
The idea may make some sick,
I am, however, completely serious.
My Persian pit bull will climb a tree
And scare off all the bad guys
He’ll me-ark! and then jump up on me
And bloody both my thighs.
Or how about a golden catriever
To fetch my pipe and slippers?
She’ll purr and whine, a stress reliever,
I’ll feed her beef and kippers.
My cog or dat I’ll keep for life
My house will need no locks.
But I’ll need to find a good strong wife
To clean the litter box.

Ten things the Loser has learned from Flickr

The Complete and Total Loser is a voyeur, peering into the lives of the successful and happy. In the past he stared at the photos coming down the little slide on the photo machines in pharmacies while pretending to peruse the batteries. Now he needn't leave his apartment. He can go to flickr.com and click the reload section on the home page and bring up photos from all over the world. He can click on those and enter the photostream of a complete stranger. It is as if he has broken into an apartment building for the United Nations and is entering the apartments where all he does is thumb through their photo albums. He has learned the following:

It's not supposed to be, but this photo is sexy as hell.

1. South Americans are sexy. Europeans are stylish. Americans are fun-loving but often overweight. Asians are cute.
2. You can never take too many photographs of: Parties, weddings, your baby.
3. Provocative: Girls taking pictures of each other in come hither poses. Creepy: Men taking pictures of women from behind in public spaces.
4. Cats are calm and often half asleep. Dogs are eager to please and as active as the people they're with. The result: Cats are easier to photograph than dogs so there are many more cat pictures.
5. When young people, especially men, are photographed they make fake gang signs in the belief this makes them witty yet mildly threatening.
6. There are hundreds of photographs of wool. Or is it yarn? Is there a difference? Is yarn just wool that's been turned into string?
7. Professional photographers take the least interesting photographs.
8. Photos of the elderly are usually sad.
9. Never show your friends photographs you took of: Sunsets, flowers, interesting cloud formations, most landscapes, interiors of the room you stayed in while on vacation. In fact, limit most vacation photos. Getting drunk on a beach was fun then. The memory of it is pathetic.
10. Very few people look good while singing or playing musical instruments. Never photograph someone while they're eating.