Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Heartache



Scruffy and Hidey have lived with us for 17 or more years. That’s a lot of time, not only in cat years.  Scruffy has had a heart murmur from the time we got him.  He now barely has space in the right or left, I don’t remember which, ventricle of his sweet little enlarged heart.  He’s also had allergies since he was a kitten and has horrible coughing spells that seem to coincide with allergic troubles of my own.  He spends his days engaged in very specific routines of his own devising which he follows religiously except when he doesn’t.  But whatever his routine du jour might be, it always involves a lot of sleeping and almost constant purring.  A simple side glance at Scruffy will elicit a purring session.  He’s easy going and pretty much lets me do whatever I want with him, which makes it easy to give him his 6 daily pills.  I don’t know why, but when I look at Scruffy, I think of a cardinal.




Hidey, although his blood sister, is the exact opposite of Scruff.  Where he is long and lanky, she is small and compact.  He is all angles, she is all curves.  He struts, she slinks.  He’s calm, she’s between high strung and wild.  He’s been showing his age, she still looks like a kitten.  He’s an angel with occasional lapses; and she has always been our little devil with an angel face. Hidey is a hummingbird.



Though the vet calls him “the amazing cat” because of his longevity in the face of all his ailments, I’ve always thought we would lose Scruffy before Hidey.  She’s always seemed eternal due to her energy and disregard for others.  Of late she had become more sedentary and was drinking a lot of water, which I attributed to aging but took her to the vet to check out anyway.  It turns out her kidneys are failing, which indeed is a sign of old age; and although a seemingly common ailment in old cats, this fact does nothing to mitigate the pain that comes with the certainty of her imminent death.



Although there is no possibility of a kitty kidney transplant here, we can keep Hidey comfortable for at least two more years by giving her subcutaneous fluids once a week.  For two months this summer that has involved me taking her on a long 17 mile drive to the vet, something she and Scruffy simply abhor: Scruffy more because he despises being confined to a kitty carrier, Hidey because she hates and fears strangers, and to her, everybody is a stranger. 

Catching Hidey to take her to the vet has always involved a battle of wills and games of deception: a pathetic dance between a tiny four legged animal and a two legged ape who dwarfs her and should be able to catch her at will.  Going to the vet is always traumatic for everyone since, at least when she was young, Hidey would not let me near her for three days after that.  Old age has mellowed her a bit and she now speaks to me on the same day. 

To avoid the trips to the vet, Curtis and I have started giving her fluids at home every Wednesday morning.  We figured it would be less traumatic, and it is... a little....  Now the trauma comes in a different form.  I no longer feel guilty for having to deceive her into going to the vet; now the guilt comes from poking her with a needle, not being very good at it, and causing her to yelp occasionally.  That always breaks my heart and makes me want to, no shit, just fucking die, even though I know I am not hurting her that much, and that without this treatment she would really be suffering.  Tuesday nights are a nightmare of anxiety for me; and apparently last Tuesday, as she made it plainly clear (and I will explain shortly), one for Hidey as well. 


One might ask how the hell Hidey knew it was Tuesday night.  Well, she didn’t, not exactly; after all Tuesdays are an entirely human concept, and she is most definitely not one of us.... On Tuesday nights I like to bring the bag of fluids and the stand on which we hang it to the kitchen so we can hydrate her first thing on Wednesday morning and get the nightmare over with.  We’ve been doing this for more than a month now without major incidents.  Last night, thinking nothing of it, I did the same thing.  I brought out the bag of fluids, put it on the counter, put the stand beside it, said good night to the cats and went to sleep.  And as the arrogant human that I am, I forgot that animals live by different cues altogether.  They think and perceive the world differently than we do, and last Tuesday night served as a reminder of that. 

Hidey certainly did not know it was “Tuesday” per se; but as cat, she has an extraordinary sense of smell, and although she could not see the bag of fluids on the kitchen counter, she knew it was there the moment I put it there.  And her brain, though the size of a walnut (and sometimes I wonder if hers is even that big), is sophisticated enough to know exactly what the fact of that bag being on the counter meant.  It meant that she could start worrying about Wednesday, not per se.

She made her worries felt at 3 a.m. when I heard a racket in Curt’s office.  For a moment I thought it was Scruffy playing like he used to do when he was young.  I got up to see.  It was Hidey scratching the sleeping bag that stays on the bed Curt or I use when either of us can’t sleep.  Hidey was single-mindedly, as only cats can do, scratching and lifting the bag.  I thought she was playing and went to see.  She got spooked when she saw me and scampered away.  I went to investigate only to find out that the little devil had peed all over the bed and was trying to “cover it up” with the sleeping bag.  This has always been her favorite means of communication when she is either pissed off or hurting.   She usually uses the bed in our bedroom to communicate her discontent; but this particular night, ours was occupied, so why not use the one in the office to tell us how she felt about “Wednesdays”.  Message transmitted and received Hidey.

Tuesday night approaches once more.  Anxiety, apprehension, guilt and anticipation will again weave their way into my dreams.  But this night, I will keep Hidey’s fluids bag in its cupboard and its stand in the living room behind the stereo speaker.  I will bring them out only on Wednesday morning while already having a firm grip on that little bundle of energy whose life force I will one day sorely miss, piss and all.







Thursday, September 9, 2010

Arrogance



An acquaintance of mine has a Brazilian au pair working for her.  I’m not sure what the arrangement is; but if I recall correctly, the young woman can stay here for two years while working as a maid with a fancy French name.  This particular “au pair” has a Brazilian boyfriend. 

This boyfriend happens to be an engineer with a job and family ties in Brazil.  He wanted to come visit her and applied for a tourist visa to do it.  He was denied. Twice. As usual the officials who denied his visa are assuming, based on nothing other than an over-inflated view of this country and a prejudicial one of all of South America, that he will want to stay here illegally. They claim he has no ties to Brazil.
Get real America!  He has a job and he has a family.  If you are an American, that does constitute as ties; but if not, it doesn't. This is a double standard born of arrogance.

Brazil is one of the economies that is actually growing in this recession we started with our failed economic policies and policing.  The boy has a job, and a skilled one, in Brazil.   Why on earth would he want to come here where there are no jobs?  And to be an illegal immigrant to boot?!   And god forbid this skilled young man tries to immigrate here legally; it would be no easier.  Our policies make it no easier for skilled individuals to move here than it makes it for the "great unwashed" we seem so scared of, and that still pour into this country like water through a sieve no matter how many bigoted and misguided policies we put into place.  They keep coming precisely because we like hiring them to do the hard and dirty labor we've long ago gotten too lazy to do well ourselves.

We need more engineers, and every year we produce fewer and fewer on account of the terrible state of our precollege education and of the fact that our people, like all peoples of dying empires, have become just plain old fat, lazy and a little stupid.  Despite the need to revitalize our country by importing skilled labor, we still make it hard for people with skills to come in. 

Our current approach to immigration, like so many things in our government, is totally dysfunctional.  Ours are the misdirected policies of an arrogant country that long ago ceased to have anything to be arrogant about.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Therapy

I've been painting the house and remembering how much I love to be outside in the sun.  Since it has been 40 degrees and 90% humidity until last week, I have jokingly called it a quasi religious experience due to the quasi hallucinatory state one can get in that kind of weather. A good friend, pure of heart, made a good case for my act actually being religion. But what good is a religion of one that is not interested in conquering minds or amassing power?  So yeah, definitely therapy:











...but then if cleanliness is close to godliness... we're soaring  (-;  ...back to work...

Monday, September 6, 2010

pet peeve of the day

assholes, like the two I saw coming out of a pickup this morning at the Lowe's, who park in handicap spaces and are not handicapped- what the fuck is up with that!