Steve Bannon, Button-Down Man

   Of all the strange news dribbling out of the White House this week--North Korea tensions ratcheting; chocolate cake and improved relations with China; Syrian missiles; a massive bomb dropped on an ISIS stronghold--perhaps the saddest, for the fashion-aware, is the diminished power and decided sidelining of ethno-nationalist troll Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's Chief Strategist.
   Who cares about Steve's populist, nativist, apocalyptic, racist, democracy-loathing views? This is a man who can rock a button-down shirt!
   Yes, all males in Washington, D.C. wear button-down shirts, the de rigueur armor of the political man. But no one quite has the button-down panache of Steve Bannon, as the following images illustrate:
 
Young Steve, buttoned down but unafraid to reveal a little skin, the tease! 


Modern-day Steve flaunts a cool lavender button-down: 


Steve likes button-downs so much, sometimes he appears to wear two! 

(Don't be fooled: it's trompe--Trump?--l'oeil. In reality, it's a polo shirt under a button-down one. Fashion forward and winter-friendly! Who says Steve's not a genius?)

Steve often pairs the perennial button-down with a sort of faux-military great coat (Steve was in the Navy, so he's earned it!): 


Relaxing during down-time? Hey--Stay-At-Home-Steve knows there's no more comfortable garment than the good ol' button down shirt (work it, Daddy!): 


   The jury is out about whether Steve will be fired from his White House perch for fighting with Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law. Our President is loyal to no one but his own shadow image of himself as a success, yet is possessed of an immeasurable capacity for unpredictability. So who knows what he'll do with Steve?
   Some commentators suggest that if Steve is pushed out of the White House, he'll return to Breibart.com, the sooper-dooper-right-wing website where he was an editor and stakeholder, and go after the Trump Administration. Again--who knows?
   All we know is this: wherever he goes, Steve Bannon is the button-down man with a button-down plan, and we can't wait to see him rock those button-downs till the day the Grim Reaper pulls him into the swamp.
   Go get 'em, Stevie!
 

An American Prayer for America and Americans

   Donald J. Trump is set to be sworn in as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America a mere four hours from when this is being written, and one is moved to offer some Good Thoughts for this (in)auspicious day:

   *May the new President lead with dignity, integrity, thoughtfulness, wisdom, and the betterment of all in mind.

   *May the new President come to understand that he is the President of all Americans, and our trusted servant, too, and may he therefore lead with a decent measure of humility.

   *May the President understand the weight and gravity of the office he is about to inhabit, and may he thus undertake his duties with modesty and grace.

   *May we Americans support and uphold the dignity of the office of the President, while, if guided to do so, mightily disagreeing with he who holds it.

   *May each of us Americans pledge to continue deepening our knowledge of this country's founding principles; may we thus better understand their purposes, respect their fragility, and fight to strengthen them.

   *May all of us who culturally and/or politically disagree with others nevertheless respect their right to voice their ideas as we would voice ours, never taking for granted the preciousness of the right to freedom of speech, thought, and assembly.

   *May each of us lean toward sanity, reason, common sense and clear-eyed critical thinking, always with the goals in mind of our nation's betterment and its peoples' elevation in prospects and spirit.

   *May all of us practice courtesy, kindness, compassion, empathy, comity--radical notions, and acts, in the face of rising vulgarity and simple-minded coarseness.

   *May America, as a nation of peoples, find its place in the world as a beacon of light among many such beacons; welcome the tired, poor, and huddled masses, yearning to be free; stand for nobleness of spirit and hope for humankind; exist as an equal among many nations, humbled by its own and others' power; and continue its sometimes raucous and roiling experiment in democracy, an experiment that has both dazzled and challenged citizens for more than two centuries.

   *May any among us who detect rising authoritarianism and/or creeping tyranny stand against it with all the power of our hearts and spirits, preserving and protecting the rights to freedom and individual liberty endemic to America and key to the true happiness of humankind.

   *On this day of celebration for some and mourning for others, may we Americans remember that we are one people, indivisible except by our own small egoic fears and needs, and  that, during times of unsettling historical disruptions, it is especially important to meet new conditions with a wide-open, daring and loving heart.

   *Finally, divided though we may seem politically, as a people may we Americans stand together for the higher principles upon which this country was founded, and which, imperfectly, have guided us thus far.

   Have a good, if not necessarily happy, Inauguration Day.
   And, as they say, stay safe out there.
 

Remembrances of Chants Past

   There is something particularly pathetic about the specter of president-elect Donald J. Trump’s recent “Thank  You” rallies, including the one he gave in Orlando, Fla., Dec. 16.

   With vanity unbound, Trump seems to prefer the adrenalin jolt of appearing before charged-up crowds to the dull day-to-day details of preparatory governance. 

   It is hardly surprising that a man with a hummingbird attention span and a bottomless need for adoration should want to appear before worshipping throngs. What's especially troubling is the nature of his free-form asides in his otherwise prepared speeches. The man simply cannot seem to let go of the campaign and election. He revisits them incessantly, suggesting a twisted nostalgia for glories past. 

   In Orlando, he spent fifteen minutes of his fifty-minute speech criticizing the “dishonest” media’s campaign coverage. Then, like all small men, he gloated about his victory. 

   Underneath Trump's braggadocio, however, one detects the stench of fear. Trump loved the rough and tumble of the campaign: the crowds, the “movement,” the energy, the constant attention (including from the “dishonest” media). He now seems desperate to capture the glories of his crusade and his conquest, but there’s no sense of joy in the work ahead.

   He’s like the half-drunk guy at the end of the bar, retailing the same tired story about some now-fading moment of distinction. “That last week was magic,” he said in Orlando, referring to the days before the Nov. 8 election. “Everywhere we went, we had crowds like this.” The only thing more important to Trump than the size of his hands is that of his crowds. He suggested that the Orlando gathering numbered “twenty-two thousand,” with more waiting outside. (Trump has proved himself bereft of fealty to truth, fact, and evidence, so one takes his estimate with a pillar of salt.)

   He also seems incapable of praising his supporters without applauding himself. In Orlando, he referred to recently being named Time’s “Person of the Year.” To the crowd, he said, “They should give it to you, because this is a movement, folks." He quickly added, "Although I have been a very good messenger, do we agree?” Classic Trump: flatter the flock, then pull focus back to yourself and take credit. (Earlier, he’d said that “the movement… is not about me.” Uh huh.)

   Trump’s supporters, of course, play their symbiotic part in fanning his peculiar nostalgia. It doesn’t take much for them to chant, “Lock her up!,” evidently unmindful that Hillary Clinton has long since conceded defeat and found her way to (mostly) private life. It’s as if tens of thousands of Chicago Cubs fans gathered at Wrigley Field a month and a half after the World Series to cheer, one last time, as the team replayed key moments from all seven games.

   The president-elect does seem to sense a change in the tenor of his post-election crowds, and in Orlando, this drew from him something of a rebuke: “Here’s what I noticed. Four weeks ago, just prior to—and always prior to—[the election], you people were vicious, violent, screaming, ‘Where’s the wall? We want the wall!’ Screaming, ‘Prison! Prison! Lock her up!’ I mean, you were going crazy. I mean, you were nasty and mean and vicious, and you wanted to win, right?” He meant these things, alas, as compliments. “But now,” he went on, “you’re mellow, and you’re cool, and you’re not nearly as vicious or violent. Because we won.” Under the bluster, one detected a hint of melancholy. He who feeds off violent energy dies a little when violent energy abates.

   Trump is not conflicted only about about the multitudes from whom he seeks worship. He also decries the “dishonest” media at the very same moment that he craves, demands, and crows about their attention. After pointing to the crush of cameras in Orlando, and denouncing them, he added, “That is a lot of [camera] people. Man! I’ll tell you—that is a lot of people back there!” In other words: we hate the media—but look how many are covering me!

   And yet, typical of a petty tyrant’s squabbling dissatisfaction with those whom he thinks should fawn, even the putatively elevating media coverage Trump receives is never quite to his liking.

   In Orlando, he offered a bizarre disquisition on the “Person of the Year” honor: “Time magazine, and the Financial Times, a very big deal, just gave me ‘Person of the Year’.” He purports to hate the media—until he's offered plaudits by outlets that, in his view, rate. Then, they’re “a very big deal.”

   He went on: “So, in the past it was called ‘Man of the Year.’ Now it’s called ‘Person of the Year.’ What do you like better? Do you like ‘Person of the Year’?” Boos. “Do you like ‘Man of the Year’?” Cheers. “Well, they wanna be politically correct. But I had an idea… If it’s a man, you go, ‘Man of the Year’—Trump. If it’s a woman…, maybe you go, ‘Woman of the Year,’ or ‘Person of the Year.’ Right? … Shall we speak to the people at Time magazine and say, ‘We want it again next year, but we want “Man of the Year”?’”

   Thus the president-elect of the United States of America, still the most powerful nation on Earth, is peppering his public speeches with corrections to media outlets who insufficiently aggrandize his endlessly needy ego. 

   The true pathos of Trump's post-election rallies lies in the mutually dependent and deluding relationship he and his supporters inhabit. Rally attendees wanted an authoritarian, and they got one. Yet they seem to reanimate good-old-days chants (“Lock her up!”) as though brandishing a crucifix against the looming vampire of Trump’s inevitable betrayal of them, even as he pines for fast-vanishing days of simple, violent rallies.

   Trump has filled his Cabinet with Wall Streeters, oil executives, anti-labor crusaders, and billionaires. These people do not represent nor care about the interests of Trump's core supporters.

   In Orlando, Trump said, “The American worker is finally going to have a champion in the White House.” The crowd howled. But it was possible that behind the throaty cheers lurked an as yet unspoken sense that those ordinary Americans will be let down, once again, by those who run the show behind Trump's deflect-and-distract "reality" show.
   Those supporters elected Trump believing they were in on the con. Soon enough, it will dawn on them that they’re the ones being conned, after all.

Game of Thrones

   My partner, Tim, and I drove to San Francisco this morning to get haircuts by a stylist who works in the Kabuki Center, in Japantown.

   Once we arrived I was seized, as one occasionally is, with a pressing need to use the gentlemen’s facilities, so I peeled off into a men’s room. 

   Inside, a man occupied one of the three stalls; another  washed his hands at the sink. I found my way to the end stall, locked myself in, and sat down to rid myself of unnecessary waste. (Fittingly, I did so while reading news stories, on my phone, about Donald Trump.)

   Some time passed. People came and went. My attention was suddenly gripped by the sound of a loud voice, speaking as if making an important announcement to the assembled masses.

   “A white boy, a Chinese guy and a black dude walk into a bathroom,” the voice said, as its owner locked himself into the stall next to mine.

   I was given pause. Was he talking to me? To the other assembled men? Were there still other men in the bathroom? The voice sounded like it belonged to an African-American man, which would account for one-third of the joke setup’s population. Had he passed an Asian man on his way in? Did he know I’m a “white boy,” and if so, how?

   I had little time to muse. The joke, retailed for an audience of no one, continued.
   “The white guy says, ‘Look at that plane, up there in the sky,’” the voice boomed.

   You know that thing where you’re in public—on the bus or the subway, at a movie theater or, indeed, in a men’s room--and someone starts talking to no one in particular, in a voice too loud to be a self-involved mumble, and you do that thing where you don’t make eye contact, and you shrink your body so as to disappear from the vista of the talker’s perspective? Let me put it this way: I was grateful for the stall wall separating the jokester and me. (To be clear: I am not a “white boy” who fears “black dudes.” I am a reasonably sane person who goes on alert when crazy might have walked into the room.)

   “The black dude,” my neighbor continued, “goes, ‘Yeah—look at that plane.’ And the Chinese dude goes…”

   Here I flashed that perhaps the man was indeed telling this story for the dubious benefit of Asian men still occupying themselves in the men’s room. Uh oh, I thought.

   “And the Chinese dude goes, ‘Look at that plane—way up there in the sky.”

   What followed was silence.

   It was not the silence of no applause; one wouldn’t expect clapping in a men’s room. Rather, it was, at least on my part, the silence of utter bewilderment. Was that the punch line? If so, just what did it mean? Was it a slight based on the perception that Asian men are shorter than others? Was the “Chinese dude” in the joke so tiny that the plane appeared especially far away to him?

   Again my ruminations were short-circuited, this time when my neighbor made what was to be his final declaration.

   “It’s kind of a shit joke,” he said.

   Well, I thought but did not say, better a shit joke than a shitty joke.

   And with shitty jokes on my mind, I returned to my reading about Donald Trump.

Total "Cuck"heads

   Voters and members of the American white supremacist right, otherwise known as the Republican party, have two vivid terms of derision for those they perceive as being soft 'n squishy liberals: we are "snowflakes" and "cucks." The former slight ridicules hyper-sensitivity; the latter one mocks a (symbolically) castrated man.
   As a soft 'n squishy liberal, I hereby happily adopt the terms as my own. I am proud to be a snowflake. (I am unique!)
   In return, I offer this term for the white supremacist right, in all its arrogant ignorance: "Dumb Fucks."  
   I'm having a T-shirt made up: "Better a Hot Cuck Than a Dumb Fuck."
   Look--I'm a gay man, and I've lived a long time. (I turned sixty this week. Gifts gladly welcomed.) Since puberty, I've studied the "straight" American male--especially of the Dumb Fuck variety--in all his glory and folly. Early on I studied them for signs of danger: they are an unpredictable and violent sort, especially when it comes to those they perceive as weak. (To the Dumb Fucks, gay males are ipso facto weak, a confusion of "gay" and "effeminate"--and "effeminate" and "weak"--that has no basis in reality, not that reality matters a whit to those imbeciles.) Later I studied them because... well, because I just couldn't believe how fucking dumb they were. (I am excepting and exempting, here, all non-Dumb-Fuck heterosexual men, many of whom comprise a swath of my friends 'n family circle.)
   After a teeny-tiny majority of Americans elected the Dumb-Fuck-in-Chief on Nov. 8, some of the country's Dumb Fucks cheerily made their presence known. They spray-painted swastikas about the place, screamed racially charged epithets from truck windows, and generally comported themselves like ill-behaved morons. (Hate-watch groups tracked nearly a thousand instances of hate speech and hate crimes in the fortnight after the election.) No sportsmanship, here; gloating is the order of the day, and attack is the new black. (Attacking blacks is the new new black.)
   Of course, Dumb Fucks that they are, some got caught and prosecuted, the fucking Dumb Fucks. Poor things: they saw the Dumb-Fuck-in-Chief livin' large during the campaign, breaking rules with impunity. (Taxes? What taxes?) So they tried the same--and quickly learned that the long arm of the law applies itself more liberally to non-billionaire rebels.
   But this is of little surprise. American Dumb Fucks proudly parade their ignorance. Autodidactic self-betterment? Courageous self-examination and amended behavior when necessary? That's for the snowflake "elites." Better to be unlettered, unlearned, superciliously stupid. Dumb Fucks wear cluelessness as a badge of honor, and a sorry badge it is. Unable to parse the simplest concepts, incapable of applying even rudimentary critical thinking, they're dupes for phony news, snake-oil conspiracy peddlers, and long cons like the Dumb-Fuck-in-Chief-elect. (If the Dumb Fucks think he has their back--oh, the pain they're gonna feel.)
      The great secret of the American Dumb-Fuck "straight" male is the terrible shame he harbors about what how little he is. I'm talking not about appendage size (though he is, often), but about his presence in the world. He beats his chest and shouts vulgarities, all the while knowing he is nothing. The more the bluster, the smaller the man.
   During the campaign, a videotape from twelve years ago showed the Republican Dumb Fuck candidate bragging about grabbing women's hoo-has. In doing so, he appeared breathtakingly puny. That he made this gloat to a man two decades his junior just made the whole seamy thing seem that much more pathetic.
   And this is the man the Dumb Fucks elevate as their role model.
   Hey--wanna make a Dumb Fuck mad? If he flips you off on the road--laugh. It drive 'em insane. I had to stop doing it years ago. It so enraged the raging men that they became truly dangerous. Flip 'em off? Sure. That's just chest-beating across the lanes. But laugh? It pokes the raw spot of their terrible secret shame. Laugh at a Dumb Fuck, he's liable to kill you. (Dumb Fucks, of course, carry guns, because why have a fair fight? Powerless men need powerful weapons.)
   So, yeah. Call me a "snowflake." Whatever. Call me a "cuck." It's water off this duck's back.
   Because here's the thing. The Dumb Fucks will have a moment when they'll feel they're in the driver's seat: Jan. 20, 2017, when the Dumb-Fuck-elect is sworn in. Soon enough, however, it will penetrate the fog of their thick brains that, like the rest of us, they've been taken for a good, long ride.
   Who's the fuckin' cuck then?

 
 

Orangey's the New Cat

   My partner and I live in a studio apartment. It is too small for a cat, because there's no place to put the--how do I put this delicately?--shit box. Anyway, the bathroom itself is not much bigger than a medium-sized litter tray. For now, we dream of a palatial future, where nooks and crannies hide cat trays and a furry beast gambols merrily.
   In the meantime, we have a sort of training-wheels cat. She is a feral tabby who makes her home in the driveway area shared by the two apartment buildings next to ours. A man in one building told me that the cat showed up years ago. He began to feed her, and she stuck around.
   The cat has pretty green eyes and fur of an orange-brown hue. The man and his young daughter named her, for obvious reasons, "Orangey." (My partner  and I, for perhaps equally obvious reasons--oh, those kooky gays!--slang-dub her "Orgy.") Another neighbor, who lives in the second building at the top of a set of wooden steps, also feeds Orangey. "I began giving her wet food," she told me recently, "and now she'll hover outside the screen door and wait to be fed."
   This is just about the total extent of Orangey's human socialization, however. Oh, she'll laze on a step in the sun, her eyelids at half mast, her body a slouched mass. But the moment she hears a sound the ears perk, the eyes widen--and she darts off the step and into the safety of the overhung parking spot. (The second neighbor has placed a cat bed and small scratching post there.) Human touch is anathema; it seems she'd rather be clawed by a competitor cat than be petted by a human.
   She is not the only feral cat to feel that way, according to a "The Lion in Your Living Room," a fifty-minute cat-themed documentary my partner and I recently streamed on Netflix. In a segment on feral felines, the film notes their aversion to human touch, even when they've been rescued and given a home and steady food. Some take years to adjust to the simplest caress.

   But then, as a rule, cats often appear aloof. This drives many dog people to distraction. Dogs are gregarious-seeming and well-socialized. They appear to manifest all the best traits of people: loyal, affable, uncomplicated, companionable. This is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of their guardians, too, although, given human complexity, to say it is always the case is a stretch.
   Still, many of these people can't see the point of keeping a cat as a pet. Where's the fun in an animal that doesn't affirm, with every whimper and tail wag, that you are the single most important being in the whole, wide world?
   It may be overstating things to say that dog people are extroverts and cat people introverts. But maybe not. Dogs are outward; cats are inward. Only an inward person can understand the true beauty of an animal which actually requires work to understand, and which, to a large extent, is beyond training. By their very nature, cats demand of humans a kind of blasé curiosity mingled with resigned acceptance. Cats are not going to do your bidding, at least on your terms and in your time frame. You might as well just let go of all demands and dig how awesome they are.
   In other words, bow down to King and Queen Cat.

   It has taken me many patient months to get to the point at which Orangey, sitting on the neighbor's stair, won't bolt when she sees me. I've learned to call her name before I appear to her. I approach slowly and coo to her soothingly.
   I knew I was getting somewhere with her sometime last summer. As I coo'd softly over the fence, her bright green eyes went from saucer-wide fear orbs to slowly-blinking satisfied slits. She had accepted my presence. I suspect she now considers my scent non-threatening.
   One day recently I prepared to bike around town to do errands. Descending my stairs en route to the garage, I spied Orangey sunning on the usual stair. I decided to see how close I could get to her. I rode into the neighboring apartments' parking area and stopped roughly fifteen feet from the cat. I dismounted, laid the bike on the ground, sat down. Orangey didn't flinch; her eyes stayed soft. I talked to her for a bit, and then slowly climbed back on my bike and pedaled away. I considered the event a victory of sorts.

   Life, as Madonna so astutely observed back in 1989, is a mystery. (Everyone, she added, must stand alone, but don't tell that to dog people). The biggest mystery of this mysterious journey is what lies beyond it, when ashes return to ashes and dust to dust, and the spirit floats free of mortal and material bonds.
   People adjust to life's unpredictability in a host of ways. To some, it is cheering to be in the company of like-minded souls; this wards off the unconscious terror of the coming void (if indeed a void is what awaits us). Among these types, it would stand to reason, are dog lovers.
   For others, contemplation of the mystery is one of the joys of the mysterious journey, and contemplation requires solitude. Among these, I would submit, is where you find your cat lovers.
   Oh, there are exceptions which prove the rule, and there may not even be a rule. But if you're given to contemplating the mystery of life and what's beyond it, what better companion than a cat, herself a mysterious piece of the wild veldt right there on the bedspread?
 
   Something of a breakthrough happened today, after I'd finished writing most of this piece.
   Having seen Orangey sitting on her step while on my way to the recycling bins, I called her name as I walked back up my stairs. Peeking over the fence separating our properties, I noticed that she'd left the stair and was standing in the overhung garage.
   I hailed her once more--and she meowed.
   That's right. For the first time, Orangey replied. (Cats, "The Lion in Your Living Room" noted--as have other cat documentaries I've watched--mainly use meows to communicate with humans, not with others of their ilk.)
   Orangey then flopped to the concrete and rolled back and forth on her spine. Her legs flailed gaily and her face was a mask of bliss (or so it seemed to me). There was joy in the land, not least because the conversation was now two-way.

   And so the mystery of Orangey, and of the life she and I and my partner and all of us lead, rolls on. I may not solve the mysteries--not completely, anyway--but I know the answers await if I'm patient. One could do worse than to be satisfied with slow and steady progress.
   Or, as Orangey might put it, "Meow."
   And you can put that in your pipe and smoke it. Or, if you prefer, you can scoop it into the toilet and flush it on down.
 

The Tall Tails We Tell

   When I lived in San Francisco, I did so in the company of two of the best cats to ever grace the planet, and I say that absolutely free of bias.
   Their names, Dash and Comma, were a writer's joke, one to which I'm pretty sure Dash never took kindly. Then again, she didn't take kindly to much of anything. She was a classic cat: aloof, diffident, haughty-seeming, anti-social. I was her sole human, and she took to me fiercely. But the world at large to her seemed suspicious, a sentiment she expressed by spending the bulk of her time staring daggers.
   Comma, by contrast, was practically a dog: he loved everything and everyone, no matter their size, shape, scent or social status. Comma would greet me at the door, sit in my lap when I read on the sofa, curl up under the covers with me when it was time to drift off to sleep. We had long conversations--my end was long on multi-syllabic flights of fancy, his on meows--and generally comported ourselves as the best of friends.

   Dash came to me in the late eighties via a roommate. He brought her home as a kitten and promptly named her Asha, after a goddess. I just tried to find information online about this goddess, and came up blank. Maybe my roommate only thought Asha was a goddess; it was the pre-internet days. Anyway, in late-eighties San Francisco, anyone could believe anything about anything, and often did.
   A year later, the roommate moved out. He offered me the opportunity to keep Asha; if I didn't, he said, he'd find a place for her with friends. Given that I was home a lot as a freelance writer and he was out at a job all day, I'd rather bonded with Asha. After all, I was the guy who fed her, which definitely elevated me in her discerning estimation.
   So I agreed to keep her on. I promptly renamed her Dash, and we became fast friends--as fast friends as Dash would let anyone become, especially someone who'd changed her name from that of a goddess (?) to that of a punctuation mark, and an underused punctuation mark at that.

   Five years later, I accepted an office job. Thus, I left Dash alone all day and sometimes into the night. A friend--who, with his roommate, had two cats--suggested I get a pal for Dash, and I agreed.
   One day I went down to Animal Care and Control, where animals not snapped up by potential guardians will be euthanized, and searched the cages. Presently, I came across a skinny little year-old thing with large pointy ears and soulful, not to say sad, brown eyes. He had a cold; he sneezed a lot, which was, I'm sorry, adorable.
   I took him to a play room outfitted with a carpeted climbing structure and a bench. I placed him  him on the opposite side of the room, and sat on the bench. He walked over and hopped up. Next, I placed him at the top of the climbing structure, and again sat down. He scrambled down, walked over, hopped up, and sat next to me.
   This suggested that he'd been socialized by humans; I thought him a great fit. Anyway, his coloring was almost exactly like Dash's; it was like I was getting a matched set, and what self-respecting gay man doesn't appreciate the occasional matched set?

   I learned from a vet that it'd be best to introduce Comma slowly into the household--which, let's face it, was Dash's household; to her, I was merely a convenient feeding station. I kept Comma in the kitchen for a couple of days, the door closed. Dash sniffed under the door, hissed, and basically behaved as would any five-year-old who suddenly had a younger brother.
   On the third day, I picked up Comma and walked into the living room. Dash stared daggers. I lowered Comma to the floor, and Dash slowly approached. There was some diffident hissing and whatnot, but in the main Dash began to practice a sort of resigned acceptance. Comma loved Dash; Dash tolerated Comma. To me they were both adorable, blessed with distinct personalities and enough fur that extraneous bits of it became fixtures on my jackets and slacks and sofa and desk.
   The cats and I--and a rotating cast of boyfriends--spent eight delightful years together. Then, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Dash, aged eleven, fell ill. After a few heart-breaking and tear-stained days, my then-partner and I decided to put her down.
   I maintain that humans place fewer conditions on animals than on other humans. The love we feel for our animals is pure, strong, deep. Losing a beloved animal tears a hole in time and space and even in the soul, not to overstate the case. It was with a great deal of grief that Comma, my partner and I bid Dash adieu.

   After waiting a decent period, my partner and I decided to find Comma another pal. At a different Animal Care and Control site, we discovered a tortoise-shell kitten, a tiny handful of fur. We brought her home and named her Ellipsis. (God bless that partner's forbearance, never mind Ellipsis'.)
   We didn't wait long to introduce her to Comma, who--and you saw this coming, didn't you?--loved her. You know those calendars with photos of cats sleeping curled up together, or licking each other's fur, or gamboling happily? Yeah. That. Our household was a constant Hallmark cat card; the level of cute was so pronounced that I feared we'd wind up in, if not as, a Disney movie.
   Alas, even Disney movies have their dark spots. Although Comma and Ellipsis got on famously and loved living together, my partner and I, in due course, did not. After four years together we dissolved our relationship. He took Ellipsis; I kept Comma.
   I wound up spending seven more blissful years with that genius of a cat. I'm in the habit of occasionally offering guidance and solace to people who request it. When someone arrived at my apartment, Comma would greet them like some kind of fur-ball receptionist and lead them to the big, green, comfortable chair. He'd then hop up on the sofa next to me and go to sleep. In this way, he'd model admirable calm in the face of life's vicissitudes; this notion was not entirely lost on the folks I was attempting to assist.

   Indeed, cats teach us many valuable lessons; here are some of them, in no particular order:

   1. Sleep a lot between hunts.
   Cats are predators. They hunt--if only, in the case of Dash and Comma, for kibble and the occasional fur brushing. These finely tuned animals know enough not to stint on rest; they sleep between sixteen and eighteen hours per day. Not that we should necessarily emulate the quantity of sleep, but the quality of it? Let me put it this way: naps are good.

   2. Then sleep some more.
   See above.

   3. When angry, arch your back, hiss, and flash your claws.
   This is especially useful when "discussing" your relationship with your partner.

   4. Flatter those who feed you.
   Translated for the workplace: be nice to your boss. If you don't, he may ban you from the snack room.

   5. Have a sense of humor.
   Ha ha. Just kidding. Cats have no sense of humor whatever. That's why they're such perfect pets for poets.
   And actors.
   And--yes, fine--writers.

   6. We are all animals, underneath the fur. 
   Or, in the case of humans, underneath the belief that reality television is the apotheosis of human achievement.

   7. Nothing is forever.

   This last came as no shock to me. I knew Comma's life in those final years would one day end. When he became ill with kidney disease in 2010, there followed six heart-wrenching months of decay, ending in the decision to put him down. No sorrow hath a writer like that of a Comma dropped.
   Since then, I have been cat free. It's nice not to have to scoop poop-crusted litter and lint-roll fur from my clothes. But I miss having cats.
   One day, my current partner and I will bring home a cat, we've decided. Until then, we have a sort of interim local beast--but let's leave that for a future post.