Purring Commas

I get those happy, yummy feelings when my cats are curled up together on the bed, like purring commas.

"Careful," a friend says. "You don't want to end up that crazy old woman at the end of the block with the big house full of cats."

Ha ha ha. Of course not.

Well, wait. Why not? A house full of cats? That's cool. As long as you can have some kittens once in a while, too.

That's how you get a house full of cats, see, by bringing in kittens. Just once in a while.

Kittens are a strong, strong juju. When I get a kitten, within months I've had all the kitten juice I need for oh years to come. Of course, the kitten still has juice. Plenty. That's where the parental love thing comes in. You love them SO much that you don't... don't!... rip their darling little heads off when they bounce across the bed at 3am, 4am, and 5am, chasing specs of dust raised by your breath as you sleep. Slept.

And in time they grow up, mellowing oh so slowly. Eventually they settle down and sleep the night through. Together, if you're lucky, curled up, pettable and purring, giving you that yummy awww feeling that only comes after you're years past the will-not-rip-head-off-kitten phase. The love only a real cat person knows. The person who becomes that crazy old woman with the cats.

Purring commas. Awww.

Stuff

The best part about moving is the dream that afterwards, on the other side, Life Will Be Better. The house will be better, neighborhood will be better, the neighbors will be better. Joy and happiness will ooze in from everywhere, and all we need do to get there is put it all in boxes and rent a truck.

Yes, my friends, on the other side, all will be well.

It's a lovely dream, and it really is the best thing about moving. There isn't much else.

Oh, some people will tell you that it's good to get rid of your stuff as you go through the hell of packing it up, the stuff that you don't really need, that disgusts you to realize you still have. And that's all true, but this would be my third move in two years, and that's a lot of stuff already well and long gone. I mean, yeah, I did that.

See, my stuff used to reside in four buildings. It had lots of legroom. To be fair, one of the buildings was a barn, and the stuff I had that lived there didn't end up coming with me even on the first move.

Stuff. Carlin was right, and so was Tyler Durden in Fight Club. All these things that I'm packing have me real good. Maybe humans are just stuff's way of getting around.

Pro Forma Indulgeo

I don't really know any Latin, but I'm hoping that using some will make me sound erudite as I do this blog thing that I have been resisting for ohhh-sooo many years.

Bet that's been done.

(You know, there's a good case to be made that I was part of creating one of the first blogs and blogging software. We were writing a web site for a radio station in Portland Oregon in what was it, '95? and they wanted their DJs to be able to, you know, write stuff about what they were thinking. It just wasn't that hard, so we wrote the code to let them type into a text window and publish it with a date and time stamp, and there we were. We didn't call it anything. We just did it.)

I don't know. The lizard tells me I'm funny and I should blog. Of course, he says a lot of things and not all of them seem to be about this universe. But he does make me laugh, and there has to be some truth in humor, since there's certainly humor in truth.

My biggest problem with this blogging thing is that I write too good. Since I write good, the finished product has to look like I write good. So I spend too much time working it over. Too much polish.

Hey, do you remember that commericial for lemmon pledge where they spray on the pledge until it's an inch or so thick, with the voice over saying "week after week you polish your furniture until - you're polishing the polish!" In those days, commercials didn't seem to be using self-mocking irony to sell, but then, I was a kid, so maybe I just didn't notice it. Maybe it was supposed to be funny.

Anyway. Polishing the polish. Mabye that would have been a better name for this blog. Can I still change it?

In the spirit of the title, I should say something here about please indulge me with this blog, and I don't really know what I'm talking about, I'm just going to tell you my thoughts however flawed, or some other crap about how it's just words, to maybe lower your expectations.

I don't think so.

Who are you anyway? Why are you reading me? Don't just sit there in silence. Say something. Tell me something.