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Change Is Gonna Do Me Good

I live in a world of cats, these days; I share a house with no less than four, and a neighborhood with countless more, so many that they have nicknames and familiar meeps as I walk past and say hello. (There’s even one who has, to all intents and purposes, taken up residence on the porch, only deigning to go home to sleep, and even then I’m not sure that’s always the case.) All of this is preamble to the strange story that happened recently, which started in the way stories often do: with a knock on the door.

It was someone I’d never seen before, who quickly explained that they lived around the corner and had found a dead cat outside their house, and would I be able to tell her which house the cat belonged to…? She was distraught to the point of tears, but she knew the cat’s name and said she talked to him a lot on this street. I said I’d accompany her to tell the owners.

The cat lives just two houses down, so Sophie — as the woman around the corner was called, she nervously explained — and I went to see if anyone was home. They were, as evidenced by the fact that their front door was open and they were deeply unhappy to see us even before we shared the unpleasant news. Once we’d explained what was happening, however, one of the cat’s owners immediately walked out to see what was happening, so suddenly that we had to ask her if she’d rather wear shoes considering it was raining.

The cat’s corpse was so strange to see. There was no visible damage, but the face was frozen in a sneer as it lay in a gutter. The owner went to pieces instantly, telling us over and over that the cat knew not to visit this particular street because of the heavy traffic, but confirming this was, indeed, her cat. The grief had turned into shock and Sophie, not knowing what else to do, left to get a box to put the cat into.

Which is when the owner realized that it wasn’t her cat after all.

Sure enough, this cat had a collar that identified them as “Captain Fake” — it sounds like a joke, but it’s not — and a phone number. Lifting the cat to expose the collar tag, it was entirely stiff, in a way that seemed less rigor mortis and more taxidermied. When Sophie returned with the box, we quickly explained what was happening, and she added this, to make the whole thing even more odd: she was, she believed, being bullied by someone unknown, who kept leaving orange things outside her house — bags of Cheetos, traffic cones, and the like. The cat was orange, and now she wondered if Captain Fake was part of this sinister agenda.

We put the Captain in the box, and the owner of the not-dead cat determined that she’d take him and call the number to share news of his discovery. I haven’t seen her in the days since, but my head is full of questions. Was he a real cat, dead on the side of the road, or a stuffed cat left there to mess with someone? If it was the latter, who’d do that? Who’d call a pet Captain Fake? What world has such people in it?

This all happened January 2. As I walked home, I wondered if this was an omen for the year, and how strange it would end up becoming. Hold on tight.

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Complicates/Compliments

I became curiously obsessed with sleep when I was in Brazil. That’s not exactly right; I actually became weirdly obsessed with the idea of the room I was in when I was asleep — what that physical space would be like, with me in it but not awake.

For some reason that I can’t put my finger on (but may, in all seriousness, have something to do with sleep-deprivation, ironically; I don’t think I slept longer than seven hours a night while I was there, and for the first few days of the trip, I think five hours was my limit), I started imagining the hotel room I’d been staying in, with me in bed, comatose. It became this strange existential idea, as if when I was asleep, I wasn’t actually me and there was this empty me-shaped shell in this hotel room, which was otherwise empty and devoid of life.

That idea stuck in my head for a couple of days; the image of a me asleep in that hotel room and the idea that, when I was asleep, my body was some other thing, not actually me. Both were new thoughts, although at least one ranges back to my teenage self, when I’d fall asleep and feel as if — when that was happening — the real me was shrinking and curling up inside my body, which was some kind of shell instead of actually being me.

At some point in thinking about this over and over, the thought struck me that what I was actually concerned about was the idea that, in Brazil, I was sleeping alone. If I had been with someone, the unexpected train of thought went, then their presence would have meant that I stayed “me” and didn’t abandon my body, as if the whole thing was a bizarre version of the “If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is there, does it make a sound” thought experiment.

Perhaps this all came from anxiety of sleeping alone in an unfamiliar place, or missing Chloe; perhaps it was just the specter of a mind that needed more rest and instead turned in upon itself to try and turn the very concept of sleep into an existential crisis. (There’s no reason it couldn’t be both, of course.) All I know is, when I landed back in Portland, I began to think about sleeping easier, for all manner of reasons.

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And Now I Finally Realize

I’ve been thinking about the idea of writing as discipline lately. I think it’s because I’m coming up on the year anniversary of posting three times a week on here, which feels at once an achievement and nothing at all, given how rambling and free-associating this can be. Nonetheless: a year. (Technically, it’ll be a year next week.)

I’m far enough away from the decision to be suspicious of any recollection of why I decided to write here more regularly, never mind on a thrice-weekly basis, but I know that part of it was a selfish desire to do something for me; writing that wasn’t work, wasn’t fulfilling an external brief or purpose. I didn’t have any intention at the time to even re-read what I’d written and posted — I still haven’t, for the most part — and I knew pretty clearly that no-one else was reading, either, so the point was the act of writing itself. Doing the thing.

(I know at least two people read now; thankfully, it’s my two favorite people in the world, so I don’t feel too self-conscious about the rambling. If there are others, don’t tell me.)

Despite the fact that I was only doing it for myself, I found myself surprisingly strict when it came to the structure of the thing; it was quickly obvious that three posts every week was very important to me for some inexplicable reason. Tradition? Superstition? Simply keeping a promise I made to myself? Whatever the reason, the idea of skipping posts was almost immediately anathema to me: there would be a post on Monday, a post on Wednesday, and a post on Friday no matter what.

And here I am, a year later, having done that, feeling quite pleased with myself. Even though, as I said, I don’t re-read what I’ve written and it might all be nonsense. (It probably is, let’s be honest.) Is it simply that I’ve kept up the routine, maintained the rhythm? Possibly, but that didn’t happen accidentally. There’s a sense of genuine achievement in knowing that I managed to be that self-disciplined all year, no matter all the everything else that was going on at the time, even if it was “just” this personal, private space.  That I continued to make time for something just for me, after years of writing myself off or talking myself down.

It’s a good feeling, really.