Hard to believe just a few weeks ago I still had to make sure the broom was kept in our pantry to keep Merlin from chewing on the broom straws and making himself sick…sixteen years of leaving the pantry doors partially open and finding vomited pieces of broom, gone! The little daily habits that once annoyed me…amazing how much I miss them when they’re no longer part of my life.
Tag Archives: family
The Local and the Cosmic
My father taught me one important lesson — never take a job because you have to and, even if you need it, don’t act like you do.
Maybe you heard it differently when I directly quoted my father. We sat in his car, I a teenager off from high school for the summer, he working as an “energy efficiency” expert in the role of extension agent for Virginia Tech. We looked out of the windshield at the small entrance to the factory Dad was visiting that day.
“Son, I want you to observe the people you meet today. There are two types — those who work in the front office and those who work on the factory floor. This little burg in an Appalachian mountain valley is what they call a company town. The people on the factory floor do most of their shopping at the local store, which is run by a member of the family that owns and operates the factory. They wouldn’t leave this valley, no matter what, and the factory owners know that. In return for giving the workers better than poverty wages, the owners and managers make sure the workers put in a hard day’s work and spend most of their paycheck getting goods and services they would not have, had the factory not been here. Most of the workers are in debt to the owners because they buy more than they can afford.”
This particular factory made ready-to-wear clothing just like other factories in the area — socks, jeans, that sort of thing.
The owners weren’t bad people but some of them were less caring about the condition of their workers than others.
I remember one factory where the owner complained that he wasn’t getting the level of performance out of the machinery that was promised by the manufacturer. A manufacturer rep had inspected the equipment and said nothing was wrong. The owner contacted the Va. Tech extension office and requested assistance.
When Dad arrived, he interviewed the owner while I sat up front with the secretary for the factory. She was a pretty, young woman who had gone to business school and could type and take dictation as well as manage the petty cash and the file cabinet organisation.
Because I was a good-looking, red-headed teenager, wherever we went Dad sat me down with the secretary to get the scuttlebutt and opinion of the owner/manager.
Sometimes, he took me along for a tour of the factory, especially if he needed a go-fer to measure distances or equipment size.
In this case, Dad made me stay with the secretary because the boss was a little agitated and wanted to personally unload on Dad about adult stuff.
After Dad toured the plant with the owner and one of the shift supervisors, he collected me, along with a box of jeans that the secretary insisted on giving me as a present for being so kind and attentive.
On the way back to the extension office in the basement of a wing in the Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon, Dad told me what the boss had said.
Basically, the man wanted to increase factory output to at least 100 percent capacity in order to stay profitable and ahead of the cheap knockoffs that were starting to flood the market. If so, he could lower prices and remain competitive. If not, he would either have to let workers go or close the factory and he didn’t want to abandon the business because it had become his life’s work and he wasn’t ready to give it up.
Dad returned to the factory without me and took temperature measurements around the equipment (mainly large cutting or sewing machines). The temperatures were only slightly elevated and did not account for a lower-than-expected output.
He returned a second time, with me along to observe.
He asked me to strike up a conversation with one of the workers and ask dumb, “innocent” teenager questions about what’s it like to work in the factory.
Dad already knew what I reported back to him before I told him.
It was not the equipment that was the bottleneck which slowed down production.
It was the workers.
They were operating in temperatures that were too high for humans to tolerate for eight to ten-hour shifts at a time, especially in the summer.
Dad submitted his findings to the boss, who did not accept that the workers, whom he trusted as loyal and hard-working, were the cause of the problems, and requested that Dad redouble his efforts to find the root cause.
Dad told me that this is the difference between management and labour.
He rewrote his findings, suggesting that to lower the equipment temperature down to a more productive capacity, large industrial fans should be installed in both ends of the factory (basically a long metal building, thinly insulated against cold).
The boss took Dad’s suggestion as a good sign that the manufacturer rep had missed something obvious, felt better for consulting Dad and installed the fans.
The factory output increased significantly. The boss was happy and gave Dad a great recommendation.
I recall that incident any time I hear a major figure in business such as Elon Musk wax poetic about the future or give away patents.
We get so wrapped up in our jargonese that we sometimes forget the fact we are one species on an insignificant planet of a solar system in one of a few billion known star systems we call the Milky Way Galaxy.
On the door mat labeled “WATCH CATS,” on the exact same spot where Merlin sat for a photograph, rests a telescope pointing down toward the ground, reminding me that my feet are usually stuck to terra firma rather than floating amongst the stars.
Merlin spent most of his life in this house and I spent most of the last seven years in this house with him and his brother Erin, who sits nearby.
Merlin taught me a lot in his sixteen years on this planet. I was never completely sure who was management and who was labour but I didn’t care — symbiotic love clouded the logic in such thoughts.
I think Elon gets the same message…
Tasteful or tasteless?
I have no problem letting my thoughts wander afield, knowing the energy spent generating thoughts reduces the energy spent acting upon them.
For instance, the day Merlin died — in fact, mere minutes before his life passed before my eyes — I drove over to the local supermarket and bought a cardboard container of fried chicken.
Seven pieces: two breasts, two thighs, two wings and a drumstick.
Can you see where this is going?
While my wife held the crying Merlin in her arms, I prepared a dinner plate for her of a chicken breast and banana pudding. I went ahead and prepare my plate, too, so that when my wife finished eating I could hand Merlin back to her and I could eat.
Merlin died before my wife finished eating.
I’m a sentimental old fool. I can sit here and remember so vividly as Merlin’s eyes dilated so completely I knew he was dying the moment Janeil handed him to me, as if he was taking in every last bit of the world he could just before he said goodbye.
But I digress.
After Janeil finished eating, she asked to hold Merlin [blog entry delay — Erin wants some turkey]…
When she held him, she looked him and said, “I think he stopped breathing.”
“I know.”
“Yes. He died a few seconds ago but I was too much in shock to say anything.”
She nodded. “Well, what do you want to do?”
“Bury him.”
“I know that. I mean right now.”
“I guess we can put him in a box.”
“There’s a box of my scrapbooking supplies on the stove. You can use it.”
I emptied the box and placed Merlin’s stiffening body inside, placing his loose head on the lip of the box as if he was just reclining in it for a moment.
I set the box on the sofa between us and went back to get my dinner plate of potato salad, cole slaw, cowboy beans, a chicken thigh, wing and drumstick.
While seated on the sofa, I ate. Tears welled up in my eyes. I looked past Merlin to my wife. “I’m trying to eat and not think.”
“Uh-huh. I know.”
It wasn’t just the thought of my dead buddy beside me that got to me.
It was other thoughts, too.
Like what does fried cat taste like?
Does it taste like chicken?
How much meat is left on Merlin’s bones?
No, no, I’m not supposed to think thoughts like that.
I’m civilised!
I’m not supposed to wonder if I placed Merlin’s body in the crawlspace, would unknown creatures strip his body down to the skeleton like the mice and chipmunk skeletons I’d found down there through the years?
I once made a recycled art homage to Damien Hirst using cat food boxes and cans, simulating a cat carcass cut in two. Would I dare use Merlin’s skeleton as an art exhibit?
After all, people have their favourite pets stuffed and put on display in their homes. Hunters mount the decapitated heads of their kills on walls.
Best remain still, my wandering thoughts, and finish my meal.
There’s always tomorrow. Seems like a pretty good idea to me.
After I buried Merlin that evening, I returned the next day to place rocks on his grave, arranged like a dinosaur skull…look sideways and you’ll see it.
Love is…
Love is a wife who enjoys a marathon session of Wild Wild West with her husband!
Returning to centre
For several years, I had meditated upon the quietude of life on the edge of a forest.
I had personally celebrated seasonal events, recording them here, such as tree leafing, flower blooming and concentrated water vapor succumbing to gravity in the form of rain.
In other words, I had developed a new persona after years of cultivating the office manager role.
But my benefactor, my sponsor of this adventure — my wife — wanted her own adventure using her disposable income to include me with her so we took up the social interaction known as ballroom dancing, which led to Balboa and then West Coast dance forms.
We met new friends whom I have transformed into fictional characters here and elsewhere.
My wife saw that our disposable income had soon been almost all spent on dancing, including out-of-town weekend competitions and dance studio showcases, not to mention weekly lessons.
Her happiness lessened.
Thus, it was no surprise that, while visiting a partner of one of our dance instructors, we were [in]voluntarily shown images of polyamorous/swinger sessions involving some of our dance instructors in an unidentified hotel room, my wife found yet another reason to distance ourselves from the dance instructors who had been burning through my wife’s disposable income.
My wife is purely monogamous — I am her only intimate mate.
She has zero interest in extramarital bedroom activities.
It was one thing for her to suspect the possibility that the out-of-town events served as a cover for swingers to get together on the pretense of dance competitions.
It was quite another for her to visually be exposed to images confirming her suspicions.
It raised a lot of questions for her such as the likelihood that a dance instructor and/or another person with whom she socially danced would pass on a debilitating or incurable infection they acquired through extramarital sexual encounters — a bloody sneeze, an open wound accidentally contacting her mouth or other mucus membrane, etc.
Plus there was for her the stigma of general association with swingers, an activity she did not condemn but also not condone, something she was not involved with at any time or in any way during her upbringing.
So it seems we are probably finished with social dancing for now, if not forever (she also has a bone spur under her Achilles tendon that makes walking AND dancing painful).
Although I thoroughly enjoyed social dancing with others, despite the minimal risks, even if I wasn’t all that good, I am happy to return to my hermit’s life in the woods, conjuring up my scientists and team of comedy writers to keep me entertained while watching the flora and fauna around me change with the seasons.
I have other celestial bodies in the universe to explore, leaving alone the political, military and religious arguments of my species.
Next on my list, however, is building a grave marker for Merlin and a small bridge across the wet-weather creekbed that separates our driveway from the woods where Merlin is buried. I would love to construct something fanciful such as the one below but will be satisfied with a simple marker and a minimalist bridge.
WHAT I WANT TO BUILD…
WHAT I WILL PROBABLY BUILD (agile design methodology)…
Meanwhile, I’m staying away from Facebook — my satire/sarcasm is lost on the literalists (as opposed to Federalists (or just not exclusively them)), and some of my posts seem to bring out the “crazies” in large numbers?
I am a forest introvert at heart — best keep to my natural surroundings and enjoy life with Rick as long as he lives!
For my dad on Father’s Day…
To you, Dad — wearing my patriotic cowboy outfit to trim the weeds and vines in the front yard, with a scythe, while getting stung by a wasp on my right wrist in my glove.
Let the memorial swelling begin!
The Magic of Merlin’s Forest
Can you die of a broken heart?
How are our thoughts manifested in our actions?
In my thoughts I live alone. I and the universe are one.
I am not the center of the universe but what I know about the universe is centered on me.
I/me is an artificial construct, a set of states of energy that has circuitry which reflects the set back upon itself like a funhouse mirror.
Over the past few months, I have consciously made choices about where I sleep at night.
During the cold months of winter, I slept in the sunroom, closing the door to the house to keep the cold out.
But closing the door also kept Merlin and Erin from seeking me as a nighttime companion.
I could sense they were upset, easily so — they started pooping near the sunroom door.
Merlin gave me what I can only describe anthropomorphically as pouting looks.
Then, as Erin got sick and I paid extra special attention to him to try to get him well, Merlin seemed to enter a longterm depression.
He, too, got sick.
He seemed to have given up.
But in the last two weeks of his life, I devoted more attention to him and he perked up a little.
However, he was too far gone at that point.
I knew it and he knew it.
He drank a lot of water and ate less food.
Then, in the last week of his life, he could barely jump up on the sofa to sleep with me.
In the last few days, he could only walk a few steps at a time and had to rest. He plopped down in front of the water bowl and laid his head on the lip of the bowl to dip his tongue just enough to wet his whistle.
Yesterday, he had to drag himself up on the sofa. He looked sad. I knew it was only a matter of hours before he died.
I cleaned his ears with Q-tips one last time. I wiped the dried mucus from his eyelids. I wet a paper towel and cleaned the dried cat food from his chin.
He did his best to purr. A tiny rattling sound.
He rubbed the top of his head against my chin or, rather, attempted to, jerking his head from side to side.
His hind legs began to stiffen.
Erin tried to join us one last time but Merlin’s spasms made it difficult for the three of us to settle down together.
I sit in one of Merlin’s favourite spots on a sofa in the sunroom, sunshine touching the edge of the sofa where this time of year Merlin used to drape his head over the edge to warm his ears and top of his head.
Erin sleeps despondently in the living room, wrapped in the fleece blanket in which Merlin died yesterday.
It is a very quiet day. Not a bird singing or a car passing by. Just the clicks and pops of the expanding roof and walls of the sunroom.
A goldfinch checks out the empty bird feeders, trying to find one last seed to eat, no felines perched on the cat stand to chatter and stare.
I piled rocks on top of Merlin’s grave this morning. Between burying him in the dark last night and the rain shower this morning, a large limb broke off the giant oak tree under which I placed Merlin’s body in two small cardboard boxes taped together in the shape of a child’s cash register toy, a printed copy of Merlin’s purchase receipt listing birth and death sealed in a plastic sandwich bag and taped to the box.
As I arranged the rocks, I noticed black beetles and black flies around the burial site. Fresh food for them and their offspring…the cycle of life continues.
I felt like I was in a horror story or movie last night, a battery-powered lantern hanging from a tree limb as I shoveled forest soil to make a hole, black humus mixed with freshly-fallen leaves covering the first few inches I dug, followed by Tennessee Valley red clay, rocks and roots.
I retired from an office job in 2007 and have spent the better part of my life since then living in this house with two cats.
One of them is gone.
No more my wife and I keeping open containers of drinking water out of reach of Merlin’s head.
No more Merlin curling up into the crook of my left armpit in bed on a cold night.
No more Merlin stretching out in the sunny spots of the house, his brother joining him.
No more soft fur like a velveteen rabbit, a unique smell up against my nose when he decided to sleep on the pillow next to my head.
My daily house companion of the past seven years, a part of my peak work years, happy to see me when I got home, is gone.
No matter how miserable his life had been the last few months, Merlin looked into my eyes at the end and fought to stay alive a little longer.
Why did I shut you out so much lately, Merlin? I was not tired of you. I was tired of myself having given up on my life that I couldn’t bear to let you see me this way, an unpleasant house companion. Yet, you asked for me at the end. You chose to die in my arms, no one else’s.
I was the world to that cat, a set of states of energy just like any other that became life, a bundle of cells symbiotically attuned to keep on living no matter what.
We qualify the meaning of life.
In fact, when I returned to the house after burying Merlin, I saw a horse fly on the ceiling in the kitchen, minding its own business, cleaning its wings and I killed it because I abhor the stinging sensation of a horse fly’s bite even though the fly gave no indication it was going to bite me anytime soon.
But is the life of a human with celebrity status any more important than my cat in the workings of the universe?
I think not.
Life is life.
I shan’t punish myself for the times I pushed away a seemingly healthy Merlin recently when I thought Erin needed attention in his weakened state as he vomited up large volumes of blood.
Erin no longer vomits blood but he wheezes when he breathes and sneezes blood droplets sometimes. By feeding him small portions of deli-sliced turkey along with regular wet cat food, I have brought his weight back up from malnutrition but he is still a skinny cat (he was always thin).
How long will he live now that it’s just the two of us most of the time and alone in the house by himself when my wife and I are not here?
I do not try to know.
All I can do is provide him the same love and attention he got when he was seriously ill before Merlin’s health started to decline.
I don’t want my imagination of two cats dying of a broken heart on my conscience.
I struggle enough as it is, sometimes, trying to find reasons to live. I don’t need another reason to want to die.
It’s almost two p.m. Time for my afternoon nap. I’ll see if Erin wants to join me or wants to take my sleeping spot, either sofa or bed.
Watching Merlin waste away the last two weeks has been tough, knowing he was rapidly declining. Whether the decline was caused by breathing the heavy dust of a new cat litter we tried, the cat snacks we gave or a spider bite, we’ll never know. Running my hand over his body, feeling his rib cage beneath the guard fur of a Cornish Rex, noticing a nub that was either a broken rib or a cancerous node. Seeing parts of him swell unusually, like a paw, a forelimb or his chin. His body getting colder day after day as he finally gave up eating…well, Erin says enough typing. Pay attention to him!
Farewell, my feline friend!
We said goodbye to our big buddy, our Cornish Rex cat named Merlin, who died in my arms a little while ago. Watching death is never easy (I have a deep appreciation for people working in hospitals and other places where death is frequently observed) — the convulsions, the crying out, looking into your eyes for comfort, help, something…anything…the struggle to restart the heart and keep breathing…the last breath…the last twitches of the ear.
He almost died earlier this afternoon and I comforted him, telling it was all right to go to sleep but he didn’t want to. He perked up when he heard the garage door opener, knowing Janeil was coming into the house. She held him while I ran out to get dinner. She then handed to me after I returned, because he was begging for me one last time, and he was gone within minutes.
He turned 16 Earth years old on the 20th of May. The last three days I had been washing fleece blankets because Merlin could no longer control his bladder. I put him in a warm fleece blanket one more time late this afternoon when I picked up his body, knowing he was dying because his back legs no longer worked. His cooling body is curled up in a box beside me, waiting to be buried after I write this Facebook entry.
Dear boy, you were a great friend to my wife, me, and your [half]brother Erin, who already walks around the house searching for you.
Who would have thought two months ago, when Erin was coughing up blood and you seemed to be fine, that you would be the first to go?
To you, my sofa and bed companion, my lap heater, who a few days ago was pushing me out of the way, even in a weakened condition, for his own corner of the couch, I raise a toast in your name! Beannacht leat go bhfeicfidh mé aris thú!
On the way to Mars…
For a long time, I dedicated time to managing my image, an extension of living in a community where worrying about what your neighbours thought of you was considered important (an extension of the group dynamics of social animals), which was handed to me by my parents and such.
We aren’t removed from the tribal characteristics of our ancestors — we just think we are.
There’s nothing the matter with wanting to please ourselves through the use of our “mirror neurons” with which we naturally mimic one another.
In other words, I’m telling myself it’s okay to be all the parts of me — including the flesh-and-bones member of one species — even the ones I’ve told goodbye!
With that said, I am back to watering the seeds of the future.
Planting ideas that have only 12852 sols (13205 days) to reseed the next generation.
Time to shop for more parts at Radio Shack to help reduce inventory at the local store, not knowing which one will be closed to keep Radio Shack the corporation solvent.
What shall I build next?
On the way to Mars…
Mourning has broken
As sheep graze the green grass of Ireland in the month of March, not more than a week away from Saint Patrick’s Day, here on this third planet in orbit around the local star we call our Sun, a collection of cells looks at itself and smiles.
Now, what is a smile?
Smile, n.: A subset of collection of cells sharing signals to coordinate an activity that similar cell collections recognise automatically.
Could the definition be more generic?
Perhaps.
What is a smile but a symbol and what is a symbol but a clash of simple meanings?
Today, for the first time, I held my smiling great-nephew in my hands and flew him through the air like Superman.
It takes one to know one.
In that moment, I realised that I am who I am, wealthy enough to retire on the interest of a modest trust fund of my own making, happy to be the slightly rude and crude fellow who occasionally acts like a gentleman in front of women who want to be treated like ladies but who otherwise is not a core member of the type of folks who would be associated with the “church lady“.
I have finished another round of recovering from the loss of my father, which includes releasing the constraints upon myself that I had learned to keep subdued in order not to feed and incur the wrath of Dad when he was alive.
I am not a weekly churchgoing kind of guy but I am willing to support those who are, having, with my wife, pledged to donate half a million dollars to the summer church camp where she and I met as 12 year-old “rising seventh graders,” neither one of us being daily Bible readers or church attendees but friends with those who are.
To those who are, I am grateful for their influence upon my youth. I know that many of them would love for me to join them in service to the community to promote religious teachings in action.
But that is not who I am. I am a child of a universe of which our cultural/religious teachings are limited to a single solar system.
I will allow the teachings to continue to be a part of my set of states of energy but I believe it is a subset of which the set includes stuff unassociated with our species and its methods of survival on and around Earth.
I am healing from unintentional cuts in the thought patterns I was following that the cuts interrupted — cuts known as psychological damage in one respect and unique personality traits in another.
I am who I am because of who I was when I didn’t know who I was or who I wanted to be, exactly.
I am a collection of cells influenced by a lot of subcultures.
But again, that is from the viewpoint of a single planet.
From the viewpoint of the known universe, our species is invisible.
I practice telling myself this over and over because I choose to equal the influence upon me from others (“others” being any stimuli outside the immediate circle of influence that constitutes my set of states of energy (this collection of cells) that moves around the planet) by repeating to myself what I believe.
I have healed from these wounds, these cuts, these interruptions that redirected the forward momentum of multiple personalities in conflict that comprise the entity known as me.
I have reevaluated my risk aversion levels woven together as characters/masks/personalities/compartmentalised responses to external stimuli.
In the midst of healing that started when my brother in-law died in 2006, continued through my midlife retirement, caring for my mother in-law as she aged, got lonely, left her hometown, moved to our town and died, then rapidly followed by my father’s declining health and death, I resurfaced the core personality traits I had suppressed for the sake of others.
I am blossoming late in life, changing my personality feedback loops to pay attention to when I’m reacting for the sake of others and cutting off those reactions, replacing them with self-affirming actions instead, rather than living in the past working hard[er] to suppress myself when it surfaced unexpectedly.
I am no longer living for others and letting others live for themselves, choosing neither to lead or follow others.
I am responsible to myself.
All while giving leave of the self for other goals that may or may not include me (especially after I’m dead and gone).
I have reached the point where achieving these goals means leaving people and ideas behind that I was trying to please for no other reason than I didn’t know what else to do because I waited for permission to tell them goodbye, permission I was never going to receive from anyone else but me.
I felt like an interstellar spaceship being held in place by the roots of an extinct dead grass patch.
I gave myself permission to once again be my natural self, weird in some circumstances and accepting of comparable weirdness from others.
Releasing the fear of being seen and judged by the imaginary thought patterns of others in the subcultural religious teachings of my youth.
The release was a relief and a lifting of carrying a burden that was not mine to own.
I stopped worrying about pleasing people with whom I don’t hang out regularly anymore but have friended in social media circles.
In other words, I want to joke about butt plugs shaped like the bust of Vladimir Putin but not when I’m getting blasted with “God is so good to me and my family” messages all the time.
So, all I can do is say goodbye to the people/family in the subcultural religious teachings of my youth and let them be happy in their subcultural circles of which I no longer actively participate.
No better way to be me than to use someone else singing “I Gotta Be Me.”
treetrunkdings 