To Purrcyville

You were the most laid back cat that I've ever met, from the first time we met 13 years ago when I opened the bathroom door and almost stepped on you and your sister, Miranda. That first night I slept with the both of you on the kitchen floor and eventually you found the courage to snuggle up to me and from that moment on you had my heart. Even when you were confronted by the other crazy animals in the house from Chyna to Chillipepper and in the end Bailey you maintained your cool and looked upon all their antics with detached curiosity. I still carry the one inch scar you left on my arm from that hot summer afternoon, when you still liked to lay down on my stomach, when somebody came in to the room suddenly and startled you into making a dash for it, gauging me in the process.

Your death this afternoon didn't really hit me until I tried to go to work and broke down in great heaving sobs. I'm sorry I felt ridiculous for mourning you. You are more than deserving of my sorrow. I'm sorry if I let you go in pain too long. I hope that you enjoyed your life as much as we did. I hope you know how much I missed you when I came home tonight and you weren't there to greet me.

Be in pain-free peace.

I find myself longing for the ideal state as described by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in which:

...there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic...

I cannot help but feel that we are on the verge of a revolution. America is not as young as it used to be and the cracks in the foundation are starting to show. It feels like we are about due.

The economic distance between rich and poor increases. Drive around most towns and counties and locate the invisible demarcation line that marks the good neighborhood from the bad and you will know what I mean.

We are being governed by politicians that we do not trust working a system that has been sold and resold a hundred times over. When did you start being suspicious of your government?

The fact that Bush is in his last term provides no comfort. If not him it will be some other fool fronting the angry mob that has since the dark ages learned to organize.

We are a generation of malcontents despite a steady diet of diversions in which we willingly participate if only to escape the burden of knowing that at some point we will actually have to do something.

Book Binging: Lies, Inc. by Philip K. Dick

I just finished reading Lies, Inc. and I gotta tell ya'; I'm feeling kinda dumb. There is an entire quarter of the book that I don't understand. There's about 48 pages of words strung together that I can't seem to relate to the rest of the book. My confusion started at the LSD sequence and didn't end until Applebaum opened the damn tin. What the hell was that?

The afterword helped diminish some of my fears that today's exposure to the suffocation humidity and heat during my walk to the train and then back home had, in fact, cooked my brain. Apparently, as the afterword goes into detail, this story has gone through a bit of splicing and dicing with and without Dick at around the same 48 pages where I got lost. I don't feel so bad.

Except for the 48 pages that made me wonder if I was on drugs the story was fast paced adventure all the way and I can see Ben Affleck badly playing Applebaum in some future adaptation.

Book Binging: Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

I love me some Vonnegut. Galapagos opens conversationally with, "The thing was...". The book continues in that same fluid, natural manner that makes Vonnegut so fun to read. Never one to be disappointed with any story about the near annihilation of the human race, I found this book to be wittily charming, cautiously cautionary, and simultaneously simple and complex (simplex?).

Book Binging: Coraline

O.K. So I'm feeling a little suckered on this one. I was making a mad dash through Barnes and Noble the other night to make sure that the unthinkable didn't happen for the rest of the summer. The unthinkable being that I finish one book and reach for another only to find that there isn't one. This happened to me last week and I must admit I panicked a little. Hence, my mad dash through Barnes and Noble the following day. So I stocked up on five books, among them Coraline by Neil Gaiman. I wasn't thinking. I wasn't really shopping sensibly. I just saw the author and grabbed. I mean I loved Neverwhere, American Gods, and loved loved loved looooooved (yeah I'm drooling so what) Good Omens.

Let this be a warning to you lest you fall into the same trap. Don't get me wrong. I probably would have enjoyed book..if I were five years old. The damn thing was a scary children's book. So if you're in the market for a good scary book for children then pick this one up.

bleh...it was pretty good...I just wanted something else...

Book Binging: Love In The Time Of Cholera

After all these years of being told to read it I finally have. I do love me some Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Love In The Time Of Cholera is a beautiful book and Marquez makes me feel like I have the power to hear, smell, taste, and touch with my eyes as I read this generations spanning novel. But, dag nabit, he did it to me again. After drawing me in and drawing me in until I felt I had lived the 80+ years with the lovers in the story and that somehow my fate was tied to theirs he ended the story. This isn't just the normal sadness of finishing a good book and wishing there was more. He did it in One Hundred Years of Solitude. He did it in Of Love and Other Demons. He just ended the book. He ended it like a capricious lover who woke up one day and said to himself, "OK that's enough. We're through."

To lovers and authors all let me just say...baby...let me down easy.

Book Binging: The Eye of the Sybil

I must be getting used to his style because this attempt at Philip K. Dick went much smoother than the last. The stories were much more coherent and engaging. Each story in the compilation,The Eye of the Sybil, were enjoyable and heavy with social recriminations without being didactic. They were all mildly creepy in the future they presented.

Book Binging: Sir Apropos of Nothing series

Last week was indeed a good week for a binge. I went through Peter David's Sir Apropos of Nothing, The Woad to Wuin, and Tong Lashing. They were each a very easy read in the sense that David has that ungarbled style that comes from a background of comics and graphic novels.

The first book is the best in that it introduces the main character, Apropos, who is the antithesis to your basic hero, without being so noble as to be an anti-hero. The following two books spend too much time rehashing or making reference to events that occurred in the previous book(s). I'm more of a science fiction reader versus a fantasy reader but I still got enough of the jokes and references to enjoy it. Even if you are neither a science fiction nor a fantasy reader the series is still an enjoyable read for anyone tired of typical hero types. I love me some flawed human type characters.