To be, or not to be (committed), that is the question.

I love timeandate.com, and use it every morning to be sure it's really the day I think it is. After my cat, Maui, died, I started pulling up the year I met him...nothing obsessive or weird - just a little running of my mouse over the day I met him: remembering (maybe—oh God please—if I run my mouse over the date I met him he'll reappear...) Then the most genius thought burst forth and I knew timeanddate.com needed to know about this, so I wrote them immediately!

Okay, so timeanddate.com wrote back and told me very politely—very delicately, even— that they are sorry for my loss and that unfortunately at this time they will not be able to accommodate my request to grant Maui his very own timeanddate.com calendar page. I sensed they thought that I might be insane.

So I wrote again. I explained that all I really wanted was for them to insert my favorite photo of Maui into the table that contains the numeral "15". You know, my favorite photo...that really super nummy handsome photo of him? the one where he kinda looks like Clark Gable? I sent my reply on a professional email template, too - and just in case, I enclosed a spectacularly executed 5 page PowerPoint presentation including 31 hand selected favorite photos of Maui. Exerting myself to be so formal and polite was like putting myself through a personality-bootcamp - and yet not even all this could have prepared me for their reply. Which of course was total silence. Asssssholes.

It was time to take matters into my own hands.

— I hope they appreciate what I've done with their nice page just as much as I appreciated you, Maui.

posted some time around march, 2008. i think

i can't get over my cat

My latest mental trick is to stare out my bedroom window at the cars passing by below and watch the sun's glimmer reflect off various parts of the passing cars. In my aggrieved, childlike imagination, I've wished that if I stare long enough that the reflected light will somehow break apart like a big bang and reform the molecules that made up my cat, then deposit him back to the foot of my bed. It's not as though I'm surprised this hasn't happened- yet it's always disappointing when it doesn't work.

Before that trick I tried purchasing a lot of DVDs hoping that by immersing myself in fantasy and theatrics that maybe I'd get so lost that when I finally got found I'd find him lying in his favorite spot in my bedroom, looking at me like he thought I'd lost my mind. In 4 months I've purchased over 100 new and used DVDs. CVS has $1.99 movies, some of them very good. None of them have delivered the hope or the cat I've lost.

iTunes has made a bundle off of me. Never shop when you're grieving or starved. They saw me coming. I've tried to apply the same principle as I did with the cars, downloading music and reminiscing deeply while staring off into his photos, hoping for that star trek like trick to materialize his body back here. I long to feel him slung around my shoulder, wearing me like a garment, with his head nestled up into my neck, eyes closed, my heart beating in rhythm to the sound of his breathing. Some days I feel suffocated by the air he once breathed.

There's more, so very much more, and I'd love to go on but he's not coming back no matter the desperate state of my reality.

His ashes are in a plain cedar box. In another, longer, box painted with ornate designs are some of his whiskers, a tooth, a small patch of fur, and my whole heart.

posted some time in march, 2008 secret message here: it's been almost 14 months. oh my dear little maui, with all my heart and all my soul, I miss you and it hurts terribly. i would love you and do it all over again if i had that chance.

harry bezalel

I love things about Harry. I love that he's fluffy and warm. He can be picked up and transported to any destination, and just left there to sit willingly. He's like clay being molded. I love watching him run and play. he is like a feather floating slowly back down to earth. He is like light being captured as a streak in a photograph. He has beautiful eyes and his coat is as silky as any surface known. His paws are too big for his body - those paws with tufts of chocolate brown fur jutting out. He has yet to grow into those big paws. I love that. And on the legs that own those big paws are longer cream colored hairs just starting to grow out. I love that too. He hangs limp and accepts being twisted into a pretzel, or dangled and folded. In the morning he sails through the air and lands on my neck. Other times I wake to find a nose being burrowed into my face. I love these things about Harry.

He has a lot of toys, but his favorite toy is a ball almost as hairy as he is that he likes to stalk like prey and then parade it around the house. I love the way his head hangs low like a bloodthirsty hunter; hairy ball in mouth. Harry is like a confection on a dessert tray, you know the kind you see carted around in expensive restaurants - there are so many flavors and textures and varieties of different creme and chocolate desserts sitting on that 6 month old kitten. I love that his body weight has already increased from air to 20% of a total. Soon that 20% will be 50%, and soon that 50% will be a part of 100%; Death by Chocolate. Harry is a dessert and I want to eat him whole.

I love that Harry blends in with every human being he meets equally, and favors not a one. No, not even myself. He is one with everyone and everything and everyone and everything is one with him. This is Harry's being, and it makes him both unattainable and aloof - and completely, utterly irresistible. Harry is as aloof as any cat I have ever encountered. His eyes don't settle on any one person for too long. He is no one individual's cat - he connects only with his greater purpose: he exists. He is a part of everyone and everything, part of the collective. And that's why I love Harry Bezalel. I can only ever love him simply, and only, because he exists and breathes air.

Maui was only and ever only just part of me-he loved no one else - and it was that way from the first day he came to possess me. I was madly in love with a being who demanded that kind of love. And I am still, and always will to be, madly in love.

posted, 2008
see my harry bezalel hear my song sung to harry bezalel