Julyworthy Autoblogography, Or: Fireless and Vacant as any hat

*

The kind woman who's helped us with The Ferals called me back, and she says a collar and tags makes no difference at all legally if an asshole is determined to be an asshole and say what can and can't be on her property, and though that sucks in this case, that is how it should be, yo. I don't want my neighbor's fuckface on my property.

The kind woman said we could buy a motion-detector that squirts water at an unwanted cat, and I said a neighbor turning a hose on the cat when she sees him would be even better, but we both know the issue is that this woman's complaint is that she shouldn't have to do anything.

The kind woman said whatever we do, let Animal Services act as arbitrator, assholes can sometimes be placated by uniformed authority figures.

The kind woman said that converting Napoleon to an indoor cat is FAR less traumatic that moving him to a farm with lots of land and vermin to hunt, the dream-life both Planet and I were constructing as emotional safety-net if we had to give Napoleon up.

She's dotty, our kind friend, with an unflappable dotty kindness that drives mean people to violence, the very same kind of kind dotty woman our neighbor fears lives two doors down from her house, and if I point out the mother feral squatted uninvited in our shed, we're not collecting ferals like our kind dotty friend, I hope that our neighbor never loses her fear.

*

New Eels! UPDATE! Nope. Wads.

*

• Need's noting.
• Compare and contrast.
• Conservative contortions.

 

Excellence via Vagabond Scholar.

 

• Hard-hitting analysis on vital issues.
• Last time (I hope/doubt) I type the name Michael Jackson.
  
• Autoblogography.
• The Backstory.

UPDATE!

Vasily Aksyonov has died. A quick appreciation. I read The Burn and The New Sweet Style and liked them, but I loved Generations of Winter, reading it three times - one scene in the novel I think about often: when Nikita Gradov, a Red Army officer sent to the gulag's during Stalin's purge of the Red Army, is brought out of the gulag to help fight the advancing Nazi's, one of the soldiers picking Gradov off gives him too much food, which the starving Gradov wolves down, almost killing him.

Normally I love the uncanny - I held New Sweet Style in my hands two, three weeks ago looking for something else on my shelves, and thought, wonder why he hadn't written anything since 1999, wondering if he was still alive, wondering if he still lived in Fairfax.

• Book Reporting.
• Is disjunction dead?
• Travis Morrison, retired?

Travis Morrison?

• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! A favorite song.

Updates later. Or not.

*

THE DRUNK IN THE FURNACE

W.S.Merwin

        For a good decade
The furnace stood in the naked gully, fireless
And vacant as any hat. Then when it was
No more to them than a hulking black fossil
To erode unnoticed with the rest of the junk-hill
By the poisonous creek, and rapidly to be added
        to their ignorance.

        They were afterwards astonished
To confirm, one morning, a twist of smoke like a pale
Resurrection, staggering out of its chewed hole,
And to remark then other tokens that someone,
Cosily bolted behind the eye-holed iron
Door of the drafty burner, had there established
        His bad castle.

        Where he gets his spirits
It's a mystery. But the stuff keeps him musical:
Hammer-and-anvilling with poker and bottle
To his jugged bellowings, till the last groaning clang
As he collapses onto the rioting
Springs of a litter of car-seats ranged on the grates,
        To sleep like an iron pig.

        In their tar-paper church
On a text about stoke-holes that are sated never
Their Reverend lingers. They not and hate trespassers.
When the furnace wakes, though, all afternoon
Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren
Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge
        Stand in a row and learn.

*