Magna is gone. She’ll be missed. What I regret is I probably never treated her fairly. Nobody at home did, apart from my father. She simply wasn’t the kind of cat to be always around to please people. She was creepy, she looked retarded. her expression was dumb and her tongue sticked out most of the time. She was not pretty nor particularly cute. She was always hungry to the point of voraciousness, like she could not be complete unless she stuffed her stomach till it exploded. Chicken was her favorite: she like roasted chicken like no other. Some of her teeth were missing because of her sickness, she had ungraceful voice. She lacked any kind of feline charm, she looked rather a bizarre mix of a vulture and a monkey than a cat, with her big chubby body and humpy back, with her disproportionate long legs and weird face. Her fur was so soft and her ears so beautiful though, like they were parts taken from another specimen of cat. I never took pics of her because she didn’t like it and I didn’t feel like it mattered. My selfish self is sort of regretting it now. I feel she didn’t understand it – she was actually very affectionate and sweet when she felt like it – but she wasn’t treated as my other cats, who were always smart and cute and anybody wanted to caress and touch and cuddle to no end. Anybody can enjoy that kind of pet. But her case was different. She wasn’t like that at all. She was dark and shadowy and clumsy and totally inadequate, all the time. But this doesn’t mean I didn’t love her. She’s resting in a cardboard box with three withered roses and a red ribbon. My mother says she looks beautiful and unusually quiet. Tomorrow she’ll be incinerated and her ugly, lovely features will turn to ashes.
Month: April 2009
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The merciful doctor makes dangerous sores
My old Magna has Feline Immunodeficiency Virus – aren’t scientific names awesome? How they can turn anything personal into something completely neutral! Anyway, FIV is the feline equivalent of AIDS. I can’t say how long Magna will live, it can be from ten days to… nobody knows. She’s all swollen and skeletal, her fur is scruffy and opaque, while she used to be such an mighty cat, so incredibly full-bodied, with a silky luminous coat like an ocelot’s. When did she contract the virus? I don’t know, presumably many years ago. She’s is nearly eleven years old.
Feeling anguish is natural. It’s not a matter of responsibility. I don’t feel guilty for her disease. It’s not that I really feel I could have done anything to prevent it. You can’t really prevent a virus like this in a cat living among other cats. It’s that it would actually be sort of reassuring to know where the responsibility lies – it wouldn’t change anything, of course, but it would just be circumscribing facts into a more approachable domain.
Right now the cat is resting behind an armchair. She’s mad at me for bothering her for making her take her medicine. I can hear her hoarse inhaling and exhaling coming from behind the armchair’s back, I can see her tail moving nervously. Though I can only think she’s being silly for not actively cooperating to her health’s sake to the point of hostility, I can see feeling that bad and having to suffer these kinds of abuses without understanding what’s going on must be quite terrible. To a person in full possession of faculties you can try to explain – though I know from experience many sick persons show no more cooperation than a cat, maybe less, even when you give them reasonable explanations. But a cat only understands nature, and syringes and bad tasting medicines are not nature to them, they are nothing but cruel tortures. All for granting survival for another month in a pitiful state, maybe a little more? Not to mention that every thread of comforting support results to be broken in the middle. Does she understands, does she not? Her purring makes me feel she does to a certain extent. There are times when lack of communicating skills from a species to another is painfully inconvenient. -
A Question of Balance
It’s easier to take a drastic decision than to be sensible enough to know the limits of an action. The lack of measure is an old plague, growing in intensity and spreading more and more. It’s not new, but it’s gotten worse in the last two thousand years or so. And it’s steadily growing.
The vicious circle of needs is what makes man so miserable. It’s a limitless maelstrom: starting to appraise necessities from the very first day and keeping on increasing the amounts of them, literally from cradle to grave; or reaching a breaking point and rejecting everything, like Thoreau in the forest. But rejection is just another form of unbalance. The measured man – oh, so rare to find! – does not need more and does not need less, either. Justness isn’t a burden to him, it’s the unbreakable flow in the currents of his spirit. Aureae mediocritates are not of this world. They’re otherworldly and singular, almost closer to the realm of non-existence than to that of existence. Nature itself has its dose of superfluities and we’re merely mirroring and magnifying them as we do with a lot of other things that started as natural and ended as human.
The sense of measure is not something acquirable with perseverance, focus and will. It can hardly be faked. Most of those considered balanced persons are mostly persons tending to the less than to the more, which is probably better than the opposite, but it’s not quite as possessing the sense of golden mean. Taking away the excesses is not as easy as to accumulate, especially when consumerism is what the majority of us knows better and is more comfortable in. But denial is another form of frenzy, though maybe less deadly. We admire so much those plunging themselves with majestic fortitude of spirit into self-inflicted deprivations: we call them saints and adorn their heads with glowing halos or we call them heroes and sculpt their features in stone and neural continuity. What’s so good in pampering yourself with one excess instead of the other? The one who stands in the right middle, not in mediocrity as we moderns intend it but in the classic acception of mediocritas (in mediocritas stat virtus, isn’t that so?): that is the deserving one. But how can minds leaning toward unceasing distraction as ours discern what stands in the middle? We clearly see and feel attracted by extremes and are blind to the rest, to the freedom of the one that limits himself. Sensible limits are not constraints, excesses are. Excesses have the power to enslave through the illusion of self-determination. I can more so I need more, and more and less are actually the same point in a circular spectrum; the freedom resides in the ability to recognize the limits of need and moving about inside those limits, not trying unceasingly to enlarge the circle till we’re not anymore the cogitating center of it, but just a mere speckle in a crowd of burdening exigencies.
This said, it’s probably useless to mull over the idea of something unattainable. Faking is always a possibility and with a right dedication one can even get close to something resembling the golden mean. But who’s so crazy to dedicate himself to go after a fake, especially when it’s not very likely that the outcome will be rewarding at all? -
Some more randomness
I‘m tired. The postman always rings when I just got to sleep in the morning and I am in the middle of some dream.
It’s always raining. I wonder if we’ll drown.
All my sport apparel is Adidas. I’m like Fidel Castro. Or Fidel Castro is like me.
Being 5’4” isn’t fun when all trousers are designed for taller people.
I haven’t spoken to a living being for almost a week, except for a couple of persons, including the postman. I shouldn’t have told the lady in the supermarket the toilet was along the corridor. I actually didn’t know where the toilet was.
Losing money sucks, but losing it and then finding it again is OK. If you don’t die of heart attack in the meantime, depending on the lost sum.
Firefox, iTunes and Photoshop can’t go together if your computer’s possessed by Vista.
Dogs tend to get overexcited easily. Cats don’t give a damn.
I want more things than I can handle.
I wish there was not a pesto lasagna in my oven. Makes me feel guilty just looking at it.
The desolation of this place is infinite.
I won’t buy tickets unless I can pay only once for shipping.
Mothers can be so careless. Especially when they try so hard to be mindful.
I hate to tag things. Tag this and tag that. I don’t know how to do it. Makes me want to run away and shut myself in a closet. I don’t know why everybody needs to tag anything these days. It’s just awful and foolish.
It’s harder when you have expectations.
I shall read more. Nescience will eat my brain unless I start doing something about it. I keep losing the books I start though. I don’t know what to do.
It’s hard to be a man. A woman even more so. Being a duck is probably funner.
I don’t want it to be hot. I don’t want it to be cold. I like it to be just fine, but it’s not going to be.
I’m not going to be here forever. Do it yourself, damn it.
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I will be twelve forever
Growing old means, among the other things, to acquire higher sense of responsibility and to be recognized by people around you as a reliable being able to take care of yourself. Wrong! It seems there’s somebody as myself that will never regarded as such by anybody, especially closer relations. Lost a father you immediately have another ready to replace him, and this new father is younger than yourself. Shame.
Taking a stroll these days has to be considered a dangerous activity which may cause people around you much stress and preoccupation regarding your safety. Who are you – I mean myself – to wake up and decide all by yourself, without consulting anybody, to leisurely walk for five kilometers, camera in hand? In rural districts, with all those reckless cars, no sidewalks, no civilization and all those life-threatening entities running amok? Who do you think you are? Indeed, who do I think I am? I’ll be old enough for retirement before I know it and I will be still treated as a twelve-year-old unable to take care of herself. It’s not depressing, but it’s rather embarrassing. Maybe it’s not even that. It’s a mixed feeling that includes mortification and sense of guilt for I don’t even know what. It takes away all the pleasure of doing anything, knowing you’re going to make people around you paranoid for a nothing like that, for just walking around and wanting to take photos of cats. I really feel like an idiot, but I sense there’s something unfair in it. I should be free to do something so silly in a place I can call “home”, but according to the state of things, I mean all things considered, my only liberty is to go to the supermarket and kick the nearest rabid housewife for trying to steal beer from my trolley. -
Viciousness in depraved charity
There are people that receive great pleasure in the growth and conservation of their benevolent soul. The soul: a deep luminous entity they keep trapped and nurtured inside their bodies, just beside their movable bowels. What’s wrong with that? Isn’t the principle of charity right after all? Well, a lot of things are wrong with that, principles can go to hell. Charity can’t be a display of fraudulent magnificence, can it? It can’t be an outlet for all the selfishness of a disturbed ego, can it? It couldn’t, but it actually can. In these cases charity is actually this ugly orifice that all the vilest sentiments of self-indulgence have to go through. Wannabe saints that do volunteer work, donations, that wear out they kneecaps in church, they go all around the place suggesting to people they should humbly and discreetly support “here’s some Providence!” It really seems a joke, but there are actually some old witches, not necessarily females, doing that and feeling they are conquering their very corner of heavenly afterlife – I do really hope there isn’t an afterlife, so they can rot like anybody else despite the greatness of their hearts. They’re not the ones researching and caring for the true misery of others, they’re not the ones to question themselves and start anew, they’re not risking anything in this farce. They bring their stale little bags of forged charity around to their very own Miseriland – a Disneyland’s zone where the miserables are in reality an elite of people in partially ragged costumes. Because real misery is too frightening to even think of approaching it. You have to look at the dirt of the world, to touch it, to let your pure fingers sink into it. It’s not pleasant, it takes all the fun of charity away. Hobbies should be fun otherwise it’s better to find others. And after the farce, the final treat: they share the remains of their feast, like the Romans casting dice bets over the tunic of Christ. Then they go back to their sanctified homes, with a premonition of Heaven in their guts. They don’t know how much their addiction to the taste of what they consider to be Heaven is harmful to those they touch, how infectious. They drag the asinine minds of those whom they favor in a bottomless lake of shit, the lake of moral absence.
There’s also another category of altruist, not much better than the other: those pretending misfortunes don’t exist in their own flawless surroundings – in their family for example – and having the absurd claim to go and solve their own problems in others’ lives. At war with their families, treating their spouses, children or elders badly, but dispensing indulgence to anonymous crowds. All they need is mirrors to be blinded by the reflections in them. It’s easy to be understanding with someone they meet just a couple of times, someone whose existence is there only as a chunk of their own reality. It’s easy to feel good after that, to feel they’ve been righting the wrongs all along, that they have a mission to accomplish. What about the wrongdoings in their lives? Do they exist or are they a myth? No, those don’t really count, do they? They’re minor spots in a vast landscape of iniquity. Iniquity’s always others’. Sin, too. They have problematic situations now and then, never evils in their own selves that need absolution. Absolution walks hand in hand with them day by day, is part of them not a need, in light of their dedication and blindness.