Backyard Intruder

There you are! Our backyard intruder, drinking prettily from the cats’ bowl. It’s too dark for me to see what exactly it is, though. It is not Ratso. My first thought was that it is another cat, but it would be quite a bulky, blocky looking cat, and I might have seen black stripes surrounding the eyes. Yes, I think it could have been a raccoon. I was too timid to chase it and get a better look. The animal did not simply run away upon noticing me. I think raccoons may be aggressive. I didn’t want to find out for myself.

The lesson: no more food outside at night. Maybe no more water either. This may be tougher on the cats, because I have been sleeping better lately, getting in three or four hours straight at a time. I have not been suffering those nights in which I have to get up every hour or two.

No Walk

The extra hour from Daylight Saving came in handy today. When I awoke this morning, I thought it was time to get up, and I was thinking that I am too tired and ragged to go on a walk, but then I saw that it was only six-thirty. I got up and did a bathroom run and gave the cats some more food on the patio, and then I dropped back into bed on this wonderfully cool autumn morning and happily dozed off for another hour.

I got out of bed at seven-thirty, intending to go out on that walk after all. I open the front door to air-out the house and get a clearer idea of the weather I will be facing, and I am taken aback to see that it has been raining, albeit lightly. I’m kicking myself for not letting the cats in a six-thirty, as all three were at the door and looking to come inside, but I wanted my extra hour of sleep and I brought the food outside. Was it raining then and I just did not notice it? It may have only started since then.

No walk. Which was fine by me. It no longer does that much for me. It is mostly an opportunity to get in some Plato or Shakespeare, which is 90% of my incentive these days. The satisfaction of feeding the ducks and of getting in a little bit of exercise supplies the remaining 10%, which isn’t much. I do feel some regret over this. I wish I was a real jogger, burning off some real calories and enjoying the healthy burn in my muscles from some real exercise, but I no longer even get the stimulation that I used to get from just getting out of the house and taking in some of the natural scene. I am too used to my circuit around the duck pond, and it even kind of depresses me now, as it has become just an extended part of my general mindscape of neediness and hopelessness, of gentle poverty and plain people.

The Natural World

"First Winter" by Ben Torode

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AP (1) New York

Price and Bateman are still on their cab ride from Wall Street to a little dinner party at Bateman’s girlfriend’s place. Price goes on and on about how much he hates New York.

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“I hate to complain - I really do - about the trash, the garbage, the disease, about how filthy this city really is and you know and I know that it is a sty....” He continues talking as he opens his new Tumi calfskin attache case he bought at D. F. Sanders. He places the Walkman in the case alongside a Panasonic wallet-size cordless portable folding Easa-phone and pulls out today’s newspaper. “In one issue - in one issue - let’s see here … strangled models, babies thrown from tenement rooftops, kids killed in the subway, a Communist rally, Mafia boss wiped out, Nazis” - he flips through the pages excitedly - “baseball players with AIDS, more Mafia shit, gridlock, the homeless, various maniacs, faggots dropping like flies in the streets, surrogate mothers, the cancellation of a soap opera, kids who broke into a zoo and tortured and burned various animals alive, more Nazis … and the joke is, the punchline is, it’s all in this city - nowhere else, just here, it sucks …”

-- “American Psycho” by Bret Easton Ellis

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Of course, there is some delicious irony in the fact that Price is riding with one of the city’s worst maniacs.