Nighttime Visitor

On a midnight bathroom run, it looked like a big cat was feeding at the plate on the patio. It seemed too big to be one of mine. But as I started walking closer, I could see that it was gray. So, it wasn’t Orangey. It was a raccoon. So, I was probably right about that other night months ago. This time our outside light was working and the animal was well-lit, and I saw those black-masked eyes. Naturally, I immediately chased it off. Fortunately, raccoons do not seem to be highly aggressive. I did not even need to step outside. It’s a lovely looking animal though. This one was also very fat. It doesn’t seem to have any trouble finding food, and it cannot all be thanks to me, because we haven’t had the plate out often lately on account of the wintry weather. I hope it isn’t pregnant and about to drop a litter here.

I brought the plate inside. The cats were going to have to go without that convenience. When I got up a couple of hours later for another bathroom run, all three cats were itching to come inside and eat. Since it smelt and felt like rain, and since it was close to morning anyway, I kept them inside and went back to bed. The cats didn’t protest.

In the end, it kind of worked out well, because when I got up this morning, I could see that it had been raining. It was a good thing that I had them inside. Another freezing front is moving in today. So, the cats will be staying in, and the raccoon won’t find any reason to stay here.

LJ

I had troubling logging in to my show blog. After only my third failure, LiveJournal banned my IP address, but for only twenty minutes. I was quite scared. Just the fact of being formally banned scared me, even if only for a few minutes. But I was also worried that I might have been hacked and that somebody took over my account. But no. I simply mistyped, again and again.

Camus and Sartre

The new philosophy of existentialism that will become known throughout the world will be grounded in leftist politics. Egalitarianism will be a cardinal principle, and socialism will be its political ideal.

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A child of the working class, Camus never used his success to raise himself above others, especially those who had shared his childhood in Algiers. It was beyond question that the playing field should be leveled. Sartre’s more privileged childhood engendered in him a deep hostility to privilege. Always unassuming toward others, he had a visceral hatred for those who believe that they have rights over others - and those institutions that embed such rights in their normal functioning. As both Camus and Sartre developed, the only social system they found acceptable was one in which all human beings relate to each other with mutual respect. To be political was to promote socialism. Their most fundamental social values were nonconformist, democratic, individualist, and anti-authoritarian. Although from sharply contrasting worlds, they both regarded the well-being of the working class as the touchstone of social change. Each saw his political task as creating an independent presence that would steer between the Communists and the other existing leftist groups, voicing a new militant politics that would avoid ineffectual idealism while insisting on building an alternative to bourgeois society.

-- Ronald Aronson, “Camus and Sartre”

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This is interesting to me because I tend to think of existentialism as being intensively individualistic, so that one could think that the political implications might run more toward the anarchic, perhaps even contain some Nietzschean flavors, so that the strong and the brilliant are more free than others. But, no, there is apparently a moral duty to respect the individuality and freedom of every person: individualism is grounded in the social ideal of egalitarianism. It can seem like a restatement of our old liberal ideal that has been the standard of Western civilization for the past couple of centuries, except, learning from our mistakes, we would do a better job of tamping down the excesses of capitalism, or at least that would be the goal.

Cats

Even though the cats were outside for half the night last night, in addition to being outside the whole previous night, Ash and Sammy are already annoyingly restless, going at the furniture with their claws, and at each other. It is not wild-crazy, but one has to keep an eye on them and cool them down, before damage happens.

TV Shows

When I was in the mood to follow a TV show a few TV seasons ago, it looks like I made the wrong choice when I went with “The Following” instead of “Hannibal”. Kevin Bacon won me, along with the fact that the storyline had a literary element, playing off of Edgar Allen Poe. And I wasn’t interested in cannibalism.

Amazon is now offering “Hannibal” on Instant Prime, and I just watched the first episode. It is much more Intense and tightly drawn, a much more intelligent show. I am in.