Epilogue: A Tribute from the Heart by Way of the Funny Bone

Gee, whiz, Michael!

May 13: Star Trek ends
May 19: Star Wars ends
May 30: Darwin's Cat ends

What am I supposed to do with myself from now on???

So writes Reverend Kathy, to which I can only reply (cue Richard Burton):

Each evening, from December to December,
Before you drift to sleep upon your cot,
Think back on all the tales that you remember
Of Camelot.

Ask ev'ry person if he's heard the story,
And tell it strong and clear if he has not,
That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory
Called Camelot.

(Chorus boys) Camelot! Camelot!

Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known
As Camelot dba Darwin's Cat.

That Was the Year That Was, or The Year of Living Bloggily

Today is the day of days. This blog is exactly one year old, 365 days, 259 posts, 149,000 words, 7,817 visits. I began this blog in an effort to approximate what it would be like to be a newspaper columnist, which was of course a vain atttempt and a vanity to think it possible since this space in cyberworld is not a newspaper. You can't exactly learn what it's like being a fish by running around the front yard waving your arms in a fin-like way and dreaming of the ocean, though you can try glub glub.

Good job! Enuf, however, is enuf.

A Corpse Flower By Any Other Name Would Smell as Foul

Here's a rare flower for you, currently opening in San Francisco. It's huge; it stinks; now you see it and soon you don't. The lady wife and I went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers yesterday, but the the plant was still in previews, as it were. We didn't see the flower or savor its odor. But thanks to the miracle of digitial photography, you are there.

In San Francisco, throngs -- well, they do what throngs do; they throng -- to see the fabulous corpse plant, whose flowerings are separated by years and which smells like rotting flesh.

Here's a closer better look.

Alas, it's not open yet.

How Tart It Is (And Away We Go)

By the way, I've started rereading Voltaire's Candide. I'd forgotten how bracing its cynicism is, how disrespectful of absolutes and of grief over their absence. I love the "hot" political bloggers who (rhetorically speaking) hack off Bush's legs and watch him dissolve in flames. And I certainly think that "we" are closer to an accurate view of the world -- a view that will at least retard the dissolution of people and systems -- than "they" are.

But it is refreshing to step back and, like Voltaire's Candide on the last page, listen to:

Martin -- "We must work without arguing. That's the only way to make life bearable"

And then say, like Candide (to Pangloss praising the chain of events that brought them to this moment in this "best of all possible worlds") -- "That's true enough, but we must go work in the garden."

Midnight Addendum: Hmmmm. The mood has passed. I've ordered a 'Hillary in 2008' poster. For did not Voltaire also say:

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

A little gardening, a little agitating and then a nice piece cake: It's called multitasking.

Sometimes a Picture is Better Than a Thousand Words, Sometimes Not. But It's Always Easier Than a Thousand Words.

"Ebony and Ivory..." Anyway, what makes this picture significant in the context of catlife at 875 Paloma is that for thirteen-and-a-half years Popcorn has been pounding on Oliver as if he were the bottom of a fresh bottle of ketchup. But now that she's old and sick -- 19; diabetic -- she suddenly thrusts her antique booty against him. And look at that expression on his face! It's like Ratzinger getting scraped by Paris Hilton: a terrifying and unintelligible event but interesting, too.

Welcome to our home, liberal to moderate friend. (Libertarians are allowed to wait outside and press their damp noses against the window. In cold weather we bring them out a warm beverage.)

It will not be difficult to find our house. 

The Republican Mind Worm Attacks Our Humble Home

One party has identified its base. The other is wasting its nickel. But what gave them the idea my wife is even remotely neofascist? Hmmm. When we are in bed tonight, I'd better stare at her until she's asleep just to make sure. Damn you, Karl Rove.

Cops, Me, Fat People in General Beware Beware

My wife took her yearly CPR class today -- according to the teacher the more times you take the class the more likely someone will find salvation at your hands -- and she has been sharing tidbits with me all evening, most of which are unsettling given the number of ways you can die, either by weird accident or simply in the routine course of things.

But this was my favorite. The two most common ways to choke yourself to death are: 1) eating beer and meat while watching football, you testosterone-sodden glutton; 2) taking a big bite of donut and a big swig of coffee. The coffee makes the big bite of donut swell in the throat.

Sip and nibble, my friend, sip and nibble.

Don't you find it poignant to the point of metaphor that when we photograph these two kitties together if we manipulate the image so that one can be seen more clearly that manipulation very nearly obliterates the other? On the other hand, maybe it's all just a subliminal Photoshop ad. 

My dear old friends. You remember how much we loved our goddamn cats and how indifferent we were to your phony claims that you were allergic? Some things haven't changed. 

Hello, Memory My Old Friend. Good to Talk with You Again

Oh damn. Next month I will be 61 and so I'm thinking about the things I said I would do during my days of 60 that I have not done.

I've done the blog. Good. I have not done the novel, which is not necessarily bad since I have a weakness for happy endings and where's the truth much less the art in that?

But most vexing I have not redeemed my pledge to reestablish contact with those old old friends from college days, grad school days and down South working days, all the friends all those times before we moved here more than 25 years ago. Haven't done it.

It's hardest getting back to those friends from the time when I was a good Christian boy because I have "fallen away" so far since those days. It's not as if I have become an Episcopalian or even a Unitarian. If anyone pressed me on the question -- and no one has so this comment is the expository equivalent of gratuitous nudity -- I would have to say I'm a generic agnostic and a Christian atheist. Yah, my old Christian friends would sure like hearing that. That will rekindle old feelings.

I was such a good boy. Let sleeping memories lie.

As for my post-Christian friends, it seems to me that there are three ideal shared elements when it comes to maintaining sporadic touch, and those are: new mates/ex-mates; children; jobs. These three categories enable correspondents to celebrate and bemoan simultaneously. No one likes a Christmas letter, since Christmas letters tend to be triumphal marches. But a nice email or phone conversation in which the participants deftly mix the good and the bad is very pleasant. It's like a tennis match in which the point is prolongation. A soft shot (my A student) gets a soft response (my gifted musician). A hard shot (my ex who disputes visitation rights) gets a matching hard shot (my ex who won't get a job). It's a nice dance, the point of which is that life is a compound of sad and glad, and that's something we still have in common even if shared experiences have grown dim or have been forgotten altogether.

But what if: same wife, no kids, a job whose pleasures and pains are subtle to the point of evanescence. That's me. Oh it's easy enough to reestablish contact -- once. But where do you go from there? (Face to face is easier. Just get drunk and remember the dead.)

Now this blog -- which is one long Christmas letter, kind of -- might be a way of maintaining touch with some old friends, and I've tried to use the blog for that a time or two. What those attempts have underlined is how much impersonality there is in a blog, how much I haven't exactly been honest about, if only through omission. This friend knows about that trouble at work, but that friend never did. She has heard all about that difficult moment in the marriage in the Eighties, but I gave him the impression my wife and I never had a sharp word. Even knowing only a little about the real You, blog-reading friends know just how thick the mask is and how much it disguises and misrepresents.

So my dear old friends. More digital photos of cats and vacations, more forwarded jokes, more comic birthday cards from the Hallmark collection -- that's just about enough, don't you think? I love you to death, but my body has completely reconstituted itself four times since those margaritas at Lenox Square. Who are we? Who were we? But let's keep in touch. Really.

Oh. If you get a Pulitzer, please just let it lie. We have plenty of mutual friends who will call to rub it in. But if your wife shoots you in the leg, hey, I'm here for you.

I Know These are Lilliputian, But Click and They Grow

If your season tickets at SBC are in the third deck -- where there is no seat license and its attendant fee -- this is what you see.

And this is what you see.

I Hope All Inconvenienced Motorists Write Sharp Letters to the Proper Authorities

This is a picture of a picture of the Lefty O'Doul drawbridge being raised during the San Francisco Giants-Oakland A's game today as a tribute to the high leg kick of pitching great Juan Marichal whose statue was unveiled somewhere near the ballpark today.That says it all.

The World is My Coffee Shop

By the way, you may have wondered why I was posting like a demon while my wife and I were in Florida inspecting her mother's health. This was the first time I traveled with my laptop, since I am paranoid about loss and thievery and figure that, while I keep an eye on the laptop, the rest of our luggage will be stolen all the more easily.

But when I called my wife at her office at 8 p.m. the night before we were flying out -- at 7 p.m. -- she said she wouldn't be home until midnight because she had a meeting summary to complete that her boss needed immediately and perhaps intravenously so vital to the health of Oakland it was.

I said: come home, do it on the plane, we'll email it back.

I have a wireless card. The world is wireless or very nearly, right? The report was done and edited by the time we got to Tampa. But the Tampa airport does not have a hot spot, though at least they knew what a hot spot was. My mother-in-law lives in Winter Haven, about an hour's drive away, and I concluded we should look for a hot spot there rather than in Tampa. When were off the freeway and approaching mum-in-law's neighborhood, I started trolling for unsecured wireless networks, found several, connected with one, and we stopped in somebody's driveway and sent my wife's email. To my surprise, when we got to mum's, several blocks away, I could still maintain a very weak connection. I did not know wireless extended that far. Ours doesn't.

It was wonderful. One of my sisters-in-law is a tv addict and my mother-in-law's hearing is sharp to the point of hypersensitivity. Not only were big chunks of the evening filled with television shows I did not particularly want to see, but those shows were also inaudible, given my own hearing deficit. I roamed the house looking for a wireless sweet spot and then checked out my news and my blogs, and posted. And when I was doing neither of these things, I ran Yahoo's baseball game channel -- little dots actually hop from base to base -- in the background and so learned almost in real time when my beautiful A's blew two consecutive games to the Red Sox when Dotel gave up walk off home runs in the bottom of the 9th.

It was just a little alienating to have that wireless connection so handy and so constant, and for decency's sake and for the sake of your humanity you have to be ready to drop the computer if anyone really wants to talk. But sometimes being in a difficult family situation is like being trapped in a whirlpool, and it is nice to be reminded that out there somewhere is still comparatively calm water where your own little troubles aren't even part of the weather report.

Why We Might Adopt You, Though It Might Be Better if You Adopted Us

My mother-in-law is fortunate. She has four daughters all of whom are to one degree or another interested in making her old age tolerable. Some are more concerned than others and some have ideas of how much they are owed in compensation for their interest that I do not agree with. But all of them are involved. One daughter has more or less moved in with her mom to help care for her, though she likes to describe her presence as a visit.

A year is a very long visit.

Another of my wife's sisters, observing how much her mother now relies on her daughters, wonders what will happen to her when she is old. She is divorced and childless. The short answer is that my wife and I will help take care of her, though I would draw the line at having her live with us. We don't have children, and -- here's another short description of a more complicated situation -- my wife's sisters are our children.

And now we get down to it: Who will take care of us? It's a day for short answers: nobody. Whatever help we get we will have to buy. I'm not exactly complaining. Not everyone with children is well served by their children, though we have many friends who treat their aged parents well. I wonder the degree to which old folk make bad decisions about health, about relationships outside the family, about investments, out of some perverse sense that dammit the kids owe us something so why not put ourselves in a difficult situation where our needs are ever more apparent.

I do not know. I am very nearly estranged from my own mother because her attempts at manipulation finally got on my nerves.

I do know that when we are my mother-in-law's age, no one will be looking out for us the way my wife tries to look our for her mother and her sisters. Perhaps knowing that, my wife and I will make better decisions now and be less disappointed than some of our fecund friends will be when they discover the children they have are not the ones they imagined. But whatever the case, even if we are sensible in our planning and lucky in the way that planning works out, sometimes I do think it would be nice to have had a daughter if that daughter were just like my wife.

But it's greedy and shows contempt for the laws of probability to think I would have gotten that luck twice.