because the light is beautiful
The creature there to the right is a baseball player.
He is seen here having just crossed “the plate,” having scored a “run.”
This “run,” it meant his team had just “gone ahead,” and might be “the winner.”
His face is contorted in an expression meant to convey pride and accomplishment and triumph. He is reveling in having bested others.
He looks like a monkey. Because that’s what he is.
This is Faith, church cat at Church of England (Episcopalian) Church of St Augustine’s and St Faith’s, Watling Street, London.
She was awarded the Dicken Medal in Silver, and a silver medal from the Greenwich Village Humane 
Society of New York, for her courage in sheltering her kitten (Panda—he was black and white) in a hidey-hole in the rectory basement, to which she had retreated from her more comfortable position upstairs, in the course of a severe bombing raid on the night of 9 September, 1940.
The church and rectory were, basically, battered and burned to destruction by the Luftwaffe, but Faith continued to shield her kitten, under a heap of smouldering rubble, until rescued by her human friends the following day. Shortly afterwards, the remainder of the church fell down, destroying her position of refuge.
Faith resumed her life as church cat, dying peacefully some years later on her mat in front of an ecclesiastical fireplace. The kitten, Panda, went on to a successful career as resident cat in a care home.
Yes, I know—this will seem silly to many In Here. But consider. Apart from the fact that it is true, Faith’s story became widely known in London at the time, and must have contributed to the morale of many hard-pressed Londoners. Her courage and endurance reflected something that Londoners hoped to find in themselves—and generally did.
—JR
From the first time ever I saw his face, Arnold Schwarzenegger has annoyed me.
Almost as much as the song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”
But never mind that now.
Schwarzenegger first inflicted himself upon me more than 35 years ago, when he was an arrogant dumbcluck dope-smoking bobybuilder, and as such 
somehow invaded the pages of my Rolling Stone.
“What a nimrod,” I thought. “Here’s a goofy gap-toothed guy whose last name translates as ‘Blackblack.’ His name is redundant, and so is he.”
Humans engage in many pursuits that may be fairly described as imbecilic. “Bodybuilding” surely is one of these. I have long believed that such people should be confined to zoos. For the poses they strike, the spectacle they make of their tortured and contorted near-naked bodies—these may be likened only to baboons shimmy-shaking their bright-pink asses, giraffes blithely running fourteen feet of tongue in and out of their nostrils, pint-sized hippos waddling about with their penises on backwards, terminally nearsighted rhinos suddenly gone mad racing across the dirt to plunge their horns into shivering two-by-fours.
“Martial artists”—they can occupy the next cage over.
It was during this “bodybuilding” period that Schwarzenegger personally consumed most of the steroids annually imported into the state of California. Indeed, so extreme was his consumption, that by the age of 30 his testicles had negative mass. They could not be detected even through an electron microscope.
Schwarzenegger next decided he would defile the movies.
Director and self-described Cro-Magnon Man John Milius must be blamed for this: he cast Schwarzenegger as the ur-human protagonist in Conan the Barbarian.
Schwarzenegger’s film career, combined with Milius’ literally unbelievable Red Dawn, recently resulted in a United Nations declaration that, as Punishment for his Sins against Mankind, Milius must be placed in a see-through bamboo cage and run through the streets of Hong Kong, followed by a million Chinese loudly banging gongs.
From time to time I have earned my crust as a film critic. For many years, it seemed like whenever some new Schwarzenegger vomit hurled itself upon the screen, I was ordered to review it. Once I thought seriously of shooting myself in the arm, to avoid a Schwarzenegger assignment, one that I knew would result in a lifetime of PTSD. I refrained only because my then-editor was such a Walter Burns that he would have ordered me to do The Job anyway, insisting I could dictate the piece into a handheld tape recorder, using my one good arm.
I remember leaving the Schwarzenegger monstrosity End of Days convinced that motion pictures should just be abolished. Better that no film, ever, anywhere, ever again be screened, 
than that something like that End of Days atrocity be allowed to slouch out of Schwarzenegger to be borne.
Somewhere along the line, Schwarzenegger married a Kennedy.
For a long time this pissed me off. Until I realized that, because of completely out-of-control Catholic breeding practices, there are now so many Kennedys in America, that the chances of a person entering matrimony finding his- or herself marrying a Kennedy, these are about equivalent to getting “heads” on a coin-toss. In fact, odds are good that I myself may marry a Kennedy, before my day is done.
Not that Schwarzenegger should be marrying anyone. He is the sort of man for whom Science Men should construct a cunning device that would be implanted under the skin in order to deliver a powerful and incapacitating jolt of electricity, whenever he comes within five feet of a woman.
This is because Schwarzenegger is the sort of “man” who, when he comes within five feet of a woman, thinks it a hoot to reach out and twist her nipple, then giggle like a monkey.
We now know that, during his marriage, whenever Schwarzenegger was puttering around the house, and would grow bored, he would wander down the hall and impregnate the maid.
After so befouling the movies that extraterrestrials have blocked off-world transmission of Terran films for a thousand years, Schwarzenegger next decided to invade politics.
When Karl Rove and Enron deliberately shot in the stomach California Governor Gray Davis with that phony 2000-2001 California “electricity crisis,” Schwarzenegger announced as one of about 465 humans, semi-humans, and flaming freakazoids of no known origin, seeking to replace Davis in a special recall election.
Listening to debates featuring the duelling accents of Schwarzenegger and that shameless freak Arianna Huffington, I felt like I had been transported into some Saturday Night Live skit titled something like “Spawn Of The Fascists.”
Where the fuck did I live? California? Bavaria? The summer playhouse of the Greek colonels?
This nonsense was so far removed from Reality, it had to be staged.
It was this experience that allowed me, some 10 years or so on, to instantly identify the 2012 Republican presidential primary sideshow as an event owned and controlled by extraterrestrials, having a lark, just fucking with the humans.
Schwarzenegger was actually elected governor by the people of California; he was then—yes, it’s true—re-elected.
I haven’t the faintest idea what he did while in office. Because I refused to 
accept it. I studiously avoided all awareness of state politics. I chose to live in an alternative universe during that period. Because I would not be a part of the universe where Californians, having already inflicted Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan upon the land, decided it would be Right and Meet to roll in the hay with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I do know that his term must have been a complete and total disaster. Because, upon his exit from office, the state’s voters desperately employed a time machine. To return to the governor’s mansion Jerry Brown, who had already served in that office from 1975 to 1983. Clearly, these voters were, ashamedly, trying to roll back time to 1983. And pretend that all the years after—and particularly those with Ah-nuld—Never Happened.
I had not thought of Schwarzenegger for many moons. Until this morning. When the intertubes chucked up the photo you see there above, and to the left.
I am not exactly sure what is going on there. But it is not anything like Good.
It seems that, with that lectern, and that pointed finger, and that earnest/amused expression, and that absurd facial hair, Schwarzenegger may now be trying to recast himself as some sort of philosopher. Ah-nuld as Aristotle.
My colleague is fond of asserting that “the American people always get exactly what they deserve.”
But no peoples, deserve such as this.
The horror. The horror.
Late the next day he came into the breaks of the Canadian, a country of shallow, eroded gullies. He could see where the river curved east, across the plains. He saw a speck moving across the plains north, toward the river. His horse saw the speck too. Augustus drew his rifle in case the speck turned out to be hostile. He loped toward it only to discover an old man with a dirty white beard, pushing a wheelbarrow 
across the plains. The wheelbarrow contained buffalo bones. And as if that wasn’t unusual enough, Augustus found that he even knew the man.
His name was Aus Frank, and he had started as a mountain man, trapping beaver. He had once kept a store in Waco but for some reason got mad and robbed the bank next to the store—the bank had thought they were getting along with him fine until the day he walked in and robbed them. Augustus and Call were in Waco at the time, and though Call was reluctant to bother with bank robbers—he felt bankers were so stupid they deserved robbing—they were persuaded to go after him. They caught him right away, but not without a gun battle. The battle took place in a thicket on the Brazos, where Aus Frank had stopped to cook some venison. It went on for two hours and resulted in no injuries; then Aus Frank ran out of ammunition and had been easy enough to arrest. He cursed them all the way back to Waco and broke out of jail the day they left town. Augustus had not heard of him since—yet there he was wheeling a barrow full of buffalo bones across the high plains.
“Hello, Aus,” Augustus said, as he rode up. “Have you gone in the bone business, or what?”
The old man squinted at him for a moment, but made no reply. He kept on wheeling his barrow full of bones over the rough ground. Tobacco drippings had stained his beard until most of it was a deep brown.
“I guess you don’t remember me,” Augustus said, falling in beside him. “I’m Captain McCrae. We shot at one another all afternoon once, up on the Brazos. You was in one thicket and me and Captain Call was in the next one. We pruned the post oaks with all that shooting, and then we stuck you in jail and you crawled right out again.”
“I don’t like you much,” Aus Frank said, still trundling. “Put me in the goddam jail.”
“Well, why’d you rob that bank?” Augustus said. “It ain’t Christian to rob your neighbors. It ain’t Christian to hold a grudge, neither. Wasn’t you born into the Christian religion?”
“No,” Aus Frank said.
Aus Frank had always been an original. In Waco, as he remembered, he had caused controversy because he never seemed to sleep. The lantern in his store would be on at all hours of the night, and the man would often be seen roaming the streets at three in the morning. Nobody knew what he was looking for, or if he found it.
Aus Frank resumed his walk, and Augustus followed along, amused at the strange turns life took. Soon they came into the valley of the Canadian. Augustus was amazed to see an enormous pyramid of buffalo bones perhaps fifty yards from the water. The bones were piled so high, it 
seemed to him Aus Frank must have a ladder to use in his piling, though he saw no sign of one. Down the river a quarter of a mile there was another pyramid, just as large.
“Well, Aus, I see you’ve been busy,” Augustus said. “You’ll be so rich one of these days some bank will come along and rob you. Who do you sell these bones to?”
Aus Frank ignored the question. While Augustus watched, he pushed his wheelbarrow up to the bottom of the pyramid of bones and began to throw the bones as high as possible up the pyramid. Once or twice he got a leg bone or thigh bone all the way to the top, but most of the bones hit midway and stuck. In five minutes the big wheelbarrow was empty. Without a word Aus Frank took the wheelbarrow and started back across the prairie.
Augustus decided to rest while the old man worked. Such camp as there was was rudimentary. The main crossing was a mile downriver, and Augustus rode down to inspect it before unsaddling. He saw five pyramids of bones between the crossing and Aus Frank’s camp, each containing several tons of bones.
Back at the camp, Augustus rested in the shade of the little bluff. Aus Frank continued to haul in bones until sundown. After pitching his last load up on the pyramid, he wheeled the barrow to his camp, turned it over and sat on it. He looked at Augustus for two or three minutes without saying anything.
“Well, are you going to invite me for supper or not?” Augustus asked.
“Never should have arrested me,” Aus Frank said. “I don’t like that goddam bank.”
“You didn’t stay in jail but four hours,” Augustus reminded him. “Now that I’ve seen how hard you work, I’d say you probably needed the rest. “You could have studied English or something. I see you’ve learned it finally.”
“I don’t like the goddam bank,” Aus repeated.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Augustus suggested. “You’re just lucky you didn’t get shot on account of that bank. Me and Call were both fine shots in those days. The thicket was the only 
thing that saved you.”
“They cheated me because I couldn’t talk good,” Aus Frank said.
“You got a one-track mind, Aus,” Augustus said. “You and half of mankind. How long you been up here on the Canadian River?”
“I come five years,” Aus said. “I want a store.”
“That’s fine, but you’ve outrun the people,” Augustus said. “They won’t be along for another ten years or so. I guess by then you’ll have a helluva stock of buffalo bones. I just hope there’s a demand for them.”
“I quit the mountains,” Aus said. “Don’t like snow.”
“I’ll pass on snow myself, when I have the option,” Augustus said. “This is a lonely place you’ve settled in, though. I bet you get a nice breeze in the winter, too.”
The old man didn’t answer. Darkness had fallen, and Augustus could barely see him sitting on his wheelbarrow.
“No beaver in this river,” Aus Frank said after several minutes.
“No, a beaver would be foolish to be in this river,” Augustus said. “There ain’t a tree within twenty miles, and beavers like to gnaw trees. You should have stayed up north if you like beavers.”
“I’d rather gather these bones,” the old man said. “You don’t have to get your feet wet.”
—Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
—Yesterday on the Sean Klannity radio show I heard the second generation of the insane Paul clan indicate that not only is he running for president in 2016, but he would like his three nutso teabagger 
mates—fellow Cro-Magnon senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, all of whom are also planning to run for president—to get out of the race immediately and endorse him. They are all loons, and seem fated to crash and burn together. People in other countries, and on other planets, are averting their eyes. It is just Too Much.
—Some Chinese mathematician has had a new and intriguing brainshower about prime numbers. People are grumpy about this, not least because he is over 50, and is therefore supposedly “too old” to discover anything important.
—The I-5 bridge that collapsed in Washington when the semi barrelled into it had been classified “fracture critical,” which means the entire structure could be brought down if even one major part failed. There are a lot of bridges like that—like, 18,000—around the country. It would be nice if the Americans would invest money in fixing such things. Would mean a lot of jobs: give the serial killers something constructive to do. But, I suppose not.
—In Los Altos, California, a woman was crabby that her estranged husband had a new girlfriend. So, she “went to the couple’s Redwood City construction business, dressed in a mechanics jumpsuit with bubble wrap underneath. She approached her husband while he sat at a computer, discharged a stun gun into his side, and stabbed him several times in the neck and chest.” He lived; she is on trial. I guess these things happen.
—News is belatedly filtering out of the Mayberrys about the 5.7 earthquake that rocked and rolled mountainous northeastern California last night:
Susan Shephard and her husband Alan Shephard, who run the Quail Lodge at Lake Almanor near Greenville very close to the epicenter, said they were watching The Hunger Games on TV when the whole building started shaking.
“All of a sudden things started falling off the shelves, mirrors fell off the wall, vases fell down to the floor, everything started crashing,” Shephard told the Redding Record-Searchlight. “It felt like the end of our world.”
Apparently crashing dishes and the like was the extent of the mayhem. No reports of deaths or injuries.
It shook the Manor pretty good, that quake. The cats held me responsible. So. Not only are they convinced that I control the weather, but now the earth rumbling and buckling is somehow within my purview.
The last time I felt a quake this seriously was in Stinson Beach, in what turned out to be a pre-shock to that 1989 shake-up that collapsed San Francisco. May this, not be that. Hard to know, though. Because there has not been much study of the faults that run through the mountains up here. That is because there are no rich people around. And, as is well-known, if it won’t affect rich people, it Doesn’t Matter.
—In that strange speech yesterday, President Obama told Congress to repeal the AUMF. Duh. The original sin from 
which all the War on Terra hath flowed. I used to grouse about that over on StormKos, but nobody wanted to hear about it. Someday the Americans will erect a statue to Barbara Lee, the only person to vote against it. Someday.
—Poor Richard III. Born into a non-ordinary body, his reign brief and tumultuous, whacked to shit in a field by an upstart Tudor. Then, 100 years later, with Tudors still running the Brit-throne show, Shakespeare dutifully transformed Richard into one of the most despicable villains in all Christendom. Nobody knew where the guy’s body lay more than 400 years, until it was unearthed a while back in some parking lot. They dug it up and ran it through a bunch of Science Man tests, and now various moneygrubbers are arguing over where best to reinter it. You see, it is expected that wherever it goes, people will come see it, and, therefore, whoever controls it, will Get Money. The family has now come roaring out to complain that the moneygrubbers should bugger right off, as their behavior is violating the European Convention on Human Rights. Because the guy has the right to have his remains lie in peace. Even if he’s been dead 400 years, and was, or so sayeth Shakespeare, a Meanie.
Golf is so Wrong, it’s hard for me to be coherent about it.
Once upon a time, I did pen a lengthy and somewhat lucid three-part jihad on the Outrage Of Golf. For one of the many newspapers that lived and died around here. Probably the papered remains, they are down in the Manor basement. Somewhere. Maybe, someday, I’ll run across them. And, maybe, then
, I’ll re-screed the jihad, here.
For the nonce, though: golf, briefly, was devised by bored Scottish sheepherders, casting around for something to do while waiting for their erections to return. At which time they could again commence buggering the sheep.
As Mark Twain observed in this space, a wee while back, penile erectile recovery, it can take some time. And so there were many idle hours, for these sad-sack shriveled-scrotum Scottish men. Out there on the moors. Glumly waiting for peter, to arise again. Buffeted by the wind, encloaked in the mist. Desultorily banging with sticks a small ball. Through the sheepshorn grass. Around sand-sweeps and puddled-places. Into various and sundry gophered holes. Waiting. Waiting. For the rise.
It is a Known Science Fact that Scottish sheepherders inserting their man-sticks into the nether holes of sheep is how incubated syphilis. Pace those the-horror/the-horror people of West Virginia, syphilis marks the nadir of the Scottish contribution to Mankind.
Well. Except for golf.
After all: today there is a cure for syphilis. But there does not seem to be any cure at all for golf.
I once knew a man who worked many years as a groundskeeper on a golf course situated in California’s Central Valley.
This man: he was a good man, a wise man, a feeling man.
And so, the obscenity of his occupation, it hurt—hard—his brain.
To assuage the pain, he first, and for well over a decade, consumed, pretty much every hour, on the hour, mass quantities of the strongest mind-ripping marijuana. The paralyzing effects of this uber-gage transported him to places where few humans go. For instance, once, when, for reasons I can no longer remember, we were all sitting around watching Dumbo, he blurted out: “I am not a human being! I am an elephant!” The man also became obsessed with the
notion that things here on Terra are so of the bungled and the botched because this world was designed and implemented by a “rookie god.” The creature had had no practice—this was the being’s first try—and so s/he bumbled out a planet utterly festooned with mammoth and grievous boners.
Eventually the marijuana could no longer do the job. And so he nestled next into methamphetamine. Which inevitably resulted in the day when he entered that congenital meth Reality in which it is absolutely Necessary to hurl the couch through the vast expanse of the full-length plate-glass window in the living room.
His wife, who did not join him in this Reality, in turn hurled him out of the house. He packed everything he owned into a small station wagon, and went into exile in Los Molinos. This is a small northstate community best known, to Those Who Know, for the Ewell-like family who dwelled for many years out by the town dump. The mother had died eons back, but there remained a father, and also many daughters. And so, each year, at least one of the daughters would come shuffling, somewhat shamefaced, out of the woods, charged with some errand like the family shopping, and bearing a newborn.
Yeehaw.
The reason why his occupation as golf-course greenskeeper so grievously affected this feeling man, so much so that he was eventually compelled to hurl his couch through his living-room window, is because, as he knew, siting a golf course, pretty much anywhere outside of Scotland, is an act of Insanity.
Golf sprang, naturally, from the place of its birth. Flat and/or gently undulating earth, covered with thick grass, watered by the clouds, close-cropped by sheep. Here and there, scattered about, smallish pools of water; bowls of sand. Maybe a spindly stand or two of trees. Some holes.
Golf, therefore, is fine—in its place. A place where sheep steadily crop the grass—as they do to this day on many golf courses in Scotland—and where the elements quite naturally dump down the 
literal rivers of water required to keep living and thriving the course and the greens.
It’s a normal thing, golf, for that sort of misty moist place.
But, as the photo there to the left demonstrates, golf, even in its native place, has, today, been brutally buggered into a place beyond absurdity, or even the Sane. Unto a shrieking maddened Court of Chaos, requiring that we must needs close our eyes, and then inject, into every available artery and vein, only the most potent of narcotics, so as to rid ourselves of the Pain.
The 1963 Alfred Hitchcock documentary film The Birds chronicles that parlous period when the birds of Sonoma County, California decided they’d had just about enough out of the humans, and so started pecking big holes in their bodies.
What the Hitchcock documentary does not depict is the armistice negotiated by the squirrels, which ended the bloodshed between the humans and the flying dinosaurs. As in the 
Korean War, there was no actual peace treaty, but instead merely an agreement to suspend hostilities.
Like the Koreans, the birds remain grumpy. As I experienced firsthand, when I lived in Sonoma County some decades ago. When I would labor on my automobile, for instance, ravens would wait until I was wedged under the thing, then swoop down and steal small loose parts with their demon beaks, returning with them to the trees, there to laugh in my face.
I was reminded of this Wrongness when I recently stumbled upon evidence of what appears to be a nationwide movement among animals to move into the yards and houses and automobiles of the humans.
Up there in the land of icepicks, a two-year old moose monikered variously Bullwinkle, Mr. Moose, and Mike, has taken to frequenting, in and around the hamlet of Crookston, a sugar beet factory, a pizzeria, a convenience store, a Ford dealership, and various and sundry backyards.
The moose seems a friendly enough creature, but nonetheless fills the humans with Fear. “Moose kill more humans than any other wild animal,” groused a human named Ross Hier, who claims to be some sort of “wildlife manager.” According to this quaky-pants, “if a moose doesn’t like the scenario, it can put its hooves through your stomach.”
Hier and Crookston Police Chief Tim Motherway said they were surprised about how the public was captivated by the moose, which grew into a tourist attraction. They feared that the moose would never want to leave.
However, success came on the fifth try of chasing the moose eastward with ATVs and other vehicles.
What a couple of nimrods. What if Mike the Moose gets pissed off? And rounds up some buddies? They could come thundering back into town, drunk on whiskey and hate, at which time no one’s stomach would be safe.
And speaking of whiskey, over in Brookline, Massachusetts a wild turkey flew through a window and into a house one recent Sunday night, apparently because it Felt Like It.
The turkey smashed through a double-paned window at the house on Addington Road around 6:30 p.m. April 28, leaving large holes in the screen and window shade, said Didi Coyle, who lives in the house.
Her husband, Tom Szydlowski, and their dog were
sitting in the living room when the bird exploded through the glass. Coyle saw the incident from the outside; she was standing in her driveway with a neighbor when the bird barged in.
“I was just sort of casually watching it and I realized it was aiming for my house,” Coyle said. “It’s a big old Victorian house, a pinkish color, so I can’t imagine it didn’t see the house.”
The uninvited guest startled the family’s 12-year-old collie. While Coyle called police, the dazed turkey flew over Szydlowski’s head toward the back of the house, she said.
A Brookline police officer soon arrived and managed to corner the bird in a bathroom. The officer opened a back window and the turkey exited the house in a slightly more graceful manner than it had arrived, Coyle said.
Science Man Lowell George told Bedlam News Service that the turkey probably arrived in search of “weed, whites, and wine,” and will no doubt be back.
Finally, a black bear attempted to make off with a truck owned by Truckee, California human Evan Nielsen.
It’s a sight Evan Nielsen had to rewatch again and again to believe, even though he recorded the video—a black bear, making itself comfortable in his truck, after somehow opening the door and hopping in.At one point, it seems like he even wavesto the camera.
“At one point, he had both hands up on the steering wheel, and was honking the horn with his snout,” Nielsen said. “It was pretty amazing for awhile.”It looks like the bear was hoping to drive away, and very quickly. Nielsen knew he had to get this guy out, because in bear versus truck, the vehicle wasn’t holding up too well.“Destroyed the back seat, this is where probably the majority of the damage is,” Nielsen said.
[Nielsen] thinks [the bear invasion] may have something to do with a cup filled with tea left it in his other car. The windows were down, the bear got in, drank the tea and went over to Nielsen’s truck, probably looking for more.
The other night, for no reason known to me, but one no doubt connected to Satan, some cat, or cats, upended a bookshelf, and spilled the poetry books to the floor.
The cats of my acquaintance have never really approved of poetry. For instance, in another decade, in another abode, the poetry 
volumes were subjected to a wanton urine rain.
The culprit has never been caught or confessed, and remains at large.
The bestained tomes, meanwhile: too many just too odd and obscure, and therefore not replaceable. So they remain in the collection. Ruint.
Cats are actually proud of their Luciferian penchant for drizzling urine. See the recent best-selling collection of poems, penned by cats, I Could Pee On This, pictured there to the left.
It is a known Science Fact that cat urine is so pungent that fresh spray let fly in, say, Albuquerque, can be smelled within moments on the Moon.
I am not really sure why, of all earthly substances, cat urine is the King Reeker . . . save for “the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity,” as Big Daddy puts it in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. (See: cat: there are no coincidences).
I believe it may have something to do with the fact that a cat’s natural diet is 100% flesh and bones. This requires stomach enzymes so powerful they can basically break down concrete. In their power, these enzymes are of stench.
Cats also use their urine as a territorial marking mechanism. And apparently it is necessary for a cat marking something in, say, Icepick, Minnesota, to olfactorily announce ownership to cats living as far away as Venus.
Anyway. Among the odd and obscure bestained volumes in the poetry collection
is I Never Saw It Lit, which is pictured there to the right. This book I remember, and retain, because years ago it caught my father’s eye, when he and I were roving the old Berkeley wholesaler Bookpeople for tomes to retail in our modest bookshop up north, on the Russian River. He thought it a worthy effort. But then said, “though probably nobody would like it but me.” I put it in the cart. Because it wasn’t, it developed, to sell. It was for me to keep. To remember him by.
Another of the poetry collections that the other night spilled to the floor was a thing called Leaves of Poetry. This volume contains a poem or two written by me.
And this is where we naturally segue from cat urine, to my writing.
Apparently I wrote these poems when I was 11 or 12 years old. And they were then pressed into a book, together with poems by other wee ones, and distributed to the masses by the county school system.
One of the poems I wrote bears the wildly creative title “Summer,” and goes like this:
Summer is hot, dull, and dry
It’s when under the sun
Your skin starts to fry
And when, on beaches,
Boys like to spy
On girls in bikinis
Who might walk by.
I see that here I was not only already wedded to the Oxford comma, but also afflicted with the need to employ commas at every opportunity, even inventing opportunities that, to a Normal writer, might not exist. I was also then too aroil with these little mini-strokes that cause me to arrange words in odd order. I was grousing about the blasted heath of summer, a constant to this day. And, even at age 11, Eros was elbowing in.
I frankly do not understand how the bit about bikinis was permitted in a collection of poems by junior-high students assembled and then peddled across the land by school officials.
If, today, I were 11 years old, and submitted such a thing, the teachers receiving it would shriek and poke their eyes out. Then hustle me down the halls—patrolled by “school resource officers” bristling with mace and pepper spray and guns and truncheons and whatnot—to be taken into custody by the deans. Who would immediately and permanently expel me. I would then be placed in a cage, and paraded through the streets, pelted by the outraged populace with eggs, tomatoes, and full beer cans, condemned as a dangerous pervert. I would be thrown in a dungeon, and there be subjected to electroshock treatments. Until I had been transformed into a True American. One pledging allegiance to Thanatos. Rather than Eros. Hoorah.
Some people still fail to understand how Captain Underpants could have lost so badly, there in November of 2012, to the Marxist Kenyan black man.
Not me. The man’s ass was screwed on backwards. That’s
enough to Doom anybody.
But for some, though, that is not enough.
For instance, 49% of those ur-humans who identify as Republicans believe that Underpants failed to prevail only because the election was “stolen” for the black man by ACORN, an organization that has not existed for nearly three years.
Now, even these brain-scrambled doubters may have to reassess. Now that David Corn, the same journalist who embarrassed Underpants with the release of the notorious surreptitiously-recorded “47%” video, has gone wide with another video from out of the Underpants campaign.
This video, reproduced below, depicts three top Underpants advisors plotting strategy for the late October and early November cycle of the campaign.
It must be admitted that these seem to be genial enough people. Politics, though, probably not really their line of work.
Previously here on red we referenced the work of my colleague—a Science Man who is a woman—that determined that there are striking differences in the brains of male homo sapiens, as compared to those of females.
Here is some of what we then reported:
Women, their brains contain many folds, storing a dazzling array of information: from how to clean lampshades, to the
ways and means of compacting more matter than exists in the entire universe into one small purse.
Men, however, their brains contain but two folds: one for sports, and one for pornography.
Building on her ground-breaking work, I have now determined that it is probable that in neither of these folds is present what is commonly considered as “thought.” It seems likely that male human beings do not “think,” at all.
I have obtained two proofs: one from the sports fold, and one from the porn fold. These proofs are presented past the “furthur.”
Prior to moving to the Manor, I shelled out money for standard dry cat food, whatever cans of wet cat food happened to be on sale at Grocery Outlet, and some sort of Normal cat litter. There was also a little finch seed-mix for the bird who thinks she’s a human, and algae wafers for the sea serpent. Occasionally various toys for these folks would be purchased. And, naturally, there were the periodic panicked trips to the vet. The realm of eccentricity had undoubtedly been entered, but not 
so extensively that there was any serious question about whether I might not be better off in a Home.
Which is clearly the case today.
For, today, a year or so into the Manor, I am a captive of the demonic feed store that squats like Satan directly across the street.
There, for the cats, I purchase this grain-free Taste of the Wild dry cat food that costs as much as cocaine, a cat litter that consists of precious stones gathered from the beaches of the Aegean Sea, and cans of wet “cat food” composed solely of ingredients like flakes of wild salmon, or ahi tuna sprinkled with shredded crab . . . which is basically the sort of fare people eat after they’ve waited a year or so for a table at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry there in Napa.
There is still the finch mix for the bird, but now there must also be a different-one seed mix for the wild birds . . . which I broke down and started buying after I noticed one such bird desultorily kicking through the squirrel mix, because there just wasn’t enough there that she found suitable. The squirrel mix is of course for the squirrels. The squirrels also require mass quantities of whole peanuts in the shell, which they share with the scrub jays. The latter have buried about 10,000 of these nuts out in the yard: they are winged doomsday preppers.
Then there are the welfare recipients. These require wet cob, which is a sumptuous mix of corn, oats, barley, and molasses. Also, alfalfa. Also, a salt lick. Also, later this year, a Shelter, because I cannot go through another winter of them staring at me with those doe eyes, through the wind and the rain and the sleet, even though it is a Known Science Fact that they do not Suffer in such elements.
Meanwhile, the mixing of the sugar-water for the hummingbirds. And still the algae for the sea serpent.
There are many ancillary costs. Such as the $75 I recently expended to have my boots resoled, because I wore them out walking back and forth to the feed store. Which also offers many toys and related doodads that somehow end up here after nearly every visit to that accursed edifice.
Last Friday I went totally insane and marched across the street to the feed store intending to return with a cat. This adolescent feline, caged, had been pleading with me over the past week or so to induct him into the Manor. Ultimately, I altered my brain chemistry sufficiently to agree to this. However, it developed that some other nutbag had walked out with the fellow a mere two hours before I weaved into the place. My condition remains so severe that I informed the feed-store ladies that if for some reason this cat reappeared, I Must Have Him.
In the normal course of things, I don’t budget. I am missing that gene. I just get some money, and then I spend it. When it starts to run low, I do a little work, to get some more money, and then I spend that. Rinse, repeat.
However, as an experiment, I recently totaled up how much I spent on these people over a month. And discovered that they are consuming about 117.1% of my disposable income.
I need a Grant. Or a Keeper.
News and reviews of recent events in and around the Manor.
—When you are a squirrel, and you use a hind leg to scratch a flea or a mite or something, said leg moves faster than the speed of light.
—There is no rug so long, so large, or so thick, that these cats cannot Somehow 
propel it around the room as if it were weightless.
—I have obtained Scientific Proof that dust bunnies are created by cats. Dust bunnies are (nearly) everywhere in this place. Every morning, I awake to a new and forbiddingly large crop. These must be soon Dealt With, lest I become trapped in here, unable to get out. There is so much material there, in the daily haul of dust bunnies, that I am thinking of discovering a means by which to spin it into clothing. I will then become a dust-bunny-sweater magnate. But there is one room in the Manor where the cats are not permitted to go. I go in there, but not them. In this room, there are no dust bunnies. Never have been. This means I do not make dust bunnies. And neither does anything else. Only cats make them.
—The deer known as Mom has shown up here pregnant again. Apparently this is an annual thing with her. Clearly, there needs to be a Study as to the availability of birth control among deer. She don’t look so good as she did last year. Guess this pregnancy is harder on her than the last. In this, she is like the woman at the lawyer’s office.
—Whenever I lie there wondering, “how come I haven’t seen any skunks lately?,” somewhere outside, usually directly next to the Manor, a skunk perceives a Menace, reacts accordingly, and then all the air belongs to stench, and I must reach for the gas mask. Therefore, I try not to have these thoughts.
—Also in the olfactory arena, whenever I am running short on sleep, really need to get some, and have to be up very early for some law project, just as I enter dreamland, some cat proceeds to the catbox, and there blats forth a load so poisonous and extreme it requires evacuation of the entire neighborhood, and the arrival of the HazMat team.
—There is a very nice washer and dryer combo in this place. However, I have come to Know that these units are from space, and from the future. They are studded with many mysterious controls. And although I have tried to master these, I have come to reluctantly learn that once I press “power” and “start,” my control over these machines ends. They then take over completely. For instance, the 
dryer will display a digital read of the time remaining to do its thing, but will then change its mind numerous times, shifting the digital display accordingly. It will tell me, say, that the clothes will be dry in 35 minutes; I will arrive back in 30 minutes, only to find the thing switching from 5 minutes, to 15 minutes. Right there in front of me. There is no digital time display on the washer, and no way of ascertaining just how long it thinks it needs to run to wash the clothes. I am helpless before it. Also, the washer flooded the Manor on Christmas, and on Easter. Only on those two days. What this means is obvious. Some people see Jesus in a tortilla. Some people see Jesus on their windshield (see photo above). I have Jesus in my washing machine.
—When you are in a city, the police station is a hulking, menacing, brooding, fortified compound. It is like you are in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. You can be arrested, or even shot, simply for looking at it Wrong. When you are here, there are daffodils around the police station. And sometimes you can see the police tending them.
—Serious eccentricity is permitted here. And only a block from the police station. For there is the lair of Rat-Dog Man. The ground level of a perfectly nice house is eschewed by Rat-Dog Man, who chooses instead to dwell in the basement. And down there in the dark, he cohabits with a coven of rat dogs. I discovered this upon one nerve-wracking afternoon, when I was wandering areas outlying the Manor, because the young-un cat had gone astray. I saw this open basement window, and, thinking maybe the young’un cat had jumped in there, I leaned down and called his name into the darkened basement. Only to be immediately assaulted by the hideous yaps of multiple rat dogs. This, I believe, was a good test of the valves to my waste-disposal system: as I did not void any substances, I think they remain in good shape. In any event, Rat-Dog Man regularly permits his herd out of the bowels of the basement and into the yard adjoining the unused house, so that they might offer up their wastes. Occasionally—usually in the rain—Rat-Dog Man will bark at them nastily to hurry up. The rat dogs have been known to object to this, generally by bolting out into the alley. We call this The Great Escape. Rat-Dog Man then climbs into his car and proceeds to slowly roll down the alley and neighboring streets, bellowing at top volume for them to return. It is for reasons like this that we do not need television here.
—The police also turn a blind eye to the wanton Crime Lords of the feed store across the street. Because the state legislature here is infested with howling imbeciles, there are many Laws forbidding—under penalty of fines and imprisonment—the feeding of various wild animals. The Crime Lords know that we free human beings alive on this earth don’t care about these Laws, and so they offer up innumerable vast bins clearly and contemptuously marked with such legends as “squirrel mix” and “deer treats.” This, legally speaking, 
is equivalent to a pharmacist setting up prescription-less shelves cheerily offering such goodies as “Friday night coke” and “mushrooms for the masses.”
—There is still the hideous belching from the lube shop. Not today, though. For today is Sunday. And the lube shop is closed. It is the day of rest.
—Hunter Thompson once said: “when a man gives up drugs, he wants big fires in his life.” I don’t know about that, and anyway it’s April, and so here the season for big fires has passed. However, I have discovered that, here in my dotage, I require decorative switchplates in my life. I did not know that such things even existed, until a few weeks ago. And maybe they didn’t. ; 0 Now, though, I need them everywhere. They have become a Requirement. When you go into the tubes, you will find that there are creative men and women, all over the land, bringing art to switchplates. And they will send this art to you, if only you give them just a little Money. So this I am doing. Pictured here is the dragonfly switchplate I obtained and affixed by the front door of the Manor. It is beyond godly.
—I have been here a year now, and still the ants continue their ceaseless march to and from the attic. There have been days when they’ve been sluggish, and days when they’ve moved but in ones and twos, but never has the march ceased entirely. They are like a perpetual motion machine. I still have no idea what they’re doing up there. But because there has never once been a single ant actually inside the Manor, I stick still to the agreement, set forth in the link above, that they be permitted to go their own way, without any snooping from mine.
As a certified Science Man, I am embarked on a Study of the welfare recipients—also known as deer—who frequent the Manor.
Soon I will publish a Paper. Its working title is “Some Things About Deer That They Did Not 
Show You In Bambi.“
With this Paper, I should receive many Grants. Also, a Chair.
Preliminary findings include:
—When you are a deer, and you sneeze, you must then quickly run your tongue in and out of your nostrils, many times.
—When they poop, deer just lift their tails and let the pellets plop out. They do this wherever they happen to be, whatever they happen to be about. They do not have toilets.
—When they pee, they kind of splay their back feet, and then hunch forward. This is not a flattering look.
—Sometimes they will poop while they eat.
—They do not pee while they eat.
—They are more graceful running, than walking. They’re actually sort of ungainly, when they walk. But not when they run. This makes sense, as running is probably most important to them, considering who they are, and who they have to get away from.
—They have Picasso heads. It is a little-known Fact that Pablo Picasso managed to pull himself out of women long enough to spend some time closely observing deer, just before he went cubist.
—When you are a woman deer, you go out and get pregnant in the fall. Then you can go 25% body fat for the winter, insulating you from the elements.
—Deer have a special winter coat where the hairs are hollow. This means that their body heat stays in their body, rather than escaping. This is why you will see deer wandering around with snow on their backs and heads, and the snow doesn’t melt. Because there is no heat on the fur. It is all in 
the deer body.
—They slow their metabolism in the winter. They, like, play at 16 rpm, rather than 33 rpm. Thus, they actually eat less in the winter, than at other times. They are sort of walking hibernators.
—Their feet, which look like women’s black high-heeled shoes, are these hoove things that have no feeling at all, really. So they can stand in snow all winter and Not Care.
—The strange insulating fur means they can also lay in the snow, and Not Care.
—When it rains, they shake off water like a dog. However, unlike a dog, when you are a deer, you are not compelled to hump everything that does or does not move, greedily eat poop, roll in dead things, or loudly lick and suck your own genitals for hours on end.
The latest photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope are in, and it seems the device has at last succeeded in penetrating the veil of Heaven.
Among other images—which shall be offered 
here, from time to time, exclusively to red readers—the Hubble returned shots of the Big Guy himself, the fellow variously known as Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, etc.
Many humans have long wondered just what the guy might look like.
Now they know. Feast, here, thine eyes.
I have to say that I myself am not much surprised.
It appears from this image that part of him might need to be Repaired. I am assuming this is a temporary Easter-season thing.
Kentucky is not without its charms.
For instance, the grass there really is blue. Also, county sheriffs in the state generally do not remain in office long enough to inflict real damage, as they are soon found to be heavily invested in the local methamphetamine trade, and so 
are hustled off to reside in their own pokeys.
However, there is a disturbing penchant among the congenitally yeehawed of Kentucky’s residents to slay raccoons and then slap their corpses over roadside fences. Traveling on the back roads of Kentucky is like boarding some bent Disney ride through an open-air abattoir.
This is why I believe that it is right and meet that a raccoon be selected by the state’s Democratic Party to challenge and defeat Turtle Scrotum in the 2014 Congressional elections. The masked nocturnal omnivores require, and deserve, Vengeance.
Turtle Scrotum is the US Senate Minority Leader and the titular head of the Confederate States of America.
He is also the horrific result of a failed Dr. Moreau-like experiment that sought to cross a human with both a turtle and a diseased and swollen scrotum.
The elevation of Barack Obama to the presidency rendered Turtle Scrotum totally insane. For Turtle Scrotum is a relict, an atavist, a being who 
truly believes that the only good black man is one dangling, strange fruit, from a tree.
The people of Kentucky know this, and it is why increasing numbers of them are uncomfortable with the notion of Turtle Scrotum continuing to represent them in the United States Congress. For Kentuckians also recently sent to the Senate Rand Paul, son of Ron “Rugs” Paul, another well-known advocate of black people as roadkill. And the general feeling seems to be that one such person from the state in the Senate, is enough. Turtle Scrotum’s time, then, is up.
This is why winter polls showed Turtle Scrotum leading by but four points one Ashley Judd, who seems to be some sort of singer and actor, but who has never been involved in politics, not even in the movies, and who does not even live in the state.
But Judd is gone now—has decided she don’t wanna—and so the Democrats must alight on an alternative candidate.
I say a raccoon.
Those who would object to running an animal for office overlook two things.
First, nowhere in the Constitution of either the United States or the state of Kentucky may be found any provision that requires an officeholder to qualify as an actual human being.
Second, Turtle Scrotum himself is at least partially of non-human origin, what with the turtle and diseased swollen 
scrotum elements of his genetic makeup.
Turtle Scrotum will not be able to devote the time and effort that he should to his re-election campaign, consumed as he is with hatred of the black man. For Turtle Scrotum is the sadsack who, from the moment the black man entered the White House, devoted every fiber of his being to frustrating the president’s every effort, no matter how benign. Who, upon Obama’s re-election, immediately informed the money-mites of the Wall Street Journal that over the next four years he would again dedicate the entirety of his being to Hating The Black Man. And who, according to an illuminating recent piece in the National Journal, has been, and is, monomaniacally focused on utterly extinguishing the Affordable Care Act. Because Turtle Scrotum, like any good Republican, is dedicated to the proposition that everyone who is not him should suffer and die. Especially if they are black.
When he does turn his attention to his campaign, Turtle Scrotum will be confronted with the fact that his opponent is a raccoon. This will derange his mind. All he will be able to think is: “coon.” This will remind him of the black man in the White House. White foam will appear at the corners of his mouth. It will not be pretty.
He will also be unnerved by the campaign song of his opponent, which I and the raccoons here at the Manor are currently refining. It will be based on the ominous strains of the Doors’ “Riders On The Storm,” and will include such revised and revisited lyrics as:
there’s a killer on the road
his scrotum’s squirming like a toad
A Super PAC that the Manor skunks have formed will flood the Kentucky airwaves with ads that will ask state voters if they really want representing them in Washington a man who brazenly wanders around with a face that consists of a body part that all decent and chaste Kentuckians modestly keep squirreled away beneath layers of clothing.
Turtle Scrotum, he is Over.
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings?
Not one of them is forgotten before god.
—Luke 12:6-7
And so, a brainshower has rained down, upon some Science Men.
And in it, these Science Men have determined that animals may be rapidly Evolving.
To which, those of us who daily, gaily, observe Earth beings of 
the non-human variety, say: duh.
The world of cliff swallows, it was utterly changed.
When humans—so sad—insisted they must race about at mad speeds, on asphalt strips, in hurtling tons of metal.
Hurtling tons of metal, raced about at mad speeds, on asphalt strips—so sad—that kill swooping cliff swallows.
But, and but 30 years on, cliff swallows have Determined to Evolve. To become Completely Ready. For the Wrongness.
Fewer cliff swallows are being killed by moving vehicles because of evolution, suggests a study published online today in the journal Current Biology.
“These birds have been exposed to vehicles and roads for 30-plus years,” says Charles Brown, the study’s lead author. “During that time, they have evolved to avoid being killed by traffic. Evolution can happen very rapidly, and some animals can adapt to urban environments very rapidly.”
The decrease in road deaths is likely because these birds have shorter wingspans, making them more agile fliers, or they are learning to avoid vehicles, Brown says.
When still I occupied the back-of-beyond of Cherokee, one spring season some fresh and new and too-young-to-really-know cliff swallows tried, for a brief time, to mud-up a couple little nest-homes, there under the second-story eaves.
Until they understood that, there, it would be just too dry, too not-right, too incomplete, too failed, there, for them.
When, after several days, they understood this, they sailed away.
Leaving behind, once again, this, in me: ∞.
The way they fluttered and fussed and flew.
So alive . . . .
These in-the-news cliff-swallow Science Men, they have no idea how harrowing this 
field of study—rapidly advancing evolution in non-human Earth-dwellers—can really be.
For they are not me.
Me. Who must—day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute—witness the scarifying evolution of that once and future human extraterrestrial being: the young’un cat.
The complete annals of the young’un cat, they may be found here.
Of particular interest, to this piece, are those earlier entries in which it was observed that the young’un cat was evolving.
But all of that, that earlier evolving, is now as nothing. Because we are now talking about evolution unto Childhood’s End.
For a step-by-step photo essay of this Astonishing Evolutionary Story—for to See—travel across the “furthur.”
(Okay. Time to put things in perspective, with a reprint of George Orwell’s “Some Thoughts On The Common Toad.” 
This piece appeared first in Tribune on April 12, 1946, a time when things seemed just as fraught as they do now.)
Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something—some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature—has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time—at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the summer.
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-colored semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.
My brother, in the last years of his life, pretty much lived for cats.
He expressed this explicitly.
When, feeling low, he presented himself verbally to me, as a 
being who ”should have been a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
But instead he was Here. And, so far as he could figure, but for cats.
When he died, there were 19 of the beasts, that he’d brought in, to his karass and his care, and who were dependent upon him.
When I gazed upon the face of his refrigerator, cleaning up after the mess of his death, I saw this, in note handscrawled: “Am I here just for cats?”
Well. Sure, you were, Steve. And a bodhisattva, in all those years, for that.
I’m not, I don’t think, circling quite the drain, these days, as my brother, in those years, did do.
But I nonetheless need to write about him.
Because my brother, he’s dead.
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