{"id":135,"date":"2010-02-20T16:12:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-21T00:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theeditorsdisclaimer.com\/blog\/?p=135"},"modified":"2026-09-25T13:43:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T21:43:39","slug":"catatonia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theeditorsdisclaimer.com\/blog\/archives\/135","title":{"rendered":"Catatonia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I spend most of my days with cats. Five of them. Lumpy has cancer and lays on the couch all day. Tigee is a feral cat living in the backyard, and semi-feral Pez has FIV and sniffles a bit. \u00a0Ozzie is hyperactive and is my least favorite. Lily is just a cat.<\/p>\n

It seems like this life should bother me more than it does, and maybe it will later. I’ve only lived here a short while. I’m not used to cats. But even if I had lived with cats before, I wouldn’t be prepared to be with them most of my day. I don’t have a job.<\/p>\n

The animals belong to my girlfriend and are very dear to her. She has had dogs, but prefers cats.<\/p>\n

I am not a cat person. But cats, like most non-human animals, seem to take a special liking to me. And I tend to like living things that like me. I’m a friend. But not a relative. I occasionally direct language at the cats, but am mostly insincere. I think most people who talk to their animal overvalue the quality of the discourse.<\/p>\n

I feed them. Eight or nine cans a day. Every day. And dry food on the side. I let them in and out of the house. Half a dozen times a day. And attend to various ancillary needs, including vet visits.<\/p>\n

They are with me when I read and eat. Sometimes when I bathe and piss.<\/p>\n

Never when I sleep or am intimate. I am thankful for that.<\/p>\n\n\n

Like my fear of becoming that guy blogging in his underwear to an audience of one, rather than just being a blogger, I fear being that cat guy; not just a guy with cats.

I also fear being that guy with a website dedicated solely to years of troubling email exchanges with his ex-wife. Or that guy with a fantasy baseball website, but no baseball league participants. Or that guy who reads a lot but has no one to share his thoughts with.

If I become that last one, it’s gonna be a lot harder to bear being the others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m not publishing this item. It’s private. For my eyes only. But I know I can’t write it as if no one else will read it. I am not that trusting of the world. (Ed. note: I published it 16 years later.)

So, I’m writing in the detached, over-explanatory style of my blog. Only this will be a personal scribbling I can’t write in public. There will be more like it, minus the personal scribblings I can’t even write in private.

I do this with the knowledge that it’s not at all healthy to be out of work, home alone and deep in conversation with oneself. I have resisted until recently the urge to start a blog. But I wanted to put WordPress on my resume and have clips to show prospective employers.

Although I add to those flimsy justifications a belief that the unimaginable could occur and an audience might stumble upon my blog, I truly expect to write the blog fully clothed and that no one will read it.

It would be quite another thing, however, to find myself holed up in a suburban cocoon, babbling incessantly in print just for the sake of babbling. That is an activity best accomplished after work rather than instead of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have been here before. I kept a journal as an adolescent, sort of. Pages were churned out on my new typewriter, filled with pithy, perhaps profound, insights and clever poetry, illustrated with idiosyncratic stick-man line-art. Bound by metal clasps between cardboard covers. I made up words — effesdity was my favorite — and fretted that “common sense: to a man without it, it does not seem common.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there was this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

he talks to talk, not to be heard,
his guttural utterings, meant to be words,
come out as syllables, never to learn,
is he who talks constantly, not to be heard.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That’s all I remember of the journal. I threw it away after showing it to my mother, who then showed it to a mahjong gathering one afternoon while I was at school. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My current endeavor is fraught with peril. It gives me great pause. Yet, I feel I have let a lifetime of mental scribblings slip through that sieve of oblivion I call my mind, and am curious to see if this shit is worth preserving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But only a little curious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Editor’s note: This essay is a combination of intro and first entry from my 2010 journal that never got past a second entry, and later ramblings. Other cats in later years: Butterfly, Zane and one who turned out to belong to a neighbor (outdoor cats) and Polly.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spend most of my days with cats. Five of them. Lumpy has cancer and lays on the couch all day. Tigee is a feral cat living in the backyard, and semi-feral Pez has FIV and sniffles a bit. \u00a0Ozzie … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theeditorsdisclaimer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theeditorsdisclaimer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theeditorsdisclaimer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theeditorsdisclaimer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theeditorsdisclaimer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theeditorsdisclaimer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theeditorsdisclaimer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theeditorsdisclaimer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theeditorsdisclaimer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}