So you think you owe some karma
and you know just where it’s at
well tomorrow I must have a
root canal and kill the cat

It’s time.

The root canal is true, too: a root canal, a post, and a crown, to be exact. I go to the dentist, have all that done, and then while I’m still chewing my lips from the anesthetic, we take Hobbes the Wonder Cat on his last ride. You have to wonder what kind of a life I’ve been leading to have all this on the same day, but I’m not the subject of this tale, he is… poor old Hobbes.

He’s at the end of the line. Left to his own devices, I figure he might be around a little longer, but not much. He has to be starving. He runs to his dish to eat, downs what he can, and throws up 10 minutes later. He’s lost half his body weight and stinks like hell. He has bloody sores at the corners of his mouth. He won’t use his box or go outside, but shits in the bathtub now — because he’s crazy or hates the snow? The lymph glands in his throat have grown huge, probably from cancer, obstructing his esophagus. Right about now someone is asking, “Jesus, why didn’t you put him down sooner?” The answer is, I just don’t know. Until today, I probably couldn’t face it. I had the notion that he wasn’t suffering, just falling apart, as if that happens without pain in any feeling creature.

Hobbes in San Cristobal, 8/14/2000

Today I saw things in a different light.

Besides pretending he’s able to eat, he’ll jump up and go after the other cat, and that’s about it for any movement. He did that this morning, yet this evening, I don’t think he’d be able to. He’s fading by the hour, almost, the little bag o’ bones. I think he’s ready to go. It all hit me hard this afternoon, but after we decided, he seems much more relaxed. It’s quite astounding, really, as if he knows. I get the impression he’s been holding on so we would get the point.

He’s been a constant in our lives for almost 15 years, half as long as I’ve been with my wife, and I’ve never known a more hilarious, loving animal. Sure, “just a cat,” but there’s been this intricate, ongoing relationship for an awfully long time. Real personalities are involved: it’s like someone in the family has to die, and we get to pull the plug. This all needs proper wrapping up, a ceremony of some kind. As sensitivity is high right now (“we’re not just bringing his dead body back home with us!”), the issues dovetail, and we’ll actually have him cremated.

No one who knows me from the past would ever believe it — understatement of the year — but it’s either that or the landfill, or else the pitiful charade of my chopping at the frozen ground under two feet of snow to bury his good-for-nothing bones. This way, we’ll have some cat cinders to scatter in the acequia in the spring. My wife first found him as a tiny abandoned kitten in a ditch, so small that I couldn’t see what she was holding in her cupped hands, so this means ditch to ditch, a closing circle. (The regional colloquialism for the traditional irrigation channels is “ditch.”) The time of year will even be the same.

But here’s where it gets even crazier:

A mobile pet cremation truck from Albuquerque shows up at the vet’s at 8:00 a.m. every Thurday. Hobbes checks out around 4:00 p.m., so he’ll miss the cull. No problem, though. They keep a freezer full of dead pets until the truck comes by again next week. Naturally I can’t see them incinerating just one animal at a time, right? If it were me driving that truck, I’d stuff the furnace full of frozen carcasses, crank it up, and walk across the road to score a latte. When it comes time to package the cremains, I can see someone saying, “15-year-old cat, eh? All right, one-and-a-half cups…” and there you go. I’m under no illusions here, but I won’t mention that again: whatever they give us next week is symbol enough, and I shall call it his own bones.

Onward, you poor sweet hurting fucked-up little bastard, loose the bonds of earth!

(Just touch him, and he still purrs like a monster…)

What is a human being? A human being is a nexus of relationships: the sum total of the connections among his or her cells, organs, and inner ecosystem; connections to other human beings that define the psyche; connections to the rest of nature and this living planet that allow life to exist. Modern thought, recognizing only a small subset of these as intrinsic to our beingness, offers us a much smaller self: the separate self of the selfish gene and the economic man, the skin-encapsulated ego and the Cartesian mote of consciousness. Rendered small, we are rendered sick.

We are relationship. The connected self that is the true human being has been reduced at the hands of civilization, leaving an isolated remnant that is not whole. Innumerable configurations of this unwholeness, or lack of health, afflict the members of our culture, each in a unique way. Depending on the vagaries of nurture and genetics, we each adapt differently to the onslaught of Separation. As Part 1 of this essay describes, some of us embody our culture’s self-other confusion on a literal, somatic level as an autoimmune disease, in which the immune system attacks part of the very organism it is meant to defend and on which it depends, much as we do to planet Earth.

The loss of self that lies at the heart of our civilization manifests in many less literal ways as well, physical and social. Consider cancer: cells that have forgotten their proper function, and instead devote all their resources toward an endless growth that eventually kills the host, and themselves as well. Modern humanity appears to be behaving exactly so in relationship to the earth. It is by no coincidence that the toxic byproducts of our collective iniquity are precisely what cause cancer in the individual.

By Charles Eisenstein, and there’s a lot more. Just go here.

UPDATE: I’m still reading it myself and found a remarkable quotation:

The Golden Rule was not originally a rule at all, but a description.

If the truth of this were more widely felt, a social revolution would ensue.

Can’t use that driveway for months

Besides digging out the car, I also made a system of paths to the bird feeders, the mailbox, the trash can, and up the hill to where we have to park the car until mid-spring. But I came up with a new principle that helped me get the job finished: since what I dislike most about the snow is all the carrying-on necessary to get out and about in the stuff, the paths had to be clean and long enough for me to do all my outdoor tasks in my L.L. Bean moosehide slippers…

Busting my ass now for maximum lazy later, that’s me.

You see, I know, now. When you live on a dirt road in northern New Mexico, the snow is a blessing at first: all the bumps get smoothed out, and everything looks clean and nice. The county might plow, but probably won’t, so in a day or two the snow is packed down hard and slippery as hell. But still smooth! And then… and then… sooner or later, maybe 10 days or six weeks from then, it MELTS, and what happens over the next two weeks determines the contours of the road for the rest of the year. Whatever massive ruts are left from all the sorry goddamn slogging through the mud will be there through the summer, rounded off, shiny, and hard as concrete. They’ll be there in the fall, although just a bit more rounded, and the first snow that falls will take the shape and carry it into the following spring, when it all turns to mud again. (Unless the county grades, but they probably won’t.)

As I write this, it’s been snowing for about 22 hours. The depth isn’t really important — eight, 10, 12 official inches, who cares? There’s plenty: enough to completely cover the woodpile, and at least a few drifts up almost to my knee. Chopping firewood in these conditions is really a joke: the snow is powder, mind you, not thick and heavy, but lying on a foundation of earlier snow that’s turned to ice. When I manage to get a footing and let the splitting maul drop, the wood splits like it should but flies off and disappears! Let’s all go play “find the wood” — if I can locate the splitting maul in the first place, that is. A few hours ago, I had to fish for it with a rake.

Winter! The real deal…(also today’s FotoFeed)

Driving home from the concert earlier this evening was a trip, too. I’m sure it’s been worse here, but I’ve never seen it this difficult, myself. For one thing — and yes, I know it’s been snowing all day — it looked like nothing had been plowed anywhere. The streets were heaped with snow and ridiculously slippery. Every 100 yards or so, there was somebody else stuck on the side of the road or in a parking lot (it was kind of hard to tell).

I haven’t done that kind of driving for quite a while, where the drive wheels are almost constantly spinning, but you’re still moving and hope to God you don’t have to stop — or if you do, that whoever’s behind you can manage it, too. Somehow we got through town, and I’ll tell you how bad it was: the few Taoseños on the road were actually going slow!

By the time we got near our own road, we ended up taking the long way around the neighborhood because of a steep little hill we knew better than to try. This road was paved, deserted, and unplowed too, of course. (The county might– oh, never mind.) This leg was actually kind of fun, because only one or two vehicles had been out in the snow, so what we had were just a couple of ruts meandering through the drifts, and no one else around to get hurt if I got crossways. Everything went well, though. I was delighted at how well the Vibe blew through the piles of powder and just kept on going, front wheels slipping all the way. That is one excellent little car, ladies and gentlemen — buy one now, before GM dies.

It’s very, very quiet here now, at half an hour after midnight.

It’s also still snowing…

UPDATE: Success! This blog post qualifies for paid publishing as my latest column for Horse Fly, which hits those paper boxes in Taos about a week from now. And just for that, here’s the pesky insect again:

Certified Fly-Worthy

Right now I’m hanging out at the very ritzy El Monte Sagrado hotel — there’s a huge Diego Rivera painting hanging on the wall near me — waiting for a chamber music concert to get underway in another hour. (At least they have a good wireless network!) My wife will be playing for most of the concert, and she’s inside the hall now practicing on the mighty Bösendorfer grand, a giant black piano the size of an aircraft carrier.

Meanwhile, it’s snowing like the dickens outside, as it has been all day. Getting home afterwards will be interesting, to say the least. And for you car nuts, I can tell you that our Pontiac Vibe is actually pretty decent in the snow. It has front-wheel drive and nice wide tires, and so far the little car has done just fine in the slippery stuff. Oh, it slides, all right, but so do 4WDs.

Spring can’t come soon enough, however.

There’s a stack of tiny little shelves that get filled with dust, mirrors, jars & tubes that need a mercy wipe, the [avert your eyes] bathtub, toilet, all that stuff. And then there’s The Sink: the encrusted mineral deposits around the faucet require a power chisel and so are mostly there, but this time I finally cleaned the knobs!

They’d always had a dull look from soap film and such that had somehow grunged them on the inside, which I never understood until today: peeering closely at the top, I saw there was a tiny hole where one could insert a small screwdriver or other tool to pry off the cap. That’s where the crud was, underneath the cap, which I never knew they had. It makes perfect sense, of course, because this lets the manufacturer make just one knob, but with interchangeable caps to indicate hot or cold. And the caps came off perfectly.

I marvelled at the knobs: beautiful examples of industrial plastic, perfectly formed, hard and clear. In a few minutes, I had them both gleaming. Wow, just like back in the ’50s, I thought with a smirk. (Actually, ’60s is more like it.) But just look at those knobs! Why, you know what? Those are too old to be cheap Chinese junk, those are AMERICAN KNOBS!!! American knobs! They MUST be, because they WORK! You can take them apart and clean them and they last forever.

John Phillip Sousa! Fireworks!! American knobs!!!

El Knob!

“WHERE ARE OUR KNOBS?!?”

Seriously, though. I know that if I go down to True Value and walk down the Plumbing Accessories aisle, there won’t be a single fitting, faucet, washer, or any damned thing that isn’t made in China instead of in Ohio or Michigan like it used to be. A little while back I bought a rubber sink stopper for this sink. It was just a little hard white rubber thingie with a little wire loop attached to a keychain — you know, the little silver chain with a little metal connector that you pop the links into to connect the ends. Well, the chain didn’t work. I could pull it apart with my fingers, because the connector or clamp or whatever we call it was made of soft tin and wouldn’t hold. I could pry it open or shut with my thumbnail, what a joke! Oh, and the stopper didn’t fit. Aarghh.

The damper in the woodstove is made in China now, not Pennsylvania or wherever they used to come from. I’ve replaced three of them, because they just don’t work: again the failure of a simple mechanical locking device, in this case, casting of the damper so it locks firmly onto the pointed metal rod and handle. It’s as if whoever designed the casting had never installed a damper inside a stovepipe, or he might have seen how badly this was made. So far as I can tell, however, these stupid Chinese dampers are in every hardware store in town. You have to have a damper in your stovepipe, and these don’t function. This is crazy-making. Not only did we sell our souls to globalization, now everything breaks!

“AMERICAN KNOBS!!!” he shouted into the deepening gloom.

The few passers-by eyed him cautiously and scuttled home to their smoky hovels, where everything ran down the drains.

The reason is simple, if pedantic, when viewed against the current culture’s massed traditions: January 1 will never be the beginning of the “new year” for me, because that started on Dec. 21., when the days began to lengthen again. Our calendar is arbitrary and inaccurate, when it comes to marking actual beginnings and endings. That’s why the time between the winter solstice and “New Year’s” has always seemed like dead air to me. I know, Christmas is in there somewhere, but that’s more or less arbitrary, too, once separated from the cosmic rhythm.

My body knows the cycle started 10 days ago. My eyes see the brighter twilight at 5:00 p.m. that brings me relief and hope. Today, on January 1 (or whenever this is), I already feel the momentum of the orbiting earth bringing this patch of tilted planet closer to the sun.

We don’t need a culture based on human foibles and projections. Everything we really are is written in the stars.

Uh… won’t that scare your customers?

Also in the Believe It or Not Dept., the above is the latest picture I have of him. If you can look like that, drive a pedicab, make a living in Austin, and generally be one helluva solid fellow, the gods are on your side. I know they’re on his, just thinking of his wife and kids. He’s also the webmaster for the Austin Cycling Association, so check out the site.

Happy B’day, dude.