Journal Entry re Dignified Withdrawal
jrnl.21Feb06.txt @ 07:33
My beloved cat Silky is alive and back home. Last seen Monday night before she left the house for her evening rounds, she was apparently picked up by someone as a stray and taken in to the Humane Society on Tuesday, where they failed to find her microchip on the first scan. A second pre-destroyal scan found the chip, so I got the call just after noon yesterday and immediately canceled my planned trip to Powells to swing back and pick her up. It took the better part of 90 minutes to identify her and get her back, and I have never seen her looking worse: she was matted, with caked shit and litter on her, appreciably thinner and so weak that when she opened her mouth to call there was no sound. I got her home immediately and tried to get some food in her, but she wasn’t immediately interested in anything. When I left the house to swing by the pet store and buy a reptile warming pad, she managed to get downstairs and had apparently been trying to get up to her basement window, but was too weak to make the jump. I thus spent the better part of the afternoon with her until Anja got home, cleaning her up, petting her and crying. In some ways it was good to have her back, but in other ways it makes it harder, because now she gets to be at home and we get to lose her all over again.
We’ll see.
I still have a lot more of thinking to do around the entire CLC mental illness thing. Certainly my entire being rebels at not having “a narrative structure” as EME puts it, and her being mentally ill is a hackneyed but sufficient structure. I text-messaged SMN about this yesterday, and he certainly believes that “standard, Western definitions, yes” she is mentally ill. “By western definition yes. In other contexts she could be seen as a wild, untrained shaman. Having no cultural context, I’d say the former. Why?” When I had a chance to discuss this with him later in the day, I expressed astonishment that this reading had never occurred to me before and he thought it wasn’t surprising. As I explained, to assert that someone else is mentally ill because they don’t behave as one would like would have been incredibly egocentric and self-serving on my part. He explained that to me that might be the case, but that he also thought that my own “sense of integrity” would have forbidden the mental illness reading because “that’s one of the worst things you can conceive of” and would be a major disappointment. Interesting or (as Alice’s author might note) “curiouser and curiouser.”
1310 @ EcoTrust Bldg
Swung by KDB’s “office” building this afternoon and found it to be pretty much an empty shell: your basic hipster abandoned building with a variety of offices on the upper floors but no normal entrance. This would seem to put the kabash on any plans to swing by and visit.
Howdy, Kevin.
You don’t know me, but I imagine you have heard quite a bit about me (and probably imagined more!). If you are willing I’d like to meet with you, at a time and place of your choosing.
Given that I seem to have been installed as a psychic fixture in your life (and vice versa) some authentic face-to-face connection seems healthiest, to humanize everyone involved and curtail any mixed messages my presence on Tribe may have generated.
My own schedule is pretty flexible, so whatever time and place are most convenient for you will probably work for me, as I can usually schedule whatever I want, with enough notice. I see that the CP office is downtown, so perhaps World Cup Coffee at Powell’s or the EcoTrust building would be convenient.
Thanks in advance for the consideration. I look forward to your reply.
- Rory
