Alternate Entries

Saturday, August 23, 2003

I'd like to propose a toast: to Katie, who stole Cheerios and peanut butter, led Bear into temptation, and made common cause with Josh. And loved, and was loved by, pretty much everybody, but especially Ramsey and Marnie. Rest in peace.

posted by jeev | 5:13 PM |

When I was looking for pictures of Esmeralda, I realized, much to my chagrin, that I didn't really have a lot. So that afternoon I sat down and wrote a list of all the things I wished I had pictures of: Esmeralda following me into the bathroom for a big pet before I took a shower; Esmeralda sitting by the moving water kittie fountain that my mother had given me for Christmas and that scared all the other cats to death, quietly looking at me so that I would turn it on and let her lick the water as it fell; Esmeralda stretched out on my stretched out legs as I drank coffee and read the paper in the morning; and, most of all, normally dignified Esmeralda and laundry - she was mesmerized by clothes freshly out of the dryer, purring furiously as she dug her way into a pile of them, flipping and twisting among the T-shirts and socks and sheets as if she were four months old again, ecstatically happy.

I'm writing all these things down here because one of the most important parts of mourning is getting through the anguish of the final moments, which is always terrible, and, in many ways, simply unbearable except that we have no choice but to bear it, and recovering the truth that lies beneath and behind it - the ordinary days and how lovely they were, despite the cruft that's always floating around - and knowing that no matter what happens, it's that that was the life. And the thing that matters.

posted by jeev | 2:50 PM |

Friday, August 22, 2003

Now that Fox News' ridiculous attempt to stop publication of Al Franken's new book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them has been - for the moment - squashed by U.S. District Judge Denny Chin (sample quote: " "There are hard cases and there are easy cases. This is an easy case. This case is wholly without merit both factually and legally."), it's probably time to go back and see what the real case was about, the thin skin of Fox's star nimrod, Bill O'Reilly. Franken humiliated O'Reilly in front of a group of booksellers to whom he was hawking his latest oeurve by pointing out some very obvious and perfectly verifiable - but to O'Reilly, inconvenient - facts. Franken was funny, too. This put O'Reilly in quite a snit. You can see for yourself: there's a Real video of it at the BookTV website, under "Book and Author Luncheon". The real fireworks start about 20 minutes in, after Molly Ivins and O'Reilly himself have their say. It's definitely worth a look.

posted by jeev | 7:43 PM |

Thursday, August 21, 2003

The Fab 5 let loose.
(Thanks, Tim.)

posted by jeev | 6:24 PM |

Ann Burlingham and Jason Parker announce the arrival of their son, Erno Piffle Parker-Burlingham, born at 5:04am, August 19, 2003, weighing 9 pounds, 5 ounces (OW!), 21 inches in length. Well, actually, they named him Henry Grosvenor, which, although not as jennesayqua as my choice, is nice too. Add your comments to his Dad's Wiki.

posted by jeev | 5:54 PM |

A definite upside to modern technology: text-messaging teens bomb the bombs at the local bijou.

posted by jeev | 12:13 PM |

Possibly the only salient part of The Maltest Falcon that didn't make it into Huston's wonderful screen adaptation is the story Spade tells of the case of the missing businessman, Flitcraft. One day Flitcraft goes out to work, as normal, leaving his wife at home, as normal. But that evening, not as normal, he doesn't come home. He simply disappears, Spade says, "like a fist when you open your hand". Five years later, his wife comes to Spade: a man who looks a great deal like her husband has been reported living in a nearby town. She hires Spade to find out what's going on. So Spade goes there, and it is indeed the guy, and he has recreated for himself a life almost identical to the one he had had before. When Spade asks him about his disappearance, he explains that on that day he was out walking by a construction site when a beam dropped barely inches in front of him, smashing the sidewalk and sending up a tiny chunk of concrete that grazes his face and leaves him with a scar. At that moment, he tells Spade, he "felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works." And what were the works? "He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them." At that moment Flitcraft decided that he needed to put his life in sync with the real nature of life, and so he lit out and drifted, haphazard, for two years.

But after two years and no more beams falling, his old, ordered, life called to him. He ended up in that neighboring town, married to a similar woman, and running another successful business. Human beings, Hammett seems to be saying, are incapable of bearing the terrible truth about the perilous, fragile nature of life in this world. After a time we drift back into living in the world as if it were a coherent, stable, orderly place, an illusion we need in a visceral way because we cannot live with the unmediated knowledge that life, in fact, is not like that at all.

All of this, I suppose, is just a way to acknowledge that after the at the time utterly singular loss of my beloved Esmeralda (and anyone who cringes and says "it was only a cat, for godsakes" is a fucking idiot) my life is getting back to normal. The awful - and I mean that in every possible way - mystery of holding a living being as it dies, and then, somehow, is no more, becomes part of a story: a picture on the mantle, ashes in a small wooden box, two new kittens, one of whom has a mark on her back leg very like the other's; and the continuity of life reasserts itself, illusion that it is. There is no way out of this connundrum, no solution. There is only doing what you do, and being grateful, and going on.

posted by jeev | 11:41 AM |

Sunday, August 17, 2003

From Redfive, a link to this Washington Post report (scroll down to second item) on a "friendly" recent softball game between fellow AOLTW divisions AOL and CNN. Of particular note:

As White House correspondent John King was rounding second base on the homer by CNN's Howie Lutt, King shouted, "You've got mail!" He denies adding a choice expletive, but the AOL shortstop took vigorous exception and cursed him out. Meanwhile, says King, AOL's center fielder bumped Lutt, leading to a bench-clearing melee in which another AOLian put his hand on King's chest.

Ah, teamwork.

posted by jeev | 8:18 PM |