Once I wrote my blog entry about having my cat put down, I had a tough time. Grieving and all. Then I realized I wanted to get out and get doing things. I phoned J and we went into the city. John Gray's Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus suggests that men, when they can't control or fix everything, feel ashamed, weak, out of control, and so they find comfort in small things that they CAN fix or control. The following should have ample signs of this working for me.
My mission was to clean up my place. I went to Ikea and got more glass jars to keep flour and corn meal and pasta and so on in, a shelving system with doors to put my non-hanging up clothes in (I always have clothes everywhere, through a mixture of being unable to throw away things I don't really wear anymore, and not having enough room for stuff that doesn't hang up in the closet) and a new switch for my broken floor lamp and two bags of assorted capacitors I planned to use to fix my broken DVD player.
We went to T's place, and he desoldered my DVD's board so I could put in a new capacitor, verified that the type of capacitor needed was beyond the scope of the two assorted capacitor bags, traded me some Atari 2600 games for my NES cartridges that I didn't want (I traded Felix the Cat and Ghosts and Goblins for Centipede, Ms. Pacman, Zaxxon and a few others).
We then went to the store T recommended for getting the correct capacitors and I got a little bag of them. Then Ikea, where we got the glass containers, the shelving unit for clothes, the dimmer switch for my floor lamp with the broken switch, and a little basket to put rolled up socks into, on the shelf in the shelving unit.
Afterward, we went to a Chinese buffet, and I found I couldn't eat much, and was very impatient to get going, because sitting silently while J ate was tough, and his mile-a-minute, four nonlinear ideas per second chatter was more than I could participate in.
Then, he wanted to buy a new guitar accessory. He'd been recording weird sounds created by using a back and neck massage device on his guitar strings and pickups, so he wanted to buy a variable-speed vibrator and try that out, with a phase pedal, wah pedal and distortion on at the same time.
I sat in the car while he apparently took stock of an adult store's entire inventory of vibrators while two "fascinated by his novel intentions" female staff showed him how to put batteries in them and change their speeds and so on. I'm sure he had the time of his life. As for me, I was in the car being miserable.
I sat in the car in the dark and moped fairly hard and felt full of a desire to just drive off, anywhere, when suddenly a huge barge of a car with two really old people (too old to be driving) sitting in front and an older middle-aged woman in back, pulled up in a parking lot that was empty apart from my car. The man who was driving tottered out and I thought for sure he'd ask me for directions.
"There is no way he will be going shopping in the sex shop while his wife and older middle-aged daughter wait in the car" I thought.
In he went. My interest was piqued. Then a blonde salesgirl came outside into the bracing cold, arms folded tightly over her chest, and pointed up the street to show him where to go to get to a restaurant he was looking for. He'd asked for restaurant directions from a clerk in a sex shop while out for a family outing.
J came out, excited at the percussive power and variety of whiny sounds his new purchase apparently makes (I didn't ask to see it) and we went back to my place. My computer was full of (and continued to receive) kind and sympathetic words about me losing my cat from all sorts of people I don't normally hear from much. I soldered a capacitor into the pin holes T kindly left for me in the power supply circuit board of my DVD player (I've never done electronics work of this complexity before, but used the Internet and was thus emboldened) and the thing started working just like new again. J watched an uncharacteristically well-made cartoon from my 1967 Spider-man DVD, then got very wrapped up in playing Super Mario Brothers 3 on the NES I fixed last week (I both replaced the 72 pin cartridge socket, and cut the number four pin on the chip the Internet told me is the fiddly one that causes NES's to flash so much and refuse to play cartridges. It's a cartridges-not-made-by-Nintendo safeguard gone haywire) while I assembled the shelving unit.
Early on, I felt like I'd been through a war, but continued on into the evening, and after I drove J home I came back exhausted. I'd wanted him to help me empty my deceased cat's litter boxes, as it seemed like a pretty sad task, but we were too tired to do it (bags of litter are quite heavy to lug down three floors).
Then I slept badly and woke unable to sleep in but wanting to sleep for the forseeable future. I still didn't want to eat, so I cleaned. There is a truly record-breaking blizzard I haven't seen the likes of that's been blasting outside all day, so I can't really, say, drive into the city and watch The Golden Compass or anything like that. I watched another episode of season two The Six Million Dollar Man (an episode, actually, that I'd left for my Grade 9 class one day when I was going to be away, in 2004, so I didn't watch it with them, but heard their comments the next day, complaining of too much slow motion.
It was "The Seven Million Dollar Man" about the rogue bionic guy Steve Austin is supposed to help adjust to his bionic limbs, but who keeps ripping stuff up and hurting people, all power-mad and stuff). Then I watched a whole thing with Louis Theroux (who'd been in Michael Moore's TV Nation years ago) in which he hangs out with Boers (affrikaaners) in South Africa, exploring their clinging to separatism, long after that battle has, legally, been lost.
Back to dishes, I guess. If I wasn't planning a trip to Brooklyn over Christmas, I'd go out and buy a kitten right now, just to make the litter boxes, cat toys and empty food and water dishes that I'm continually tempted to absent-mindedly refill less upsetting. Maybe I'll take a walk down the street in the blinding blizzard to stores that are within walking distance. That's always good.
UPDATE: snow still blowing, but you can see through it. Don't know if we'll have a snow day tomorrow or not. Still feeling "phantom pet syndrome," in terms of reflexively worrying about leaving the hall door open or a plate of food left out in the other room, then remembering there is, at this time, no cat here to get into that stuff.
D phoned and we had a leisurely, long chat in which I was free to babble about things other than lost pets. A while after I got off with him, and organized my DVDs and polished my shoes with mink oil after wiping some road salt residue off them, then did laundry, my Mom phoned.
We talked for a good while, including kind of a comforting retrospective of all of the pets we've had. Most died on the highway. Here's most of the list, excluding things like zebra finches, gerbils and fish:
Freddie. Huge declawed black cat who seemed to be around since my birth. A great hunter. Killed rabbits quite often, ate them, and then lay around nursing his distended belly for days. Lived to almost 20 years before being hit on the road.
Flossie: beautiful black, white and tan collie we had for a few years, then hit on the highway.
Heidi: very intelligent, attentive female german shepherd who could open doors with her paws and seemed to understand family routines and casually-spoken english to an unnatural degree. Got sick with parvovirus, survived that, and I think was hit on the road. Lived about five years.
Max: 125 lb bear-like male german shepherd. Trained to stay away from the road. Could eat muffins in one gulp without chewing, and you could put your fist in his mouth and not touch the teeth on either side. Un-neutred, became an "outside dog" once he reached full size upon this incident: Dad was going around the house with a plant sprayer, spraying nutrient-enriched water on all of mom's many plants, and then saw that Max was walking around after him, a few plants behind, also "spraying" each one. Max lived to a fairly ripe old age, but got hip dysplasia (a typical German Shepherd problem) and eventually was put down.
Smokey: affectionate, smoke-grey cat who was cool and liked to "hang out" with me. When my grandmother was dying of stomach cancer, he was dying from bladder stones blocking his bladder, but, distracted by all the hospital visits, we didn't notice until it was too late to save him. Cats hide their illnesses when they can, and he didn't do anything obvious like peeing blood into the tub, like Syd did when he had that problem.
Josie: beautiful, bitchy female grey and white tabby cat who eventually got brain tumours, which caused her skull to swell up like Brain from Pinky and the Brain so I (a young adult) took her down to the vet and had them put her down, and brought her back home in a plastic bag for Dad to bury.
Sam: medium sized black cat my father brought home from my uncle's (could have been a relative or ancestor of Syd's, therefore). A playful, fun cat. We actually got him for Dad to keep in his Grade 5 classroom (until a child with cat allergy complained) while Josie was still alive, and he got hit on the road before she got sick.
Alex: once Max died and my parents had no pets, I bought Alex at a pet store and brought him to them. They were going to refuse him, but soon came to really like him. He was a slender, large grey cat with pleasing barred stripes of darker grey. He lived for years before succumbing to the highway. You'd think we'd not let cats out if they kept get hitting on the road, but my dad is very old-fashioned, did his best to train dogs to stay away from the road, and thinks cats belong in a barn to kill mice, so even though we let ours stay inside (which, to his mind, meant they weren't "working" and earning their keep by mousing in the barn) he certainly wouldn't insult their professionalism by keeping them from going outside.
Azra: my sister got this huge, hyper, hairy, smelly Golden Retriever while living briefly with my parents, then moved to an apartment and she stayed with them. She has survived for about seven years without getting hit on the road. Can't be still for a moment. She runs everywhere and gets hair and slobber everywhere. Continually desperate for constant attention, and petting her makes your hand stink. When you get used to a cat, this isn't too welcome.
Lana: a huge fat, grouchy grey cat with odd brown markings that look like she's got dirt in her fur. More than a bit psycho. My sister got her a few years back and has spent the rest of the time trying to get other people to take her off their hands. Unpleasant. Apt to unexpectedly bite, scratch or snarl. I was once sitting in an easy chair at their house, with no idea that Lana was between the chair and the wall (there was plenty of space, and she'd crawled in there) and my brother-in-law handed me a drink. I was sitting there, and as I went to bring it to my mouth, Lana erupted in my face, apparently from nowhere, mouth wide open, a vicious howl moving rapidly up the scale, and then landed back on the floor, growling. My flinch reaction caused the fluid in my glass to leap about two feet into the air above the glass, and some of the drink didn't land back in the glass.
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