planet kitty

A Novena for the Completely Distracted

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The cat took the phone. That is the only explana-scuse I can come up with. Ángel, el gato de amor (pictured above), wanted me to get an upgrade so I could take better (well, any) photos of her. Like the one above.

One night last week, somewhere between the room in which my girlfriend and I were watching television and the bedroom in which we were going to be sleeping, my phone left my person, never to return. I placed it in my pocket upon standing to walk into the bedroom, but when I arrived in the bedroom three seconds later, it was no longer in my pocket. An inspection tour of both rooms and the hall in between them led to neither phone nor evidence of foul play.

An ancient (five-plus-years old) brick of a phone, which did not do its one job of placing or receiving phone calls very well, it is not missed. What is missed is an important sense of myself. What is missed is my understanding, my long-understood understanding, that I do not lose things, that not losing things was my one talent. Sense of self, we hardly knew ye.
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Ángel, el gato de amor

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The following first appeared on April 12, 2015:

The stories about Angel’s supreme being-ness are too many to recount and they bore her anyway. Our entire Planet Earth, all four rooms of it—and, really, that’s three rooms too many but space is needed for all seven billion humans upon it—are here because she willed it through complete indifference.

Without trying, but after a really deep stare at nothingness, then a nap because she was shagged out after all that thinking, there was tuna, and even better, salmon treats, but there was no one to bring these savories to her. She developed opposable thumbs but was bored with the effect and thus willed thumbs onto someone who could use them to bring her platters of tuna, and even better, salmon treats.
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