Meeting the Night Neighbor

Nightly came the crashing sounds below: toppling stacks of plastic pots, tomato cages that bent and thwanked, a persistent metallic scraping. I initially theorized that the neighbors' funny-eyed cat was hunting rats down there and rested easy on this theory, with its benign implications, until the neighbors and cat moved out. Then I moved on to thinking a homeless drunk was bedding down in the crawlspace. (The challenge was explaining the spectacularly awkward movements that would create such mayhem. Most creatures are sneaky and smooth; they don't trip over stuff with every step.)

I developed half-waking paranoia that the drunk would break into the coop and slaughter the chickens for a meal, and Crim amused himself exploiting my fears. I'd bolt awake in the night and say, What the fuck is that? and he'd say, Shh, go back to sleep. It's just Ernie the Homeless Guy, stumbling home hungry.

A few times I whined enough to make Crim gallantly step out the back door, peak under the house and report that there was nothing there. We let the mystery persist for a good half-year. It became de rigeur to pretend it wasn't really weird to have something crawling around down there.

Was it rats, drunk off whatever was in the corners of the bottles Ernie left behind? A raccoon doing dissertation research on coop security systems? A skunk? In any of the above cases, I didn't want to encounter the perpetrator, which fed the systemic denial. But then fleas fled the cats and invaded our bedclothes (nice work, Advantage), and one fitful night I lay awake with fleas and phantom fleas crawling all over me, hearing Ernie or Skunkie or whoever down there knocking shit over. Classic invasion of grossness. I snapped. I threw on my robe, grabbed a flashlight and said, I'm ready for you, fucker. Be thee skunk or drunk, I shall face thee.

As I stumbled down the back steps, I thought about Writing. I think about it a lot, Writing being the altar at which I have sacrificed whatever money, power, respect I might otherwise have coming as a thirty year-old college graduate. When you want to write things, stories tend to come. And maybe also courage. Because you want a good story, and a good story requires going out there and meeting the beast.

(When I was ten, a skunk got into my bedroom at night--don't ask--and I spun it into my first publication feat: a proud check for $10 from Stone Soup, the magazine for children that no child has ever read. The check was tacked to my wall for years, beginning what I can only hope will be a lifetime of Writing paychecks so tiny that they are more trophy than income.)

I soothed the hens, who were making quiet sounds of anxiety. That's the best they can do, defenseless in the night: commiserate with each other like, You hear that?--sounds like something--well I'm okay--you okay?--everybody here?--united front, girls, stick together--we're okay--not to worry. Then I looked under the house.

Nothing there, of course. Silence where the crashing sounds had been. But I wasn't going back inside. I crouched among the cobwebs and the rat droppings and waited.

Finally, near the opposite wall, I saw something. A swish-swish. A long, white tail. No other movement. No other sound. It became The Sound of Music: me as Nazi soldier with my flashlight and this thing as the Von Trapp family hiding in the abbey. But there would be no climbing the verdant Alps to Switzerland on this night; I was persistent.

Whatever this creature might be, it was not bright. No self-awareness where the tail was concerned. It was struggling mightily to keep the rest of its body concealed, but the rattish tail was out there unselfconsciously flapping in the breeze. That tail looked familiar, and I gradually remembered why. I had seen one like it when I accidentally caught a baby opossum in a rat trap (an unfortunate incident, which may or may not have made me cry).

Finally the fugitive was ready to give himself up. Lowered his gray and white fur girth out of his hiding place and stepped into the beam of my flashlight. Big, fat possum. And an affable creature: once he decided the jig was up, he started tightroping across an elevated pipe bridge--there was the metallic scraping!--right toward me.

Posse the Possum. Long last we meet. I was taken with delight. Possums make unobtrusive neighbors, and their appetite for snails, rotten fruit and pre-killed carcasses earn them the nickname 'Mother Nature's cleanup crew.' They don't disturb the garden and, best of all, they are North America's only marsupials! Who wouldn't want to cohabit with a species that carries babies in a pouch?

Posse stopped a few feet away from me. We stared at each other for a while, then went our separate ways. I went back to bed contented, knowing that somehow I wasn't going to mind all the knocking and scraping and thwanking. Because I would think, hey, it's Posse, of the Midnight Marsupial Janitorial Crew, just going along to get along. I still don't know why he makes such a racket; supposedly opossums' jutting eyes give them excellent night vision. But now his awkwardness seems kind of sweet. I'm glad we met.

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Deep Thought for Friday

Wouldn't it be funny
If a guy made a comment about my ass
And it answered
With a fart

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Might As Well Have, Much As My Cat Accuses Me of Cheating

I thought he would like seeing the Facebook page of another kitty, but Paulie was: devastated. Apparently I had made some recent comment about how the gray and white neighbor cat was cute, and Crim had come home from a social function with Maine Coon furs on his sweatshirt, and then he finds out I'm Facebook friends with this other feline and, being Paulie James Walnuts III (drag name Molly Pecans, blues name Muddy Paws) he had to bend it into some overarching theory.

You guys are seeing other cats. Don't bother to deny it.

Of course we rolled our eyes at this nonsense. How much vet debt must we accrue, how much biting abuse must we tolerate, how high-end a cat food must we buy to prove our boundless loyalty? Assurances were made that he is a very special cat. Staggeringly handsome, impeccable wit, always top predator in our ecosystem, master of all he surveys, &c.

And how superficial did he think we were? As if we would judge our animal companion by mere degree of cuteness, or proportion of assholish to sweet behavior, or amount of particulate matter stuck to rectum, or number of fleas leaping off onto our bed.

What about your charming wiles and pocketful of foibles? And his anarchist saboteur technique of clawing the mattress underside until his demand to be let outside is met--I have a grudging respect for the strategic means there, even if the ends are questionable. What other cat puts on stunna shades and does hip thrusts to "Poker Face"? What other cat wept at the end of Milk with such passion? And your comic timing! He has great comic timing.

That night he stayed out late. We played right into his paws, were worried sick, calling from the back door and then the front and then the back. Around midnight he showed up, flea-ridden, cobwebs stuck to his face, and got just the worshipful welcome he had angled for. We saw the trap and fell in anyway. Because he may be a dictator. But he's our dictator.


More weird Walnuts posts:
Four Paws Marching
Goodkitties
My Cat is a Narcissist, But I Love Him
Walnuts v. Walnuts

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USEFUL VOCABULARY: "thirsty"

thirsty (adj.) 1. Afflicted with horniness that knows no bounds, esp. in men. 2. Shamelessly solicitous. 3. Dehydrated of female affections.


As,

"I went out to Easy the other night and the guys were mad thirsty. I told one of them, look, my boyfriend is right over there. He offered to intercourse me in a way that would cause my gray matter to extrude, regardless."

"Wow. Thirsty indeed."

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Paradox of Thrift

Thrift has many paradoxes, the foremost being that if everyone is thrifty, the economy hurts. (The economy being an obligate fiend for consumer spending.) These days I like to go around saying, to anyone who talks about trying to cut back on $3 lattes or $30 sweaters, "In this economy, who can afford it?" (And I'm sort of saying it ironically, although of course no one would ever know that; I have to sometimes indulge my urge to be unnecessarily weird.) You could call the thriftward shift irrational, since the recession hasn't made us all suddenly broker. In fact, Dean Baker has pointed out that our real wages have actually gone up as prices have dropped.

Of course layoffs force some to cut back, and the threat thereof makes us all legitimately cautious. But who says we're rational? (Oh right, economists do.) We also react to the ethereal panic and want to hunker down. The entire economy can be like Wall Street in its self-fulfilling expectations. We think the economy is going to suck, and we thereby cause it to suck harder. Each individual household is responsibly protected, but the economy itself become the collective goat no one wants to feed.

My personal P of T is that the recessional spirit of the times makes me want to thriftify, even though my household income is at historic highs (meaning, middle-class eligible.) It suddenly seems cool to be plucky and resourceful, steadily defrosting my bricks of summer tomato sauce. Whereas in the boom economy, when I was boom broke, I had to make periodic pilgrimages to Payless for some knockoff insensible shoes, just so as not to feel left out. We are social animals, I suppose, listing toward the zeitgeist.

Yet another paradox is that thrift is good, but an Ascetic Mission is bad. (You might be on an Ascetic Mission if...you feel wrong paying $1.75 bus fare when it's raining but you could have biked.) Many forms of thrift are gratifying and fun, but going too far can set up a landslide of thwarted consumer desire. When I heard this story on NPR, I was totally with the newly poor and unemployed heroine, Gigi, as she described her excised spa treatments and her switch to outdoor exercise and her homemade clothes. But then she said she had "downgraded [her] coffee" from Starbucks to Yuban. This reeked of Ascetic Mission. I am a Peet's girl myself, and I appreciate the symbolism of ditching the morning Starbucks, but Gigi: there are less drastic measures. Like good coffee beans at bulk prices. And if that latte is so very sweet, why not make a weekly ceremony of it? The best kind of thrift, after all, makes us really enjoy the good things.



And P.S. Who's got the last laugh now? Could it perchance be the crazy lady who grows vegetables and keeps chickens and makes soap, and sometimes uses the eggs from the chickens as an ingredient in the soap. Oh wait, that's me! Ha! (That was me, having the last laugh.)

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Ode to Demetri Martin

It is a truth universally acknowledged that to talk about comedy is to sound awkward and conspicuously unfunny. But I am willing to sound lame and worse in service of praising the subject of this ode.

Comedians tell jokes, and when Demetri Martin is about to tell some, he admits to it ("Let's go with...jokes.") But he also invents formats. He begins with a kernel of funny and decides later whether this comedic stem cell will become a skit or a slam poem or a pie chart.

Demetri's ability to draw mountains over time.


His new series, "Important Things with Demetri Martin," which premiered on Comedy Central on February 11th, allows him to sprawl across his many pet formats. When the catchy but understated song comes on that goes, "This is a sketch/This is a sketch/It's a sketch," it does not signal a sketch comedy bit, but rather that Demetri is about to bust out Pictionary-style, drawing and writing with both hands at once.

He loves using hand-drawn graphics, especially data charts. He flips the page on his big sketchpad to show a line graph and says, "This is the cuteness of a girl versus how interested I am in hearing about how her intuitive her cat is...You'll notice, at a certain point, I don't care how cute you are, I don't want to hear about your fucking cat anymore."

And when he does plain old stand-up, it has maximum density, no filler. The ratio of setup is miniscule; it's a payoff and then another and another. He always seems to have too many notions and nuggets kicking around his brain, such that when he plays guitar and harmonica and bells while flipping through jokes on the big sketchpad, it seems to mirror his mindstate.

Martin is a comedic philosopher, lifting the stones of our cultural foundation and examining the underneath bits. He specializes in small observations: "What distinguishes man from animals is his ability to reason. Another way is last names. What's his name? Patches? Patches what? No last name? That's a dog, don't waste my time."*

*Joke estimated from memory.

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