Adel, the best cat that ever was

Bad: Adel had to have his lungs drained today. Worse: The vet is 99% certain he has wet FIP. Worst: It is a fatal prognosis. There are two versions of FIP, a wet version and a dry. They are testing the fluid to confirm the diagnosis. The former, which they think he has, kills in under a month once it's activated. If it is the correct verdict, then our lovely kitten was born genetically predisposed towards having a common cat germ twist inside him, like HIV into AIDS. In most cats, it's nothing, completely harmless, but in 1 in 5000 cats, it's deadly. And it seems he and his white furred brother might be on the unlucky side of that equation. We can't help but hope for a misdiagnoses, but it seems unlikely, and it's probable that their brother Schprot has it, too, as he has come down with some similar symptoms. (The tabby siblings should be fine, as we suspect a different father). TLDR: Our hearts are crushed. Time with Adel is very limited and our greatest priority. If you want to come love on him, the time is now.

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Our perfect cat, Adel, is dying. He’s only five months old. The thing that is killing him is beyond our power to cure; an immuno-disease called Feline Infectious Peritonitis (or FIP for short) that will slowly crush his lungs with 40cc of fluid in his ribcage a day until he can no longer breathe. In order to save him from this slow, painful, panicky end, we will have to have him put down.

I have never experienced this type of wrenching pain. He curls up with us in the nest of pillows we’ve created on the living room floor, purring madly, happy that we’re with him, happy that we’re together. He traps my hand against his belly with his paws and I leave it there for two hours without daring to move. He wraps his tail around my ankle like a monkey’s prehensile tail and I choke back a sob. Alexandre is not faring better. We are both working from home this week and constantly breaking down into tears. It is all so, so hard. Our little cat transformed us from a couple into a family, the three of us a unit of proof against the world’s pains.

I want so much from this little cat. I want to wake up with him on my face, doing happy back flips against it, while I want to sleep a half hour longer. I want the games of fetch every morning to continue, his joy at chasing the ball contagious, making every day better as he returned it for me to throw again. I want to see how big he would be as an adult, how long and sleek his body, how improbable the length of him against me, remembering how he used to fit in the palm of a single hand. I want to take him on road-trips and offer him strange food that he will refuse and walk him through new cities in the crook of my arm, his favourite place in all the world. I want impossible things. I want him to get better. I want a future that I’ve never had and now never will.

Selenium is sick


TV On The Radio – Trouble

“All of this borrowed time, it’s running out. It’s the ending of the show.”

Selenium, our beautiful one-eyed pirate ferret who had the dreadful kind of exciting year, has just been diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma. This is, unfortunately, a death sentence. There is no cure or reasonable treatment. We are uncertain how much longer she has, the prognosis for aggressive lymphoma in young ferrets is dire, but as it is rare, there is less information on it. It might be that she will not survive until January, though David has been giving her the very best possible care and inventing new recipes for soft food that have been successfully coaxing her into eating, or she might survive it until spring. We just don’t know. But please, if you have a moment, if you can reach out to David and offer any kind of help or support, it would be dearly appreciated. There is only so much I can do from England.

Goodbye Stephen Elliott: best cook, best smile, best father.

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Stephen Elliott, the closest thing I ever had to an adopted father, passed away on the morning of September 1st.

Stephen, Tim

I was at Burning Man, so could not be bedside. I also missed his memorial. Yesterday would have been his 67th birthday. I do not feel guilt or regret, only grief.

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It was a privilege to know him and to receive a small part of his generosity, cleverness, and joy. Somewhere there is a video of him playing Spanish guitar at one of my birthday parties, as pictured above, but that doesn’t capture his vivaciousness or his overwhelming wonderful everything. They don’t make them like they used to. He was quality and charm and grace personified, as well as the best sort of sly English wit. I don’t know what else to say, except that he was loved, and is loved, and will always be so in my heart. My sympathies and condolences to everyone else currently grieving. He was prolific with his care, there are so many of us who will forever miss him, and we are all worse off for the loss.

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inside/outside: loathe to explain

The air bit with a chill that didn’t match the bright sunlight. I was on a bus traveling from my apartment to a doctor’s office I’d never visited at the university of British Columbia. The view from the bridge might have been pretty, but to me it was nothing but a view of the recent oil spill. I did not know what to expect at the doctor’s office. Someone over the phone had dropped the word “cancer” into conversation as innocuously as a sugarcube into coffee. I didn’t have enough data, so I did not know what to expect. As a result, I failed to have any expectations. The unknown no longer holds any fear after the worst has happened.

I was recently in Los Angeles for three weeks. I stayed up an entire night and watched the moon’s light be eaten by our planet’s shadow from a barren desert near the border of Mexico. I learned how to drive an ATV and I sped in a race car on a track for the first time. I drove my first go-kart and only partially dislocated my shoulder doing so. I was introduced to shooting skeet and never missed, not even once, until the assault rifle jammed. I had dinner at the Magic Castle and discovered a secret door. I visited the spaceship Endeavor and a Banksy piece and the Echo Lake chandelier tree.

Luck was mostly with me. My company was always kind and funny and smart. My days were spent working and exploring, unearthing new places and experiences, and my evenings were often spent in the company of my host, one of my sweetest ex-partners, a man who pet my hair when he caught me keening with pain in my sleep.

Every day I think about Michael, his smile, his kindness, how much I would do if it would let me see him and hold him and let him loose on the world again. I would do unspeakable things. His smile, his wit. I would burn down houses. I would burn down cities. A life for a life. Ten lives for his. A hundred. He would be horrified and justified. He would be validated. I cannot say his name without twisting inside.

Everything in California made for easy stories. The sun shone almost every day, there were flowers everywhere, a downy brown hummingbird in the front yard, a familiar taste like metal in the back of my throat from the pollution in the air. I touched a tiny wild lizard, I bought books at The Last Bookstore, and sobbed until I thought I might die on the perfect sand beach at Santa Monica. I danced until last call in my underwear in a borrowed bear suit open to my waist in a bar on Hollywood Boulevard.

I try not to think about my coward of a most recent ex, M., and how much pain he’s left unaddressed inside of me. I shy away from it the way I now avoid mirrors, as if he literally slashed me with knives and then declared me too ugly instead of only figuratively. I cannot bear my unwanted reflection as I cannot rely on my heart. It is too broken. I am too ruined. Both have fractured and cracked and crumbled. The abuse, such a surprise, was too much. The trauma, as unexpected, destroyed what was left. I am used up and there is not enough left to put anything back together. I cannot say his name, nor that of the planet he named himself after. I can barely utter my own.

The difficult stories are harder to see, but they are bigger and deeper and wider and greedy.

Being in the desert was triggering, (he grew up out here, he told me stories, fixing his jeep with the gusset of his underwear, getting lost in gullies while looking for ghost towns, his words a footnote to every stone), but who alive has eyes that could see such a thing?

I cannot reliably keep down anything I eat. I have lost fifteen pounds. People are constantly saying, “Oh wow, you look so good!”.

This is also a trigger.

A terrible winter, leading into a spring that only looks better with eyes that cannot see.

Being alive is triggering. Everything hurts. Everything. Always.

My life since October has been a near comprehensive list of tragedy, injury, pain, disappointment, disability, death, and every wrenching heartbreak. I constantly wake violently throughout every night, usually crying, my endoctrine system certain that I am always under threat. Why else this much pain? I live stunned with it, trapped in the suffering cage of my own failure of a body, forcing myself to try to move normally through each moment even though its roar is deafening.

I try to be the sort of person who does not bring the tone down, does not to contribute to the disappointment, and I am sick of the world, so mostly I have been quiet. But, in truth, I am sick of living. I want to quit. Yet these habits die hard. When asked about such things, I have been telling the easy stories. “Magic!” “Race cars!” Tone. Keep it light, (keep it pointless), keep it bright.

I might say we went to the Salton Sea, went to Slab City, and looked at the art. I might say that the art was unexpected, that it was good to see the piano still present. Those are the outside stories, not the experience, not how I only went to East Jesus to visit a dear friend’s grave to try and make a genuine connection with his unexpected death, only to encounter a tourist destination and be force-fed a rote and rehearsed tour and a bizarre and misplaced lecture about my lack of respect. Both happened, but the latter is more important to me than the first fact.

When pressed further by people who know about the other narratives, the shadow, less superficial stories, I have been still replying defensively until very recently, habitually, with the only good thing left unharmed – “but the pets are fine!”

Even this, however, is no longer true.

The day before I flew back to Canada, my flatmate David sent me a panicked note over Facebook. The unthinkable had occurred; Tanith the cat swatted Selenium the ferret and ruptured her eye.

He was worried she was going to be blinded and didn’t know what to do. I arranged for hospital care, I arranged a ride there, I arranged to borrow space on a credit card to pay for it all. I did everything from California, hoping her vision could be saved, stressed out and over stretched, breaking down whenever I thought about how much she must be hurting, no matter where I was or what I was doing. All of our options were scary and expensive. The vet referred us to an optical surgeon. Two hundred dollars. The optical surgeon suggested her eye be removed. Another two hundred. We scheduled the surgery. Eight hundred. She had a rough time on the table. Another hundred. The mask became harder to keep in place.

Posting to social media about Selenium’s needs and ordeal covered the costs. I am grateful, we’re not going to be wiped out, but my grateful allayment is muddled. I am conflicted. There is no justice. She is home now, looking more like a prize fighter than a pirate. This is the Red Queen Paradox with a knee to the kidney for good measure; we run and run and run to stay in place, everyone throw in! Yet no matter how much is given, how much support is offered, (where was this before?), the best that can be possibly attained is a new equilibrium worse than the previous norm. It’s like my life’s theme, if such things existed outside of the convenient packaging of construct or English lit.

Now that April’s Big Bad Trauma has arrived and (mostly, as best it can, a bankruptcy disguised as success) been neutralized, I am waiting for whatever happens in May. It will be rough, it will be tumble, and I refuse to try to imagine what awful unexpected there is left. Who’s next? What’s next?

It’s my birthday this month. Thirty-three on the twenty:ninth. Ten years plus one from when I promised Michael I would fight to stay alive and try, no matter what, to find joy. Ten years “and a day” of failure and pain. If I can’t succeed at such a small thing, in that length of time, I can’t succeed, full stop. My promise runs out on my birthday. It’s almost a relief. Ten years and a day of fighting and struggle, just to confirm: My best isn’t good enough and it never will be.

“I am the captain and I sail a sea of dreams.”

Woke up this Valentine’s feeling sick and hollow. During the inspiring decade+ that Michael Green starred in my life, the glorious, mad wit that so well defined him always astonished me. (I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone to be more dynamic, vital or alive.) And, like the great actor he was, he mastered and treasured every role in my life he could get his hands on – mentor, lover, pen-pal, partner, parent, tantrum child, art king, collaborator, curator, smart-ass student, responsible educator – with an effortless, beautiful sincerity I couldn’t help but admire and reciprocate with my entire heart. I am devastated with this loss.

There has been no one better in my family, no one brighter or more essential to my life. He could, in turn, both amaze and terrify, but he cared deeply and he graciously made certain that his love supported me during the darkest times, such as what we’re all experiencing now.

So today, as a comfort to my heart and yours, as he would prefer, as he would be proud to be, may he also always be The Whaler.


The Whaler, performed by Michael Green of One Yellow Rabbits at Performance Works as part of the Here Be Monsters theater festival 2006. Recorded by myself.

this is not a temporary error

Vancouver poet Zaccheus Jackson’s death by train in Toronto ‘an absolute tragedy’
36-year-old Alberta native is remembered as a passionate educator who was “just fully coming into his power” as a spoken-word poet of Blackfoot descent.

Zaccheus was a good person as well as a good poet. He was a bright light, easy to recognize even at a distance, and he shone constantly and tirelessly and true. Even though I met him years ago, he was one of the only people who could still coax me to come out to a poetry slam.

I am sorry I didn’t get to know him better. I am grateful for how much I did.

Always remember to tell people when you love them. Nothing is permanent. There is no such thing as the future. There is now and then there is maybe, possibly, only potentially a later version of now. Tell people you appreciate them, that they move you, that you respect them, that their taste in clothes is nice, that the way they move is graceful, that you like how they place their hands on the wheel of the car as they drive, that you adore when they sing along to the radio, that their stutter is appealing, that their guitar face is ravishing, that your admiration for their way with words is endless and honest, that you are attracted to them, that you are in awe of how silly they can be, that you think it’s great that thing they did one time, you remember, with the fork and their niece, that thing, you still think about them, you think about them and you smile, that you think about them and cry, that you think about them, that you miss them, that you sympathize, that you admire and recognize their efforts, that you grasp what they are trying to say, that you regard their puns as a necessary evil, that you commend their sensitivity, that you respond to their touch, that you feel the world is better with them in it, that you worship their cooking, that you long for more time with them, that you idolize the same values, that you are fascinated by the same things, that you hold them dear, that you have had your mind changed by their point of view, that you dig their taste in music, that you value their opinion, that you applaud their parenting, that you esteem their criticism, that you enjoy the way they make you laugh, that you luxuriate in their attention, that you treasure their affection, that their approval makes you happy, that you want to make them proud, that they inspire pride, that you care for them, that they satisfy your curiosity, that they are sweet, that they are treasured, that that shirt matches their eyes, that you’re glad to have met them, that it’s no problem to help out, that you are glad to be of service, that you accept their charity, that they are cherished, that they are anything and everything, that we, each one of us, is the world. Remember and tell them and love and love and love.

“The fastest we live is still the slowest we die.” – Zaccheus

Tell them, your friends, your loved ones, but the acquaintances, too. Tell everyone. Fight against the inevitable coming of night.

-::-

She’s Still Dying On Facebook

“On March 2, more than four years ago now, Lea died of substance-abuse-related liver failure. June 10 would have been her 27th birthday. This time of year is when she’s always most on my mind, and I’m sure that some Facebook technician who keeps track of what we all do on the site would report that my visits to Lea’s profile increase exponentially as the weather gets warmer. I don’t know how, exactly, I managed to open up my old messages with Lea. I want to say that Facebook put the messages there—that I didn’t click the button, that they just appeared, Lea’s face popping up because she had something to say, she wanted to chat. But I must have clicked. Maybe by accident. Still, I can’t ignore the pull of my bookworm’s interpretation, arguing that technology is the closest human beings come to magic. I know nothing about the way the Internet works. I still half-believe the Internet is simply air. So why isn’t it plausible that Lea’s messages appeared in response to how much I miss her, to my own guilt about her death.

[…]

Lea died the first time soon after she joined Facebook, when I witnessed her transformation into someone she would have mocked and pitied. She died again, a smaller death, a year or so before her real-world one, when she basically stopped posting altogether. On March 2, she died publicly, her wall turning into the memorial it is now. To me, she’s died again and again since then. The posts remembering her are fewer and fewer, months apart sometimes. When I rediscovered our messages, she died again—in a different way, because I’d come face to face with how I failed her. Facebook has made her death a sort of high-concept horror movie. How many more times will I grieve her? How many more details from my past, from Lea’s past, are buried online, waiting for me to uncover them?”

With Andrew gone, it’s time to pick up the slack he’s left behind.

“Meaning”
by Czeslaw Milosz

—When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.

—And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?

—Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.

-::-

Andrew was barely in his forties, an acting father of three, a husband, a lover, and, as he would say, “all of the things”! Essential to at least three of my neighborhood’s core communities, he was a precious friend I never imagined doing without. He fell suddenly, an aneurysm or a stroke, the sort of death that unfurls its red flag without warning. I could list facts: his love of pirate clothing, his irrepressible fever for wordplay, his drawings, his games, the entire shelf of books on Rome that served as the incubator for a project that will never blossom from its imaginary blueprint seed. None of it will properly convey who he was, what sort of life he created to inhabit and to share, so the narrative that I have decided upon is to declare him the laughing buddha, the zen creature without public ego who didn’t give in to the idea that we should care what strangers think of us. Monks in saffron robes suffer on mountain tops while he found illumination in the way dice moved over a table, the way foam wrapped sticks bounced off other foam wrapped sticks, and a thousand other nerdy occupations I have never really understood but didn’t need to in order to appreciate him and his glee. We bonded over shiny things, science, dancing, and the regular delights of mangled days. All of that, years of it, but I cannot convey the map of his nation’s borders. He was smart and he was good and we miss him. Everything else is set dressing.

It doesn’t seem so long ago since I last ran into him on Commercial Drive, floppy hat, massive cloak, somewhere probably a drum. The man wore tutus and face-paint as commonly as other people wear socks. He was easy to spot. Was, not is. I write that word and lose my courage. It doesn’t seem long because it wasn’t, yet it will never happen again.

I offered to take his picture before he was cremated, something for the family, something for us, an image to represent the man we all loved. I didn’t even think about it, it was as natural as offering my hand to someone sitting on the ground, and his widow said yes and thank you and we agreed. This left me standing by his coffin at the crematorium two hours before the service, my friend Jay acting as a driver and a voice activated light stand, kit in hand and a bag full of expensive lenses I had never used before.

Though it was surreal, I was fine until I bumped the coffin, reflexively apologizing to his cold face, and when I touched him, brushing hair to cover some of the bruising that the make-up didn’t cover. Excepting those moments, I had a skill set to wield, he could have been made of spring flowers, a still life empty of residual heat. He has too obviously absent, an unmanned puppet, only a former body of work, still bones, still skin. An object encased in love and lighting problems to solve.

Fast forward, I stood with his family, perhaps the only one present who wasn’t tied to him through marriage or blood, the last of the last, in the final moments before he was taken away and sublimated into shimmering air molecules and carbon. Tillie couldn’t be there, but AJ read out a note from her, a prayer for the living who stood in a circle around Andrew’s abandoned body. I watched everyone, I watched and I ached and part of me died, and I made my own strident promises: May we remember this and resolve not to let it go. May we forever refuse to stand still.

Devorah

There’s something about the smell of the place that clings to my skin. Perhaps it’s a disinfectant or the lotion she rubs on her skin. Possibly a mix of them both. Either way, it has become the scent of her dying and it won’t let me sleep. As soon as I am home, I step into the shower to rinse it off, knowing that I am sluicing her touch from my body as well and uncertain if it should feel like a betrayal.

Her name isn’t one I mention here. We’re unrelated by DNA. Until recently, for almost a decade, I only saw her on Jewish holidays. The entire story is more complicated, a byzantine web of different familial relationships, but the truth remains, and it all boils down to this one simple fact: My mother is dying.

She has severe young onset Parkinson’s and she is not going to improve. She is not going to rally. She is not going to be saved by a miracle, a drug, or by therapy. It is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system that currently does not have a known cause or cure and kills her brain cells in certain types of pathways, destroying her body from the inside. Her symptoms are typical and so is the progress of the disease. The medication they have her on at the care home help, but they are gradually becoming ineffective. Other than her body failing, her symptoms include memory loss, inability to focus or stay present, mild paranoia, depression, and slight dementia. There is no recovery. Nothing about this will get better. It will not “be okay”. Her failure is inevitable.

I try to visit at least once a week. I try to always bring some kind of treat. (Otherwise, the chances are high that she might not eat that day). I bring flowers and movies on a memory stick. I bring printed out pictures of her loved ones that I tape to the wall where she can see them from her bed. I offer her my service in any way I can. I joke that she has won a life-time supply of chocolate, now that the end of her life is close enough that I can finally afford to guarantee such a magnificent promise.

We lie in her bed together and she snuggles up to my body the way I used to press into hers when I was five. Her body has wasted away so much that she barely has any substance at all, so there are no problems fitting both of us in her hospital style bed. She is so fragile, it is hard to believe. I could probably carry her a mile in my arms. Instead I support her shaking limbs and brush shea butter onto her skin with my fingers and try not to count her vertebrae. I love her so, so much.

She has other daughters, but I am special in that I am a bridge, the physical avatar and “child” of her relationship with my godmother, her best friend of over 30 years. My visits ground her as very little does. And I touch her constantly. I can’t not. Even when I sit on the floor at her feet, we twine ankles, we perpetually hold hands.

We discuss everything. About when I was a child, about when she was a child, our loves, our relationships, our disasters, but also activism, feminism, poetry, technology, sociology, history, literature, religion, psychology, education, and nanotech. When she is present, she is clear, intelligent, and sharp. Her life has been endlessly inspiring, one of bravery and protests and marches and academia and marathons and that spark still exists sometimes as light in her eyes. The end of her life, she says, is the one adventure she knows she will get right.

Yet she is one of the only people alive who has known my life. She is one of the very few human beings on the planet that I know actually loves me. And she is about to die. I got the phone-call from the care home today. It is going to be very, very soon.

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Visiting her is one of them, even as it breaks me. Even as I cry every time I leave. Even as I still don’t know how to say goodbye.

a goodbye that came far too soon.

Tony & Jhayne w. Drew aka Schmootzi the Clod
The day we met Drew Keriakedes (aka Schmootzi The Clod) at Circus Contraption. ♥

Drew and Joseph Vito Albanese (aka Dexter Mantooth) and God’s Favourite Beefcake will be missed.

For those who haven’t heard the shocking news, Drew and Joe were killed at 11 o’clock this morning by a random gunman at Cafe Racer.

News of the crime and the murderer.

Titanium Sporkestra have opened up their rehearsal space for an impromptu vigil at 1700 East Marginal Way South, which is where I would be if I were in Seattle tonight.

The gunman killed another woman during his car-jacking escape and then later shot himself in the head when cornered by police, but did not successfully kill himself. (He is known to be mentally ill.) Kendall and Dustin were not present, but Len, who also works at Cafe Racer, is still in the hospital, potentially still in surgery, and the severity of his injuries are unknown. Drew and Joe’s families were not notified by police, but found out through their facebook pages, which was stunning to behold.

They were glorious, talented, and beautiful people, lions and lords of their community who I greatly respected and deeply admired, who always made me feel welcome and loved. My heart aches to lose them and I have spent my entire day glued to the news, watching the story unfold, unable to stop crying. They’ve taken part of the soul of Seattle with them.

“It’s been good to know ya.
The time has come for us to say goodbye.
Put on your mask and don your feather boa.
We’ll sing and dance until the end of time.”

yesterday I danced in the rain

The Mother Writes to the Murderer: A Letter
by Naomi Shihab Nye

To you whose brain is a blunt fist
pushed deep inside your skull
whose eyes are empty bullets
whose mouth is a stone more speechless
than lost stones at the bottoms of rivers
who lives in a shrunken world where nothing blooms
and no promise is ever kept

To you whose face I never saw but now see
everywhere the rest of my life

You don’t know where she hid her buttons

arranged in families by color or size
tissue-wrapped in an oatmeal box
how she told them goodnight sleep well
and never felt ashamed

You don’t know her favorite word
and I won’t tell you

You don’t have her drawings taped to your refrigerator
blue circuses, red farms
You don’t know she cried once in a field of cows
saying they were too beautiful to eat

I’m sure you never thought of that
I’m sure nothing is too beautiful for you to eat

You have no idea what our last words were to one another
how terribly casual
because I thought she was going a block away
with her brother to the store
They would be back in ten minutes

I was ironing her dress
while two houses away an impossible darkness
rose up around my little girl

What can I wish you in return?
I was thinking knives and pistols
high voltages searing off your nerves
I was wishing you could lose your own life
bit by bit finger by toe
and know what my house is like

how many doors I still will have to open

Maybe worse would be for you to love something
and have it snatched up sifted out of your sight
for what reason?
a flurry of angels recalled to heaven
and then see how you sit
and move and remember
how you sleep at night
how you feel about mail my letter to you
all the letters passing through all the hands
of the people on earth
when the only one that matters
is the one you can neither receive
nor send