Hanging Out the Wash, I Visit the Cats

Fleabus, yesterday, waiting for me to lie down and read so she could sleep on me. Remember when every post at this shitty blog had a Fleabus photo? Fleabus' official photographer left four years ago for college and while she has returned home she hasn't resumed her duties.

We've hired a new weekend supervisor. This past Saturday, while training, a friend came to the desk to pick up her books, she's a professor who happens to also live in my neighborhood (she too mourns the theft of our plastic goat, on walks with her two small children they'd pass our house just to look at the goat), and she asked, how are my cats? After she left, the new weekend supervisor asked me, How many cats do you have? Seven, I said. Seven? Man, I hate cats. I asked, are you allergic to cats? He said no, cats are creepy, they freak me out, they're always watching you, they're always hiding, they make my skin crawl, make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, I can't stand to be in the same room as one, god I hate cats. Well, fuck, the world is for suck and now this motherfucker. This guy could turn out to be the finest, most reliable, dependable, and capable weekend supervisor ever (odds are he'll be fine but not exceptional), but forever and amen I will never trust him as a good soul.

Here's one of Planet's Fleabus photos:

• Another insane devotion.
• The Left, the government, industry & animal rights.
• What's wrong with people?
• The Banality of Ethics in the Anthropocene part one, part two.
• It's really very simple.
• Another person found dead in jail.
• { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
• Josephine Miles: Saving the Bay.
• Why cats are better than people.
• Heard the Three Dog Night cover of Nilsson's One while pumping gas this morning, here, the original:

MYSELF WITH CATS

Henri Cole

Hanging out the wash, I visit the cats.

"I don't belong to nobody," Yang insists vulgarly.

"Yang," I reply, "you don't know nothing."

Yin, an orange tabby, agrees

but puts kindness ahead of rigid truth.

I admire her but wish she wouldn't idolize

the one who bullies her. I once did that.

Her silence speaks needles when Yang thrusts

his ugly tortoiseshell body against hers,

sprawled in my cosmos. "Really, I don't mind,"

she purrs—her eyes horizontal, her mouth

an Ionian smile, her legs crossed nobly

in front of her, a model of cat Nirvana—

"withholding his affection, he made me stronger.'