Handsome James was one of three born in Pepper's second litter with The Pirate King of Pleasant Street. Pepper, a dainty seal point Siamese, twice escaped to mate with the one-eyed, ratty-eared brute before my mother finally got her fixed, abandoning dreams of raising purebreads. We know The Pirate King was the father, because every single one of Pepper's many kittens came out looking exactly like him; there wasn't a single thing to suggest their Siamese maternity, except when they opened their mouths to let out the trademark Siamese caterwaul.

I named him Handsome James, because that's exactly what he was; sleek, black, strong, with yellow-green eyes and an affable face. He spent most of his waking hours patrolling the neighborhood, eventually inheriting his father's title by the ancient rite of combat. He likely fathered plenty bastards before he, too, was fixed, almost as an afterthought. He would sometimes disappear for days, only to show up in the backyard with a mouse, smelling of skunk, or with a gash in his ear: trophies from his many escapades.



Sometimes he would march in, eat a can of catfood, promptly vomit it back up again, and march back outside, satisfied. Other times, he'd chase around Annabelle, my mother's chihuahua, or decide that the best place to nap was on top of your sleeping face in bed. Whenever he left the house on one of his many adventures, he would answer my mother in a call-and-response that continued until he disappeared around the corner.

"Here you go, Handesome James." 
"Mrrow!"
"Don't go in the road!"
"Mrrow!"
"Have fun!"
"Mrrow!"
"It's supposed to be cold out tonight!"
"Mrrow!"
"Goodnight!"
"Mrrow!"
"See you later!"
"Mrrow!"
"Okay!"
".....Mrrow!"

He'd been gone for nearly three weeks when my mother found his body underneath our front porch today, already far along the process of rejoining the soil that fed the grass he loved to hide in, stalking voles.

I had worried about how he'd take it when my mother left the house, taking the animals to start a new life. I know he wouldn't have been happy being an indoor cat. He'll always be a part of Pleasant Street, now, his belly always full of fieldmice and his feet on the sun-warmed earth.

After reading about using marjoram essential oil as aromatherapy for high-strung dogs, I thought I'd investigate the use of essential oils and cats. A quick Google search revealed dozens of articles, but not at all about what I was expecting- apparently, most essential oils are toxic to cats, either in the short or long terms, because of their livers' inability to process phenols in particular! I couldn't find any definitive lists, but there were a lot of testimonies from vets about not using essential oils on or even around cats, because they can build up toxic levels quite easily due to the lack of a liver enzyme most animals have, but cats lack. The cats absorb the oils readily through their skin and inhale the compounds, building up over time to toxic levels. Here's a quote from one site:

It is best to avoid any oil containing phenols: oregano, thyme, cinnamon (cassia), clove, savory, birch, and melaleuca (Tea Tree oil) or ketones: sage. Another group to avoid are the citrus and pine oils: lemon, orange, tangerine, mandarin, grapefruit, lime, bergamot, pine, spruce, and any fir oil.

These are very common oils, and include several that Jeremy and I have been spritzing around the house for the last few months! I tend to prefer essential oil diffusers to incense (because of the smoke), but it seems like I'm going to have to make some sacrifices in the aromatherapy department. I literally just sprayed the living room with a relaxing aromatherapy combination before I had the idea to look up this information, and I feel terrible.

After spending a good amount of time on the internet, I'm convinced this is a legitimate concern and not alarmism. A good site to start with is The Lavender Cat, which has lots of vet testimonials and links. The bottom line seems to be that you should never, ever use essential oils on your cat no matter what the product says, and that even spraying or using them in your home can cause damage in the long term. Has anyone heard anything about this?

Apparantly, the 737 that went down over the Amazon last weekend hit an executive jet in midair, which was then able to land safely. The two planes were inexplicably both at 37,000 feet, and there was no indication to either plane that there was another jet approaching the exact same airspace. With two planes flying 500+ mph, there would have been no time for sound to warn of an approaching aircraft, and it is believed that the pilot of the Brazilian 737 made an evasive move at the last moment that likely saved the lives of the handful of people aboard the executive jet. It has been repeatedly stated that it's impossible to survive a mid-air collision.

And don't even get me started on how bizarre this recent rash of school shootings is. Am I the only one who feels like I'm living in an episode of the X-Files?

I check the  New York Times obituary page pretty frequently; it's part of my daily news routine. It's a curious way to keep up with the goings-on in the world, but it's acquainted me with a number of important people of whom I'd otherwise be ignorant. People can spend a lifetime of passion and dedication, and it can all be condensed several paragraphs. I figure I owe them that much; to read about their lives, and how they've contributed to mine.

But yesterday was the first time I've loaded the page and saw someone I've actually met and spoken with as a person.

Murray Bookchin, radical scholar, co-founder of the Institute for Social Ecology (along with one of my professors from Goddard College, Dan Chodorkoff) died on June 30th of heart failure in his home in Burlington. The Deep Ecologists will likely be celebrating; Bookchin often referred to them as eco-facists for their anti-humanist goals and philosophies. He published nearly 30 books, many under pseudonyms, and had a significant impact on the Green Parties in the United States and Europe. In 1992, the London Independent called him "the foremost green philosopher of our age." First a communist and then an anarchist, Bookchin eventually developed the political philosophy of social ecology, defined as "a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society."

His utopian dream was the abolishment of the nation-state, replaced with localized power organized by community governements modeled on the New England Town Meeting. Contentious, free-thinking, inflammatory, contradictory, brilliant, maddening, compassionate, ornery, and challenging, Bookchin's influence is more wide-spread than most realize. Still, in many ways his philosophies have never been widely accepted in the greater academic sphere, and so his ground-shaking ideas have never been fully debated.

His works include The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence & Dissolution of Heirarchy, The Murray Bookchin Reader, Urbanization Without Cities, and Our Synthetic Environment, published just six months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

I don't like internet drama, especially livejournal drama. I find that this isn't always the best forum to communicate, because those critical components of human interaction are missing: tone, body language, and instant response. However, there has been something that's been eating away at me for the last couple of months, and I've specifically not addressed it here because it distinctly falls into that category. If it were merely just 'net-based, it wouldn't be such an issue, but the problem is that it involves someone I know "in real life," as it were. I haven't even wanted to discuss it because a) it involves someone else's personal life, b) the whole thing feels juvenile, like a 7th grade cat fight, and c) it involves someone who is ubiquitous on my journaling community.

I don't even know where to start. The details are messy, and I'd rather not go into them becuase it's not important, in the end. Suffice to say that I haven't felt this angry, hurt, betrayed, and frustrated when it comes to a friendship. I don't open myself up easily, and I don't have a lot of friends in general, because I aim for quality over quantity. Whenever someone enters my life, I try to learn as much as I can from them, assuming that the Universe has something important to teach me. But right now I'm literally shaking with hurt, with anger. Since moving to Madison I've been feeling so disconnected from the people I love, my friends who are more like family, a thousand miles away, and I thought I'd found a potential kindred spirit.

I want to tell myself it's for the best; I sometimes thought this person was immature, or that we were on different paths, but who isn't? At the time, I worked through those feelings, telling myself that everyone has something to show us, a different niche to fill to make our experience complete. In the end, I realize that this person never saw me, never wanted to see or know me, never felt the same way about what I might be able to teach her, and her me. I never got the full sense of her as a person, because she always held back. I should have trusted the growing sense that it was an unhealthy pattern, that the gulf was too great. My problem is that I'm a fixer, and the believer that two people can work together to create a third truth. I approach all my relationships dialectically, and with the full force of my energy.

In some ways it's a relief to step away, to breathe out. Still, it's like being dumped; you always wish  you thought to do it first. It doesn't matter if you were considering it anyway; the rejecetion always hurts.  I think in this case, the pain comes from all the lost effort, the weeks of patiently waiting while the ball is in someone else's court, the failed attempt at a different approach. I'm almost embarrassed at how much I wanted this to work.

I wish I could be flippant, or humorous, or even crass. I could throw around a few "fuckings" and a "bitch" or two. I tried an angry rant, and it stalled out into self-pity. I can't even just walk away, as though nothing were different except that today it's raining. Sadly, I'm just too much of a sucker for endings. They always make me cry.

On my way to Jeremy's house for the weekend, we drove by a balding, potbellied man on an old red Schwinn. As we stopped at the stop sign he'd gotten off his bicycle, and was peering down into the sewer drain along the curb with perhaps the saddest, lonelist look I have ever seen on anyone. I was terribly close to asking Jeremy to stop the car so I could help him; how, I have no idea. I'd buy him a cookie, perhaps. "I think I'm going to cry!" I exclaimed, surprised at the force of the image of the sad, slow-looking man clinging to a beat-up bicycle and peering helplessly into a hole in the ground. "What if..." I said, my kamikazee brain immediately coming up with the saddest thing I could think of, "what if he's looking for a lost kitten?!. And the tears came in racking, hormonal sobs. For the rest of the weekend, I was close to weeping at the slightest provocation, and the announcement that several of my friends are either getting married or having babies put me in a maternal frenzy. Pictures of swollen bellies and breastfeeding babies became my kryptonite; it was enough to send me after Jeremy in a flurry of kisses, but not enough to keep me from finishing my birth control pill cycle.

I'm sure the ladies can sympathize.