The roller-coaster ride of old pets, another dip, another rise. Took my dear old Bug boy in today to our outstanding vet office, East Carolina Veterinary Service, sure in that awful down-in-the-bones way it was over, or the start of over, and even the vet was bracing me for the worst of news. Old boy has …
So it’s well after midnight, and my dear wife has awoken more than once to alert me to this, as Total Dingbat Kitty with the big paws snuffles and snorts his way through sleep in the plush pillow valley between us, and the chipped wine glass sits cold and empty in the air-conditioned computer light …
So I’m in my kitchen doing kitcheny stuff, and my son, Luke, from the other room, starts banging out the drum part on the Jimi Hendrix gem “Crosstown Traffic,” on whatever version of Rock Band he’s wrapped up in today. And suddenly, there I am in my last angry years of high school, slumped down …
So I was not even aware that Mike “Obviously the Voters Are Sick of Me” Huckabee had bailed two days ago on his second abysmal slog at ensnaring the American electorate in his angry-white-man web of proselytizing pablum. And now, alas, Rick Santorum, God and Google’s own smudge of wet fecal ick, has himself left …
RIP, great Meadowlark. You inhabit one of my favorite childhood memories. This, from a story I wrote for Mountain Xpress in Asheville, when I was working there back in 2001: An 8-year-old kid gapes from the stands as the great George “Meadowlark” Lemon stomps over courtside to hurl a bucket of water on the ref — …
So there was this time that me and Monday were in a life raft together, the ship we’d been on sinking fast against the horizon, it matters not why. Soon after, Monday tried to take all the fresh water for himself, so I snatched a fat seagull right out of the sky and beat Monday …
So Thursday shows up, once again, at what he’s told will be a great party, invited, though kind of as an afterthought, along with his friend, who won’t be arriving till later. The place, of course, is dead, as dull as last week’s news. People are milling around aimlessly, as if waiting for some reason, some excuse, to let …
So if you beat a Monday hard enough for long enough, it’ll finally begrudgingly give up and go away, dragging most of your joy right along with it. But then Tuesday. Oh, Tuesday. Tuesday is that dreaded family member who shows up late at a holiday dinner, his bags packed in the car and his wheezing …
There’s just something about a bunny, apparently. As so many times before, as this morning, as I’m trying, vainly, to meditate, with enough focus issues without this to contend with, too: Our goofus half-hound Maggie goes absolutely batshit crazy over the sight of any of the little furry hoppers that call our part of the …
Few things are as heartbreaking to me as seeing someone at the veterinarian’s office with a much-loved animal for the very last time, with that shattering person struggling to hold it together, and the pet, through all its final suffering, still attentive to its adoring human. That kind of helpless grief and abiding devotion, that throbbing human …