Contemplations

Yeah, well I guess I haven’t written in a while. The part of me that needs to write, needs to communicate, has gone dormant for a while. It’s happened before, and it will most likely happen again. It’s just the way I’m built.

I’ve been busy, though, in my own peculiar way.

-I’ve been honing my eye/hand coordination by playing lots of Snood. I haven’t got any new high scores to report – I suppose after you’ve been obsessively playing the same game for three years you eventually reach a skill plateau that will only be rarely surmounted, and then only briefly. I reached apogee on 7/23/03 with a score slightly over 36,000. I’m currently seeing Snoods when I close my eyes and drift off to sleep. Especially those fuzzy blue ones. I wonder what that means.

-I’ve been in the process of conducting a study of that which lands in the tissue after I forcibly eject air through my nostrils. I’ve found it to be a fascinating pastime, though it is frustrating that no one else is as taken as I am with the various colors and consistencies I’ve been able to produce over time. I’ve progressed from the clear, water-like snot that precedes a cold or accompanies hay-fever to the rubber cement stuff that can be anything from bright red to a sort of grey-puce color and is nearly impossible to dislodge using the reasonable nose-blowing pressures the human body is capable of producing. What really amuses me is when I finally build up a good enough jet stream to knock one of the more persistently clingy goobers loose and it smashes like a little bullet into the Kleenex®. Like I said, no one has been as fascinated with this as I have been.

-And while we’re at it, has anyone ever noticed that Kleenex® Brand Tissues with patented anti-viral action come with “Directions for Use” on the bottom of the box? To quote the entire set of directions: It is a violation of Federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling. Use only as a facial tissue. Excuuuuse me? You mean if I use a fresh tissue as a bookmark, or a napkin, or … God forbid … wipe my butt with one the Feds are going to clap me in irons? It’s not even a matter for the local cops or the Staties? I wonder if this falls under the FBI’s or the CIA’s jurisdiction.

-I’m trying to read the Silmarillion. I read it once, back in the seventies. The edition I have is the first American edition, purchased by my parents as a Christmas present for me the year it came out, with their signatures, best wishes and date in the front. I read it soon after I got it and was disappointed in how difficult it was to plough through. I’d imagined it was going to be something like The Lord of the Rings, and instead found it to be more of a reference book, disjointed and full of unpronounceable names and obscure motivations. Indeed, I’ve exclusively used it as a reference book in the decades since. Over those same years I’ve gained in my knowledge of Tolkien’s world, and I’m hoping that I’m now mature enough to tackle the Sil and get what I should out of it. We’ll see. I continue to find the names and awkwardly Biblical phrasing difficult work; while I admire Tolkien’s ability to manipulate the language, I often have to read a sentence two or three times to extract the meaning of it. As of today I am no longer using a fresh Kleenex® as a bookmark.

-I continue to check on all the cats in the Shelter twice a week. It isn’t particularly taxing work. I just ascertain if each kitty is healthy or requires a visit to the “real” vet. I’d hoped to find this rewarding, and at times it is. In my present state of mind though, what I find is often disheartening or even heartbreaking. Even in as altruistic a group of people as I work with here, there is a lot of in fighting, backstabbing, and power grabbing. And I see so many animals that come to us for stupid, stupid reasons. Oh, the people doing the dumping always speak with voices filled with regret, and we’re given reasonable justifications, and I suppose the justifications are true more often than I credit. But surely there are not that many allergic children in the world. If a person didn’t want a cat to claw their furniture, then you’d think they wouldn’t have encouraged the kitten to crawl up their pants leg when it was seven weeks old. The cat has hairballs? Ever consider brushing the poor thing once in a while, or giving it a bit of Petromalt now and again? I guess I should be grateful that the people are bringing these animals to a shelter instead of simply making sure that the door didn’t catch their tails on the way out of the house. Getting a pet is a lifelong commitment peoples. Don’t get a cat if you haven’t done the research and can’t commit. I tire of seeing so many pleading eyes peering through cage doors.

-Oh, and to the bastard who injured one of our cats so badly as to cause it to lose one eye and slowly go blind in the other: You’ve done more towards inspiring religion in me than any of the proselytizers I’ve encountered in my life. I truly hope there’s a hell, so you can rot in it.

– I am in the active stages of planning for a trip to Holland in May. The passport application goes in tomorrow night, after work. I have to appear in person because my old passport was issued more than fifteen years ago. I’m stymied on a few stupid points in the application, though. For example, what do they want me to put under “hair color”? Is this supposed to be the genetic one, or the adopted one? If I admit to coloring my hair, does this make me a potential Enemy Of The People? Will I go on that secret list that we paranoid types all know the Government is keeping on potential terrorists? Fortunately, I didn’t change my name back to my maiden name when I divorced. A change in hair color AND name, and I probably wouldn’t be permitted to leave Pennsylvania, much less the country. Or perhaps they’d let me out and then not let me back in. It’s a good thing the passport application doesn’t ask who I voted for in the last election, or I’d most likely find myself in some secret detention center after submitting it. (If they find out about my illicit use of Kleenex® brand tissues, I’m really a goner.)

-Sixty-five days until Star Wars Episode III is released. I saw the trailer this weekend when I went to see the movie “Robots”. Actually, the trailer was about 75% of the reason I wanted to see the movie “Robots”. The movie turned out to be quite good, though, far better than I’d expected, so it turned out not to be a case of spending $8.00 on tickets just to see a two minute promo. Pathetically, Revenge of the Sith is the gleaming Star of Eärendil illuminating the path before me.

So that’s me, in a nutshell, to date. If you’ll excuse me, I think I see another game of Snood in my near future. But first, I have to blow my nose.