P. Silb

With Cat

I’ve spent a good deal of the past two days sitting with a cat.  This particular cat, with the person-name Margaret, doesn’t have a lot of time left.  

I first met Margaret when I was probably 14 or 15 and my sister & her partner brought this kitten home.  They were in college and planned to bring her up to college with them, but in the limbo of winter break, Margaret was going to live with us.  She liked to scratch and bite, and when it turned out that you can’t have cats living in the dorms of certain colleges, Margaret came back to our house, where she could scratch and bite me as I attempted to pet her for the next several years.  

I had never really considered myself a cat person, but Margaret’s persistent aggression actually had me leaning in an anti-cat direction for a little while back then (especially when juxtaposed against the kindest dog I’ve ever known, the late Louie Silberman).  I’m not proud of this prejudice, and have since changed my mind, but in the interest of honesty I have to admit that.

My sister’s life took an impulsive, unanticipated and exciting turn toward California, but Margaret remained with my parents in New York.  For the years that followed, Margaret lived as a staple of our household, sitting around, hunting mice, eating, and glaring.  She and I developed a relationship not unlike that of two housemates who have issues and avoid one another.  

But in the past few years, Margaret’s changed.  She got nice.  

She stopped swiping at me, and in turn I stopped ignoring her.  We never became “close” the way some people are with their cats, but I became genuinely happy to see her when I visited and I think she was happy to see me too.

Now Margaret’s been sick for awhile- intestinal cat cancer I think, though I’m not sure because I’m not the one taking her to the vet, and I’m not here very often.  She’s mostly stopped eating, and so the logic goes that if you’ve treated something in these animals for a long time and it isn’t going to get better, the best you can offer them is relief.  So then arrangements are made to have a vet put her down.  

She was gonna go today, but then she started eating again, so we called it off.  But now again, she’s stopped, so the plan is to reschedule for Friday.  I’ve never really thought about making and breaking appointments with Death. Apparently there’s no 24-hour cancellation policy.

I’ve sat with her as much as she’s willing to sit still for.  Every so often she whips her head from left to right with her jaw open, a piece of whatever’s wrong with her.  The rest of the time, Margaret seems peaceful and knowing, quietly understanding what’s happening in a more primal way than any vet could ever explain to us.  She’s experiencing her end just a bit soon, at 12, which I am told is not that old for a cat.  She’s patiently watching the end of her life, a black cat lying on the shore as the tide comes in.  

And this is just a part of everything.  It can be upsetting to know that sort of truth about our lives, but I don’t think it should be depressing.  

If anything, maybe the predictability can be freedom, the lightness of knowing that we’ve only rented space until friday, so let’s see what we can do with only a few days.  After that, we have to leave with whatever we came up with while we were there.

Every time something dies- be it a cat, a friend, a spider, whatever- it should be a pie in the face to anything keeping us from using every second of our lives as an opportunity to do something completely fucking awesome.  

We are so lucky to have brains that give us hearts.  We are so lucky to have the capacity to care deeply about a fucking friendship with a cat.  

an excerpt from a new direction

I’m repeatedly listening to something we’ve finished recently, and writing down everything I think of, in hopes of making sense of it.  Here’s some of that:

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Let us make the best of the world we’ve all screwed up.

Let us forgive ourselves for being unable to conceive of the consequences of our mistakes.

Let us try to slow down our race to the end.

Let us know that altogether, the entirety of humanity and our planet is infinitesimally small, a speck of dust on a grain of sand on the endless beach of an infinite shore.

Let us find comfort in the peace that will come when the storm and the flood ends and the waters are still.

Let us be happy for the planet that it will be without us someday.

Let us acknowledge that the planet is better off without us.

Let us not take that personally.

Let us not look at this as fatalistic, nor as pessimism.

Let us be relieved that the catastrophes we’ve incurred here will not likely stretch beyond our general vicinity, that planets and stars and people billions of light years away will not be hurt by us.

Let us be apologetic for the mistakes we have made, but let us be happy too.  Let us enjoy ourselves and try to be better.

Let us be okay with the futility.  Let us be okay with our inevitable end.

Let us understand that the rules we’ve invented to explain the universe are designed for our own understanding, that they are not absolute.

Let us be proud of the fact that we are doing the best we can, and let us NOT use these previous admissions to mean that we should: give up, feel sorry for ourselves, be terrified, feel hopeless, feel guilty, feel ashamed, or feel anything other than extreme gratitude that despite our mistakes, we are here and we are alive.

Restart

At some point, I stopped truly writing publicly, maybe in an effort to funnel all of the words into our music, maybe out of exhaustion of explaining myself through vague, out-of-order sentences in interviews, it’s hard to say.  But lately, there’s too much to say and just never enough time to say it.

So what will likely follow are excerpts from longer entries that will remain mine and must remain mine.  What will likely follow is what I offer to you, in the hopes that it is never self-indulgent nor self-involved.  What will likely follow may seem perpetually out-of-context, despite all things in our world perpetually existing in-context.  What will likely follow may seem occasionally redundant in the event that you see no difference between redundancy and repetition, despite the billions of repetitions we experience every day.  What will likely follow may get swallowed up in your feed and ignored, or skimmed, because today we are impatient and our brains are getting full.  What will likely follow may have typos and grammatical errors but hopefully not too many.  

This is my attempt to write more, and an experiment in honesty.  There are times that writing anything at all seems pointless, not out of any self-deprecation, but rather out of being suspicious of one’s own motives.  At a time when everything we have to say is shared with everyone we know, the incentives behind speaking often and easily become self-promotional.  I want to avoid that as much as humanly possible.  I would write anonymously, but there is an inherent value in a large audience over none, if what you’re saying is honest and not self-serving.

A good friend passed on to me a speech Charlie Kaufman gave a screenwriting class.  I think this sums things up nicely:

What can be done? Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognize him or herself in you and that will give them hope. It’s done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it. It has profound importance in my life. Give that to the world, rather than selling something to the world. Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do. Try not to.