moonlit berkeley hills floating in a sea of irk cat blogging

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I think I just inadvertently saved a deer from a big puddy tat. Very quietly out on the back deck in my socks to smoke a cigarette, and there were some very deer-skulking-in-the-bushes sounds, accompanied by a rather feral sniffing sound. So I started talking to them. The deer bolted, but the cat did not. I can't be 100% sure it even was a cat because I could not see it, but that's why I'm nearly 100% sure. The cat's coat won't reflect the moonlight, nor, if it's wise, will its eyes give away the glint of the lights still on in the neighborhood. Anyway. It kept up with the sniffing and completely relaxed skulking and then there was the sound of crunching bones. So. It already had dinner there and accounts for why the other deer didn't get chased when it bolted.

This is both soothing and distressing because it feels like home, but there are a lot of people around here with too much money and psychotic about their pets' welfare. PETA members, all, to be sure. So dat puddy tat gonna be mounted on somebody's wall if he eats Fifi or Muffy. Take that to the bank.

And, excuse me, this is the cat's property, no matter how much you've sunk into architects and feng-shui, but I had to go up and try to count house cats anyway, make sure everybody was inside. One is missing, but I think, I hope, he's in curled up on Trishy in the tv room having her before bed nap....

I've been having to do a heck of a lot of running around the past couple days in her car, since Goldie's in the shop, but now that she's back from Missouri, I won't have wheels till they can make Goldie do what she's been doing steadily for weeks now. You know the drill. But this isn't usually an impediment at the Honda Gods' place because they know to trust my word and go off that... always pans out. But, but, but the owner isn't there and the manager isn't there and it's a new mechanic, which is plenty weird because nobody leaves that job unless it's in a pine box... so... well... it's disorienting! It's almost as though they have stepped off their godhead and decided to go mainstream, ordinary, and it's scaring me.

I take this stuff hard. I took it hard yesterday after getting back over the hill [Mt. Tamalpais] from the doctor. I always go to the Bon Air shopping center when I'm here to see the nice people at the natural supplements store. They are wonderful! They know everything about all the vitamins, etc, and they only sell the stuff that is absolutely what it says on the labels -- vital to me now that I very seriously must keep my vitamin D levels up -- and I suddenly realized that it was almost five in the afternoon and I'd eaten exactly ONE banana all day. This fully accounted for my strange discomfort and that nagging, gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach.

So I decided to do something about it.

I walked over to Molly Stone's, one monster-ass snitzy grocery store with a dazzling array of gourmet ready-to-eat-practically-any-old-thing-your-heart-might-dream-up-to-desire. I merely snatched up some fancy Italian kind of sandwich and a pint of milk and headed for the checker....

Big puddy tat skulking and sniffing right out the window just now....

There was a woman in front of me who was plugged-in to her iPod... just going about her transaction as though the checker were an android or a vending machine and her fellow shoppers nonexistent. Another example of the dazzling heedlessness all around... but, of course, I could feel the checker's heavily suppressed anger, feel her battling the insult from blooming on her face, so I decided to go daffy in the checkout line, distract everyone, distract the checker from her hurt. It worked like a charm. The walking sculpture of heedlessness just completed her transaction with nobody and walked off in her chic gym clothes while all the stress and crappy atmosphere was being dispatched from the express check out.

I went out, grabbed me a little sidewalk table and bolted down my chic sandwich with my good old completely ordinary milk. Amazing. That gnawing thing cleared right up. Then I headed back toward Peet's so I could do something about the neurons batting willy-nilly against the inside of my skull, realign my synapses with some seeeeheeerious caffeine. I realized as I went that I was having another one of those days where everyone is looking at me again. I saw them all arranged at various spots, lounging with coffees or chic food or laptops at various coördinates, plotted just so to maintain a loose illusion of being somewhere public, but alone, aloof, almost part of the ambiance instead of the sentience.

I have a devastating effect on that stuff.

So. Hell. I entertained the snot out of all those empty-headed extras in the movie of my life and sashayed across the parking lot with my coffee toward an ATM machine that would spit out some of my no cash, help me support all this coming and going and staying and waiting.

It was little better today. Had to get back over to Mill Valley to have blood drawn to test all the levels of all the sundry things that need to stay optimized, a fasting blood test, and got stuck in the traffic jam of the apocalypse, yet another jackknifed big rig on the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge. My left leg has had to be strapped back onto me from clutching my way through the ordeal, but the buddhas smiled on me and let there be no one ahead of me at the lab. A nice easy, painless, few minutes with my insides trading places and back out into the world I went.

Chaos. Crowded streets and freeways, full of pinhead drivers and waves of irk flowing and flying and bouncing from every surface as far as the eye can see. Clerks who are as impermeably I-don't-give-even-a-micron-of-a-fuck as the woman with the iPod at Molly Stone's. Others harried and trying to be helpful, but really only being harried. Italianate men fetching up a pizza of divinity, and pausing to make calculations in a nifty little triangular space out of the hubbub. Pharmacists shrugging over a statin drug someone needed not being delivered today, not even breathing in the direction of making an arrangement for the poor patient who needed it to get it from a nearby competitor. How hard is that? How hard is that? How damn hard would something that simple be?