ONE DAY, when my wife was a young vet tech the mere sight of whom in her scrubs would’ve killed me outright both then and now, they got two nearly identical giant orange tomcats, both named Bill. “What are the odds?”, one might ask, and I would tell one what I tell her every time she asks that question: good enough, apparently.
So, as was perhaps inevitable, the wrong Bill got sent home with the wrong family, and they didn’t discover this bambillzlement until they got home, at which point he scarpered from the carrier under their bed, his catheter flailing behind him like a can from a car marked Just Married, a spume of piss sprinkling the room like morning dew.
Now obviously that’s hilarious, but for my part I cannot imagine not noticing it was a different cat??? Do people not poke their fingers between the bars for to be rubbed upon? Do they not sing tiny songs about how their cat is their small and handsome son who has a stripey tail, and if he did a tiny crime he wouldn’t go to jail? Do they not answer in kind the Sad Car Meows, in solidarity at the injustice of it all?
Who is this cat-owner? Now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast.
January 14th:
What Is Your Preferred Mode Of Travel?
(Obligatory reminder to subscribe to my once-monthly newsletter here, which rounds up everything I wrote in the preceding month, grants access to a curated members-only Spotify playlist, and includes a piece of exclusive bonus collectible content I will NEVER repost anywhere else, ever!)
Why, by chocobo, dear boy!
Fun fact, because I was an only child and have a penchant for pronouncing things in unsanctioned ways, I always pronounced chocobo ‘KO-kuh-bo’, not ‘CHO-ko-bo’ or ‘CHO-kuh-bo’ as many do and which, I am forced to admit by the singular specificity of one of the ways the Japanese language is written, is technically “correct”.
The only real Travel™️ I’ve ever done was to Ireland with my mother in I think ’05 or so, where we took a train from County Cork to Killarny, which was lovely, it’s like a whole country made of Oregon, and we saw sheep that had been spraypainted, which is apparently how one brands one’s ovines.
Other highlights of that trip:
- Sitting in LAX reading Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island at like midnight because it was a 15-hour flight and I still don’t understand how the timezone/dateline stuff works
- Getting tiny airplane vodka spilled on me
- Listening to The Moody Blues’ Hall of Fame and Strange Times, and the Hellsing soundtracks on my ~20 gigabyte iPod~ until they were burned into my DNA
- Wait the money I saved for six months gets me how many Euros?
- Watching the UK premiere of Gorillaz’ Dirty Harry music video on television, which was the style at the time
- Trying to tip-handshake our driver and totally biffing it, said Euros fluttering to the floor like leaves that died of uncoolness and fell from their tree, weighed down by their failure
- IRISH DR. PEPPER IS (OR WAS, I DUNNO) MADE WITH WATER FROM IRELAND AND IT IS INCREDIBLE
- Having my very first drink (mead) ((gross)) due to Ireland’s drinking age on a tour of a castle (cool) ((also: drafty)), where they gave us symbolic bread and salt to represent hospitality and friendship (also gross, ditched in a sconce)
(Brief research update: this was in fact very illegal, and an instance of my mother being secretly cool that has gone unappreciated for almost twenty years! Or maybe she didn’t know and the pubman was cool? Someone was being cool to me in direct contravention of the law, is my point.)
Now I have cats and back pain and a full-time job and also uh that pandemic never ended, so yeah, I don’t travel. I guess a better book-blogger would say “*pulls down half-moon spectacles* *puffs on pipe* In books, naturally, scoff, etc.”, but in honesty that’s never been my experience of reading; I don’t exactly ‘picture’ what I’m reading, but when I do it’s always in third-person, just like my dreams, so A Memory Called Empire doesn’t ~transport~ me to Teixcalaan and I don’t feel like I grew up in Redwall Abbey, much as I would’ve loved to for adventure and also food reasons. Mmmmm, shrimp and hotroot soup with elderberry cordial and fresh oat bread.
–The Bageler
Feel the arms that reach out to hold me
In the evening when the day is through