Navigation

Archive | Cat Lady Matters

We’re All Hotel Clerks

September 26, 2015 in Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, Quoth the Raving, Spirit Matters

There are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor, who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the willful guests.–Katherine Mansfield

I came across this in Tracy Daugherty’s Joan Didion biography, The Last Love Song, which I’ve been reading thirstily and disdainfully. I don’t mind the anonymity the quote describes, but I’ve been flashing on it as I’ve been watching the day turn to night. Sun’s turning all kinds of neon bruises that’ll disappear with her grand exit, permakitten Grace and I are admiring from the kitchen window, and there’s this feeling–immense, bottomless–of all of us passing through each other without leaving a dent. What’s interesting is how completely I’ve come to accept this. It’s not sad, not really. It’s just the fourth dimension, slicing through our existential chatter.

Sex Pots… and Pans

August 16, 2015 in Cat Lady Matters, Essays, Food Matters, Past Matters, Sabboytical

Tonight I ruined my beets. I boiled them for such a long time that by the time I looked up from my book, smoke had filled my apartment. I haven’t been that cotton-headed since I started living by myself twenty years ago but it was an engrossing book (another Octavia Butler) and it has been a terrible summer.

I mention the beets because, in the process of ruining them, I also ruined the pot, which made me panic for an existential minute. I’ve had this pot, a Brazilian stainless-steel 3-quart saucepan, for as long as I’ve lived by myself. I inherited it in a very stupid breakup—or, rather, in the demise of a very stupid relationship, the sort we used to have in the 1990s when we still equated sex with death and so made long-term commitments out of what should have been one-night stands. This man, whom I have called The WASP elsewhere, left me in his West Village studio when he left for graduate school, where he began shacking up with a fellow student before properly ending things with me. When the lease of his NYC apartment ended, he was too terrified to claim the household items he’d left behind. To be fair, by then I’d threatened to mutilate him with most of them.

So I found a sweet and affordable Brooklyn apartment of my own, and soon enough the only traces of him could be found in a set of stainless-steel pots as well as two sky-blue plates. (I ritualistically burned all his plaid flannel shirts.) This established a pattern. Whenever I received kitchenwear from a lover or, worse, their mother, the romance’s death certificate appeared on the wall. Continue Reading →

The Curious Case of the Red-Faced Cat

August 8, 2015 in Cat Lady Matters

This morning, as is her wont, permakitten Gracie raced into the living room and skidded to a stop right where I was sprawled on the rug, reading and drinking coffee. “Hello cute person,” I greeted her, as is my wont. Then I noticed her nose and forehead were smeared with an alarming shade of red. Had she killed something? Had she, G-d forbid, been injured? Already weeping, I reached for her tiny face to assess the damage when I realized that, in fact, she was covered in lipstick. Hey, love is love, baby.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy