Tag: cats

555: “What Do I Toss?” (Stephen Spotswood)

                “When I began the chore of writing all this down, I found I had to keep making the same big decision over and over again. What do I keep and what do I toss?” -Stephen Spotswood, Fortune Favors the Dead, pg. 98

                It certainly does feel like a chore sometimes: sitting down to type something out, to untangle and re-tangle thoughts and images into memories and scenes, people and relationships. There is so very much to put together. Today’s applecore, waiting on the cutting board to be sliced for the compost pile. My partner talking on a zoom call. My friends, a state away, and our long phone call. The cat I’d never seen before watching me through a window. “What do I keep and what do I toss?”
                And it’s not a chore, too. Also. At the same time. A delightful both-and, with meanings branching to meanings, moments nestling into movements. Because in the apple core is the cold water as I washed the apple this morning, and the rock of the knife, cutting slices to share with my beloved, and the sweet kiss of all that sunshine gathered into apple. In my partner’s zoom call (half overheard) are ideas about representation and community and delight. That’s what she’s talking about, and we talked about that too. Including on a walk some weeks ago, the sunlight warm on my bare arms as winter lingers in the shade of the trees. My friends a state away, and also their last visit, and the next time I might visit them. I don’t keep things or toss things. Maybe that’s why it’s less of a chore. I write in circles to feel the all this inside all this, circling and inside, again and again. A cat watching me through the window. The next time I walk by it’s gone, but we’re woven together. In its fur I felt warmth, a stranger, and I also felt the warmth of a cat I knew when I was nine.

by Azlan

484: “Your Strangest and Funniest Friend” (Dave Eggers & Amanda Uhle)

                “Find your strangest and funniest friend. Have that strange friend find their funniest and strangest friend.” -Dave Eggers & Amanda Uhle, Introducing Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire

                This is going to be a little all over the place, because you know when a child comes running up to you because there’s a cat outside and the cat was climbing a tree and my friend climbs trees and we love plums and did I tell you we’re building a spaceship that might be a garden? Were you that kid, sometimes? Are you still?
                Today my friend Jackie and I were sitting at a table, enjoying the breath of a gentle breeze and squinting through bright electric lights, and trying to work. It happens sometimes. She was working on an application for funding, which would help make possible some of her wildly cool research. I was trying to read Aja Martinez’s Counterstory, also wildly cool, and important for a journal article I’m revising. It’s all work we believe in. And we just didn’t want to do it. Our snacks had helped, fueling a few more keystrokes, but all the snacks were gone.
                So Jackie showed me Nael’s “The Tiger.” You might’ve seen it before—a spark of a little poem, and it jumped through all sorts of social media a couple years ago. The author’s a child. The poem’s full of a wild, brave, world-making excitement. “The Tiger” was published in a collection edited by 826DC, a very cool place that I’m definitely not reading more about (instead of doing my other work). I didn’t know this strange friend but I immediately recognized them as friends with 826 Valencia—a very cool someone, if you haven’t met them, and probably worth some not-reading of your own. And we do love plums. And there is a cat outside. And sometimes in learning from children (of all ages, 6 and 25 and 92) I remember that I’m a strange friend who loves my strange friends and that together we’re definitely making something.

by Azlan