Iron Sky, Chope’s… and the box in the freezer

Won’t be sleeping for a bit.

***

My dad and stepmom had me down in Las Cruces, New Mexico for three weeks.

I got to show Gwen (in spirit) White Sands National Monument at moonrise. And show her what a chile relleno at Chope’s is like. (Chope’s is where they make the best chile relleno in the world, ever, and even in the future. When you take a bite there is some danger of dropping straight off to sleep and having a dream about how good it is. Chope’s is on Highway 28 south of Mesilla. Make a note, in case you’re ever in the Las Cruces area. If you ask about Chope’s on arrival they’ll assume you’re from there and ask which high school you went to.)

Showing her the bat flight at the Carlsbad Caverns briefly looked possible but did not come to pass – it would have been a two-day trip. Well, something for the future.

I showed her the most beautiful skies in the world, New Mexico’s. They are. Or they’re dead even with any possible competition. The summer flotillas of cumulus clouds were fanned out across the sunny skies in infinite array on this one day, and they get this violet glow on the bottom that is almost too delicate to catch in memory. I almost can’t remember it now.

And in a mad, mad, mad diversion… well, Gwen and I had been waiting very impatiently for Iron Sky to finally get a U.S. release. We waited for months, while it was released in Finland, Europe, Australia, the U.K… We waited forever. They finally announced the U.S. release the day after Gwen died. They did the release, if you can call it that, very strangely for the U.S. – it’s through a company called Tugg.com, where you can request a single showing of a movie on a single day, they’ll set it up with a local cinema, and if you can get enough people to reserve a minimum number of tickets it’ll go “live” and the show will actually happen at that one time on that day in your town.

So, in the grip of strange bittersweet weathers, I wrote my family and one friend in Las Cruces and asked if, since I was going to be flying down, they could corral some people to reserve some tickets if I used Tugg to request a showing in Las Cruces, so that I could take my fiancee to see this bizarre B-movie comedy about the Nazis who have been hiding on the Dark Side of the Moon since 1945. They didn’t think it was crazy; they liked the idea. … And after much drama and tearing out of hair, it actually worked and came together. My family bought enough tickets to make it go live. I put up some posters around New Mexico State University and in some coffee shops… and the room damn near sold out on the actual night, 91 people, which took us all by wonderful surprise. And Iron Sky was a lot of fun.

So.

And I was carted around a lot, up to Dad and Ann’s cabin in Ruidoso – and then out west to Tucson, Arizona because a nephew of mine had a soccer game in Phoenix… (We went to the Sonoran Desert Museum, an incredible and thorough place, like a big unending mazy interpretive zoo, out in the middle of the Saguaro National Forest, meaning a forest of saguaro cactuses as thick as pine trees would be elsewhere… That place is worth seeing!) Not as much time actually in Las Cruces as I thought, although I did get to go up and climb around the Cueva Rocks up near Dripping Springs, at the base of the Organ Mountains east of town. Three weeks there.

And then I came home. And joined this situation here. And I get to hope (in whatever strange speculative agnostic desperate loving sense) that Gwen followed me in my journey, or that she did not grow disheartened at the long break in my near-daily visits to her grave, and attenuate away in my absence… I explained it to her before I left, and I tried to bring her to me when I was down there…

***

And Ziffles my cat is in the outside freezer, in a box inside a plastic bag, next to the lasagna.

Because she is to be buried underneath the memorial tree that we got for Gwen, a Sango Kaku (coral bark) Japanese maple, and I was not here to clear the area in the ornamental grass bed for the tree to be planted, or to dig the hole for it. So.

Mom took her to the vet while I was gone, I mentioned in here that that was going to happen. When the vet weighed her, she weighed four pounds. Four pounds. A skeleton under the fur. And when the first sedative went in, before the second killing injection, she purred. She purred.

The vet said that a thyroid problem would account for the weight loss even though Ziffles was eating ravenously the whole time. … And I have since looked it up, and a thyroid problem would have explained EVERYTHING, everything from the beginning on down… the strange meowing, the confusion, the endless circling, the progressive (and, in the end, decisive, of course) loss of toilet habits… Everything.

The worst thing is that, from what I can find, the thyroid problem may have been treatable. Looks like it. Ziff could have been fine. It sounds like she’d have recovered.

But – well, Mom was thinking that this was an eighteen-or-nineteen year old cat, who didn’t have long anyway, and as far as we knew this was just old age, no point spending money on a vet… I was more on the side of taking her to a vet, but I had no money myself to do it, and I had no reason to argue with Mom’s logic or her premises; they didn’t seem wrong. And we thought an old cat would die soon, if old age was catching up; we had no idea of this long, strange, terrible degeneration over the last year and a half… We did pay attention and talked about it and we didn’t think that Ziffles was actually in pain, and maybe we were right. I hope so.

So now Ziffles is in the freezer next to the lasagna.

Listen. Read close now. Ziffles had the largest and most varied vocabulary I have ever heard from a cat, with great command of inflection, that she used to express a great many things. A lot of cats meow a lot, but Ziffles was a conversational cat. She liked to talk back and forth with me. She was – very awake, sometimes. Very there.

And… it is said that cats cannot recognize themselves in mirrors. Mirrors were Ziffles’s favorite pastime. She would sit and look into them alone, and she would come and get me and jump up on the bathroom sink and look at me in the mirror, and lean backward into my hand when I went to pet her. (And when she began to lose her mental acuity, the mirrors were the first thing to go. Suddenly there were no mirrors, even if I tried to show her.)

And, you see, no one at all is going to know these things, ever, if I don’t tell you here.

Sorry, Ziffles. My cat. My best cat ever. Sorry. This place here, this world, is a hell of a mess, and so are we.

***

The terrible thing about that memorial tree for Gwen, that beautiful idea, is that Mom has a reverse mortgage. Never mind what that is; the part that matters is that Mom, who is 75, can keep the house for as long as she lives in it, but, when she dies or can no longer live in the house, unless she has lived long enough that I am 62 and I can take the reverse mortgage over, the house will have to be sold immediately to pay off the bank. And here we are planting a memorial tree in the yard…

It’s the little things that get you. Or the huge things, the things of context. The world’s on fire.

***

In a way I think the trip was a mistake under the circumstances – or the vacation between classes, the three weeks down there being extreme vacation. From one angle, anyway. I came back not sure I’m coping here as well as I was when I left; there is a wondering where my balance is, and not really having it… No.

(My bedroom had been closed up for three weeks, and all the catshit smell, including parts and notes that don’t normally come out of the turds fast or strongly unless you damn near chew them, had had all that time to come out of the little bits that Ziffles had hidden at the far side of the room and that I had not found. So when I opened the door, I hit an unbreathable wall, and I opened all the windows and then slept on the recliner in the living room that night instead of in my own bed, and that is like what returning to the scene of my grief was like, even though I’d been carrying my grief with me the whole time.)

But the angle I was thinking of. I think the vacation time, with guesting and with the family carting me around for three weeks, may have been a mistake in one sense during this time – meaning that I seem to be out of practice in making decisions of any sort.

(And with, meanwhile, Gwen’s death in the core-of-self I’d usually be relying on. I mean, usually problems are on the outside and I turn to my inside and what’s going on there, but now I can’t… Is that clear? I can’t tell.)

Since I got back, I have had a few days, alone in the house, that you could call “alcohol-free lost weekends.” Where I just sat. I guess I expected I was going to do things, things I did need to do… and I had intentions in the sense that if asked I would have reeled off what they were… but there was an eerie total absence of the sort of intending that moves you. Just – nothing.

Maybe I should have spent the time “retreated” into a really in-depth strategy computer game, where you do nothing but practice making picky little decisions. (I had actually been thinking something of the kind, before I left, and I had been looking at the game Distant Worlds, with the two expansion packs; too expensive for me to be able to get, especially because it appears both expansion packs are necessary to make it playable, but it looks really, really good.) It wouldn’t have looked healthy – but. “Stay busy.” Maybe?

I hope the arrival of my next online class cracks me out of this. … That’s a silly thing to say, isn’t it? What is “out of this”? What is that supposed to be? – Out of the “alcohol-free lost weekend” dumb ADD-on-jet-skis stasis, anyway. Where I can barely even mumble “I need to start making lists.” Where I’m not being what Gwen would like – even at all…