Not Settled In

Good evening morning. A few things are different now than they were the last time I talked to you, but you had probably gathered that from before.

I've mostly moved back into my old place, I'm slowly acclimating myself to my new job, a new hockey season has begun, and I've re-aimed my sights once again towards what should be a positive direction. (Remind me to tell you about that later.)

That's nice, you might say, probably patronizing me when you do. Sounds like good times, you add. And I'm sure they must be, but despite these things it has not exactly been a good week.

Far from it, in fact. I've spent the past week anxious and miserable and pissed off all at once, and this combination may not be coming apart for a while yet.



This is my cat, Maceo. He is a black cat with yellow-green eyes and a distinctively low call; his fur is far smoother than you would expect, and since he is made of solid muscle he is substantially heavier than he initially appears.



He is about a year and a half old, he is neutered, and the tattoo in his ear reads SA3317. He has been missing for a week now, and there is nothing that I could have done about this.

None of my former roommates have owned up to doing it, but damn sure somebody put him outside; I don't know what kind of contemptible shithead lets an indoor cat out two days before its owner has to pack up and move away, but sure enough somebody did just that a week ago and nobody has seen my cat since.

This is astoundingly similar to how my last black cat disappeared. At the time I was eleven years old, and I had owned her since I was two and a half; eventually she turned up after several months and immediately died of feline leukemia. I took this about as well as any eleven year old does in these circumstances.

You can imagine why I've not been blogging away, as late. I've tried phoning every outlet available (the Dead Animal Pickup has no records matching the descriptions, so there's hope yet); I've called from the windows and hilltops; I've lapped that neighbourhood who knows how many times now. The Humane Society only holds on to adult cats for four days, so I'll be launching myself on regular sortees out to Transcona. And with a week having now passed I'm going to be scaling up to posters, handbills, increasingly furious searches, and a progressively worse mood.

If you're in the southern tip of Winnipeg, in neighbourhoods along Pembina and just north of the Perimeter, please keep an eye out for any black cats; if one walks up to you (and I don't doubt that he might), check his ear for tattoos or lift him to see if he's deceptively hefty. Turn him in to the Humane Society or your nearest veterinarian, or contact me directly at the email address given above; whatever the case, I'm sure I can scrape together some kind of reward for whoever might find him.

And until I find out what's happened to him one way or the other, I reserve the right to be taciturn and dangerous; I'm very much an animal person, and since nobody has yet confessed to their having taken an animal of mine away from me at the worst possible time, I've decided that I'm not too keen on people right now. (And I was never much of a social butterfly to begin with.) Please do not take it personally if you approach me about some unrelated or trivial matter and I burn straight through you with the heat and fury of a thousand suns and a thousand wrathful gods.

Such is my mindset right now. My apologies in advance.

Broder Daniel - Dark Heart (Broder Daniel Forever, 1998)
[info | myspace | official... forum? | somehow this album is completely unavailable anywhere]

Deckard - Nothing More (Dreams of Dynamite and Divinity, 2004)
[buy | site]

Okkervil River - No Key No Plan (Black Sheep Boy Appendix, 2005)
[buy definitive edition | site | myspace]

Zombina and the Skeletones - Nobody Likes You (When You're Dead) (Taste the Blood of Zombina and the Skeletones, 2002)
[site | myspace | for the life of me there is nowhere to buy this album]

I'll make an effort to keep writing about whatever and the usual and etcetera, but you'll probably be able to tell that my heart isn't really in it. Granted, I'm out of town for most of this weekend (it's already Thanksgiving, somehow; I don't know how that happened), but I'll come up with something soon.



Man, I miss my cat.