Here's to them, the people—whose voice on the phone can make an evening; whose visit can make a weekend; whose love and friendship can make a lifetime. Here's to them, who sit by and let me scribble about their foibles (and mine), who share their lives with me, and make incredibly long treks for geekfests.
Without you, I'd have absolutely nothing to write about but myself, and what an amazingly tedious drudgery that would be.
—Life's rich pageant
(15 June 2002, the 2nd anniversary of this site)
'cat.net started as a lark, and I think about the first year's worth of entries can be taken as such, and left at that. In time, it has evolved, and continues to evolve. What it has evolved into is a matter of debate.
Commentary on the absurdity of life?
Travelogue?
Memory repository?
Free-form expository essays?
Saccharine homage to feline ownership?
Yes.
For now, I'll settle for this:
chronicle (noun)
'Chronicle' suits; it holds the implication of a narrative thread without the potentially pretentious nature of 'journal,' the confessional nature of 'diary,' or the referential nature of 'weblog.' It's also why people either stick around for years, or read one entry and go away: it's a long-form performance in a typically short-form medium. Most of my friends—indeed, most people I know—keep their personal-site readings to the equivalent of short literary snacks. Check the feedreader, see what's new, follow the tasty links and get back to work.
If I've achieved my intention, 'cat.net is the antithesis of the cheap literary snack. There are expository paragraphs. There are semicolons, for crying out loud. It's elliptical and appallingly verbose and uses quotes out of context and comes as close as I've ever managed to representing on paper the odd syntax and word choice that epitomize the continual waterfall of verbal tics that for years my friends have called "amyGlish."
I'm not an easy person to get to know. My website's about as user-friendly as the rest of me: cranky, obtuse, distracted, often forgets to answer emails … but if you're patient, and keep at it, one day the words will sink in and hit you just right and you'll sit up and say, oh my goodness, that's really her, isn't it?
I've been kicking that explanation around for a few days, after a short phone call with my mother. The distant nature of my relationship with my family has long been a theme here, but this phone call was not notable except for a small exchange that stuck with me:
me: "I posted my hiking photos on domesticat. I don't know if you've seen them."
Mom: "Oh, I don't look at anything like that."
I thought about it, long after the phone call ended and I'd driven on to my next errand. A lark, this once was, but no more; the fact that she wasn't reading it meant she was missing something important. More than once she's said that she didn't really understand me, and that she wondered what was going on in my life, and it hit me—for years now, she's had access and an avenue into not just my life, but a lot of my thoughts, and she's chosen not to use them.
For better or worse, these words, despite (or because of?) their obtuseness, are me.
Her loss.
]]>After all, lacework is the art of beautifully framing empty space.
I like stories about flawed people, mostly because I understand how to relate to flawed people. The knots—the holes, if you will—give you places to grab on to. Points of reference.
Years ago, I knew someone—let's call him Jeremiah, for reasons known only to me—who undoubtedly qualified as the least flawed person I'd ever known. Even now, many years later, he still holds that distinction. Then, I would have described him as "smart." Now I would just describe him as "relentless."
He was perfect. Aggressively so. Grades: perfect. Shoes: evenly tied, equally (gently) worn. He slicked his hair down even in 1994, when plaid flannel and Kurt Cobain were the fashion heroes of the day. He wanted to be a doctor, probably had never considered being anything else, and we had known each other since first grade.
I spent years attempting to crack the perfection he presented to the world. We (those fellow misfits I banded with in high school) all did. A Seventh-Day Adventist, Jeremiah staunchly refused to attend football games on Friday evenings, nor would he join us for casual get-togethers on Saturday or Sunday nights.
Gradually, we all let go of him. Not because we wanted to; we had all grown up together and wanted to remain friends, but there was no visibly empty space in his life that any of us could fill.
With no visible holes, there was no foothold. WIth no foothold, he just slipped away, as self-contained as he always was. I haven't heard from him in eight years. I doubt that, unless our classes have joint reunions and he chooses to attend, I ever will.
By now, he's probably a doctor, and probably a technically excellent one. I just wonder if he was ever able to learn to truly relate to the foibles and fallibilities of others when he had so few of his own.
Somewhere, along these lines, lies the elusive answer to why I liked Twin Falls Idaho so much. Even on the second viewing, I could see the faults lying behind its earnest intensity. Contrary to my usual behavior, I found I liked the movie all the better for them.
It concerns itself (surprisingly enough, given the subject matter of this entry) about holes. Not pretty, I-don't-know-what-I-should-wear-today Valley Girl holes, but the kind that come from dealing with a reality that doesn't come tinted by the silver unreality of cinema. The kind of holes that throw a person so off-kilter they only manage to right themselves for a few minutes every few years, before slipping back into their world of constant overbalancing and overcompensation.
One of the keys to the movie is to look where the directors want you to look: at the third character. The movie's twins, Blake and Francis, have such painfully obvious holes in their lives that Penny's holes in hers are overshadowed. A viewer who stares only at the twins during the movie won't notice that Penny's dress, hair, and makeup gradually melt into a semblance of normalcy as she finally begins to relate to someone.
The movie progresses by occasionally-obvious steps, peeling away layers of characterization until what's left is nothing but two very desperate, very lonely people, whose need for someone in their lives is so pervasive, so looming, that it would be almost impossible for them not to be able to supplant each other's weaknesses. The comfort, when it comes, is both sad and haunting. Most movies never manage to conjure such a moment.
An appreciation of moments like these runs counter to just about every notion of 'connectivity' that we have in our culture. We have email, snail mail, voice mail, answering machines, multiple telephone lines, instant messages, notes on the fridge, notes on the counter, cell phones with voice mail, and sometimes even pagers for when all of those other methods don't work.
All because we want to be found the instant someone cares enough to want to find us.
The empty spaces, framed and punctuated by calls/faxes/letters/emails/messages, can be daunting. Mostly because we suspect we're the only ones who ever, occasionally, feel a stab of worry that the silence means that no one gives a damn.
After all, it's only a neurosis if you're the only one that's got it.
* * * * *
So, yes, I went chasing around town today to see if anyone actually had a used copy of Twin Falls Idaho available on DVD. Of course not. But I did find that Peter Murphy CD I wanted, so the trip wasn't entirely wasted.
You know, I really only meant to get up to get a glass of water; when I left this entry a few hours ago, I really meant to wait until the morning to finish it. Oh, well. These things just happen, I suppose…
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