Monthly Archives: June 2005

Taking Care Of Chaos

Thumbnail: Chaos looks

Took care of Chaos over the week­end. Karen’s off in Toronto for a month, and Aaron went to vis­it Greg (who joined the reserves). Chaos is get­ting a lot big­ger, and even though he’s not quite an adult yet, he’s get­ting more and more dif­fi­cult to lift.

Thumbnail: Chaos sniffs

I’ve been think­ing about a sec­ond cat, ever since Shirley sus­pect­ed that her cats were giv­ing her chil­dren aller­gies. We were play­ing around with the idea of me adopt­ing one of them (the younger male), and she already told her kids that one of the cats may be going. Unfortunately, she found a bald spot on him, and needs to get him checked out first. If the vet vis­it goes alright, then we may do a one-month tri­al, to make sure that he gets along with both Dolly and Nala. I’m still not sure if I’m up for the com­mit­ment though. Dolly is enough of a hand­ful already, and I seem to be get­ting busier every day.

Resonance

(This took four months to write)

I was kick­ing back on the couch with ____
with the lights out and the music on.

Wut wut.

Anyway, we were stoned out of our skulls and it was Naked As We Came by Iron And Wine. We sat there, lis­ten­ing to the dul­cet notes of a lone gui­tar lead into Sam Beam’s sug­ary voice, soon to be gen­tly round­ed off by his sis­ter, Sara, as the har­mo­ny. A sum­mer-morn­ing-dur­ing-har­vest song, or danc­ing in the mid­dle of a cool rain­fall.

She says ‘If I leave before you dar­ling
don’t you waste me in the ground’
I lay smil­ing like our sleep­ing chil­dren
one of us will die inside these arms

Eyes wide open
naked as we came
one will spread our
ash­es round the yard

And we sat there, lis­ten­ing, remark­ing to each oth­er about how mor­bid it all was, yet so beau­ti­ful.

How two peo­ple can be so inti­mate with each oth­er as to be com­fort­able enough to casu­al­ly talk about the dis­pos­al of remains. They were plan­ning it like an ado­les­cent cou­ple decid­ing the num­ber of garages or chil­dren they’re going to have.

Even John was moved, but how could he not be? One of them would die but there was solice in the fact that it would be in the embrace of the oth­er, as if nei­ther one would want to die any oth­er way, doing any­thing else.

And it felt like, for the first time in my life, John could under­stand a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent side of me.