Doldrums

Winter is deep and seeping like Oregon mold, tendrils reaching in and branching off to grab onto every part of me.  I'm dodging here and there, back and forth, cutting off those tendrils where I see them, trying to survive with at least part of my happy face in tact.

Nights now I read on my bed, with my reading lamp and my reading glasses, sometimes aloud and dramatic, to my cats, making more of a book than it is, then laughing.

I do laundry but not like earlier, when I was trapping all those cats, and mine own would get bent from their smells in the garage and pee mark on my things and so the laundry was more then.  Now, there's very little unhappiness or territorial insecurity going on, not even with Number 34 in my garage the last couple of days.  We play so much now.  I call my cats The Family, because it's a big clan, mostly loving.  We all care about each other.   Not to say I don't miss my own kind sometimes, want to spend an hour or two with humans.  Sometimes I regret that weakness.

Been watching The Great War Diaries on Netflix.  It's hard to imagine WWI.  Just when everything was getting good, a terrorist act in Serbia, plunges most of the world into war.  Countries joined in for the smallest of reasons.  People had already forgotten how bloody awful war is and became joiners and followers, each in their own country.

The series is tongue in cheek at times, taken from letters and diaries of real folks living through that hell.  Sometimes they'll have one after another praying each to their god for victory and to save them personally, one after the other, from each country involved, from every side, praying to every god imaginable.   Can make a person laugh at the absurdity.  Or cry.

Everything humanity had achieved and accumulated and accomplished they blew up and destroyed over the course of that war.  And the people followed along.   In the end they turned over their belongings to be melted into bombs and tanks.   And we'll do it again.   One battle, one day--19,000 British troops died.  One day, one battle, on one side that many lost.  Wasn't enough though.  All sides kept blowing each other to bits and destroying their countries even longer.

That's how stupid humans are.  That's why its a weakness of mine to still want human companionship now and then.  A weakness I tell you.

The atrocities highlighted are unfathomable.  Like the Turks as their front failed to the Russians took it out on the Armenians.  They killed the men in terrible ways, and set fire to women and young girls before hurling them off a cliff.  They took many young girls and nailed them to crosses.  Armenians tried to flee to Russia but Russia did not want them.

Russians meanwhile were sent large amounts of aid money for doctors and nurses and hospitals and when an English aid worker went into Russia to trace the aid money, she found empty hospitals, nurses and doctors, on British aid salary, living the high life, with parties and fine accommodations.    She was outraged at Russian character.

Meanwhile, in all nations involved in the war, while the soldiers suffered and died, and the general population sacrificed and suffered, there were the profiteers who made tons of money supplying what was needed to the troops, from munitions to food, at very very high prices and at the expense of the people, forced to turn in their own belongings to melt down for munitions metal and work long hours in polluted dangerous factories at low wages to produce what the profiteers then sold for large sums.   Like we saw, in the Iraq wars, from military contractors like Haliburton---the blood sucking profiteers.

I had to bow out of this particular series after episode 6.  I couldn't take it.

Number 34 was neutered today.

On the drive over with him, I was making up a song.   We need a Neuter Rap, really, for the young people, something cool, not old like me.   I'll leave that to some young person to compose.

I tried hard on the short drive to come up with lyrics to opine away out of tune, to the poor boy in the trap in the back.

 "Just...say NO to F...I...V.....!  And you can go ahead and neuter me.......Your life will change.  You'll get brains.  It works better than a four year degree......."

I sang, dramatically gesturing to the cat in the trap in the back who had no escape.

I'm sure I could come up with better lyrics.  So could you.....!  Go for it.   Write a Neuter Rap!

I don't have any other trapping jobs on the horizon.  I can only trap if people pay my expenses and arrange for the cats to be fixed at the FCCO or Heartland and pay for the fixes.   The FCCO will often fix the cats for whatever a person can or can't afford, even if its nothing.  But just the fact I want my gas and bait paid for means most people who feed cats won't go for it.  Most people want it all done for free.  Most people want me their slave.

I'm really good at solving cat situations.  Or was.  I can so quickly assess it, determine what cats are what, the numbers and make a plan to get it done quickly.   It's a skill and a needed one, but I can't just give myself away as I've done for years, forever.  Too bad I couldn't have found a way to be paid.   It's a valuable service.

I came home and put the fake Christmas tree away.   I unscrewed that fake thing in two places, leaving it in three pieces and hung it in the rafters.   The spiders will love it!

The holidays are over with now.  Christmas.  New Years.  Again, I did nothing much to celebrate, although there's not much a single soul can do, really, except pretend best one can.

Try not to break out sobbing in public.  I'd just get hauled away.

It's just these short days, cold and wet and dark and nobody to talk to and nothing much to do.

Well, I could get in shape, I think to myself, choose a work out plan, do it in the living room now that the tree is in the rafters, there's room.

Ok, that I can try.

All right.   See you when I'm ripped and jogging up mountains while carrying large objects for effect with a Go Pro camera strapped to my forehead to record every moment for nobody in particular.

Eh.