And I don't mean the late-life Trump craziness. Or the mid-life Scientology craziness.

Last month I watched “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” for the first time in forever, and I was like, “Oh right, Kirstie Alley as Lt.—or Mr.—Saavik.” I'd forgotten how sexy she was. To be honest, I'd also forgotten she'd died in 2022—age 71. Cancer. But while perusing all of this on her IMDb page, I, inevitably, came across this.

What's missing from this “Known For”? Just what she's known for.

That algorithm really disrespects TV, doesn't it? That algorithm really disrespects us, doesn't it? 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Did anyone tell Christopher Nolan, as politely as possible, “Hey Chris, you might want to take a breath”? Probably not. Breathless is Nolan’s default. 

Last summer my twentysomething nephews asked me which of the Barbenheimer films I liked best, and for a moment I pondered the joys and issues of both films before side-stepping toward what felt like the truer response: “I’m happier that ‘Oppenheimer’ was made.” It’s a movie for adults about some of the most serious topics of the 20th century: the creation of the Atomic bomb and McCarthyism. And it was done hugely and beautifully and released in the summer. My god, the summer! What a joy that is. How much we should be kissing Nolan’s ring for giving us a big, serious film in July. 

And yes, you could say “Barbie” was a movie for adults about important topics. But it’s several times a fantasy whose interest in the end is about power and partying. “Oppenheimer” is about power and intellect. It luxuriates in smarts. It’s an ode to genius.

Chain reactions
“Oppenheimer” has three intercut storylines:

• The main one: the journey of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) from studying quantum physics in Europe to leading the Manhattan Project and beyond
• His interrogation in a 1954 closed-door congressional session, masterminded by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), that leads to his dismissal from government service
• Strauss’ interrogation before Congress in 1959, when his appointment as Sec. of Commerce is rejected

Live by the congressional hearing, die by the congressional hearing. That old saw.

Are there too many “gotcha” moments? Too many “reveals”? Oh, so Strauss isn’t a good guy? He’s the main villain? And David Hill, tossed up as a potential enemy, and whose clipboard Oppenheimer sends clattering across a train station floor, and, lest we forget, is played by Rami Malek, he stands up for him? And oh no, Oppie’s wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), is going to testify, but she drinks too much, and now she’s hemming and hawing and looking down at her lap and maybe itching to get the flask out of her purse as the prosecutor digs in. But wait! She totally turns things around! She makes him look bad and gets the congressmen on Oppenheimer’s side! Yay!

I also don’t get Alden Ehrenreich’s role. He’s supposed to advise Strauss during his congressional hearing but turns against him, or at least roots against him, when he finds out what a jerk he is. I guess he’s just there to signal what we’re supposed to feel. “Chris, what’s my motivation in this scene?” “You don’t have a motivation. You don’t even have a name.”

With all this carping, you’d think I didn’t like the movie. I did. It opened up (as much as anything could) the world of early 20th century quantum physics for me. And it was fun seeing characters excited to see Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh). Hell, it was fun seeing someone portraying Niels Bohr. Or Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer), Richard Feynman (Jack Quaid) or Edward Teller (Benny Safdie). And those are just the names I know. Imagine you’re a scientist watching this. It would be like me and “42”: Hey, Clyde Sukeforth! Cool!

So I liked all that and the early amazement at Oppenheimer’s intellect: learning Dutch in six weeks, knowing Sanskrit, reading Proust and Eliot and quoting Donne. And I just loved David Krumholz’s Isidor Rabi, the fellow Jewish-American physicist who humorously chastises Oppenheimer for learning Dutch while not knowing basic Yiddish, then feeds him like a Jewish mother. That’s a supporting role I could’ve seen expanded. I smiled every moment he was on screen. (Rabi’s relatives, apparently, felt otherwise.)

And when Matt Damon’s Col. Groves shows up? So fun. The “We need to get this done by any means necessary so get out of my fucking way” attitude, but with a glimmer in the eye.

Does the movie lose itself about 90 minutes in or did I just get tired? More, does the tripart structure (the trinity structure?) take away from the magnitude of the discovery—the moment when we realized that all that intellect and progress was just leading us toward global destruction? These are its last lines, a flashback to Princeton 1946:

Oppenheimer: When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world …
Einstein: I remember it well. What of it?
Oppenheimer: I believe we did.

Then he stares into the void and feels the horror of the accomplishment. Some have criticized Murphy’s performance as too wide-eyed and one-note, and, given everything Oppie did, he does feel passive. But Cillian is amazing for staring into the void and feeling the horror. (Cast him as Col. Kurtz.) But should that moment have been at Princeton 1946? Is there a reason it’s Princeton 1946?

The constant reference to Oppenheimer’s post-Hiroshima fame is a little odd, too. Before he visits Pres. Truman (Gary Oldman), he sees a TIME magazine cover story on him: Father of the Atomic Bomb. Then Truman greets him with “How does it feel to be the most famous man in the world?” Because of TIME? Oppenheimer’s TIME cover story was actually from Nov. 1948, not Oct. 1945, and its subhed is a little less grandiose: Physicist Oppenheimer: “What we don’t understand, we explain to each other.” He certainly got more famous. According to newspapers.com, “Robert Oppenheimer” was mentioned in seven articles in 1944, and 1,490 in 1945, but it doesn’t top 2,000 much. That’s not exactly “the most famous man in the world.” It’s science fame. He was famous for a scientist. His high-water mark, again per newspapers.com, was set during those 1954 security hearings, when he’s mentioned 22,042 times. You know who was written about more that year? Lewis Strauss: 30,504 times. He’s written about even more in 1959. 

The Strauss affair was a huge story at the time, written about constantly, not to mention historically important: the only cabinet nominee between 1925 (Charles B. Warren) and 1989 (John Tower) to be rejected. What I find fascinating? I’d never heard of it. I was born in 1963, sure, but I read a lot of history, and a lot about that period, and … nothing. Even in Robert Caro’s thousand-page tome, “Lyndon Baines Johnson: Master of the Senate,” it’s mentioned only once, and off-handedly, not to mention parenthetically. In the lead-up to 1960, LBJ had to placate both right-wingers “and the great Senate bulls (he paid off a lot of debts to Clinton Anderson by cooperating in Anderson’s efforts to defeat President Eisenhower’s nomination of Lewis Strauss to be Secretary of Commerce…”).

Should that have been the lesson of the film? If your power stays in the shadows, your legacy might, too? Or is that too “Amadeus”? Oppenheimer’s name continues to resonate while Strauss’ winds up in the dustbin. “Do you know nothing of my music?” It might’ve helped if Strauss had made music.

Teller’s hand
“Why aren’t you fighting?”

Kitty says this (repeatedly?) during the ’54 hearings, but it seems an odd question since Oppenheimer is never portrayed as a fighter. He’s a scientist who somehow falls into the Manhattan Project gig. (The film assumes he’ll get it—because he does—but I’m curious who else Gen. Groves considered, and why, in the end, he went with Oppenheimer.) Oppie’s a man with an open mind who listens to everyone around him and tries to keep the group together. Teller wants to work on his H-bomb theories? Sure. Have at. He’s a diplomat.

But since the film raises the question, what’s the answer? The obvious one is he feels the need to pay for his sins: A-bomb, Hiroshima, bringing us into the nuclear age, destroying the entire world.

I’m curious why he didn’t make more of the thin window between the end of the war in Europe (early May 1945, when our need for the A-bomb kind of ended) and the Trinity test (July). Was there too much momentum? I get the political calculus: You save countless U.S. GI lives and send a warning to the Soviets. But what was Oppenheimer’s calculus? To just see it through? Was it a bit of Stockholm Syndrome? He’d drunk the military Kool-Aid? Or did he, the perennial theorist, just want to see if it would work? Because if he’d wanted, he could’ve put the kibosh on it pretty quickly. Just resurrect the whole  “Yeah, we might set the entire atmosphere on fire” scenario. “What are the odds of that?” “Oh, less than 10%.” 

The most famous line Nolan has ever written, or filmed, is probably from “The Dark Knight”: You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Back in 2008, that felt like bullshit to me—in the film it comes out of nowhere—but, man, the times have proven it true. “Oppenheimer” adds an addendum: resurrection. For a time, J. Robert is the hero. But he lives long enough, and through reactionary times, to become the villain. Then the times shift again, his enemies are smited, and in the 1960s his wife stares daggers at Edward Teller’s proffered hand.

I suppose I should finish the book—it might answer some of my questions. I got 200 pages in last summer but got distracted. Either way, I’ll always have a fondness for the film. It’s the last movie I ever saw with my brother.

The other day, walking around a city that is increasingly full of homeless drug addicts, Bob Dylan's “Tryin' to Get to Heaven” came on iPhone shuffle, and these words hit me in a new way:

When you think that you've lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more

Chris and Jellybean last fall, Clem last month. And, as the man said, it doesn't have to end there. There's more to lose. “Not single spies but in battalions,” as another man said.

And here's yet another man, Craig Wright, who, the other day on his SubStack, gave us an ode to living with uncertainty and a warning about its opposite.

“...every time I've seen a properly sad and searching human being stop searching quite so desperately because he believes he's finally found enough of what he needs that he can rest his soul for a bit, I've seen those human beings lose some of their human being: most pertinently, their ability to listen. The machinery in them that used to be for listening gets repurposed...

”But I have some news for you, those of you who are (thankfully) still sad and searching, who don't quite believe what you believe and have no place to rest: you're supposed to be sad and searching and there's no time to rest. You're doing great! If you're doing your job as a real human being, the job should get harder. You should know less every day and move with ever more caution and quiet through a landscape about which you should be increasingly suspicious. That Grief that children (and inner children) want to flee should look bigger and more unjust as we grow in awareness, and nothing that claims to quell it should be trusted because that Grief is actually where the Hope and Love we need most to keep searching forever live.“

That is a balm to my soul—assuming I'm still a sad and searching human being, as opposed to just sad. Either way, it spoke to me. In a way, it was better than Dylan's or Shakespeare's lines. Theirs are basically ”Tough luck, kid.“ Craig's is ”Welcome to the party, pal," but he means it. He wants us at that party. Because the other party is just assholes.

I recommend the whole article. Pass along if you know someone who could use it.

Task No. 1, Billy: Don't let something like this happen.

Hey, it's the Oscars today! Remember those? Also Daylight Savings! I can't forget those. Not because I'm agin it but because of the neverending bitching. Maybe more on this later. I just know we have a big country, and the north ain't the south, and people in the north don't want the sun to come up at 4:30 AM nor have it pitch dark at 8 AM. So I don't mind. It's a ritual. Learn to set your clocks. Figure something else to bitch about.

Related (to the Oscars thing): I recently finished Michael Schulman's “Oscar Wars,” a book that delves into the history of the Academy Awards via eight or nine focal or pressure points, including:

1. the creation of the Academy as an anti-unionization mechanism, when the awards were an afterthought
2. the Robert Rich debacle, when the 1957 best story award was presented a guy who didn't exist (it was a pseudonym for blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo)
3. Gregory Peck's 1969-70 attempt to add youth to the Academy membership while letting some of the older, less active members fall by the wayside (repeat every 10 years)
4. the Allan Carr debacle
5. how the Academy was unable to save “Private Ryan” from Harvey Weinstein
6. #OscarSoWhite
7. the envelope-gate debacle

Schulman goes deep into each topic. I mean, I've read a lot about the blacklist but he was providing context I'd never heard before. So too with recent history like EnvelopeGate. I knew there were two versions of each envelope, for stage right or stage left, but not some of this:

The Friday before the show, an Academy staffer showed Todd and De Luca a prototype of the winner cards, which for the first time weren't printed by the Academy's regular stationery company. Todd, who wears glasses, asked that they be reprinted in a bigger font, so that the presenters wouldn't have to squint. “But,” she recalls, “Mike and I never saw the outside of the envelope,” on which the categories were printed in a gold-on-maroon color scheme that was difficult to read. And instead of a faux-wax seal with an easy-to-pull ribbon, as in past years, the new envelope was sealed with a cumbersome piece of tape.

Gold on maroon! JFC, that's like a John Mulaney joke: “I hope that you can read pink on purple, as that is the layout that we have chosen.”

In the aftermath, everyone was trying to figure out what happened, and Warren Beatty was refusing to give up the card he'd been holding and that he knew was wrong because it was for best picture but read: EMMA STONE, LA LA LAND. Apparently Faye Dunaway just saw the LA LA LAND and blurted it out. In the rehearsal, Dunaway had initially said she wanted to read the nominees, then said no, she wanted to read the winner, for which Beatty teased her. And maybe she thought he was now letting her do just that.

(Here's my day-after take, defending Beatty from all the sharks in the water.) 

Backstage, everyone was trying to figure out the why of it, and it was director Glenn Weiss who zoomed in with his iPad and realized they'd been given the wrong envelope. And eventually a culprit was found: PricewaterhouseCoopers accountant Brian Cullinan:

Cullinan was concerned that the presenters would futz over the tape on the back of the envelope and was showing each person that it was easier to slip a finger under the flap and pop it open. After Emma Stone won, Cullinan had two envelopes left in his hand: Best Picture on top and the Best Actress duplicate on the bottom. He flipped them over to show Beatty the trick with the tape, which put the Best Actress duplicate on top. He then mistakenly handed the duplicate Best Actress envelope to Beatty and tossed the Best Picture envelope in his briefcase and forgot all about it. In the greenroom, Dawn Hudson turned to Cullinan. “Your one job was to give Warren the right envelope.” “No,” the accountant said, bewildered. Minutes before the screwup, he had tweeted a backstage photo of Emma Stone. “The lesson here is we're too celebrity-obsessed as a culture,” De Luca says. “It's even poisoned accountants.” Cullinan deleted the Emma Stone photo and was gone before anyone noticed. “He basically disappeared,” Kimmel says.

And now you know ... the rest of the story. I like that level of detail.

This year, for the first time since 2019, I've seen all the nominees, and even wrote about most of them, and yet I have no real dogs in the hunt. My sister's family asked me to rank my pics and I went with “The Holdovers” but I also like “Poor Things” and “American Fiction,” “Zone of Interest” and frontrunner “Oppenheimer.” Each has plusses and negatives. I'd vote for Paul Giamatii but I loved Cillian Murphy, too. (Actor is stacked.) I'd vote for Sandra Huller or Emma Stone but I'm resigned to Lily Gladstone. I'd vote for the Hulk but I'm fine with Iron Man.

Let the debacles begin. (Kidding, Billy.)

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is “Poor Things” the funniest movie of the year?

It starts out trading elements of “Frankenstein,” “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and some 19th-century gee-whiz wonder emporium—a pre-Great War belief in science and progress, before all the pop-culture scientists became mad and all the real-life progress became radioactive. Then Mark Ruffalo shows up and it’s the funniest movie of the year. The ending? A little too “Freaks” mixed with feminist self-satisfaction for me. But still OK. 

The movie is basically a picaresque, and, as such, deserves a superlong subtitle out of the 18th century: “Being of the erotic and philosophical adventures of Bella Baxter, a rogue and foundling.” It’s beautiful to look at and completely unique.

But does it mean anything?

Poor Max
Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is a 19th century Scottish doctor/scientist who operates/educates out of a London medical theater with arena seating, where he suffers no fools and draws at least one acolyte, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), whom he subsequently hires as an assistant. If Godwin suggests Dr. Frankenstein, his face, a patchwork of deep scars, suggests Frankenstein’s monster. Before he was experimenter, you see, he was experimented upon. By his own father. Who, among other things, made him a eunuch.

Maybe that’s why, despite everything, the movie never loses sympathy for him.

The enclosed grounds of Baxter’s estate are populated, Max finds, by creatures out of one of those flipbooks where you match the heads, torsos and legs of different animals. Here it’s bulldog/goose, duck/goat, pig/chicken. Then there’s Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a full-grown woman who cannot walk or talk properly, and who pees on the floor without embarrassment or awareness. “My, what a very pretty retard,” Max says. It’s his job to educate her, and she seems to learn freakishly fast. She goes from wondering about the places of the world to climbing to the rooftop to see what lies beyond the gate of the mansion.

She’s a prisoner, Max finds out, and an experiment. That opening scene of a woman jumping off a bridge in London? That was Victoria Blessington (also Emma Stone), who was pregnant, and Baxter animates her body with the brain of her infant, which is why she acts as she does. He keeps her on the grounds, he says, because he needs a controlled environment in which to gauge her progress. But as she chafes against these strictures, he seems to pivot. He allows—even suggests—a marriage proposal from the besotted Max. Then he brings in a lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo), to make sure everyone agrees to the terms. Everyone does. Except Duncan.

He's a rake, with, as the housekeeper Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine) says, the scent of a 100 women on him. “She undersells it,” he responds vaingloriously when he hears. Enamored, ready for another conquering, Duncan whisks Bella away to Lisbon. She’d already begun her own sexual adventures, onanistically, and these continue with Duncan. Part of the humor in the middle section is the straightforward way she talks about it all. She calls fucking “furious jumping,” wonders why people don’t do it all the time, and when Duncan begs off after three rounds, laments the physiological weakness in men. On a cruise, she introduces an older woman, Martha von Kurtzroc (Hanna Schygulla, Maria Fucking Braun herself), as someone who has not fucked in years, and then adds, “I hope you use your hand between your legs to keep yourself happy?”

But what’s fantastically funny is how she undoes Duncan by outdoing him. He considers himself a free spirit and libertine who scoffs at the conventions of polite society, but she is all of this many times over. When she doesn’t like food, she spits it out. “Why keep it in my mouth if it is revolting?” she says. She is impolite in polite company and insistent on new experiences. The more he tries to grasp her, the further away she gets away. “I have become the very thing I hate,” he admits at one point. The humor is in his frustration, his slow-burn jealousy, and his creeping awareness of what a conventional man he really is. One night she finds him at a bar, where he admonishes her for spending time with another man. 

Duncan: Did he lie with you?
Bella: No. We were against a wall.
Duncan: Did you furious jump him?
Bella: No. He just fast-licked my clitoris. I had the heat that needed release, so at my request it was.
[Duncan bashes head against bar]

Duncan is vain, Ruffalo is glorious.

Bella’s education moves beyond the sexual to include food, drink, music and philosophy. She meets a cynic, Harry Astley (Jerro Carmichael), who shows her the deprivations of the world in Alexandria. Distraught, she bankrupts Duncan with money that, yes, doesn’t wind up with the poor anyway, and the two are set ashore in Marseilles and wind up penniless in Paris. There, Bella resorts to prostitution. That sounds like comeuppance, but for her it’s almost a win-win: a place to experiment with other lovers while making the money to survive. The sex is both graphic—for a mainstream film—and fantasy, in that pregnancy or disease never really enters into it. Maybe she can’t get pregnant? I think that might be implied at one point. She returns to London when she finds out her creator, Godwin, whom she calls God, is dying (of cancer) as the 20th century is set to begin.

An important character is introduced at the 11th hour, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), the former husband of Victoria. With Duncan in tow, or alternately hiding behind him, he interrupts Bella’s marriage to Max with the announcement that Bella is in fact already married to him. Upon hearing the tale, Bella agrees to go with him for the same reason she does most things in life: to find out answers. She’s truly Godwin’s daughter in that respect. 

And she finds the man is surely insane. He pulls rank stunts on servants, levels guns at them at all hours, and expects Bella to get a clitorectomy. No wonder Victoria threw herself off that bridge. But Bella, as she is wont to do, turns tables. She tosses the drugged drink in his face, the gun goes off on his foot, he passes out. And this is when she truly becomes Godwin’s daughter. His foot is repaired but so is he: He’s given a goat’s brain. What happens to his own? Is it put into the goat? Did they try to film that and it was too creepy? Either way, I pity the poor goat. It doesn’t want a human body. Imagine the first time it tries to jump.

But this is our feel-good feminist end: Bella presiding over the grounds and its mostly female denizens: Toinitte (Suzy Bemba), her Black, Parisian prostitute friend/lover; a second Bella experiment, Felicity (Margaret Qualley); and Mrs. Prim, Oh, and Max, of course. Poor emasculated Max, poor thing.

Poor Wednesday
So it’s a ride. It’s beautifully photographed—often with a fish-eye lens—and intelligently made. The early shots are in black-and-white, and expand to color once the adventures begin. It’s mostly fantasy, as stated, with race-blind casting. Is that odd given Alexandria? Race issues go away but class issues don’t. Maybe they’re our bigger problem.

I love the principles. On a ship, there’s a dance between Bella and Duncan that is their relationship in joyous microcosm. It’s more battle than dance. Still a child, really, she hears music, begins to dance in unconventional ways, and he, with a desperate smile, tries to segue it into smooth, conventional patterns. And she keeps fighting him. I flashed on the Wednesday Addams dance that made the rounds last year, but Bella makes Wednesday seem like Duncan. Even so, expect a mash-up between the two. I’m shocked it hasn’t been done yet.

Despite the feminist ending, there are inevitable feminist complaints about the film: graphic sex, women with child’s brain, a trio of male creators: director Yorgo Lanthimos, screenwriter Tony McNamara and novelist Alasdair Gray (RIP). It’s still vaginal-forward, unique, beautiful and hilarious. It’s my wife’s favorite film.

But does it mean anything? I keep coming back to that. What’s it all about, Alfie? I thought in the writing, I would write my way to some deeper meaning, but I’m not feeling it. It’s a lark. Even so, more larks like this, please.

Earlier this year I received a text from a woman running for office in a Democratic primary somewhere. Apologies I’m not more specific, but I quickly deleted it, or STOPped it, or STOP TO QUITted it, so I never got all the details. All I knew was she was running “against the odds,” she said, but she’s running anyway, damnit.

And that’s what made me lose interest.

I flashed back to February 2020 when I met my friends A. and B. for drinks in Seattle. All three of us are white, liberal, 50+, politically engaged and/or (in my case) vaguely aware; we’re all journalists or journalist-adjacent; and the conversation inevitably turned to the Washington state primary for the upcoming presidential election—one of the most consequential elections in our history. 

A. and B. are more politically engaged than I. Put it this way: They actually watched the primary debates to figure out which candidate aligned best with their vision of where the country should be heading. At the restaurant, they wrangled this out: Well, this candidate says this, and the other says the other, and that’s why I support the other. Washington is a mail-in ballot state, with ballots due in early March, and neither had filled out theirs yet, but I think one leaned Elizabeth Warren and the other Bernie.

And at some point they asked me who I planned to vote for.

“I already voted,” I said.

“Who?”

“Biden.”

Long pause.

“Well, you just threw your vote away.”

“Yeah, he’s already out of it.”

This was before the South Carolina primary on February 29, when Black voters saved Biden’s campaign, and (you could argue), the United States of America—let alone March 3, Super Tuesday, when ditto. I think it was before Nevada, too. Which means we’d had two contests, Iowa and New Hampshire, and in both Bernie had come out on top, with Pete Buttigieg a close second, and either Warren or Amy Klobuchar a close third. Biden had finished a distant fourth in Iowa and a distant fifth in New Hampshire. He was done. I’d thrown away my vote.

I should add: I didn’t necessarily think they were wrong. But among the Democrats running, I knew Biden was the best bet to beat Trump. Everything else was just blather. 

Who … can … win?

That’s the question Democrats don’t ask themselves nearly enough. Here’s another question Dems should be asking themselves: Who’s the Kirk?

OK, I’m going to go even further back now, to around 2000, when I used to go to the post office fairly regularly. There, I often had conversations with one of the employees, a super smart, super friendly guy, about movies and politics. Maybe this was around the 2000 election, I don’t remember. All I remember is what he said: If you want to figure out who’s going to win a presidential election, ask yourself this: Who’s the Kirk and who’s the Spock? Because Kirk wins.

My immediate reaction was “Naw, it’s not that simple.” But then, I began to backtrack.

• 2000: Al Gore vs. George W. Bush. Gore is the epitome of Spock. Bush wins.
• 1996: Bill Clinton vs. Bob Dole. Clinton is clearly Kirk-esque. Clinton wins.
• 1992: Bill Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush. Clinton: Kirk. Clinton wins.
• 1988: Michael Dukakis vs. George H.W.  Bush. Did I say Al Gore was the epitome of Spock? Apologies. I forgot about Dukakis. Bush wins.

“Damn,” I said.

And since then? John Kerry was another classic Spock in 2004—and lost. Obama muddled the metaphor a bit, since he tends Spock with some Kirk swagger. I mean, Mitt Romney was definitely no Kirk but you could argue John McCain was, so 2008 was the only time the post-office guy’s handicap didn’t work. Otherwise he’s been dead on. 

Admittedly, some years, it’s tough to parse the Kirk-Spock divide—2020, for example, seemed more good Capt. Kirk vs. Evil “Enemy Within” Kirk—so for the past 10 years I tend to take a step back, squint, and ask: OK, if these two candidates were running for high school student body president, who would win? Most Americans take it as seriously as that. And that’s why I was so worried in 2016. In one corner, you had the girl with a perfect attendance record, who showed up every day to every class, got straight A’s, and maybe even reminded the teacher when they forgot to assign homework. And in the other? The rich guy who threw keggers at his house.

I’m still worried about 2024, but at least Biden seems the right candidate for the Dems. He’s Kirk with a touch of McCoy. The other guy, “Enemy Within” Kirk, is crazier than ever. He’s ready to take the Enterprise down with him as he rants away into the viewscreen.

And my friends A. and B.? The latter is in California now, and I’m not sure which way he’s leaning. But A. is still in Seattle and hasn’t changed much. On Instagram he recently posted a selfie of himself mailing in his ballot. “Uncommitted,” he wrote. Another winning choice. Boldly going where Democrats have always gone before.

Via Preet Bharara's Cafe Insider site, former U.S. attorney and current law professor Barb McQuade talks up the continuing difficulties of determining, for legal purposes, what exactly social media companies are. 

Are they town squares, where anyone can speak? Are they publishers, which can regulate content? Can states such as Texas and Florida, in the NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice cases currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, pass laws saying they can't regulate content because they are in fact town squares, and doing so would impinge upon free speech?

My decidedly non-J.D. thoughts: Social media platforms are both town square and publisher, and of course they can regulate user-created content, and Texas and Florida saying they can't is the violation of free speech, not the other way around. I'd go further and amend the immunity conferred to platforms by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which made them not liable for user-created content the way publishers are liable. I'd actually like to see the world where that immunity was never conferred in the first place. I get the feeling it would be a good sight better, or at least less disingenuous, than this one.

McQuade makes her own case for how to better regulate the Facebooks of the world, including:

• Requiring social media companies to disclose their algorithms
• Requiring disclosure of paid content: not only who is paying for ads, but the communities they are targeting

God, yes. This experiment is not working, kids. We were never ready for it.

Clinching the pennant, age 19.

When I was a kid I'm pretty sure I kept getting Don Gullett and Don Sutton mixed up. I was in an American League city, they were both National League pitchers, and their names weren't dissimilar: Don and then two syllables: Uht-en or Uhl-et.

Talk about opposites, though. Sutton is the quintessential longevity Hall of Famer. He led the league in Game Starts once, ERA once, and never finished higher than third in Cy Young voting; but he kept plugging away: 15-13, 14-12, 11-11. He debuted in 1966, bade farewell in 1988, and in every full season until the last he appeared in 30+ games.

Gullett was more nova. He debuted in 1970 at age 19 and was done by age 27. Twenty-seven! What a rip. But in his nine seasons he pitched six times in the postseason, and in five of those the World Series: Reds in 1970, '72, '75 and '76, and, after signing a $2 million dollar deal, with the Yankees in '77. He last pitched July 9, 1978 vs. Milwaukee. He didn't get out of the first inning. It went: flyout, single, single, walk, walk (run), flyout, double (two runs), walk, walk (run), and that was it. He last faced Buck Martinez and he was replaced by Bob Kammeyer. And that was it. There would be fingers-crossed press reports about him in the NY papers for a few years but the fingers never uncrossed.

He retired with a 109-50 mark and a 3.11 ERA. In his Gullett obit, Joe Posnanski trots out this list of the best winning percentages for pitchers who won 100 games by age 27:

1. Roger Clemens, 116-51, .695
2. Don Gullett, 109-60, .686
3. Dwight Gooden, 142-66, .683
4. Jim Palmer, 122-57, .682
5. Pedro Martinez, 107-50, .682

Poz also mentions this:

Don Gullett was a private person. He was a farmer after he finished playing, he and Cathy had three children. He was the only major Big Red Machine player who declined to talk with me for my book The Machine. He was kind about it. He just said that he didn't really want to look back and didn't think he could add anything. “Other people remember better than I do,” he said.

When he debuted at age 19, players were agog. Willie Stargell said “He could throw a ball through a carwash without it ever getting wet.” Pete Rose said the same thing. He was on the mound, age 19, when the Reds clinched the pennant against the Pirates in 1970. He was the pitcher who set up the incredible Game 6 of the 1975 World Series by shutting down the Red Sox in Game 5—going 8 2/3 while giving up 2 in a 6-2 victory. He was the Game 7 starter, too, before Merv Rettenmund pinch-hit for him in the top of the 5th. He left, down 3-0, but—and you may have heard this—the Reds came back to win it, 4-3, for their first championship since 1940. They won again the following year. He didn't pitch well for the Yankees in the '77 postseason but he got another ring with them. Then the injuries piled up and he couldn't come back from them.

Apparently, growing up in Kentucky, he was some kind of all-around athlete. Posnanski mentions a high school football game where Gullett rushed for 410(!) yards and scored 11(!) touchdowns. In high school basketball, he averaged 22 points a game. “As a pitcher in his senior year,” Poz writes, “he struck out 120 batters in 52 innings and threw a perfect game where he struck out 20 of the 21 batters he faced.”

He died earlier this month, age 73. No cause mentioned. Private to the end.

How much does the ending dictate the story? 

For a week I thought the story was this: a good-hearted couple doing what they could to help a newly adopted two-month-old kitten overcome dysentery and thrive and live a long life. They doubled their laundry load, put warm compresses to his backside, fed him medicines, bought him diet supplements, cooked him chicken and rice, and spent more than $3,000 on five vet visits over a eight-day period to make it right.

Now the story feels like: two dullards who missed the clues and let a small animal suffer and die.

The image I can't escape is one from his final full day. He had been eating well, and filling out a bit. But he'd already begun to leave wet spots and he was still walking slowly and creakily. Because his backside hurt, right? That's what I thought—incorrectly probably. This day, this Friday, he wanted to walk in the hallway outside our second-floor condo, as our cat Jellybean liked to do. And as with her in her final days, I accompanied him on the slow walk. But now I accompanied with a squirt gun. I'd bought the squirt guns in anticipation of teaching him bathroom protocol. He understood the litter box, but not always, but we assumed it was dysentery dicatating the mishaps, including the sudden peeing, and once he got over it, things would self-correct. But just in case, squirt guns. In the hallway, he huddled in a corner, his preferred place for peeing and pooping outside the box, and so I leveled it. In my head I was a responsible pet owner ready to teach bathroom etiquette to a kitten. In reality I was an idiot leveling a squirt gun at a kitten slowly dying from malfunctioning kidneys.

I didn't pull the trigger. But I can't get over that image.

During this messy week, many people suggested we give Clem back to Seattle Animal Shelter, where we adopted him on Feb. 13. He was too much trouble. A question in the adoption papers asked something like “What might make you return your pets?” and we wrote “Can't imagine.” Now we could. But that wasn't us. That's what I said to Patricia one of those nights: “We're not those people.” Now I'm wondering if it would've been better for Clem if we had been those people. Maybe they would've picked up on the clues in time.

I still wonder about all those vet visits. The regimen we went with was: five days of antibiotics, and if that didn't right things, an abdominal ultrasound. He didn't last the five days; he had one dose to go. The final vet said his kidneys seemed off, wrong, but no ultrasound or radiograph was done, per the invoice, so maybe she was guessing. At this place, at the outset, they let you know how much it might cost—the high end of it, Clem's was $5,936—and you pay that before they do anything. And if they don't need to do everything, you get what they call “a refund.” We got a refund. The only new item on the final invoice was euthenasia: $203.11.

Taken together, the vet diagnoses feel like a bad joke. Does he need more extensive care? Not yet ... not yet ... not yet ... too late. 

Some of the real clues, including the sudden wet spots, didn't materialize until after the penultimate vet visit, but would we have known enough to tell them properly? You need a way to relay the facts to someone who has the knowledge to interpet the facts. We didn't have that. Clem didn't have that. Sadly, he just had us.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is there a better 1950s B-movie beginning than busty blonde Bonnie Parker (Dorothy Provine) disrobing down to her slip to a jangling rock ‘n’ roll beat? The opening credits are on the left, and we see her through a window on the right—with a swinging light above her, lockers behind her, and a bored expression on her face. Where is she? Turns out getting ready to work at a diner in Oklahoma City in 1932. Basically we’re peeping toms. B movies sell sex and boom here it already is.

I remember being surprised—about 25 years ago—when I found out there’d been another “Bonnie & Clyde” released about 10 years before the famous Beatty-Dunaway version, but the real surprise, now that I think about it, is that there was just the one. The Bonnie and Clyde story is made for exploitation. It’s got built-in sex, violence and rebellion, and the majority of it can be filmed in the hinterlands, where it’s cheap to film. Shouldn’t they have made more of them?

He's my all
The focus with this one, as the title implies, is on Bonnie. Clyde isn’t even Clyde. He’s Guy Barrow, with Jack Hogan doing a kind of Elvis Presley thing: anachronistic sideburns, Tupelo twang. If you think of him as Elvis and Provine as Jayne Mansfield, it’s an ultimate 1950s oomph matchup.

Parker is played as a bit of a sneering harridan. All the men make a play for her, and she belittles them all, calling them small-timers. She’s the force behind everything, the will, and does a lot of the killing. She’s a very, very bad person. Then, oddly, near the end, she gets religion in a way that nice guys everywhere will shake their heads over.

A nice guy named Paul (William Stevens), you see, asks to borrow her phone but doesn’t give her the once-over or get too close or sloppy. The opposite. He’s simply phoning a sick friend to let him know the reading assignments. Bonnie assumes he’ a teacher but he’s a night-school student looking to become an architect, and he explains what that is without patronizing her. He’s not just nice but down-to-earth, and the movie implies he’s the chance she blew. Later, when Guy tells her she’s lost her nerve, she responds, “I didn't lose my nerve, I know right where I left it,” and you get the feeling it’s here, talking with Paul, particularly when her dying words are “Paul … Paul…”—which the cops mishear as “Guy… Guy…” He was her potential redemption, the movie implies. Of course, by then, she’d killed nearly a dozen people, some in cold blood, but what the hey. Give a girl a chance.

The filmmakers muck with the history of course. I didn’t know, or I’d forgotten, that the real Bonnie Parker was married before—to Roy Thornton, a burglar—but here he’s named Duke Jefferson (Richard Bakalyan) and doing 175 years in federal prison for murder. The real Bonnie never saw hubby again after 1929 but this Bonnie helps Duke break out of prison—not for anything romantic, mind you, but to help them rob banks. Is it awkward, this threesome? Naw. By this point, Bonnie is cold to Guy, too. Early on, the two go at it hot and heavy but that ends abruptly. Not sure why. Other than him being small-time.

Wasn’t his brother a bigger deal in real life? Here, he’s named Chuck rather than Buck—and played by Joe Turkel, everyone’s favorite bartender in “The Shining”—but he’s barely in it. He and wifey show up at Bonnie and Guy’s ranch house, unknowingly bringing the cops along. After they shake them, the four camp out in the woods, but the cops find them there, too, and, blam, there goes Chuck. He doesn’t pull even one job with his brother.

Frank Hamer? He’s Tom Steel (Douglas Kennedy), forthright, sharp, and right on their heels from the beginning. But they slip through his clutches twice, and then he’s MIA, and then he shows up in the final reel for the big blowout. So odd. He’s supposed to be the hero but the movie makes him look rather incompetent.

Cuckoo’s nest
Other odd choices. It has them dying on June 6, 1934, rather than May 23, 1934. Didn’t writer Stanley Shpetner and director William Witney have an encyclopedia? A local library? Or were they trying to avoid a copyright lawsuit?

Even so, for what it is, a drive-in movie from American International, it’s not bad. We get a few surprising, sharp moments and some not-bad dialogue. I like the kid sticking them up. There’s a fun bit with hiking boy scouts coming across their path whose comical, portly scoutmaster seemed familiar to me. Turns out it's Sydney Lassick, good ol' Charlie Cheswick from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” making his screen debut. Nice to see you, Cheswick.

Production-wise, they don’t do a poor job of it, either. One wonders how they afforded all those 1930s cars and then you do the math: It’s just 24 years prior. It would be like us doing a movie set in 2000. That seems shocking to me. From 1934 to 1958, we extracted ourselves from the Great Depression, went through World War II, entered the atomic age and the Cold War era, and went faster than the speed of sound. We went into outer space. What’s happened since 2000? Yes, 9/11 and COVID, but both led to backbiting and/or problematic policies. Mostly our phones got smarter and we got dumber.

They released the Hunter Biden transcript on Thursday, and amid the bloviating there's some expert trolling of Donald Trump and the monstrously hypocritical Republican party by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA). Warmed my heart.

SWALWELL: Any time your father was in government, prior to the Presidency or before, did he ever operate a hotel?

BIDEN: No, he has never operated a hotel.

SWALWELL: So he's never operated a hotel where foreign nationals spent millions at that hotel while he was in office?

BIDEN: No, he has not.

SWALWELL: Did your father ever employ in the Oval Office any direct family member to also work in the Oval Office?

BIDEN: My father has never employed any direct family members, to my knowledge.

SWALWELL: While your father was President, did anyone in the family receive 41 trademarks from China?

BIDEN: No.

SWALWELL: As President and the leader of the party, has your father ever tried to install as the chairperson of the party a daughter-in-law or anyone else in the family?

BIDEN: No. And I don't think that anyone in my family would be crazy enough to want to be the chairperson of the DNC.

SWALWELL: Has your father ever in his time as an adult been fined $355 million by any State that he worked in?

BIDEN: No, he has not, thank God.

SWALWELL: Anyone in your family ever strike a multibillion dollar deal with the Saudi Government while your father was in office?

BIDEN: No.

SWALWELL: That's all I've got.

Encore. 

Day 8

We didn’t even have him 11 days. 

The day before Valentine’s Day, my wife saw a photo of two cats on the website of Seattle Animal Shelter (SAS), where she’s a volunteer dog walker, and gave me a look like a kid in a Lassie movie. Can we keep ‘em? Can we? He was a tabby with big, cute ears; his sister was a tortoiseshell. After our cat Jellybean died last December, we talked about how, next time, we’d get two cats, so they could keep each other company when we were away; so we wouldn’t worry they were lonely. These were those two, Patricia was saying. They were from the same litter, bonded, and sleeping together. Somebody had left them in a box on the doorstep of an animal shelter, and that shelter transferred them to SAS on Feb. 7. They were just two months old.

Though they were recovering from neuter surgery, SAS let us take them home that afternoon. They were tiny things—as light as dust bunnies, I thought—but the boy didn’t seem worse for wear. He left the cat carrier with a tough-guy walk and explored the joint like he owned it. He was mouthy, and if he wanted your attention, and your back was turned, he’d scramble up your body like Spider-Man, then perch on your shoulder, meowing. 

“Right now it’s endearing,” Patricia said with a laugh that first night. 

For those first few days, I was a little out of it. As we sat at SAS filling out the paperwork, what was initially sniffles got worse. I’m guessing it was just a bad cold—all my COVID tests were negative—but I missed some of what was going on.

Patricia floated the idea of naming the girl Daphne, and I was an immediate no. “Why?” she asked. Overhearing, the SAS woman taking our information said, “And you can name the other one Fred!”

“That’s why,” I said. “‘Scooby Doo.’”

Eventually Patricia landed on Maisie for the girl. I forget what other names she’d floated for the boy but I kept shooting them down and she kept pestering me for a replacement. One morning, she asked while I was at my computer, and I had the Baseball Reference page up, with its revolving photos of ballplayers in the upper left hand corner.

“What about Clemente?” I said.

“Clem!” she said. “I love it!”

“Clemente.”

“Clem.”

At this point I was more worried about the girl. Clemente had his tough-guy walk and seemed more athletic. He was able to jump onto the bed, for example, while she had to find a foothold and do it in stages. The bed thing didn’t last long anyway. Though they understood the litterbox idea, one of them wound up pooping on the bed the first night. Worse, it was a little loose, a little runny. And it kept happening. The second or third night, Patricia thought that if she slept on the floor, next to their cat bed, they’d be that much closer to the litterbox in the bathroom and use it. Nope. In the morning, Maisie jumped onto the bed and peed near my pillow. That was that. We became a closed bedroom door family, and they would sleep in the heated cat bed out in the living room. Once we got the diarrhea problem under control, we thought, we’d work on bathroom protocols.

That was a common refrain: Once we solve this, then that. We didn’t know we would never solve this; we didn’t know we’d never get to that.

* * *

On the first Wednesday, Patricia bought a pumpkin supplement from Mud Bay, and a day later picked up cat food and a probiotic from SAS, all to help with the diarrhea problem. But whose problem was it? We had just the one litter box and didn’t know whose stools were getting firmer and whose weren’t. But we had our guess. Maisie was filling out, Clem wasn’t.

“Is he not eating?” I asked.

“He is,” Patricia said. “Just as not as much as she, I guess.”

SAS told us to have them checked out by a vet within a week but they didn’t tell us how to get the vet appointment. Our old vet, Four Paws, wasn’t taking new customers—new animal customers—so Patricia asked around and went with Jet City Animal Clinic, which was nearby, but the earliest appointment she could get was Monday, February 26—two weeks from when we got them. And with the way Clem was going, that seemed too far in the future. He needed help now. So on Friday Patricia made an appointment for the following Monday. By Saturday morning, he was so thin that the following Monday seemed too far in the future. So she took Clem to Urban Animal on Capitol Hill, which was open on weekends, and where subcutaneous fluids were given, and blood and fecal tests taken.

On Sunday, while Patricia was away, I googled his symptoms and wondered if it wasn’t worms or parasites. I was texting her my theories, while Clem lay on a heating pad in the window seat in my office. Then he went over to the sleeping bag in the corner. Was he squatting? Peeing?

He was shitting. Almost liquid.

“No no no no no no,” I said, picking him up, and holding my free hand under him as I ran to the bathroom and the litterbox.

“The pumpkin is doing nothing,” I texted Patricia.

To friends I began quoting Kurt Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, who, after he became a father for the first time, wrote to Kurt: “Here I am, cleaning shit off of everything.” We were in the laundry room a lot. We began to use a separate bag for shit-stained items.

The fecal test came back negative for parasites, while the blood tests were a bunch of numbers—we didn’t know what they meant. But the vet at Jet City—our Monday appointment—took one look at them and said: “He needs an IV.” He recommended a couple of places. BluePearl was within walking distance from our condo.

And the vet there said, no, Clem didn’t need an IV.

Patricia exploded. Patricia never explodes. But this was her third vet trip in three days and we weren’t getting any closer to a solution.

At least they gave us a gameplan. The diarrhea might be viral-related, the vet said, and recommended a regimen of oral liquid antibiotics. She showed us how to administer them: hold the cat firmly, cheeks back, then edge the syringe toward the side of their mouth until it opened. I got fairly adept at it.

In a follow-up email explaining the blood numbers, Saturday’s Urban Animal vet seemed to agree with the BluePearl vet:

For the most part, this bloodwork is normal for a kitten of this age. The SDMA result is difficult to interpret since this kitten is so young and there is no accurate reference range. 

The potassium is mildly high and can be seen with kidney disease, but in Clem's case the kidney values are normal. In some cases parasites can cause an elevated potassium. The significance and the cause of the mild elevation in potassium is not readily seen from the bloodwork and fecal at this time.  

If Clem Fails to gain weight, I would consider other diagnostics such as abdominal ultrasound.  

By Wednesday, Clem’s stools were getting bloody. When I patted his butt with toilet paper after he pooped—a necessity with the diarrhea—it came away with less poop and more blood. And his anus was … was it supposed to look like that? Patricia called it distended. When the BluePearl vet gave us a follow-up call, and we mentioned all of this, she recommended a return visit.

Again, the IV route was discussed, and again it was rejected. A normal PCV or Packed Cell Volume, was 30-35, she said. His was 38: elevated but not dangerous. If it was above 42 she would recommend hospitalization. All his other labs were within the normal range, too. She gave us prescriptions for two anti-diarrhea meds, both orals, meaning by Thursday poor Clem was taking seven different oral doses a day. We also switched his diet. Both the vet, and a friend, had recommended chicken + rice for animals with diarrhea. And holy crap did he like it. He attacked it. He ate like a champ. It warmed Patricia’s heart.

And for a day and a half he filled out. His stools were still slightly soft, with blood snaking through them, and his butt still sore, but he seemed to be getting better. Didn’t he? Per the vet’s instructions, I also began putting a warm compress on his backside for about a minute or so. He didn’t seem to mind this. Maybe it felt OK. Maybe it was because we were doing it in the bathroom sink, and he had a fascination with sinks. Most of his feedings now took place on the kitchen counter—to keep his food separate from Maisie’s—and afterwards he’d stroll over to the sink, where I might be washing dishes, and just stare, fascinated. When the water was turned off, he'd climb down and nose around.

But this was him at his most curious. After a meal he would normally crouch at the edge of the counter and stare down. To Maisie, the world was a toy. She zipped, batted things, chased sparkle balls. He wasn’t doing any of this. And his tough guy walk had become a stiff-legged gait—we assumed because of the distended backside. Once he got past it, we thought, he’ll be OK.

Once that, then this.

He was in my thoughts all the time. All of this happened during the Seattle International Film Festival’s Noir Festival, to which, several weeks earlier, I’d bought a pass. But between my sickness and Clem’s, I didn’t use it much. I went Tuesday night (“Black Tuesday” with Edward G. Robinson) and then again Thursday night (“La Bete Humaine” with Jean Gabin), and I was thinking of staying for the second and final feature. But I was too tired and I wanted to see how Clem was doing. A drink maybe? No, I was too tired and I wanted to see Clem.

When I called my father and step-mom during a late Friday afternoon walk, I went through the trials and tribulations of our week. What a shame, they said, that we couldn’t enjoy the fun and kittenish moments. “I don’t know,” I said. “When we first got them, and our friends came over to coo, etc., I wasn’t feeling it. It wasn’t until all this happened that he really entered my heart.”

Besides, I said, we were on the upswing. We were beginning to get past it.

* * *

When I got home, he was laying on the window seat in my office. I kept an eye out so he didn’t poop again but missed it when he left a big wet stain near the window. The night before he’d driven Patricia batty by suddenly peeing in the pantry. “What are you doing?” she’d admonished. But that pee didn’t smell like pee. Neither did this.

“Doesn’t he seem thin again?” Patricia said. “Yesterday, he was eating a lot and his tail was up. Now…”

“And we’re down to one antibiotic dose.”

That night he stopped eating. He stopped drinking. He didn’t look comfortable and couldn’t get comfortable. He’d stay in my lap a few seconds but would move off, and crouch nearby. In the kitchen I watched as he bent over his water dish, put his mouth close, and just stared.

“Maybe we need to go to the vet again?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Patricia said.

Another vet trip so soon seemed like a lot for him. I thought I might be overreacting. “Let’s see how he is in the morning.”

I woke up at 4 AM with a panicked thought: What if the wet spots that didn’t smell of urine weren’t urine? What if something inside him had broken? I found him, not in his bed, but sitting in the dining room, like he’d never gone to sleep, like he couldn’t get comfortable enough to go to sleep. BluePearl, it turned out, was closed weekends, but there was a clinic in Shoreline—the place that had diagnosed Jellybean’s cancer last September. I phoned, and they picked up right away. Patricia joined me in the kitchen as I explained to the clinic what was going on. We left shortly after 5 AM.

“Am I overreacting?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Patricia said.

At the vet they took Clem in his cat carrier and told us to wait in the lobby. We waited. And waited. And then, in a separate room, the vet, Dr. A., told us they’d run a test and didn’t like the looks of Clem’s kidney. She said we had two paths. One involved stabilizing Clem and then running a battery of tests.

And the other? I asked. She paused, and looked delicately at us.

“First option,” I said.

After another half hour or so in the lobby, the nurse came out with an update. Did they know what the problem was?

No. They couldn’t even stabilize him. They were losing him. They recommended we say goodbye.

Like that.

We found him in the back room lying on a table, an IV tube in his little leg. We could see his belly going up and down rapidly. Dr. A. tried to explain how euthanasia worked—the first shot to relax him and put him to sleep, and the second shot to…

We know, we said. We’d just been through it.

* * *

Our apartment at 9 AM felt eerily empty and calm, and we both tried to deal with it however we could. I went into my office to write it all out; Patricia went into the kitchen and began throwing away leftover medicines and syringes. She did the laundry with the pooped-stained towels. She was cleaning it all out but there was no cleaning it all out or writing it all out. It just kept hurting. 

I don’t know how it felt to Maisie. I don’t know how she misses her brother. We just know she hasn’t slept in their bed since. The point of the two cats was to make sure they wouldn’t be lonely when we were away, but I wonder if we made sure a part of her would always be lonely.

I now assume it was acute kidney failure: the lethargy, the stiff gait, the sudden peeing that didn’t smell like pee, all are indications—I read that day—of kidney malfunction. But why didn’t it register in the tests? Did he arrive with it and it got worse? Was it a consequence of the week-long dysentery and dehydration? Or did the infection that caused the dysentery—if an infection caused the dysentery—travel to his kidneys?

We don’t know. I just know he got a raw deal. Everybody let him down—starting with SAS. They were bad partners. Both kittens were neutered the day we picked them up, and they were supposed to come with cones, and didn’t. Nobody even mentioned it. It wasn’t until Maisie’s stomach became distended that Patricia brought her back and demanded to see a vet. That was on the same day Clem returned to BluePearl for his penultimate vet visit. Because the cat carrier was at SAS, for Maisie’s re-surgery, I had to take Clem there in a tote bag. And then I had to take him home in a cardboard cat carrier they provided. He’d already beshat it and himself when they handed him over. He was such a mess we had to wash him in the bathroom sink at home. Another indignity. 

Mostly I think of those oral meds I gave him—particularly the anti-diarrhea one he hated—all of which did nothing. “Sorry, buddy,” I’d say, “but this’ll help you get better.” The last dose I gave him was around 6 PM Friday. Afterwards he gave me such an exhausted look, it nearly broke my heart.

“Sorry, buddy,” I said. “But we’re almost done with it.”

We had him fewer than 11 days. He had fewer than 11 weeks.

Xoxo

Day 1