Looking Forward with Tunnel Vision

yes, i have been absent from the blogosphere for about a month. time goes by fast. we didn’t have internet for a few of those weeks. after that, i have no excuse.

i had a post all ready for “A Week of Horrors, A Week of Hope” Part Deux but now it seems irrelevant and outdated. and besides, enough people blogged about the Phillies trash causing flat tires at Critical Mass and Obama becoming President Elect. the only real change i wanted at the time was for him to ride a Critical Mass and bring a sense of decency to Philadelphia’s failing monthly “group” ride.

oh yeah but now the economy sucks.

and it’s fucking christmas. i don’t even want to talk about christmas. i went to a Borders a few weeks ago with my sister and we saw this

and almost threw up.

i’m not a “scrooge” (i hate even using that term because it reminds me of the facist anti-semites at Disney) but Christmas just gives everyone anxiety and everyone’s already broke and homeless so someone should make one of those “The Year There Almost Wasn’t Christmas” Specials and instead of some asshole saving the whole thing they could end the movie early and all the pensionless people can come on screen and say “Really kids, you’re parents are broke. Give them a break. Don’t you want to eat next month without indebting your family?”

i’d like to just have a Christmas where it actually snows (temporary earmuffs to the ubiquitous shouts of GLOBAL WARMING) and everyone just hangs out by a woodstove and drinks hot drinks and eats hot food and no one cares if everyone got each other gifts. maybe that’s what the word WASSLE really means! and we just threw that word away like it was dirty laundary from the late nineteenth century.

so skip to new years day in Philadelphia. that’s right. MUMMERS! i am a Mummer this year. i kid you not. we are Mummers on the Eve of the Nukuler Winter or something like that. but there are budget cuts, and the parade is shortened and apparently there’s no Two Street party. but the final decisions are coming in Thursday of this week so i’m not going to jump the gun here. i really wanted to dress as a Cyborg but our costumes have to be consistent. we could be a lizard, slug or robot and i picked the psychedelic slug.

maybe if we strut hard enough we can convince the people of Philadelphia to throw money at us. or pay the Police Department’s overtime wages. technically, we are from the future. as all alien/time travel movies go, the commonfolk should be awestruck and give us their complete subordination for at least 12 hours before they begin to devise a plan against us.

wouldn’t you, if these guys were playing banjo in the string band?

which brings me to my continual thoughts on the year 2009. what the fuck is going to be up with 2009? 2008 was way crazier than we all thought. no joke, like ANYTHING can happen in ‘09.

it’s always a lovely time to compare headlines of today with those of a century ago. like, wow, they were just going to the north pole then! and now it’s melting. there were no noise shows or rusty tandem bikes or money-hungry landlords occupying my building then, either, just some textile and asbestos manufacturers. oh how things change.

some photos of Tuna

i received these yesterday via email. they were taken by christopher wirth at the cafe.

and her with the kittens!

a sad day in my animal kingdom

“A Week of Horrors, A Week of Hope: Part Deux” is being put on hold for the moment. today was a tough day for my animal-loving friends and family; two members of my extended furry family passed on, and they will be greatly missed.

the first one to pass was Mittens the Sheep. Unfortunatly, i don’t have a digital photo of her (but i have many prints, and there is even-yes-a painted portrait of her at my mother’s house).
Her mother, Madeline the Sheep, is still alive-she was a teenage mother, just one year older than Mittens. Mittens’ father Flash the Ram is long passed, may he rest in peace. I have fond memories of Flash’s statuesque nature; sometimes you could catch him standing with his two front hooves on a small rock, perfectly still, staring off into the distance, as if he was thinking “YES, I OWN ALL OF YOU.” Mittens looked more like her dad than her mom, and had a slight overbite–you had to mind your fingers when you hand-fed her grain.

Mittens the Sheep was euthanized today because of health complications due to a meningeal worm infection. I don’t want to humiliate her here with the details, but, as she was an old sheep (14!), my mother and the vet thought it best to let her leave this earth before the pain was too great.

I had never heard of a meningeal worm before. Apparently, if you don’t have a minute to read the link, it’s kind of like spinal meningitis in humans. Here is a diagram showing the life cycle of the worm:

and, i couldn’t find one of these for a sheep, but it affects llamas in the same way:

the numbered parts are all the organs and other bodily functions the worm seriously damages. apparently, from what they could tell, Mittens’ entire nervous system was ravaged by this worm, which comes from white-tail deer. and if you know anything about hunterdon county, nj, them bitches is everywhere.

I was talking to my mother on the phone about what happened to Mittens while taking a break at work when my manager came in from the back garden and told us that she went to pet Tuna, the cafe’s cat, and Tuna was dead.

We had taken Tuna in as a stray; she had appeared one day in the back garden, small and cute and friendly as can be. My boss loves cats, and decided to keep her. We soon after discovered that Tuna was pregnant (she couldn’t have been older than nine months!) She had her kittens, four of them, which I helped her to deliver because one was stuck in the placenta. Tuna had given birth on the concrete, and being able to dry off newborn kittens and help calm Tuna down and make them all comfortable in a kitten nest together was such a special experience.

The kittens were immediately spoken for. We told all the adopters to wait until the kittens were off nursing and Tuna got to spend some time with them; it was a real Discovery Channel-touching-moment to see how Tuna instantly knew just how to be a mom.

This past week, some of the kittens started going home with their new human parents. Tuna got spayed a few weeks ago, had an infection, but my manager and my boss both took care of her with medicine and paid the vet bills (along with help from all the generous donors at the cafe to the Tuna Health Fund) and Tuna seemed good as new.

Until today, when she was found laying under a bench on her side, stiff with rigor mortis, a small pool of blood on the concrete under her mouth. Tuna had no wounds or external signs of physical trauma. After my manager and I bagged her up and put her in a box and called our boss (who is devastated) a customer told us that she saw Tuna no more than two hours earlier, strolling around in front of the cafe, looking and acting like the usual Tuna.

I think she may have had a brain hemmorage or an aneurysm or, this is something else I found which may explain what happened.
Whatever it was, it was obviously quick and not diagnosable, since she had just gotten a vet checkup not even a month ago.

i’ve lost a lot of animals in my time, and it’s difficult to deal with, but it’s always much harder when the animal is young. there is no feeling of relief when they die, because they had a long life ahead of them and you expected to see them everyday.

i also don’t have any photos of Tuna–if anyone does, please send them to me. i know my boss would love to have them, she got very attached to Tuna. the sound of her voice when i told her the news broke my heart.

now, you should all learn about the Rainbow Bridge. apparently, it really helps you deal with situations such as these.