Roadrunner Twice

I'm assuming everyone who follows my Mastodon/Twitter/old-Instagram already knows about Mogwai, Muffin, Willa, Tampa, Glitch, Zero-Day, and Bruce "Wipeout" Jones III, the cats who, at various times, have lived on our side of the block. But there are also some other cats we see occasionally, who hang out on one of the other sides of the block.

I don't have photos for most of these, sorry.

• Little Black Cat — a medium-sized black cat, but we call her little to distinguish her from Glitch and Zero, who are approximately cinderblock-shaped.
• Northern Spawn of Bruce — a smallish female with the exact same markings as Bruce, who hangs out on the northern side of the block and gets food from one of the houses there. Seems sweet-natured.
• Southern Spawn of Bruce — a medium-sized male with the exact same markings as Bruce, except in a darker grey that looks almost black from a distance. Extremely skitty.
• Fluffy Black Cat — a very large cat with tuxedo markings who is MASSIVELY FLUFFY.
• Muffin-Alike — a small tuxedo who looks almost exactly like Muffin from a distance. You can distinguish them by size (Alike is slightly bigger), face (Muffin has one off-center eye), and disposition (Alike is skitty at any distance; Muffin seems very sanguine until she doesn't).
• Orange Cat at Tyrone's — a medium-sized orange cat. Skitty.
  • Ruth also calls him Angry Orange Cat because he always looks furious.
• MissingNo (emeritus) — the third of the identical cinderblock-shaped black tomcats called Glitches, who we originally thought were just one cat until we started trapping them. We THINK we've seen No a couple times since getting him fixed, but it's dubious and we're not wholly sure where his territory is. Dude was just wrong place wrong time that day.
• Cat Under the Stairs — a medium-sized cat with a blobby white and grey pattern, who, as soon as he sees you, will run inside a hole in the concrete stairs up to this one house's porch. He has to squish to fit through, and then he'll turn and glare balefully out at you.
  • Update (July 2020): I met cat-under-the-stairs’ caretaker!!! This cat is a she, her name is Shorty Ro-Ro (which is short for Shorty Royana Whitehead), and she is Bruce’s littermate!! Her tail might have been truncated by a bird!
• Short-Tail Cat — A medium-sized cat with a blobby white and grey pattern who has a clipped tail. He will act like he doesn't see you, but will just happen to cross the street to avoid you.
  • Ruth says this is the same cat as Cat Under the Stairs! She is right.
• Colette — small tabby. Feral girlfriend of Pierre, a small black cat who is actually someone's pet and has a collar and everything. Their love is so pure 😭
• The Skunk — NOT TECHNICALLY A CAT.

A month or two back, one of Ruth's friends* threw a party to celebrate the end of work on her PhD.** While we were drinking wine and snacking, she thanked me for some advice I'd given her a year or two ago. I asked what advice that was, since the occasion hadn't stuck in my memory, and she said, "something like, 'the external systems we relied on for structure are all gone by adulthood, so you have to create your own systems to support you and keep you accountable.'" Then she said she'd even copied it onto a post-it that she kept on her monitor through the entire process.

🌻I HAVE NO MEMORY OF GIVING THIS ADVICE AND QUITE FRANKLY IT SOUNDS SUSPICIOUSLY LIKE SOMEONE MUCH WISER AND MORE GROWN UP THAN ME.🌻 It also happened to be exactly what I needed to hear lately, which is hilarious.

So, anyway. I've been working on trying to design the systems and routines of my life in a much more conscious and deliberate way. It's, uh, hard. Deciding what I want and where I'm going in life is hard. Deciding what I care about enough to wedge into each day is hard. Following through on my plans is extra hard.

One thing I've been doing this week is going for a 20m walk every morning, after I make coffee and feed the cats but before I eat breakfast. Commuting to work used to be a nice boundary between work time/home time and also a way to see the same area a little differently each day, and I miss it now that I work from home, so now I'm commuting nowhere. Or maybe it's more like communing, IDK. It's real good for my head, though.

Actually, my walk today reminded me a lot of walking around the neighborhood in the morning in Minneapolis back in '06/07, first while I was unemployed and then later on days when I didn't go to the bakery until 12. I went south from our house, and made it almost down to the Convention Center MAX stop. It was sunny, there were a bunch of people on their way to do stuff I didn't have to care about, the maple trees were finally all leafed out and casting proper shadows again, someone with the raddest blue extension braids was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the barber shop on whatever the street is that's south of San Rafael, I noticed some weird structures that seemed only conditionally real (like the second car wash, and the power substation behind the Wendy's). Yeah, I'm gonna go with "communing." I felt oddly plugged-in to the flow of life in general.

——

I'm also trying to meditate for 20m at the end of each workday, as part of "clocking out." Previously I've meditated as a break in the workday, but I think I like this a lot better. I have more luck with wrangling my brain, and the outcomes seem more useful.

There are a bunch of other things I'm trying too, and I'm not really sure yet what's working or not. IDK. I'll probably talk more about this later.

——

Oh, and as I went to paste in the current music, I remembered that there was a whole story behind this DJ mix, and it finally just made it online for the first time. Check it out if you're into drum & bass at all, Stary is such a good DJ.

——

* By the way, isn't it weird how we track deed and title to transitive relationships like this? Anyway, this is a person I'm quite fond of, but I don't have her contact info or anything and only really hang out with her via Ruth.

** Later, Ruth got her a 5 ft. long plush snake toy, a printout of that classic McSweeny's bit, and a certificate of snake fighting mastery.

Today, I finally went on that 13-parks-in-8-miles run I've been planning since early this spring. It was fantastic! It was further than I think I've ever actually run before. It was tons of NoPo shit I hadn't explored yet! It was... kind of pathetic, for those last two miles or so. But that's okay.

Anyway, the way this worked was that I took the Yellow Line up to almost the Expo Center, then bailed out and ran toward home. The parks, in order, were:

• Kenton
• Gummans
• Arbor Lodge
• Omaha Parkway
• Patton Square
• Pittman Addition
• Madrona
• Mocks Crest
• Overlook
• Denoval Unthank
• Dawson
• Lillis Albina
• Irvington School

Everyone here who has tried to go somewhere with me in real life is now asking the same question, and the answer is yes, there was some navigational comedy, shut your damn mouth already, geez. Anyway, it was much better than it could have been because I am nobody's fool and hella brought a map:

( Cut for image tallness )

Long story short, I just kind of assumed (based on Google Maps) that there was access to Mocks Crest from Greely, but said street turned out to be a highway at the bottom of the huge drop-off that gives Mocks Crest such a bitching 200° view. I'd never been there! I didn't know it was on a damn cliff! And I would have had to backtrack a shitload to get up there, which might have been fine except that I had no idea how to FIND it again after doing that, since the whole area is lousy with dead-ends.

So I said fuckit and climbed up the big fucking dropoff, blackberries and all. It was totally badass, although none of the folk drinking in the park seemed impressed. Anyway, I explored some once I made it up, and the answer for next time is to go straight from Patton Sq. to Madrona, then backtrack to Pittman Addition, take the spiral-ramp bridge over Going, and ride Skidmore to its dead-end at Mocks.

Other things:

• Hurray for performance-enhancing drugs, by which I mean the big bowl of yerba maté I chugged before heading out.
• So over on Gay Ave., just south of where Omaha Parkway dead-ends, there's this kind of amazing bar/thrift store. It is extraordinarily cute.
• Madrona Park has a kind of impressive thimbleberry thicket! Alas, they weren't ripe, so I'll have to come back later in the summer.
• Ow.

EDIT: I took Schwern out to Mocks because we were going to Prost anyhow, and he noticed something I hadn't: there's a convenient ramp right at the edge of the cliff in the event that you desperately need to launch over it. What?!

What are you doing in Portland?! You live in the desert! There is no desert in Portland!

This is the healthiest one, probably on account of the good drainage and afternoon sun, but these guys are all over Woodstock. Does anyone know what the deal is? How does an outdoor cactus survive in the Pacific Northwest? It reminds me of those mad palm trees that were all over Cork.

March 6th, at the Mission Theater & Pub, 1624 N.W. Glisan Street. Flook and Karen Casey. This is seriously the best night of Irish music you're likely to be offered in your lives. You should do it. I'll try and bring recordings of both of 'em to Salon. In the meantime:
Flook Flook Karen Karen

(Minneapolis people, we need to go see Flook on the 22nd. Doesn't look like Karen's going to be in tow, though.)