not like this

and the need for a room of one's own. and a better world.

NB. This started as a comment on MaryBeth Bonfiglio ’s piece today and then it grew

Our house is something of a cat magnet.

I’m not sure why, although I have a strong suspicion it has to do with a partner and cat magic and their beloved companion of many years ago.

Nonetheless, cats seeking refuge seem to find their way here.

We leave our door ajar for Reasons and they take it as hospitality and ....we have to gently encourage them to find their ways home again.

Someday, a cat, but I digress. This is really about this one cat and the side effects.

Of the cat.

He’s a kitten really and for various reasons we have ended up seeing to some immediate and vital things for him, especially that he was quite young and not neutered and we could not find any humans who claimed him and so he he has spent more time than usual in our house.

He interrupts my mornings.

As I lie abed and read substack, the kitten who wandered in is telling me loudly about everything. He is a morning kitten and wishes to begin his day with speed and gusto. I, also, am usually a morning kitten but in these portal days (mine go from solstice to new years) I am coming back to bed after I brush my teeth, against the chill and the dark, to let the sun get up before I do.

If not for the kitten, I would light the solstice candles (one for each day between here and there, one more every day) and light the altar and get my writing things and give this time to myself. But I cannot think when he is pontificating and we have not figured out yet what to do so meanwhile I hold him in my otherwise-intended interregnum between light and darkness.

He will quiet eventually and come to lie on the bed if I don’t get up, usually just about when I’m about to get up. But meanwhile he talks and jumps up and down and plays with the blinds and I wonder what the card of kitten is meant to bring.

Writing in a crowded cafe is one thing. But writing with a very opinionated cat in the room reminds me of nothing so much as the Kurt Vonnegut story, Harrison Bergeron.

It is Not Cheerful but it does feel a lot like a lot of our world these days.

And specifically of myself.

It is not, I think, unreasonable to say that I am gifted at writing. I have had enough people tell me unprompted, and I have made enough of my living to assure even my absolutely unsupportive emotional brain patterns that this is true.

But I cannot think when I’m being constantly interrupted, which is partly why I do some of my best writing for you, dear readers, in bed against all sleep hygiene advice to the contrary.

Except right now there’s a kitten who has more energy than anyone else here and wishes to....yowl.

It reminds me of the cat I sat for while his humans were away. It was St Paul in the early aughts and the house was one of those glorious city Foursquare houses from the early part of the 20th century when the Twin Cities were being built up so beautifully.

It was Big. Three stories, a glorious open first floor in the original style, living room, sitting room, dining room, kitchen. Then two floors of bedrooms with sitting areas and fireplaces on the second floor and more modest ones on the third.

The cat was elderly, 20 years or so, and mostly deaf and mostly blind. He would forget everything about everything and stand in the middle of the first floor and yowl mournfully until I would come and tell him it was ok and pet him and, if it was bedtime.m, carry him to bed. He couldn’t tell much except food time and if he was alone.

This little guy sounds as bereft.

Like the small creatures of our youngest hearts, he desperately wants something and knows nothing else but to ask loudly. I hate saying no but for various reasons I cannot give him what he wants, not least because the muse is draped seductively across the arm of my proverbial chair with a sweet smile and a sharp knife.

I have been taking direction from her for decades and I like it. I’m not going to stop now.

But when she feeds me words like single grapes while whispering sweet nothings I sometimes cannot hear her over the kitten.

(I’m already fighting the AI driven autocorrect that has three times changed muse to nurse in the preceding paragraph. No, dammit. There is no nurse, only a mythological creature who runs the best part of my brain, the only part I am sure of.)

Everything already has to be pretty perfect. Climate. If my skin itches I have to shower without losing my ideas. Energy vibe thing which is the most ephemeral of all. It’s worse than trying to have sex, which is already complicated and rare, and this is like...even more easy to lose the thread, I just have more experience picking it up again.

Dump trucks and sirens and people who want things all make the muse-blown soap bubble vanish. My phone lives on silent, I’m sorry if you needed to reach me, I’m busy running around after iridescent globes of magic and trying to hold them in slick, wet hands.

Virginia Woolf was right, I need a room of one’s own, but I have them only the doors do not lock and sometimes I have to pee mid-thought and then the world comes crashing in. I joke but it is not a joke, about making a sign that says “still thinking” and wearing it around my neck as I leave the room to cook or tend my body needs when I do not wish to be spoken to. Maybe a special hat. But stopping to think about the hat or sign would also break the bubble so.

I have somehow turned into the grumpy professor in his office only the things I write and teach are about how to love and embrace the world and people around us so we don’t have to be quite so grumpy. I know at least one person who is going to be grumpy forever but they are very kind to ignore my optimism instead of arguing with it. This optimism is hard-won, constantly defended against an equally unreasonable total despair, and it is often the only thing keeping me alive.

It is an optimism that enough people want to care for one another that a society is possible and viable and holy.

But I know that this is not a thing we can assume without shoring up and scaffolding and community. So I provide support for that. Essays yes, but also consulting for small and earnest and possible noble companies and their leaders, and classes and sometimes coaching for individuals who want to lean into the goodness in themselves and the world, despite everything and without losing their shirts.

I want a better world, I want us to live into what is possible in common care and support. I give away a lot of work because the world needs it. And then I make spaces for more than that, and I get paid, too. I can’t, I find, devote myself to anything other than or less than a better world.

That is why I do this. Join me?

(And here you thought this was about kittens. So did I. The muse is winking at me, though.)