(Dearest Felicity, I am going to be talking, in part, about your wonderful cat Nero’s untimely death in this blog entry. I will completely underdstand if you choose to skip this entry. I do not wish to make your grief any worse. It’s just that his passing has stirred up a lot of old memories and dormant emotions about the cats I was lucky enough to have in my own life and what it was like when they died, and I need to write about them in order to work through them.)

My dear friend Felicity suffered a loss in the family recently. Her cat Nero, only seven years old, died after a long and painful illness. For a while, vetrinary medicine kept him going, but by the end he was in severe pain and had to be put to sleep.

She is grieving terribly for her lost feline friend. It is bad enough that we outlive our pets many times over. But to have one die so young after watching him waste away in pain is just too cruel, especially when no certain cause is found for the illness.

It is cruel, it is unfair, it is senseless, and it is horrifying in its arbitrary and random brutality.

I have been where she is far too many times. I grew up in a house full of cats, all with their own wonderful personalities, and all very much loved. I might not have had a lot of friends growing up, but I had cats, and there was many a day when I watched television accompanies by three or four of the locals, whom I would pet and fuss over and play with during the commercials. Often one (or more!) Of them would be curled up on my lap, purring away as I stroked it, the two of us the very picture of cozy contentment.

There were so many over the years. There was Minou, and her daughter Duchess. Then Blosssom adopted us by having a litter of kittens on our back porch in the dead of winter. She begat (becat?) Ace (named by my sister after Ace Frehley of KISS), Noodle, and Billy. Ace later begat Trigger, Headline (for her black and white fur), and Coug, named after the mascot for Cougar brand shoes.

I am sure I must be missing a few, but that is most of them.

That is nine cats, all coexisting in a three bedroom home along with two adults and four kids. I was delighted, of course, being a cat loving kid.

But looking back on it, it does all seem a tad whacky.

I like to tell people I grew up in a cat house.

Nine cats, of course, means nine deaths. We were quite lucky that, despite them all being indoor/outdoor cats, most of them lived to the ripe old age of twelve, and some even more than that.

But their deaths still hurt, and I still miss them all, as well as the other critters I have known as an adult. I regret that my instinct to reassure my parents that I was OK made me just nod and say “Okay!” When my mother would tell me a cat was gone. It must have seemed to her like I didn’t even care.

I did care, I cared a lot in fact. But I did not know how to grieve back then, let alone express negative emotions. So all my suffering was silent, internal, and inconclusive.

I treasure all the memories I have of all those wonderful little souls. To mean, animals are people, it is as simple as that. Sure, they are not as smart as me and you, but neither are children. And that is how I see pets : eternal children, and us their lucky, lucky parents and caretakers.

So when I say that Felicity suffered a death in the family recently, I mean exactly that. I am not being facetious, sarcastic, or glib. Pets are members of the family, full stop. They are fuzzy little people to me.

I have gone many years now with no animals in my life, and I really miss them. If I ever start making a living as a writer, I plan to get my own apartment in a pet friendly building, and two cats.

Pets give us so much in the time they are with us. They give us love, companionship, affection, entertainment, and even a little bit of chaos to keep our lives from being too routine and predictable.

And they ask for so little in return. Just food, shelter…and love.

Rest in peace, dear Nero. At least you are beyond all suffering now.

Been dodging a big dose of sadness for a few days now, and sooner or later, it is going to get me.

Not sure where it is coming from, but as I have not had any life trauma, bad news, or underprocessed food lately, I am just going to assume that it is part of the long digestive process of recovery. I have reached a point in the process where it is necessary to process some sadness on a conscious level, so I am stuck with it.

So some quiet moment soon, I will consciously let go of all resistance and try to just let this shit happen. Resisting it is still my default position. I automatically shove it back into the outer darkness when it dares to set one toe into that terawatt spotlight of my conscious mind. It’s instinctive.

But not good, not int he long run. We might have to suppress our emotions at particular moments because there are things we just plain have to do on any given day, but you can’t afford to let that kind of thing build up or before you know it, you’re like a hoarder buried beneath your hoard of emotions.

But you are not your hoard. That’s the vital distinction all hoarders of all sorts need to make. You could lose it all and be just fine. Better, even, because losing all that garbage has freed you to truly be you, the you that you were before the hoard, the you that you still are, under all the junk.

The secret is to learn to let go. Like Zen mastery, it is a most difficult simplicity. When you learn it, it can be as simple as releasing a balloon and watching it float away, over the horizon, never to be seen again.

That’s the difference between expression and repression. Expressed emotions go away. Repressed emotions stay.

Another thing contributing to my sadness apart from emotional processing is that pent-up, crazed, caged tiger feeling has been creeping up on me. I have been trying to deal with it, but it builds nevertheless.

And it’s begun to have physical symptoms, like joint pain, muscle twitches, and headaches. Isn’t it cruel how the symptoms of stress can be so… stressful?

I think the problem is that I am reaching the manic-ish part of my cycle, the opposite end from the one where I sleep all the time and have weird, intense dreams. My body needs exercise in order to excise these demons, and yet it is still very hard to convince myself to exercise of my own volition.

The anti-action bias is strong in this one. I associate stasis with safety. When I am still of body, my emotions settle and become quiescent and easy to ignore. I can sit there with my tablet playing video games and live in a world almost entirely of the mind, everything else shut out Not one little bit of myself experiencing the real world in any meaningful sense. A sort of poison paradise, my own private dystopia.

It makes me sick and I hate it, but I hate it like a junkie hates junk, knowing that it has power over me, that it is my addiction, my god, my escape, and my doom.

I wish I could just crush this sell of mine, take a sledgehammer and smash it into dust, and hence destroy my lines of retreat and force myself to go forward.

But I am too scared. Getting out of my shell for a little while feels good, like taking your winter clothes off ont he first day of spring. You get to air yourself out and breathe free for a change. You stretch, look around, and enjoy the sunshine on your skin.

Holy Hannah And Barbera, this week feels like it just zoomed right by.

Seriously. It feels like I wrote the last Saturday entry yesterday. Maybe the3 day before, tops. This thing where subjective time speeds up as you get older is really the pits. No wonder old people want to slow everything down. I’m only forty, and already I feel like I am always running to catch a bus.

And I know it’s just a trick of memory and consciousness. As we get older, our consciousness of time just keeps on expanding, and so the number of “consciousness units” in a day gets smaller and smaller, especially as recorded in our memory.

These units are the lynchpin of how our minds measure time, and while that works well enough in the short term, it can’t handle our modern world of clocks, artificial lighting, and alarm clocks, and so subjective time and objective time become almost entirely disconnected.

That’s also why boredom makes time go slower, by the way. With so little stimulation, the mind has insufficient input to turn into consciousness unitd, and so it ends up creating them very, very slowly.

It is kind like your mind sets down one concousness of time marker per X amount of stimulation, and the number of markers in a given length of objective time equals our subjective sense of how fast time is going by.

Now enter aging into the equation. When you are young, the world is bright and fresh and new and very stimulating, but you lack the breadth of consciousness to make long consciousness units, so days seem to last forever.

As we get older, our mind expands and the consciousness units get bigger, and we end up feeling like everything goes by so quickly these days.

I am not quite sure that all hangs together, but you get the idea.

I just keep telling myself that no matter how it feels, the day still has

1440 minutes in it and they take just as long while they are happening as they did when I was a little boy.

I need that reassurance, because without it, this ride is just too damn scary.

I am typing this entry on my tablet via my fancy-schmancy Bluetooth keyboard tonight. Now that I am a little more used to it, I feel very writerly sitting here on my bed, glasses on, studiously typing away. Perhaps in the future, this is what our standard view of The Writer Hard At Work will look like. Not the quill pen, the typewriter, or even the word prcocessor any more.

Remember when a word processor was a standalone unit the size of a small TV? I really wanted on of those, back in the day.

Heck, I still kind of want one, even though I have far more logical and pragmatic ways of accomplishing the exact same goal.

Then again, part of me still wants a Speak n’ Spell. I guess some desires neer die, they just get sent to the back files.

Today has been normal for me, which means it has been about as productive as a bee hive with only one bee.

And it’s a drone.

I feel like I am building to something, though. The boredom and dissatisfaction with spending my days like I am waiting for a ride is building every day, andI am hoping that if I tender that tender little flame long enough, it will eventually get big enough to burn through the numbing,soothing cold of my anti-action bias.

And I am getting truly sick and tired of it. And that’s a good thing. It is the kind of unhappiness that brings change, and boy, do I need change.

Preferably a dump truck full of toonies large burlap sacks. Ha ha ha.

I was talking about change with my therapist yesterday, specifically the nesrly perfect folly of wanting the results of change without anything actually changngm because change is scary and hard.

If you are not happy with who you are and want to become a stronger, happier, healthier person, then logically speaking, you want to change who you are.

And yet so many people are miserable in their lives and hate themselves and wish everything was better, and yet violently and vehemently fight any kind of change in themselves or their lives.

They want things to be better without anything changing. In absurdium, one wonders if some of these people would turn down a lottery win if they just didn’t feel up to it that day and couldn’t handle the stress and the hassle of it.

I can say this because I wasted decades of my life as one of those people. Sure, I wanted change in an abstract sense, but the reality of it scared the hell out of it, and I not only refused to do anything to initiate it, I ran away frm it when it happened.

No more. I now accept (some days more than others) that what I want is chan within myself, and that means leaving the crappy but familiar behind and reaching for the superior but unfamiliar and holding it tight until it becomes a part of you, and thus replaces dead tissue with healthy, living flesh and blood.

For the first time in my life, I accept the necessity of transformation. It is only by transformation that we can evolve, and it is only via evolution that we can transcend what we once were and become a better version of ourselves.

Some problems are too big for incremental bug patches to solve.

You need to create a whole new version of yourself. You keep all the features that work, but redesign everything else based on what you know now.

That is the transformation I desire. The transformation I will. The transformation I open myself to.

Because you know what?

I deserve better than this.

There is a better me inside me just waiting to be born.

I think it’s high time we induced labour.