Dispatches from the Abyss - Friday, Oct. 19th

Well kids, sorry about missing last night. I came home from work, cranked one out, and almost immediately fell asleep. That lasted until around 8 PM when I realized I still needed to go to the comic shop and get dinner. For some reason these two tasks seemed to take longer than they should have and it ended up I only had time to write the review of Charlie Wilson's War, although writing that review took almost my whole hour. Of course in that case I was editing and rewriting just a little bit since the review is at least in form more formal than these dispatches.

As I type this it is about 2:30 AM on Saturday and I am sitting on the deck of the beach house some friends and I have rented for the weekend. There will be no soundtrack tonight as I am sitting here listening to the crickets, waves, and wind. Until I turned my laptop on I could see millions of stars. Orion is still visible, slowly swinging through the sky as morning creeps up on the world. This being the Gulf coast there are several blinking lights on the horizon which indubitably are drilling rigs of one sort or another. While I can see about four from the deck of the house, I can remember when we used to come to Galveston when I was a child and there would be dozens of them along the horizon. As the near shore reserves get consumed they are taking down the rigs. On the one hand it is nice because we are moving towards a more natural horizon, but on the other hand it was kind of neat to see them. With them gone from the horizon it feels as though another piece of my childhood is gone.

I mentioned Orion however the star that I keep looking at is a bit lower in the sky than Orion and almost in line with his belt. If I did not know better I would think it is a police chopper as it seems to flash blue and red. I imagine it is one of the planets, not Venus as that is known as the Morning Star, however either Jupiter or Mars would not be too surprising. Tonight we have been graced with a small meteor shower with Nyla having seen six or seven before she called it a night. I saw two myself, one of them a very good one which covered about a quarter of the sky. Sadly I had no wishes ready.

So what did I get up to on Thursday and Friday? Well Thursday was another typical day at the office. I was marginally busy because of one bitch paralegal making mistakes and I having to show her the error of her ways or correct her mistakes. To a certain extent that carried over to today where I spent all of my day working on correcting her errors and reloading one of the databases to account for her errors. It would not bother me however I have it on fairly good authority that this cunt bitches about me to management. Of course it was all made better by the fact that I was telecommuting today, something she complained about, and spent most of the day working in my britches. Scott and I got together for lunch today, and that was a very nice break.

Today I also learned that the only way to do laundry in the laundry room at my apartment complex is to wash everything on warm. The hot water will not run and the cold water will not run. Somehow this seems really retarded to me and frustrated the every living monkey out of me today as I tried to get laundry done so I would have clothes to wear this weekend.

Speaking of my apartment complex the bastards are keeping me from adopting a couple of kittens with their draconian policies. They require a $250 deposit PER KITTEN and require the entire deposit to be paid before I can bring them in to the house. This is the first time I have been asked for more than $300 as a pet deposit and the first time a management company has been unwilling to work with me and allow me to pay the pet deposit in installments. I am kind of pissed about this and will bring it up when my lease comes up for renewal, although I will probably re-up where I am right now. There are too many advantages to where I am currently living.

I was at the office when I figured out the whole not getting a cat thing, which I had been thinking about for a couple of months. To a certain degree I am tired of living completely alone and I think some animal companionship would help alleviate this. It would certainly do better than the occasional phone sex calls I have been making. The cat issue became a little more urgent to me when I found out that my friend Greg rescued a litter of kittens from his neighbors yard during a recent downpour. The kittens are taking solid food and have all been checked for Feline Lukemia and been given a clean bill of health. He needs to get rid of the kittens, which are in the five week old range, and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to adopt. All I would have to pay for is the eventual spaying or neutering, so I started pursuing this with the company that manages my apartment complex.

As I said I was at the office on Thursday when I figured I was not going to be able to get a kitten and for some reason I started to tear up and cry a little bit. I really don't know why but the fact that I could not get one filled me with equal parts anger at my management company for being so unreasonable and just sadness. I felt very alone all of the sudden and I really missed Gurion.

I cannot remember if I have ever talked about Gurion here on the Opiate before. Gurion was my cat which I found when I was in Houston and I had for a couple of years in College Station before he escaped the house as some friends were cleaning after a party. Gurion was a very good cat and my first pet that was not a family pet or a fish.

Gurion came into my life when I was living alone in the garage apartment on Dallas street. I did not have a phone in this apartment and so in order to talk to Kat I would walk down to the payphone on the corner. I had been kicking around the idea of getting a pet but had been putting it off since at the time I was thinking about getting a dog but had a fairly busy social life. I did not want to start resenting the dog for cutting into my social life. I had tossed around the idea of getting a cat, however not very seriously. Anyways, I was there talking on the payphone with Kat when this tiny little kitten comes walking across the street. I thought that if he let me pick him up then I would take him home because he was far too small to be wandering alone. I picked him up and he immediately curled up in the crook of my arm. Right then I knew I had found the pet I had been looking for.

Gurion was a great cat except for his disturbing habit of wanting to play while I was on the toilet. He would always be in the same room with me and when he was a kitten he would sit in my lap while we watched TV. During my super short hair phase if he caught me laying on the floor he would spend quite a bit of time cleaning and grooming my hair for me. When I would get home from work he would want to spend ten to fifteen minutes getting stroked and talked to about my day. He was the best stress relief ever!

My favorite Gurion story happened while I was living in the trailer in College Station. Ever since he was a kitten his favorite toys were those little plastic mice with the rabbit-fur coverings. I would buy a package of those a month as he would play with them and they would inevitably end up under a piece of furniture. I would watch him stalk and pounce on these things all them time and became pretty familiar with his routine. One day I had been in the computer room, which was the bedroom off the living room and headed into the kitchen to get a drink. As I walked out of the computer room I saw Gurion hunched down beneath the futon staring at something very intently. As I followed his eye-line I saw that there was a field mouse right in front of the TV. I stopped and decided to watch how this turned out. Gurion crouched even lower and shook his butt, a sign he was about to attack the mouse. Then he shook his butt again and exploded from his spot, making a beeline for the mouse which was across the living room. It should go without saying that the mouse took off like a rocket, but the moment it moved Gurion slammed on the brakes and headed back under the sofa to reassess the situation. I can just imagine what was going through his head. "That fucker moved before I even got there! This never happens. Clearly my powers have grown and I will soon be able to face Darth Vader again."

My second favorite Gurion tale takes place at my garage apartment on Dallas. When Gurion was younger he was prone to freak out from time to time. These episodes usually took the form of running laps around the room and his favorite was my bedroom. On this particular night I was working at my desk, which was just outside the door to the bedroom, when I hear Gurion get spun up and start doing laps. I just shake my head and continue working on whatever project consumed me at the time when out of the corner of my eye I see Gurion go sailing across the doorway and down the stairwell. It turns out that Gurion had decided to stop on top of the pile of papers on my bedside table however he had enough momentum and the papers were loose enough that stopping there was not an option. Gurion was fine, if a bit embarrassed by the whole episode. I think I consoled him with a new mouse toy after that.

God Gurion was a good cat. We had a fun couple of years together and I hope deep down in my heart of hearts that some deserving family who needed him found him and that he is living out his years in a loving home. Where ever you are I love you and miss you, Gurion.

Well, I tear up when thinking about Gurion so I am going to go ahead and cut tonight's writing short by about ten minutes. I hope you'll pardon me.