@godofbiscuits what i missed was not knowing the definition of 'homeopathic' sorry. in reply to godofbiscuits #

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Or perhaps the grasping, globular intellect seized quite involuntarily upon a common causeway to traffic meaning between the two: Absence?

Vulgar vernacular has writer’s block down as an absence of sorts: a blank page refusing to surrender itself to ink or carbon or variant pixels. Selfsame for meditation, although intentional: achieving the blank page of the mind and standing sentries around it that reject arrant thoughts, plant trees as windbreaks that keep out wisps of ideas while we sit, perhaps Zazen, with nothingness.

When, though, was a blockade or any form of blockage about nothingness? And how does one construct sentries and windbreaks in the mind without thinking?

Relax, it’s rhetorical: there is no nothingness. Nature abhors a vacuum—or is it that vacuuming comes naturally to a whore?

No matter. The Truth of it is that writer’s block is about crowding: too many notions and potions, ideations and creations competing for primacy, hoping to be borne onto a page: thoughts alchemize when they hit the air and are forever changed, and the little pricks know that.

And they know it’s worth fighting for and, lordjesusfargochrist do they know it. And fight they do, and it’s the murderous storming clamor that drowns out thought itself, that clogs up the pipeline and creates—you guessed it—blockage.

And what’s this to do with meditation? Meditation is about letting go of the valve on that pipeline, letting the clamor happen and letting those little pricks just exhaust themselves or go hoarse. Either is acceptable, because the outcome is same: respite for you.

Sentries aren’t needed and windbreaks are beside the point because there is no point to be made: thoughts have run their course and you’re left with You. Which is to say, nothing. Because truly, self-image is a construct, just another one of those little pricks, if you will, vying for me-time. Reach that point in meditation and, well, there’s not enough other to record the trip.

So you might have actually been there before: if you’ve truly been successful, you won’t ever know it.

It’s what death must be like. There’s no you remaining to experience the truth of it, and so the little pricks of the world clamor to paste handbills of riotous, shallow meaning to it and call it truth.

Christianity. Atheism (capital-A, rabid variety). Islam. Only the Buddhists are self-abnegating, which is why you’ll never see a Buddhist with a gun and a Plan for Self-Ascendancy, and that should tell you all you need to know.

Shakespeare, for all his fathering of Western Literature, is the Ironic Critic of all its mundanity. He made up literally (ha!) thousands of words because the West had no means of describing the things his mind cooked up.

Not a whit, we defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?

And there is a special providence in the fall of every sparrow. There’s just no need to manufacture a special provider in order to appreciate that fact: We do indeed defy augury.

Marry me in Massachusetts? RT @NathanFillion: RT @Klassp @NathanFillion marry me? Play your cards right… #

@wurtis nerfty! in reply to wurtis #

@hobronto did you insist on the bigger, more ostentatious bow tie? in reply to hobronto #

@Nancy_Anderson Nothing's wrong on Twitter, except Spam and Justin Bieber. in reply to Nancy_Anderson #

@bynkii it really was! and we're really OLD. in reply to bynkii #

@dlpasco re: Bernadette Peters. OMG *LOVE* HER. (was that too gay?) 'member on her SNL, laid out on a piano singing "Making Love Alone"? in reply to dlpasco #

Behave! I <3 Seth. RT @hobronto: […] Yet another communication medium made less funny by the presence of Seth MacFarlane. #

@greacen Verbatim, huh? Lemme guess: Matt said it. in reply to greacen #

Were you listening in on a pocket dimension tuned to 1983? RT @greacen: overheard: "I have the urge to merge." #

@hobronto horses? After 6, I would have expected goats[e]. in reply to hobronto #

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@rhino and I thought it was an earthquake in reply to rhino #

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Saucer of milk & large popcorn? RT @hobronto: FF 2 year 2028 to see what kind of high school-aged characters Michael Cera is playing then. #

Stop following me & I will "follow" you…ifyouknowhatimean RT @hobronto: Want to impress me? Tell me who I should *stop* following. #

But you're not a *NEGATIVE* asshole RT @gruber[…]no, working to not be negative is good, otherwise u sound like an asshole like @gruber #

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Once upon a desert, once upon a hill, I loved you once. Once upon a forever, once.

Goodbye, Sam.

For a second there, I thought that was a new contraction for "napa cabbage" / RT @Daigansf: No no no, not Miller Time.. Nappage Time.. #

SFW Gay pr0n warning! /// RT @lonelysandwich: […] now I proudly don these dreamy unlicensed postal shorts. http://yfrog.com/07vrawj #

Turns u supergay? RT @Clarko: Protip: Don't have a lot of energy drink […] to wash down habanero […]starting to see a triple rainbow. #

Ayn rand() ?? Ew. I grossed myself out. Hate her. // RT @tewha: I have no idea where all this randomness is coming from. #

You're talking about Chrome? // RT @bynkii: yay! Now I have a face to put to the name behind the abomination that is Google UI #

@danbenjamin I'll definitely be back. You made all the observations & asked the questions I would have asked. Obviously, you're a GENIUS. in reply to danbenjamin #

@bynkii it's hilarious! but my inner completeness nerd wants to correct the moon part: latest theories say it did come from earth-mass. in reply to bynkii #

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He had a penchant for “old man names” when it came time to naming anything…a Mac, an iPod, an iPhone, anything…so he had started to come up with a list of names for what he’d name the cat even before we had made a single plan to go to the “no kill” cat shelter in Tucson.

I was reluctant to do any of this, especially because his tenure in the USAF was so tentative; I just didn’t think it was the right time to consider getting a pet. But there was no dissuading him.

Anyhow, I don’t remember any of the “old man names” on that list of pet names, but I’m sure that they’d subsequently made their way onto MacBook Pros, etcs. Henry and Ralph and Edgar and the like.

We arrived at the cat shelter, a sprawling ranch house that’d been added onto—badly—several times, but Tucson weather being what it was, you could get away with such stuff. To a person, it was run by morbidly obese white women. Sam had whispered a comment about bull dykes being around all that pussy. I smacked him, but hid my own smile.

“All that pussy” was 435 cats to be exact: they kept a white board near the front door to show you an up to date tally of their “current residents”.

We walked through several rooms—a shotgun-shack-style construction: no hallways anywhere, just room connected to room connected to room—each of which had a dozen or more cats in various states of leisure and play like living knick-knacks and we were two suburban low-rent homos out flea-marketing on a weekend.

In the fourth or fifth such room, there was a Himalayan cat whose head had been shaved, a long old scar running from the top of her head, between her eyes and down the side of her neck. Her nose was very red, her eyes a mystical green. You couldn’t stop looking, but not because of her disfigurement. She actually appeared to rise above it. It was a weird cat-dignity thing.

Sam wanted to move on, though, and at first I couldn’t figure out why. Though she looked like a strung-out, morning-after drag queen, I thought the Himalayan’s comportment more than made up for whatever had been done to her by ugly, inhuman scum (the need for the surgery, not the scar from it).

Then I saw what he saw and what made him need to leave the room: there was another cat over on the floor, mostly white, whose spots were actually striped regions. A beautiful cat, intact in appearance but not in function: he was paralyzed in his rear quarters. His tail lay off to the side unnaturally and his legs were flat on the ground behind him. He was walking across the floor slowly but with cat-confidence, pulling himself along quite capably. It was too much for Sam and I wasn’t moving fast enough so he grabbed me by the hand and INSISTED.

I tried to tell him that the cat was doing just fine and that he was managing perfectly well. He’d adjusted, he’d learned to—

But I got that look from Sam that said not so much “shut the fuck up” as “I’ve unplugged your mic”. I can smile now, but I knew when When was WHEN, if you know what I mean.

We finally got to a large screened-in outdoor space with at least a hundred cats.

The biggest commotion in the room was a noisy toy that had a floppy thing with lots of rubbery tendrils at the end of a foot-long arm. At the other end of the arm was a motor in a case. The encased motor was the pivot point and as it rotated the shaft of the arm, the floppy thing, well, flopped about and circumscribed a clear area on the cement floor around which about thirty cats of all stripes (and spots and Siameses) were waiting their turn for the floppy thing to come ‘round again so they could have their swats at it.

I walked away from Sam over towards them and looked on for a bit.

Sam’s eyes were always the first thing you noticed about Sam. Brown eyes that were dark and shiny—sometimes. Or mellow and warm—sometimes. I think he was able to command them to be either. He never told.

They were almond shaped, exotic, like so many things about Sam’s personality, intelligence and creativity. Exotic. He never believed me, I don’t think, when I told him how wonderful that was; he seemed to just want to be like everyone else. From the little I’ve gotten to see of how he was with Greg, however, their togetherness alchemized his world into something that let Sam celebrate everything that was special about himself.

And how fucking great is that?

But I was talking of hundreds of cats and a milestone day. I found a cat. He was silver with a dark grey undercoat. Small, with green-yellow almond-shaped eyes. I called Sam over, who was doing nothing but trying to avoid the cats who were living with maladies or disfigurements, so he came right over. I pointed out the cat that I thought he might like, joking (though not really joking) that this cat “looks a lot like you!”

He glared at me. Lesser men would have withered and blown away. Not me though (he says, puffing out his chest).

Sam crouched down nonetheless, to get a better look. He wasn’t down for more than a few seconds when he felt two paws on his thigh. He lifted up his left arm and there he was: an orange and white cat, separate from all the other cats, standing up on his hind legs.

Looking up at Sam and making no noise at all. He even reached up with a paw and put it on Sam’s hand.

I gasped: a big-ass, if undernourished, orange cat had found his way to Sam!

Sam picked him up and held him on his back, face up, like an infant and one of the women there gasped as well. Apparently she’d never seen this particular cat permit such a thing.

Sam said to the woman, “could you tell me please about this cat?” His voice was small and quiet and measured. I’m sure if asked he would have said he didn’t want to disturb the cat, but I could hear tentativeness and fear there. Fear of breaking the spell. Fear of finding out something that would prevent him from fulfilling the wishes this cat had already Wished.

The woman replied, “Let me get Walter’s paperwork.”

Sam’s head turned and snapped to look at me. His eyes went wide and he mouthed the name “Walter!”

Walter! Old man name! Big-ass Orange Cat!

I smiled and actually teared up: I believed in things like this because I’d already been living in San Francisco for a decade. When things are right, the Universe invites you to screw up the courage and take action to make them real. Simple as that.

Walter was “about a year-and-a-half to two-years old” and “was social, except with other cats”. Fine so far, since Sam and Regina (his roommate at the time) didn’t have any other cats.

“I would like to take Walter home with me.”

It was so strange that he sounded so much like the little boy when he was saying such a mature and responsible thing. A clear, direct statement of protection, commitment and honest love.

The shelter insisted on a home visit before permitting the adoptions, to make sure it was a safe environment for the cat. Oh, Sam was all bluster for a week about “how dare they judge a Kennedy!” and such, but he did everything he possibly could at the apartment to make sure it was cat-safe (to this day I have no idea what that entailed) so that Walter, having wished for Sam, could have his wish fulfilled.

Beautiful story, right?

But the most beautiful part of it is something I have yet to recount, because it didn’t happen in Tucson. It didn’t happen on the move from Tucson to San Francisco. It didn’t even happen while Sam and I were still together and both living together with Walter.

It happened when things were perhaps nearly the worst they ever were between Sam and me, after things were over. He was moved out and we were barely speaking. He wasn’t doing well no matter how you cared to measure wellness.

But he contacted me when there was no other reason to other than to say what he’d needed to say after he’d come to a decision:

“I want you to have Walter,” he said, speaking very carefully, deliberately. “I know I owe you a lot, but he’s the only thing I have to give you.”

It was so strange that he sounded so much like the little boy when he was saying such a mature and responsible thing. A clear, direct statement of selflessness and honest lovely giving.

Walter is laying right here next to me, like he always does. He’s never been completely just mine.

And you know what? Even now, he’s still a little bit Sam’s. Always will be.

That's shocking! You use a Mac? /// RT @gideonse: Just worked for 180 minutes with http://www.macfreedom.com! #

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