I Can See Your House From Here - Archives
vol 2 number 17
I'm not sure what makes me so irritable. It might be the fact that I don't sleep enough, or that I don't maintain a healthy regimen of diet and exercise. It's possible that the world is irritating, of course; I have a lot of fellow writers whose essays and columns will back me up on this. The answer could be as simple as this damned cat that won't shut up -- at this moment, I'm going to choose this as my final answer, Regis.
The cat in question is named Cassidy. I claim that he's named after the vampire from Preacher (I'm enough of a geek that I name all my cats after comic characters; Cassidy followed Constantine and Gaiman, which was the result of a compromise), but there's another story behind that, one that doesn't get told very often. See, when I got Cassidy in the summer of 1996, it wasn't apparent to me or the vet that Cassidy was a boy, and so I named him -- er, her -- Cassiopeia. It came time to have Cass sterilized, and boy, wasn't that veterinary surgeon surprised! I quickly renamed Cass, and supplied him with all the football, cheap beer, and porn videos a little cat could ever want.
So now, five years later, Cassidy is as well-adjusted as any creature that lived with me for five years and spent the first few months of life as the opposite sex could be. Except that he likes to run away from home. Sure, all cats like to roam the neighborhood, playing and fighting with the other overgrown rats, eating dead things, and causing traffic havoc. Cassidy, however, is an indoor cat. At the moment, I can't think of a good reason for this, but he is, and that's the way we've been for years. I've always encouraged his growth by telling him that, as soon as he can open the door by himself, he's welcome to come and go as he pleases, and as he has neither the opposable thumbs nor the network of friends necessary to turn the doorknob, I can proudly say that I mean it.
For the past three years, my wife and I have lived on the second floor of a house that has been converted into a makeshift duplex (a slate of drywall leans against the door that opens to my landlord's apartment below). One of the best things about this house -- and there are many -- is the porch that overlooks the neighborhood. It's a covered porch, great for entertaining, grilling, and storage of all the rugs that one of our other cats marked (long story short: Tat had a bladder stone roughly the size of his bladder, and so took to relieving himself anywhere but the litter box). It was also an ideal way to let the cats roam outside; although there's no screen, it's a full twelve feet from roof to grass, so the cats, while scaring my wife with their tendency to play near/on the edges, were effectively confined.
Well, mostly. There was the time that Tat jumped off of the roof and disappeared for three days. And Puddy occasionally falls (she's too stupid to jump), though she'll soon wander back over to the stairway that leads to our door. Cass, though -- well, I'm becoming less and less convinced that Cass is a special cat. He's discovered that he can easily survive the jump, and so the minute the door to the porch is open, he's out and off, and heading down the street to walk casually into the neighbor's houses, or to sit just beyond the snapping jaws of the token Big Rabid Dog on a Chain of the neighborhood. Simple solution: cats are no longer allowed outside. End of story.
Of course, as Robert Fripp's Guitarcraft teaches, the end of a process is the beginning of another. Cassidy's new pursuit involves his newly found voice, and exercising it while standing by the back door. What used to be a cute squeaking chirp has become an alleycat mewl that won't quit, not unlike Mariah Carey. We've tried ignoring him, responding negatively, walking away -- everything short of duct tape, and at this rate, that might not be so far off.
I've started noticing that I can't get away from it, no matter what I try. At work and school, I hear it. Turn on talk radio, I hear it. It's at the clubs, on television, and all over the Internet (find a comics or science fiction bulletin board populated by Paul Riddell's Cat Piss Men and you'll have your proof). It's that sound that we all hear every day, but somehow learn to shut out. The parents out there will relate really well to this, I imagine, as will creators. That's because the sound is the incessant, soul-draining wail of a creature not getting what it wants, what it is convinced that it somehow deserves. Of course, the parents deserve it, because at some time in their life, they, too, looked at the people that spawned them and repeated breathlessly "I want the new Barbie Dreamhouse with High Speed Internet Access and Neighborhood Watch™," or "I want to go to Disneyland nownownowNOW!"
Do the creators deserve it, though? It's certainly not what they signed up for, I'll bet. I know that I didn't sit in my bedroom playing guitar along with the newest Van Halen album thinking, "Someday, someone will rant endlessly about how I'm not giving them what they want and deserve! I can't wait!" Surely George Lucas didn't celebrate the unexpected success of Star Wars by praying for armchair directors to haunt online bulletin boards telling him what The Phantom Menace really should have been about.
Then again, maybe he did. It's either that, or he let his kids write it.
A friend was telling me last night about the (rather opinionated) fans of King Crimson criticizing Adrian Belew, one of the group's guitarists, on the electronic mail list that fans of the band share. After a lot of criticism, Belew himself responded, essentially saying that when anyone could do all the things that he does in the band, they were welcome to take his place; he would gladly step down. The comment was made that, although a valid response on Belew's part, all the things that he defended were the things that didn't belong in King Crimson (those sorts of comments, by the way, continue to this day).
There are Stephen King fans that continually bemoan the loss of King's old stories. Each new book comes with a slew of "It's certainly no Shining " and "I wish he'd write scary stuff again." Even after ten books, though, these people are still buying and reading and complaining.
Now, I'm not saying that it's bad for them to wish for a return to whatever greatness they claim is gone; nor is it wrong to criticize art of any medium. If King writes a bad book with a pretty cover, it's fine to call a turd a turd, no matter how polished.
For crying out loud, though, if you don't like it, don't buy it. King Crimson sounds like what they sound like, and they'll continue to, because that's what they do, not try to sound like what everyone thinks they should. King (and, heaven forbid, Lucas) writes what he does because that's what he does. Comic storylines go the way they do because that's the way the creators write them. It amazes me that anyone would entertain the concept of an artist or group of artists not being what they are, as if by some strange and undefined sense, it was suddenly possible to glean new insight into the world and see that things were wrong -- ALL WRONG! -- and that a simple alert would be enough to make creative types say, "Whoa -- wait just a moment! He's got something there! It's suddenly so very clear to me!"
It really bothers me to see that even after all these years, people still have some unpleasant remnants of animal in them. Unlike Cassidy, though, the whiners of fandom have opposable thumbs; someone just needs to tell them to open the door. A cat is not capable of seeing the dangers that roam the streets of the city. Fandom is, though; jumping off of that porch means taking chances with financial woe, critical failure, and being eaten alive by rabid fans. It's a whole lot easier to sit behind a meaningless latch and cry about how things aren't the way they're supposed to be than to try the door, to write the story the want to read or to make the music or movie they hear or see in their heads.
It's that sort of thing that makes me appreciate my cat. His cries, at least, come from helplessness. Besides, he bathes himself, sleeps in my lap, and never criticizes my writing or my music.
Still, I wonder in these small hours exactly how unethical having an animal debarked really is...