Who Feeds You?

 

 

My wife has been feeding a black and white cat that hangs around our backyard. Now she is vamoosed to Florida indefinitely so daughter has taken over the task.  I'm sure raccoons and a skunk family under the deck appreciate the gesture.  I would.  The issue of food never goes away; there is a stream of edibles that go in one side and come out the other, until death.  In some ways every living thing is an eating machine; and then there are the habits and expectations that go with it.  Now the cat has a dependable source of food here; he may be a real entrepreneur and have little venues like this all over the neighborhood.  I can imagine him creating a side business with the excess, "Twice as nice found food boutique" or something like that.  In any case, a culture is built up around a habit that my wife started, passed on to her daughter, and will be terminated by me.  I have no intention of feeding the cat.  Call me a Social Darwinian; cats are already an exotic species, the expectation for a hand out is endless, it does not engender real love, and the problem multiplies with the cat's success at getting me to support his habits.  Who owns him anyway?

 

I hear the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Rothschild's, and Fords all over the place in my attitude.  "Get a job!  Be useful for something!" "No jobs sir, and all I wanna do is eat a few pieces of GMO cornmeal mixed with chicken scrapings off the floor of the Purina Plant." "Then you are OUT OF LUCK, the 'family camps' may have a place for you. BYE." We invent the neediness and then condemn it to hell.  What are all us cats to do in such a system?                                                     

Nothing will be solved here, rest assured.  Go to Stephan Covey, Wayne Dyer, Sri Sri Ravishankar, The Ford Foundation help line, or the Salvation Army soup line, but cats can just sit on the fence howling until it seems like they better get on with it elsewhere; until  ducking shoes in the moonlight becomes more difficult than looking cute enough to rate a free meal. You might say, "Wait a minute!  I WORK for a living!" This is where the cat is much smarter than I am, so the metaphor dies with that very point.  Cats just live.  "They don't do shit" for a living.  'Patches' or whatever his name is called, will eat and owe me nothing; not a good days work or productivity or cuteness or even a nod of approval.  I on the other hand make sure to balance my value as a creature sucking resources out of the planet against my real or imagined contributions to "THE MAN", who, by-the-way I have entrusted my planet to for safe keeping.  Let's forget about "man the higher animal" unless slavery in so many beautiful colors can be considered superior to walking as a sovereign on your own Earth.  Cats don't care about or notice boundaries, even DOGS have to be beaten (or 'conditioned'...which is mind-beating) to notice the boxes, edges, do's and don'ts that humans relish.  The higher animal is apparently a happy slave; as a hammer views all the world a nail, so the slave views all the world a sweat shop owned by fat guys with cigars. (Maybe the fat guys view the slaves as nails.)

 

 

 

Like a moth round the little yellow light at Camp Lostenforsaken's outhouse, I circle the issue of slavery while a full moon beckons just above the tree line.  Let's look up, moths, cats, slaves, and notice the full moon that has floated, huge and lamp-like above the trees. The cat is already there; I can join him.  The system works because day by day I recreate it.  The cat does not shudder in fear of hunger or rejection.  He will look at the empty bowl for a few days, then with less and less frequency, eventually going for baby birds, maybe even road kill or open garbage cans.  He won't see the memes at work, that he has fallen, and is now just a "garbage cat", a loser.  He won't look up from some mysterious meat and gristle and say, "Hey, I'm better than this!  I gotta do something!" and then head round the country trying to look cute enough for hand outs, learning tricks, rolling his eyes, or even getting depressed and losing weight, ashamed to show his loser face to other cats.  I want to learn that: The sovereignty is there, the dignity of being alive is inherent in breathing; the rest is a rat maze, dog training school, operant conditioning prison to convince me I can be improved by pulling fat guy's chariot around. 

 

Maybe I should be sure to follow the cat around and see where he goes when he leaves my empty bowl.  Maybe I should feed him because he's so great and I might learn something.  One way or another, I've got to get something to eat.