There's a lesson in hubris here, if only we could find it

And that's how I discovered that Yet likes to climb trees.

Moments after this, I heard a plaintive mew and flung the camera to the ground. As I ran toward the tree, Yet was climbing down the trunk backwards, struggling against her tangled leash, until finally she was just suspended from her harness like the Golden Fleece.

And moments after my daring Argonautical rescue of her, I lay in the hammock reading Hippolytos while the cats hunted butterflies. Because, as Euripides tells us, some Saturdays life is freaking hard.

“Hovering at all times everywhere, like a bee,
is the goddess of love, sifting
upon our flowering fields her savage pollen.”

— Euripides, trans. Robert Bagg

We never blink, see, and you can see me; we fell asleep in the middle of the fury

It's good that D's coming home soon. I'm developing a certain Havishamesque hermitude, wandering the garden aimlessly with a knife, arguing with desultory plants.  The plight of the bats worries me.  I know more than I wish to about the sex lives of squash.

 I'm having increasingly formal conversations with the cats, and they have the unsettling air of being on the precipice of answering back.

“ ‘So!’ she said, without being startled or surprised; ‘the days have worn away, have they?’ ”

— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

"Bonesy," I said a moment ago, leaning in to the cat curled up by my head, "if I died suddenly and left you alone here, would you eat my face?"

She gave a slow, indulgent cat blink.

"You're very hungry, but I think you wouldn't." She stretched, her polydactyl paw coming affectionately to rest at the very edge of my eye socket.  Wearily, I remembered my Herzog. "Or you'd hold off at least as long as a human would?"

Blink.

---

I wish that I could describe to you the look the cats cast upon me when I climb on the exercise bike and begin tonelessly belting along to late-90s pop.  I attempted to render its full horror on Twitter earlier, and the closest I could come was the realization that Bonesy bore an uncanny resemblance to that portrait of Garrick as Hamlet, seeing his father's ghost for the first time. You know, the scene for which he had a wig constructed that, upon brief pressure to a trigger in his hand, would raise the hairs in sharp, uncanny alarm.

“His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak.”

— Christoph Lichtenberg on Garrick (1775)

And Yet, poor Yet, still hasn't forgiven me for sweeping her up to dance with me to the pounding beat of Sleigh Bells. She fled soon after. I can hear her plaintive yawps (she too is untranslatable) echoing downstairs. Come home, D, I think they say. Have mercy: come home.

And this house just ain't no home

It was hallucinatory fog last night in the coastal barrens. The sort of fog that contracts the world to a hundred-yard radius, dropping a boundary where everything fades abruptly to chalk. The sort of fog which forces everyone to a tense, precise, unwavering adherence to the speed limit, no more, no less. Bleak, claustrophobic, murder-mystery fog. As I drove, familiar things appeared suddenly, unexpected and unrecognizable, stark and two-dimensional on the blank skene of fog. A local church promised a Blessing of Blackberries. Through the speakers, a local bluesman played Ain't No Sunshine.  D hasn't been home in a month and a half, I thought with wandering languor.

Really just the weather for the start of term, if one had a mind that ran to pathetic fallacy.