Once Will Suffice
Mr. Wuss has been OK. "Been OK" means he still sleeps on his chair by my desk, he still waits for me by the door when I get up in the morning to feed him his breakfast and he still waits for me by the door when I return home to feed him his dinner. He wants to be petted and I make it more of a point now to pet him. I don't let him sit on my lap anymore because he can't control his water and he seems more frail, but his tail is bushy and he isn't fretting. One night I'm going to come home and he won't be waiting at the door or one morning I'm going to wake up and he isn't going to be at the door and I will hesitate and think for a minute before I go to look for him in the apartment. And that will be it for a journaler's cat, known by people who live in places he cannot imagine. And I will not be happy. But now, for what time is left, we'll be old guy and old cat, making it as best we can in Oakland.
So much for life and cats, let's get down to business. I'm writing this on Monday night and Ally McBeal, a program that has been on vacation for the last several weeks, is playing in a special two hour segment. And the writers appear to be having fun in a kind of careening mad - half good, half bad - half assed fashion. The pace is furious, ginned up snappy patter, and I'm enjoying it. Wuss is curled up on the bath towel I have folded up on his chair beside me, not feeling the allure of Monday night McBeal and her life in the law firm of Fish & McBeal on Fox. Then again, this fine honed appreciation could just be me and the two whiskey and waters. The snappy patter. The furious pace. Alcohol. It happened once before, in Detroit.
So now it's Tuesday and I'm tired. And I've been sitting here playing Freecell like a zombie and that's pretty much it. We learned today how the cubicles will be reorganized in our department and my new roost is, um, not promising. All the little status signals say adios Prop, you're not a keeper. The current rumor is they're getting down to the nitty gritty in negotiations with a well known outsourcing firm that will wipe out our department and I'm thinking, well, I'm not thinking at all, I'm sitting here playing Freecell. I'll get up to Napa this weekend (or next weekend) to see what the wine business is up to (might be fun to manage a winery site he says for the forty second time) and wonder what other kinds of companies might cotton to an old guy with a web habit. Who shoots pictures. Writes. Has a cat.
Hell, I'm drifting. Same old subject. I have no doubt I'll wait to the bitter end to see what happens, go up to Napa, sure, but pretend to poke at possibilities and then come back. I don't really want to go back into the wine business, although the web site idea is a kick. I could do that. Napa was nice, but San Francisco was nice and Oakland is nice, but none of them twice, once will suffice. Some say that about life.
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