Gargoyle and Big Foot

A not-so-nice someone from my past quietly joined my list of followers and I just as quietly blocked the person.  No emotion.  A simple, not happening.  No further thought about it until today when out of the primordial ooze of sleep deprivation I rose . . .

Big Foot & the horse she rode in on
by Siniharraka Urban Photography

 My current WIP isn’t progressing.  I’ve been working on the same paragraph for about two days, not so much because it’s a difficult passage but because of this pickpocket, water loving, newly arrived noodle.  There are horrible and marvellous things happening in the world at large, but in the Writing Closet, there is only Big Foot.

We’d long been thinking Big Nose needed a friend, but he’s such a wonderful dog, we feared the chances of getting a canine version of the Gargoyle Possum.  You remember him.  The stray cat who turned out to be a bloodthirsty desperado with a brain tumour.

Gargoyle Possom

Big Foot is no Gargoyle Possum.  She brings all the clownery of puppyhood but inside a calm and grounded personality.  When she starts sleeping through the night, I may even begin to love her.  (Okay, so I already love her.)

 All the cats including Gargoyle have adjusted amazingly to Big Foot.  In an aura of complaisance, we noticed one of Gargoyle’s paws twitched when he slept but if you have dogs, a twitching paw doesn’t compare. 

So one afternoon, I’m snoozing on the couch with Big Foot when the slap of body part against wood wakes me up.  The Butler, who’s not really paying attention, says it’s Gargoyle twitching in his sleep.  Gargoyle is out of the Butler’s line of vision, but I see the cat’s upper body rise and slam against the floor.  The Butler’s examination makes Gargoyle march indignantly into the back garden and the incident gets swept away by Big Foot doing a flying leap onto the kitchen table.

The next morning, the Butler goes into town.  Big Foot settles into her morning nap.  There are various cat bodies scattered around making cat snore music.  I’m at the computer writing when Gargoyle goes into grand mal seizure.

If you’ve never seen a cat have a grand mal, don’t put it on your bucket list.

The vet wanted us to see if Gargoyle had another fit before medicating him.  Fuck this.  The cat has a brain tumour.  Of course he’s going to have another one.  We’re now in the stage of continued petit mals until the meds are regulated, but everyone (except, presumably Gargoyle) knows this is the last stretch for him.  We’d hoped he’d go quietly in his sleep, but he’s never been an easy cat, has he?

There’s no sense of Alpha-Omega for me in this juxtaposition of Big Foot and Gargoyle.  It’s the story that’s happening now in my anonymous little life.  While I toss tennis balls and take shoes away from Big Foot, Gargoyle’s emergency rectal dose is always within reach. 

Accepting inconsequential details
by Siniharraka Urban Photography

Every life is made up of these inconsequential details.  The heroic outburst of the Paris rose, the variety of butterflies around the buddleia, the buzzard and fox sightings, Big Nose’s hydrotherapy and Bunny Butt’s latest kill, these are the warp and weft of my existence. 

So it is that when these inconsequential details are attacked, taken from us, something so small that it seems childish to complain, that’s actually where something greater, more destructive starts.  Awards that are only allowed display in the guest bathroom.  A favourite TV show always interrupted.  A brazen hussy of a red dahlia ripped up by the roots.

The message here is that your right to small little pleasures pales in comparison to mine.  Or maybe even that this right doesn’t exist for you.  That, my friend, is a scary message.  On an interpersonal level, it’s new stepchildren insulting the bride’s friends at the wedding lunch.  On the global level, it’s the genital mutilation of all females aged 11 to 45.  Or happy dances over the most recent genocide.

Trollop
by Siniharraka Urban Photography

In my garden, there grows an inconsequential detail I call trollops.  Malopes, to the uninitiated.  El Punko, who has narcoleptic episodes when I discuss the garden, took photos of them for his urban photography website.  The message here is that exercising my right to have small little pleasures actually gives him pleasure.

With people like that in my life, not-so-nice someones from my past will continue to be quietly blocked.  If only it were so easy to block the not-so-nice from doing harm on the global level.

Don't Kill the Monster

It’s been a wonderful and strange week in this world, hasn’t it?  The US government’s still shut down.  In the UK, legislation was passed to make landlords, banks and GPs participate in the xenophobic witch hunt called immigration control.  And the Spirit Moose in Canada was legally killed by non-indigenous hunters. 

Then Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize.  We chuckled over David Gilmour showing his narrow minded ass.  The White Hats win and they’re worn by women.  Canadian women.  If Munro had been gay and Chinese, I would’ve gone back to church.  Having said that, it’s here where we move a little too close to the self-destruct edge.

Let me tell you about a cat.  Stray Eddie.  A pot bellied, one eyed, scrofulous, geriatric stray with hair like an American opossum.  In other words, icky.  We very kindly brought him into our home where he promptly savaged the Butler, terrorised the much smaller females, urinated in all the wrong places, jumped up on the table during meals with the expectation he could eat from our plates.

What an ingrate.  He had to go.  The Butler rang round and was told by cat rescues that the only solution was euthanasia.  Okay, our home had been taken over by the North Yorkshire Monster, but euthanasia?  You do know what that means.  Kill the monster.  Kill.  The.  Monster. 

Kill.

We weren’t going to do that.  Fortunately, our vet explained cat behaviour to us and we realised we’d been making Stray Eddie more and more stressed out.  Here we had an elderly cat with a collar mark still in his fur who apparently had never been let outside and seems to’ve lived alone with one person who treated him like a human companion.  Now he’s been turfed out only to find shelter where he's under siege by other cats and the new humans have no manners.  On the plus side, he seemed to like the Big Nosed Dog. 

So we’ve implemented the vet’s attitude adjustment plan (to the humans) and immediately, things’ve calmed down.  The cats aren’t merrily skipping round a May Pole, but the reign of terror is over.  Stray Eddie and our calico are in the kitchen together watching birds as I write.  I’m certain they still hate each other, but you can’t have everything.

The same tactics apply to the human world.  In his interview, Jon Stewart asked Malala how she reacted to learning that she’d become a Taliban target.  She said her first thought was that she’d take a shoe and defend herself.  Then she thought, if she used violence, she’d be no different than her attackers.  She decided that she would tell them how important education was – for their children, too – and then say, ‘Now do what you want.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjGL6YY6oMs

I doubt she had time for dialogue before she was shot.  However, even after the attempt on her life, she believes that we can only bring change through dialogue and peace.  How wow is that?

We have the power to be wow, too.  Or to be Monsters to someone else.  Writers tweet, blog, express more succinctly and thus more convincingly than most.  Therein lies the strength and the danger.  We can be the GOP holding an entire nation hostage – not just Democrats but children, cancer patients, veterans, the elderly – or we can be Malalas who put down our weapons and recognise the humanity in each other.

Today is National Coming Out Day.  Today there will be children as young as Malala and adults as old as myself who take that step, who hope they will be met with dialogue rather than weapons.  Some lives won’t survive today.  But the reason the possibility exists for a Coming Out Day is because of the belief that dialogue and communication can win out over weapons and hatred.  When they do, it takes our breath away.

My hand is up to say I’m guilty of all sorts of –isms.  I know they’re more naughty fun than being Malala.  But you and I are the communicators.  We have a huge responsibility to do no harm.  After you’ve been shot, after someone kills your Spirit Moose, after the opposition passes a bill you dislike, don’t pick up a gun, don’t shut down the government, don’t kill the monster.  Don’t deride, don’t ridicule, don’t alienate. 

Create.  Communicate.

A Trans-Parent Request

Not Friday yet, but I didn’t expect the week to be like this.  It started so well.  I finished draft 7604 of my Afghanistan novel, the blog post here did nicely, I even (with some technical aid from my son, the peripatetic El Punko) entered into the Twitter world.  Nature cooperated by keeping our snowfall in the ‘pretty’ rather than the ‘I-hate-feckin-snow’ zone and Big Bang had a new episode.  Then there was Julie Burchill.

My first reaction, to wonder if Burchill understood the what-happens-next after publishing an article like that.  But then, I always go all left brain when faced with things that should knock me on my ass.  Which is why, about ten years ago, my son had the research ready when I asked him, ‘What did I do to make you like this?’

The morning after Burchill’s rampage, I woke before dawn with what felt like a clunk of The Hopeless on my chest.  Someone who doesn’t know him, hates my son.  How do you fix that?  But when people objected to Burchill’s hate mongering, focus switched from transphobia to freedom of expression.  A slight of hand that equated hurling epithets at a marginalised group as a civil liberty. 

I wanted to take a sick day from life.  An image kept going through my head, a photo I put on Facebook to make El Punko’s cousin in the US laugh.  

I ask you, how can anyone hate an elf?  (Read what my son says about Burchill here http://saschk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/open-letter-to-julie-burchill.html.) 

Ten years ago, a lot of the research pointed to the mother as the cause for Gender Dysphoria, either for psychological, sociological, or physiological reasons.  I suspect some social scientists have issues with their mothers but hey, I’m willing to say to Julie Burchill et al, don’t hate my son.  It’s my fault he’s trans.  Hate me. 

Because even if I didn’t psychologically, sociologically, or physiologically make him into the man he is today, I aided and abetted him.  I stood outside the men’s room when he went in until he pointed out how pervy that was.  I chanted that being trans was a special gift, then shut up when he said he wished he weren’t so damned special.  I visited him in a hospital where it was injudicious for the doctor to admit what type of surgery he’d performed on my son. 

Hate me, because I didn’t even try to stop El Punko.  While you’re at it, hate his friends for not doing a mass intervention to keep him a real girl who fights the male hegemony because hey, that’s more important than his gender identity. 

Hate the men in our family for sharing male greeting rituals with him, because doesn’t that separate us into first class and carriage?  Hate the university that prepares him for his ivory tower existence where miraculously he won’t suffer anymore.  (We’d all get Ph.Ds if that were true.) 

Hate his cat for loving him, too.

Each and every one of us is connected to someone else who’s connected to someone else who’s connected to someone else.  It’d be exhausting to hate all of us, so come on.  We have more in common than we have to separate us.  Julie Burchill attacking transfolk in defence of Suzanne Moore is motivated by the same thing that makes me want to step between her and my son. 

Her results, however, are less attractive.  It doesn’t matter if you’re working to gain equality for women if you’re swatting at transgendered people.  Or persons of colour.  Or Muslims.  Or gays.  Or my Big Nose dog.  The swatting cancels out the gains you’ve made. 

Hatred is an easier tactic because it dismisses the conflict person or group so we don’t have to deal with what we don’t like.  It’s self indulgent.  It’s theatrical.  It’s cathartic.  It’s destructive.  It’s a cop out.  It’s beneath us. 

Here’s my kid and the Big Nosed dog.  Please don’t hate him.