It's easy to love someone who loves the things you love, and
there's so much in this world to love:
simple things like fresh fruit and Robert Altman films, and less simple
things like physics and justice. You love cats, and it makes me feel suddenly
that something deep and terrific exists between us, because I love cats too.
"I lost my job
I miss my mom
I wish my cat could talk."
In the early months of my pregnancy I received a phone call
from my mom letting me know that Shaniqua, my favorite childhood pet and truly
my best friend, was going to have to be euthanized. The vet had discovered a
tumor in her stomach. Shaniqua's sickness provided a retrospective explanation for some other problems she had been having, the most notable, and to me the
most unsettling, of which was the deterioration of her coat. Shaniqua in recent
months had stopped bathing herself, leaving her fur to tangle into knots: a few of them could be brushed away,
but many were so large and unrelenting that my only option was to cut them out,
which gave my kitty a ragged, patchy appearance that at first seemed at odds
with her playful, vivacious personality. But more and more her spirit came to
match her new, ragged look: she
became tired and impatient, and on the day preceding her scheduled death, she
was getting about with her front legs only, her back legs dragging lazily
behind her.
A few years earlier, Shaniqua yawned in my face during one
of our cuddle sessions, alerting me to a cauliflower-like abscess in her mouth,
sprouting from underneath her tongue. My mom and I took her to the vet's office
immediately, and the vet told us that our kitty probably had a tumor. "I may be
able to remove the abscess, but that won't cure the cancer," she told us with a consoling tone. We
left Shaniqua at the vet's office overnight so that the abscess and her blood could be tested. We
thought she'd have to die the next day, so that night I had wine and Vicodin for dinner and then cried myself to sleep. But the vet called the next morning
with amazing news: the abscess
wasn't a cancerous growth, and with just a little bit of tugging it popped out
of Shaniqua's mouth just like cauliflower from its stalk. Shaniqua came home totally
healthy.
By the time I found out about the growth in Shaniqua's
stomach the cancer wasn't just suspected—it was confirmed, so there wasn't any
hope for a happy ending, and there also couldn't be any wine. When we thought
Shaniqua had a tumor in her mouth, I wanted a tumor too. I wanted to be with
her in every way and through everything:
the pain, the medical procedures, even the dying. But this time I was so
full of life that I had two heartbeats, mine and little proto-Graham's. We had also just adopted Jeffery the dog—we were in the back yard together when I got the
phone call about Shaniqua. I had new lives, I had to keep going, and, as I said, I had to
do it without wine.
The songs you sing on "Crazy for You" don't sound inspired
by or intended for a kitty; you must've written them to a boy. But the album
has a kitty on the cover and the music video for your album's eponymous song
contains more cats than a pound. (Actually, the video contains kittens, and
although I think pet ageism is a real problem, the kittens in your video do an
excellent job both representing and evoking appreciation of innocence, vulnerability and exuberance. These are traits that pets have and also emotional states they inspire in
their parents.) But if you're singing to a boy …
"Honey, you're so fine
I wanna be with you all the time."
/
"I want you
So much
And I miss you
So much."
… why am I talking about my dead cat?
I sometimes imagine myself as a stick of butter on the
beach—hot, dissolving and carefree. It's an image that I force my mind into
making at times, because otherwise I'm too obsessive. I don't think people know
that about me, that I'm an obsessive person, but I don't mind telling
you, because I think you understand. (I just heard the song "Sutphin Boulevard" by Blood Orange for the first time twenty hours ago, and I've listened to it twenty times already, but not once every hour, because I've slept some since then. There have probably been four hours where I listened to it five times.) There are dead cats and there are living,
unresponsive love objects, and they make me think about the way desire
represents an absence, which means that states of longing can be overwhelmingly
lonely. Your songs make me wonder things like, What's the point
of love anyway, and what especially is the point of a love that is not only
unreciprocated and silly but that also—and this is the graver matter—seems only
to foreground our loneliness?
"What's the point?" isn't really the right question, because
love is inevitable and uncontrollable and—in both a temporal and teleological
sense—endless. "How do we deal?" is a better question, and I'm writing this letter, which is actually to anything we love, because Best Coast asks and answers the question. You deal
by relaxing, by listening to music that makes you feel like butter
at the beach. Rhyming sun and fun and lazy and crazy is easy peasy, and the
efforts it takes to keep butter from melting in summer is unnatural. Keep
your butter out of the fridge and in public, and let it make a melty mess.
Communicate what it feels like to want. Make the word I last seven
seconds: "IIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIII
want you so much." The length is longing, which, whether it's for a boy or a kitty, goes on forever. We share with others what can make us, when we're on our own, feel lonely. We are, ultimately, all together. This is what
your album tells us, and I appreciate it soooOOOoooOOOooo much.
Love,
Amy
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