as part of her volunteer duties at an animal shelter jenny has been fostering a mommy cat and her litter of kittens for the past couple months. four of them. a week or two ago she got four more kittens bringing the total up to eight. the cuteness of eight kittens is more than eight times the cuteness of one. i went into her room to play with them, but i couldn’t find them. and those spazoids aren’t very inconspicuous. i went to get jenny to tell her that they escaped or something. it turns out that they crawled up through her dresser to sleep in her sweaters. jenny opened up the drawer to show me the big pile of cuteness greater than the sum of its parts. way greater.

so afterwards i went with jenny to the shelter when she brought the kittens in to get their ears checked. i decided to check out the other animals in lieu of watching the kittens get the mite feces cleaned out of their ears. there was a cat with seven toes on its front paws. seven. it looked like it had thumbs. it was the coolest thing ever. i’m not even exaggerating. i guess it’s a fairly common mutation.

then i walked into the dog part. they all started barking really loudly at me. maybe they were just excited because they thought i was coming to take them for a walk or something, but the barks were so damn grating. i felt like those cartoons where daffy duck turns into walking t-bone once that dog notices.

for a few grades of elementary school i had to walk by a yard with really high solid fences. i knew there was a dog in there, even though i couldn’t see it through the fence. i knew it was there but it would bark at me every time i passed. it would bark loud. i could tell that it was just on the other side of the fence. i remember hearing it breathe in between barks. but i couldn’t see what it looked like at all. it’s not like it would matter though. even if it was a tiny little smiling dog that looked more like a bunny than cujo i still would’ve thought that some day it was going to eat me. some days i would go out of my way to avoid barky. one of those times i came across a big “playful” sheep dog. i guess it thought i looked like a fun kid to play with. he reared up and put his front paws on my shoulders knocking me down and pinning me. i guess he thought maybe he’d climb up me or something. dogs are dumb. i was smaller than him. at any rate all i was thinking was that second grade wasn’t the year i wanted to kick it.

these things may or may not have influenced my wincing at the shelter when the dogs started barking at me. but i have been reminiscing a fair amount about the way i used to think about things. i’m been working with computers for years and years and i read quite a bit of leftist political writing. despite this it still takes me a while to catch on that someone’s talking about a peripheral and not a rodent when they say, “mouse.” and i always think of the facts of life not the CIA when i read, “the langley crowd.” there’s gotta be some sort of explanation.

my roommate asked me to put up this story. i took private swimming lessons from some student at a university my dad worked at. i don’t know how old i was exactly, but i wasn’t old enough to be in the men’s locker room by myself so i would change in the women’s locker room with my teacher. i was also young enough to not know that while it’s usually wrong to stare there are some things you’re never supposed to stare at. however. i was old enough to decide that in the women’s locker room is where i wanted to spend the rest of my life.

sometime after this when i had learned “modesty” and at the time when i was first starting to be allowed to go pee pee on my own my parents took us to some sort of 50s era styled diner for dinner. the kind where the bathrooms are labelled something like, “daddy-o’s” and “shortcakes”. in cursive lettering no less. i couldn’t figure it out. c’mon! cursive? i weighed the options, admitting my inability to go on my own to my parents was not one of them. i made my choice. i was happy that this restaurant seemed to recognize that there’s no way anyone could possibly be tall enough to use the toilets that hang on the wall. only regular toilets like at home. but i was still uncertain if i made the right choice. someone came in and i leaned over to check out his (hopefully) shoes. no guy in a 50s era diner would wear pink shoes and i knew it. i was sunk! so i sat there in that stall until she left and i was sure that i wouldn’t get caught. could i still get detention even if the girl’s bathroom wasn’t at school? i finally made it out of there. unseen.

“you were gone for a long time.”
“oh.”
“you’re dad went in to check on you. he couldn’t find you.”
“what do you mean?! i was there!”
“did you go to the girl’s bathroom?”
“no way! no way! uh uh!”

i suppose i am usually reminiscing to some degree, but i have quite a bit more lately. which is prolly normal for any brand new adult who is nearing a crossroads.