Today there is another cat-shaped hole in my heart. When I die and they autopsy me, they'll surely wonder at the dozens of cat-shaped holes.

This morning we found our Greta dead behind the sofa. She was about 11, but she hadn't been sick, lethargic, anorexic, or any of the other things cats usually do to let you know they're in trouble, so I took her to the vet for a necropsy. It turned out that she had advanced cancer of the spleen, which Dr. Scott said is often asymptomatic and painless. The tumor ruptured her spleen and she bled to death sometime early this morning. I've read that bleeding out isn't a bad way to go; you're weak, then high, then gone. I hope so. At any rate, the necropsy settled my mind that we couldn't have done anything to help her and that her cause of death isn't anything that can affect the other cats.

We're having her cremated, because she always hated the cold. We got Greta from the Southern Animal Foundation, a good animal welfare group/shelter that used to be neighbors with my vet. They knew I loved black cats and asked if I'd consider taking a beautiful black kitten who was semiferal, as they knew I'd be willing to work with him. When we came to get Ivan, the kitten, they said, "Oh, you've just got to take the mother too, she loves her baby, she cries whenever we try to take him away!" So mother and son came home with us. It was winter then too, and we were living in a big old drafty house, and mother immediately abandoned her son in a downstairs closet and plopped herself down directly in front of the bedroom heater. Ever since then, we called her Crack Momma. But she was a sweet girl, jet black and beautiful, if somewhat coffee-table-shaped (she liked her food).

Ivan died after the federal levees failed and we couldn't catch him. He didn't drown, but was exposed to something poisonous, probably water. They're still the only two cats out of all the dozens I've had that I've found dead at home. It's a shock, but in Greta's case, also a little reassuring -- she didn't have to be prodded and needled, and the other cats got to see her and know what happened. They're sticking close tonight.

When I was 23 myself, it amazed me that T.S. Eliot had written "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at 23. Now it makes more sense to me, because of the refrain "There will be time ... " Only a young person really believes that, I think.

R.I.P., Greta, 1998 (?) - 2010. We love you.

I can't believe I just paid $25 for Ethan Brown's new book Shake The Devil Off, an account of the 2006 "voodoo shop" murder/suicide, only to find out I apparently joined the media frenzy that savaged the reputations of the young murderer and his victim:

"After Katrina, Addie enthused to a reporter that 'we've been able to see the stars for the first time.' After she was murdered, Addie's remark about the stars brought a nasty rebuke from New Orleans novelist Poppy Z Brite, who wrote on her blog that while 'I feel bad for the girl ... I can't quite forgive that remark about how beautiful the stars were over New Orleans in the nights right after the storm. Stars are horrifying things in general and should never, ever be seen over New Orleans. Our night sky is supposed to be purple.' While it was understandable that New Orleanians sought to distance themselves from the gruesome tale of Zack and Addie [yes, I've always sought to distance myself from gruesome tales - PZB], surely these two young people had lives that did not need to be attacked at any opportunity, and sad ends that did not deserve to be ridiculed." ( -- Ethan Brown, Shake The Devil Off)

All very noble, Ethan. I'm not sure how disliking a starry sky qualifies as attacking and ridiculing, but let's leave that. Instead of arguing the point, may I bring to your attention that I did not recently publish a 286-page book about Zack and Addie's lives and, primarily, deaths, a book that meticulously details how the blood poured out of Zack's mouth after he jumped off the Omni Royal Orleans deck, how Addie's charred legs in a roasting pan, severed head, hands, and feet in a stockpot, and garbage-bag-wrapped torso in the fridge were found in the couple's squalid Rampart Street apartment, graphic descriptions of the police photographs you looked at, and exactly where and with which tool (the tub, a saw) he cut her apart? I don't see any notations in the flap copy or acknowledgements about your donating a portion of the book's proceeds to groups for Katrina recovery, troubled New Orleans youth, or a similar cause, so I assume you're profiting (such as book profits go; I don't say you're getting rich) off Zack, Addie, and readers' desire to know the gory, painful details of how they lived and died. No doubt you're doing it to try to understand and tell their side of the story and all sorts of other compelling reasons. As everything seems to do these days, it reminds me of a Stephen King story, in this case "Apt Pupil" and its young boy drawn to Nazi atrocities*:

"'Anyhow,' Todd said, "the library was real good. They must have had a hundred books with stuff in them about the Nazi concentration camps, just here in the Santo Donato library. A lot of people must like to read about that stuff ... I really did do a research paper, and you know what I got on it? An A-plus. Of course I had to be careful. You have to write that stuff in a certain way ... All those library books, they read a certain way. Like the guys who wrote them got puking sick over what they were writing about.' Todd was frowning, wrestling with the thought, trying to bring it out. The fact that tone, as that word applies to writing, wasn't yet in his vocabulary, made it more difficult. 'They all write like they lost a lot of sleep over it. How we've got to be careful so that nothing like that ever happens again. I made my paper like that, and I guess the teacher gave me an A just cause I read the source material without losing my lunch.' Once more, Todd smiled winningly." ( -- Stephen King, "Apt Pupil")

So you go ahead with your bad self, Ethan Brown. Smile winningly at your signings, and keep telling yourself, as your flap copy rather startlingly claims, that you have discovered how these two young people's lives could have been saved. We'll hope your book makes certain that Nothing Like That Ever Happens Again. I'll just stay over here nastily rebuking people on my blog.

But remember this, Ethan: Both you and I have profited from writing about severed heads and bloody limbs.

Mine were fictional.




*I'm aware that I have invoked Godwin's Law here and thereby lose all the Internets. I can't help it; that's what the damn story is about.

Going to get my crazy pills adjusted today. I've actually tried to stop using the word "crazy" on Twitter because I know there are people on my tweetstream who feel it is an "ableist" word and are hurt by it. I may or may not agree -- I consider myself fairly crazy at this point, and the word doesn't particularly hurt or offend me; nor does the word "lame," though it undeniably applies to me. Twitter, though, is more or less a conversation or series of conversations. In conversation, I think it is reasonable to avoid language that you know hurts people. So what if I'm not hurt by "crazy" or "lame"? That doesn't negate Jane Deaux's pain, and I'm tired of seeing people blow off genuine pain as "insistence on political correctness." I retweeted a good quote once, and I can't remember it exactly, but the gist was Why should I have to explain precisely how the knife you stuck in my back is hurting me before I can convince you to take it out?

There's no need to hurt people if you can easily avoid it. So many people online seem to ignore or gleefully defy that. But this journal is my place, my online living room if you will, and here I'll call myself crazy and lame if I like.

PZB: If only I had gunslinger's eyes, the color of faded blue denim.

CdB: Come on, now. [He knows this kind of talk usually precedes trouble.]

Posting this mostly so EXTRA! EXTRA! BIG-ASS FREAKOUT! won't be the top entry anymore. I'm still having little-ass freakouts, and something will have to be done about the situation after all this holiday nonsense is over, but I have my ways of maintaining.

**********************************************************

The above is part of an entry restored from three days ago when our Internet broke. The freakout is no longer in effect. I've had about enough of this mood swing shit. My health problems (mental and physical) aside, this was actually a very lucky and prosperous year for Chris and me. It seems to have been a pretty shitty one for almost everyone else, and for that I am sorry. I hope things look up for us all in 2010.

Oh, and I have a New Year's resolution: I resolve to accept that everything I wrote before Liquor was a vampire story. They weren't when I wrote them, but by some strange cultural alchemy they have changed, and I accept that I can never change them back. The Gambit's nice review of Second Line acknowledges this well-known fact, and so do I. And so do Vampire Trevor, Vampire Zach, Vampire Kinsey Hummingbird, Vampire Andrew Compton, Vampire Jay Byrne, Vampire Lucas Ransom, and the always terrifying Vampire Tran.

But that still doesn't mean I will let anyone option the movie rights to Lost Souls for less than $100K. I am old enough to know the difference between trouble I can't escape and trouble I don't need.