#daydrinkingthoughts...

Iqbal was born into his 33rd life as a cat. This would have surprised him had he retained more memories, because his 32nd life had been spent as a Muslim who believed no such thing could occur. Iqbal the Muslim had in fact spent delightful hours over tea with a Hindu neighbor discussing the possibilities, or lack thereof, of reincarnation.

Iqbal the cat dutifully washed his paws in the drinking-bowl after visiting the litter-box.  Then, catlike, he would be distracted by the trail of water splashed out. He would follow it with his nose and return again to the bowl to splash out more water, never able to solve the mystery of gravity.

Iqbal peered out from behind the door of the barn where he spent his sleeping hours.  He took his naps in the straw-pile, which was much like the bed of straw his momma made him as a young boy growing up in the Swat Valley.  Iqbal the cat didn't so much remember his  human childhood as he felt a natural comfort in the smell of straw, in the slight cra…

I get how the internet is evil. People of diminished capacity (and yes, this is measurable) can feel confident in spewing their ill-formed ideals and even have them validated by other idiots. A movement begins.

Face-time is important. TOUCH is important. Knowing real people is important.

But then there's me.

Some of us are unicorns, hiding in plain sight. We've been burned by popular society since we were old enough to form opinions, and we've been advised to fit in. Just be normal.

Make do with what you got is the Girl Scout motto; I learned that very well. But I see beautiful things in the world and in my own mind, and when I try to share them I get deer-in-the-headlights stares at best, called crazy at worst. Normal people seem to have no imagination, or they eschew it for their own reasons.

At this point in my life I realise that every thing I believed when I was 7 years old contained a kernel of truth. All my fruitless efforts to fit in (which only resulted in further…

After Canyon, we headed south toward San Antonio. Maz's sister lives there and said we could stay at her house while she was away. North of Sweetwater, a little before sunset, Maz made a video (which we thought was hilarious) of an Oil Crane Pump Well (which looked like a grasshopper). We didn't make it to my family's ancestral graveyard but stopped at the Ballinger intersection where we could have turned left toward Brownwood. There I picked up a rock that may have touched either foot or hoof belonging to my old settler Ewings. As we passed Paint Rock, I thought about how Southwestern petroglyphs really freak me out. Like cold to the bones and feeling nauseous freak me out.

I swept slabs on construction sites in San Antonio during 1983 instead of graduating from high school. My daughter's father's father lived in Universal City, and we landed at his place for a few days before finding a trailer and getting jobs in the booming home construction industry. I sometim…

I came home from this road-trip to find my cat Noori hiding, crying, in the closet.  She was so well-entrenched that I couldn't even find her in the closet at first. Finally she came out and hid under the bed, still complaining. By morning she was walking on me and  yelling for breakfast as usual.

She went out briefly earlier to eat some trumpet vine, and then I made her come back in.  She's sitting at the front door now, telling me to open it.

I want more, she says.

"You can't go out there. You're getting too brave. I need you to not be brave," I tell her, and then immediately I re-frame those words as if she were a human-child, and I feel a tinge of something akin to regret.

I don't care, she says.

"There are things out there that will EAT YOU." Again I flinch; but this time I know I'm telling the truth, not setting up unknown dangers to bind the child's spirit. "There are owls and foxes and stuff." There really are.

They won&#…