Tag Archives: Cats

Cats, Existentialism, Literature

Wheel of Time

The disk stood upright in the dust like some ancient timepiece cast down from a forgotten world. Its face bore the graven marks of vanished beings, their symbols weathered by winds that had blown across that red waste for millennia untold. The patina of verdigris spread across its surface like a plague, green against the oxidized copper, testament to ages of slow corruption under alien skies.

In the distance rose skeletal ruins against the ember glow of evening, columns broken like the ribs of some vast beast picked clean and abandoned to the sand. The sun hung low, turning the world to rust and fire.

No track led to this place nor away from it. The artifact stood solitary in its vigil, inscrutable, bearing its cargo of forgotten meaning. Scarabs and spiders marked their territories in the compartments of its face, their forms rendered in relief like some final hieroglyphs of a dying tongue. What liturgy or calendar it measured had passed beyond all reckoning and the wind made the only sound, scouring the dead world with mindless persistence, and the shadows lengthened, and the day died.

Dippy the Diplodocus rose from the deeps like some antediluvian dream made manifest, its great columned neck ascending from the gray waters of the lake. The Cudahy pumphouse stood witness, that cylinder of concrete like some monument to the age of steel and diesel, now dwarfed by this visitor from an age when the earth itself was young and the sun burned with a different fire.

The path lay cracked and weatherworn. The grass at its margins yellowed and sparse. No sound but the lapping of water against the shore and the distant cry of gulls wheeling in that depthless blue. The creature regarded the land with eyes that had seen the world when it was green and savage, when great ferns covered the earth and the only law was hunger and the brutal mathematics of survival.

It had returned as if drawn by some lodestone buried deep in the memory of stone and water, as if the pumphouse itself had called to it across the millennia, one testament to existence calling another. The shadow it cast stretched long across the path and the people came or they did not and the lake went on in its turning and the earth turned beneath it, indifferent as always to the affairs of men and monsters alike.

They drove through the country of dust and ruin, a place where the sun burned down like judgment, the sky above them vast and pitiless. The Cadillac, blue as a forgotten dream, cut along the blacktop, humming low like some hymn. Two cats sat within it, one black as the pit and the other tawny and watchful, the driver. Their eyes narrowed not with worry but with the cold calculation of those who had seen the world and found it wanting.

They passed saguaros like sentinels thorned and skeletal, reaching for a heaven that did not answer. The land stretched on, empty save for the wind, which bore no scent of life, only the stale breath of things long dead. The cats did not speak. Something had been left behind. Or waited ahead. Either way, the car moved forward, indifferent. They drove on.

The temple rose from dark waters like some monument to gods long turned to dust. The lunar disk hung in that firmament pale and absolute, a cyclopean eye bearing witness to the earth’s old corruptions. Rain fell slantwise through the darkness and the statues stood in their weathered vigil, their faces worn smooth by centuries of wind and grief.

The door at the summit, that blue anomaly, some absurd portal grafted onto antiquity as if modernity itself were but another stone to be laid upon the altar of ruin, testament to all seekers who’d climbed before and found at the top only what they’d carried with them all along.

The sea moved in its ancient rhythms, indifferent, immutable. The rain fell. The moon watched. And the door, that incongruous blue door, stood closed against the supplicant and the pilgrim alike, offering neither entrance nor explanation, only the cold comfort of its own inscrutable existence in a world where all answers are bought with the same coin and all climbers arrive at last to the same locked threshold.

A History of The Cudahy Taverns

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Cats, Existentialism, Literature

The Capybara Sundial

They stood in their mute encirclement of the old stone dial whose gnomon cut the sky like some blade buried to the hilt, watchful and unknowing in the ruin of that bloodred firmament where the last clouds moved like smoke over a charred plain and the trees stood stripped and dead, each branch a black hieroglyph inscribed upon the horizon of a world that had outlived its own design, the beasts patient and stolid as though they had always been there and would remain long after the monument had crumbled to dust, their vigil primal and inexplicable, witnesses to some covenant made before memory, before time itself had learned to mark its passing on the sundial face of that strange pillar.

The cat regarded him across the rust-colored waste with eyes like amber coins struck in some ancient forge. Behind them the ringed planet hung enormous in the darkling sky, a judge presiding over dominions of dust. The creature beside him stood in its alien perpendicularity, eyestalks searching the horizon for what sustenance this world might yield or what communion might be drawn from the silence.

They were pilgrims both in a land that knew no scripture. The cat’s fur held the darkness of collapsed stars and its red collar was the only covenant between the world it had known and this one. The companion creature, orange as oxidized iron, as the very soil beneath them, seemed born of this place, extruded from the planet’s own weird geometry.

What word could pass between such beings? What language obtains in the transit between one world and another? They sat in that vast cathedral of emptiness and the wind if there was wind carried no answer. Only the patient mathematics of orbit and decay, the supreme indifference of the cosmos to the small and the breathing, the furred and the strange, all that moves and must one day cease to move upon the surface of ten trillion worlds or one.

The cats sat upon Andy narwhal in the crystalline dark, their caps the colors of some merchant caravan out of antiquity, rainbow-banded like Joseph’s coat. Above them the auroral light moved in great sheets across the firmament, green and luminous, a celestial fire that burned without consuming. The beast beneath them cleaved through black waters, its horn a pale tusk jutting forward like the spear of some drowned knight errant.

The orange cat’s eyes held the simple faith of all creatures who know not their fate. The black cat watched with an older knowing. They rode the leviathan through that polar waste beneath skies no different than those which men had watched since the world was made, wondering at their brief passage through the dark and whether any hand had set the stars or whether the stars themselves were but another kind of wanderer, alone and purposeless in the void.

The water rolled away from the narwhal’s passage in folds of deepest cobalt. What lay beneath no man could say. What lay ahead the same. And still they rode.

Long ago, when the moon was still young, a calico guardian fell asleep on a cushion of stone. Around her crept goblins with sacks of gold and pots of clay, hoping to steal while she dreamed. But the cat’s slumber was deeper than time itself, and her breath was the rhythm that kept the world from unraveling. The goblins soon discovered that each coin they lifted crumbled into sand, each jewel turned to ash. They understood then that the guardian was dreaming for them all—that her silence was the thread that stitched memory to reality. So they stopped their thieving and kept vigil in the shadows, protecting the cat who protected them, waiting for a dawn that would never come as long as she slept.

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