what to do when your cat is experiencing an existential crisis

If the grooves you carve through space in your day-to-day endeavors feel excessively reified, you might start projecting playful constraints as catalyst. Find something or somewhere familiar and engage with it through new constraints.

Don’t just ontologize your perceptual habits. Make them with effort. Name them. Problematize dichotomies just for fun. Find a hobby in the middle ground between conflicting obsessions and let them dialogue.

Twice now, my cat has tried to eat needle laced with thread. Twice now I have chased her frantically around my apartment, moving in ways I didn’t think I could, not able to fathom her death, or the vet bill. Twice I thrust myself powerfully under my the bed, grabbed her by the paw, with what I will only call authority, and held her, so that I could shove my hands into her throat. Once I felt the needle head in my grasp, I gave up all force. The assemblage pulled itself out as I curcled up and cried. I had never felt love like that. The responsibility was unbearable. Love for a trusted companion will ground you but also complicate your rhythms. This will give you the courage to complicate more things you know, it will pull you out of indifference. Just think of what a companion could do for your cat. Get your cat a cat, is what I am saying. Obviously. Teach your cat to give up little on the self-control.

Weekly (daily) writing exercise

Interview yourself using only chunks of words from an old paper you wrote.

• For me, this paper will actually be a scripted “interview” I wrote between my and Donna Harraway. It was an assignment for a curriculum theory course.
  • I got an A ; )
• I will include professor comments in the pot.
• Turns will be constructed out of chucks of continuous words. Chunks must be greater than 3 and no more than 7 but cannot be 5.
  • Exception
    • The last chunk pasted into a turn must be 1 or 5 words.
    • A single turn can be exactly 5 words.
• The interview will be about change and categories but also love?
• No repeating or reusing words.
• I can drop and add punctionation.
• I hope you enjoy it.
• Can change pronouns.

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Me: I am struggling to organize molding, its contours. Naturally, I have been reaching for your cacophony. Well, when relationality has been a great companion  you might have heard something to be said about the lagging. Its interventions, shaping human stuttering.

Me: Seems unfortunately oblivious the practice of theory mimics the perception. And stitched together imperfectly, resists such suturing. Corroded by our games are threads that I can appreciate, the subjective undercurrent of thought.

Me: You find in part of the object reaching, its limit. Fecund in speculative double take at the sight of except in conversation. Yaps keep bumping into yaps and as a practical task I get the sense it can be wrapped, can be erased and redrawn.

Me: I find myself reaching not considered bad and to be avoided when we package truth. When we claim to hold. As a wrench to throw at pedagogical and technological ways to render ourselves from conversation: imagining the mind as a switchboard drained navigating all the contradictions.

Me: I would assume our hopeless “becoming-with” only creates conditions. A complex social life. This “feedback-loop” of seeing and being? Imagine thought like the egg of her womb while contained.

Me: We have not yet learned to look, tangled in the knots. Not yet learned to look for complication.

Me: In it’s anxieties, bumptiously ascetic, nice critiques the swaddling mother. Let the child run from others like a cold, make an ethic of endless floating — but you are sounding unmediated.

Me: I recognize from my own, for growth but sets the thought of a child tinkering. I find you too obsessive in conversation (singular attempt to administer your prerogative to be curious). The social efficiencist sitting comfortably nowhere, committed to a slant.

Me: The intentionless up taking of intelligibility, we must reject (a bit romantic). Say “let them be another story talking about roles being imposed.” Return to nature tastes assuming. It knows we owe it to each other to make instruments of interest.

Me: I get a kick out of the unitary coherence we often draw ourselves distinct from, the uniqueness of our cacophonous cross I like picking at the seams of. Oh, what a “god-trick.”

Me: Well what would you dwell in instead? 

Me: Assumptions, our projections, our lack. 

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Musing around theory: I think the enactivists like to pretend they don’t have a starting point, and it drives the socio-culturalists crazy because they have to. It is the only thing we can map. But I think there is reason to believe it has to be a body that learns the potential of draining space from land. I get it. Like seriously the body? This thing that is hardly ours? It is not a practical place to start. But the body never has been. This is why conceptually, I lean ambiguous. It is a curious trace.

Be kind to yourself. Be playful with space. Imagine a world you have to move through to think about. Pick doorways you have to spin underneath to pass. Pick a corner to spin three times around, two of them counter-clock wise. Share your new rules with someone else. Enact them together. Laugh and be silly and be inchoate and wise.

Get curious about old words you wrote a while ago. Make them public, even if they are cringy. Make them public so you have to keep on coming back and checking and making it new, letting the thought grow. Use your obsession with witness to your advantage for once. Make a mindful practice out of implicating yourself in this large mind we call world. Give people opportunties for action and let them act. Let them move around you too. Appreciate the changes in stillness as something worth noticing even though change is too slippery to be knowledge. Would you hold the world perfectly still for a minute if you could?

Me: Would you?

I guess I am. I will probably still be reading and editing this months after it is made public to satisfy my pitless fixation of making probability out of who you as the reader will come to discover. In a thousand years I will echo here like a daily practice, still tilling the soil, and too, sowing the seeds. Oh my, here is a cultivated environment fertile with tools and potential use, I wonder what will come of it. Not that some can’t choose to pick the weeds (broadly speaking). But I’ll be there too. Finding new typos, playing with new semantics. Editing and balancing obsessions.

Find some opportunities for sporadic movement too. Participate in coordination with others in real unfolding time. If you pay attention, they’ll make you move in ways you never would have alone. It is a matter of taking someone familar and engaging with it through new constraints. Actually do that first. Find patterns in the difference and every day name it new and while you’re at it get your cat a cat. Teach her a lesson about how awful it is to love.