Skook and Paliki have never been the best of friends. It’s not that he doesn’t like cats. He and Chainsaw adored each other. When we’ve walked the neighborhood there are cats that come when he whistles – cats that never let me get within a hundred feet of them. But Skook and Paliki … something about their personalities just doesn’t groove. They either ignore or avoid each other depending on how the relative space around them can best be navigated.

This week, unfortunately, Paliki is really getting on Skook’s nerves. Normally she’s an indoor/outdoor cat, coming and going at her own whim. On Sunday I noticed that she was favoring one of her front paws. A quick examination determined that said paw was messed up. It was swollen and the outside toe was sticking off at an angle. Monday, Presidents’ Day, I took her to the vet and discovered that she’d somehow gotten an infected cut and dislocated a toe. The vet instructed me to give her antibiotics twice a day, painkillers as seemed necessary and keep her inside. Paliki came how sporting a nifty blue bandage around her right front paw. She got the bandage off within a couple of hours of being home. She pulled off the two bandages Nizzibet and I replaced it with. She hates the antibiotics and the painkiller makes her foam at the mouth if the pill doesn’t go down the first time. And she really doesn’t care for this being kept in stuff.

Skook says that normally Paliki sleeps while Nizzibet and I are off at work. She’s not doing that this week. This week she’s down in the basement bugging Skook to let her out three or four times a day. Being nocturnal by nature, he’s not appreciating all this attention. He’s been out of the house right at sundown for the last two days. He was gone before I got home tonight. He got some peace today since I’d dropped the cat off at the vet for a check up on my way to work. She spent the whole day there, no doubt complaining about it the whole time, and I picked her up at about six. I’d planned to be there by at least 5:30 but one of our clients called at 4:53 with an emergency that needed to be negotiated. That kept me in the office until 5:30. It poured on the way to the vet. We don’t have a car so I took the cat most of the way there and back on the bus but there’s enough of a walk (and a wait) between the bus stop and the vet’s office that I got soaked. Paliki stayed dry in her carrier and mostly kept her discontent to herself.

(Funny the things you notice. Another client at the vet’s was given his pet back and told that he had a really great cat. My darling Paliki doesn’t get that sort of compliment. It hurts my feelings a bit. I can’t really argue. Her charm is discreet.)

Poor Skook. Paliki’s got to be in for another four or five days. The garage is even less of an option since DoubleM gave us a lawn mower and yard tools.

Jaydogg has been working diligently on the Labor of Love Creative Studio website. If you haven’t visited it recently, don’t. Wait another week and see it all. Unless you’re like me then you’ll go check it out now and forget about it for another couple of weeks.

In honor of Blake getting her ownself up and blogging I hereby post for the first time in ten days. I will make no excuses for lack of posts. Now if all my other 50 or so dear close friends to set up webjournals I’ll be able to evesdrop on all their lives from the comfort of my basement lair.

Woke up at 3:30. That’s the a.m. version. No odd noises disturbed my sleep. It wasn’t because I’d been dreaming of the ocean and now had to pee really bad. It wasn’t the cat needing to be fed. It wasn’t Skook knocking on the window because he’d lost his keys again. It wasn’t Nizzibet doing the Disco Inferno in her sleep.

Just one of those mornings where I was wide awake at an hour that I rarely experience while conscious. So I fed the cat, used the bathroom and went back to bed. Snuggled up to the Nizz for another 40 minutes before I finally got it through my head that I wasn’t going back to sleep. Just didn’t feel like it.

Found out last week that an old friend had killed himself. Found out yesterday that another old friend has probably only got another week to live. Nizzibet and I have been looking into getting life insurance. Had nurses over two weekends in a row to get blood and urine samples. But it’s not thoughts of mortality waking me at 3:30.

Whatever it was, I’m up. Might as well draw.

So I noodle a bit here and there. Change the wording on a heading or two. Add a link. It’s like setting up an office. I rarely get everything in place the first time.

No bios yet. Deadline is tomorrow. I’ll check my email Sunday morning and if there are no bios I’ll be forced to describe myself in a paragraph. Hopefully the humble me will be in charge that morning.

I need a biography. The Black Seal is redoing its website to reflect the upcoming second issue and has asked for contributor bios. I’ve already sent a photo but the bio itself eludes me. These last couple of weeks I just don’t care what I’ve done in my life. I’m not feeling smart ass enough to toss off a spoof piece.

Which is where you come in. Whoever you are. I need a paragraph about me to pass on to The Black Seal. I don’t care how accurate it is (though some relation to facts would be nice) so if you’re someone who has wandered onto this blog from a far corner in cyberspace and doesn’t know me from adam, feel free to write something up.

Everyone who sends a bio will receive either one of my 2003 calendars or a copy of Last Dangerous Christmas (an anthology from 1997 that features “Where Elves Come From”, a story I illustrated).

The deadline for bios is Saturday the 8th. Be sure to specify whether you want a calendar or Christmas and include a snail mail address. Send to chaosunit@aol.com and put “biography” in the subject line.

Books recently read. Book the Second –

Jack Faust by Michael Swanwick. Lesson to be learned? The truth is neither freeing nor beautiful? Human beings are greedy awful creatures and always have been? There’s more profit to be had in war than in knowledge?

This is the third Swanwick novel I’ve read (Vacuum Flowers and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter were the others) and each book is enjoyable to me more for the ride of the story than its conclusion. In this one, Johan Faustus is offered the secrets of the universe by Mephistopholes so long as Faustus listens to what the demon says. And so Faustus ends up bringing 20th Century technology to the plague and superstition ridden 16th Century. Entertaining reading for those days when you can only see the bad side of humanity.

Books recently read. Book the first –

Depraved by Harold Schechter – the true story of H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer. So says the back cover blurb. It’s not true. That is, the story is true but Holmes is hardly America’s first serial killer despite his Ted Bundyish personality. America had a few multiple murderers prior to Holmes’ escapades.

I’m not a fan of true crime books. I prefer fictional horrors to the real stuff. A hundred years does give enough distance that I’ve found Holmes’s legend fascinating. It must be a sign of my own depravity and jadedness that I was disappointed with how few people Holmes seems to have actually killed. I’d first read about him in Bloodletters & Badmen by Jay Robert Nash. Prior to the Chicago World’s Fair in the 1900’s Holmes had built himself a “Murder Castle” with secret passages, acid baths, gassing chambers and other ammenities for the purpose of doing away with people and bodies. He himself confessed to the murder of 27 people. And perhaps he did kill that many. There’s no way to know. Holmes was a liar above all else. Some of the people he claimed to have killed turned out to be still living. Others he almost certainly murdered he insisted were still alive.

Depraved mainly details the insurance scam that finally proved his undoing. It’s a grisly enough tale but rather commonplace in comparison to the horrors that the Castle suggests.

I don’t understand writer’s block. I’ve never had it.

What I do understand is being so annoyed with whatever I write (or draw or cook or say) that I don’t want it around to bother me.

And then I’m annoyed that I’m annoyed. And then I’m annoyed again because the whole process is so … normal and mundane.

That’s the worst of it. Normal and mundane.

When I get to that realization, at least I can laugh.

Doesn’t make any of the creative work up to that point look any better.

Bath night last night. For Skook that is. I bathe in the morning. Take a shower. Skook would trash our bathroom if he tried to use the shower. I doubt he’d manage to get wet in all the necessary areas either. The shower head only comes up to the bottom of his rib cage. I have the same problem with the shower at my Mom’s house but I can limbo around enough to compensate. Skook is far too wide for the same sort of twisting about in our shower stall. Taking a bath in that tub is even less of a possibility. His butt, his back, his everything is far too wide. There’d be no room for water in the tub.

There are plenty of places around town for a sasquatch to bathe. A lot of the time Skook heads over to the zoo and dunks himself in one of the moats. If he feels like stretching his legs a bit more he can use the reservoir over in the Roosevelt neighborhood. Some unsuspecting Seattlite’s hose will do in a pinch.

Last night, after watching the newest Angel and a tape of Tuesday’s Buffy, Skook, Nizzibet and I walked down to Golden Gardens. Skook uses the duck pond there for his bath. With all the rain of the last few day we had to be careful going down hill – the path is plain mud right now. We also took care to walk on Skook’s tracks. He doesn’t leave many but we like to be sure. There was little worry that we’d run into anyone. By ten o’clock on a wet Wednesday night most people in Ballard are in doors.

Nizzibet and I only got halfway before her leg started bothering her. The path is a fairly steep downhill all the way to beach. So going home is an uphill climb. Skook offered to carry her back home but she wanted to give the leg a workout. So Nizzibet and I trudged back up hill while Skook continued down. Without us along he avoided the path altogether. I’m always impressed by how quietly someone as big as he is can move.

Nizz and I got home and got to bed way too late. It’s taken me an hour and a half and two cups of coffee to get to my keyboard. If it wasn’t for Paliki’s insistence that she needed feeding I don’t know that I’d be up yet.