My Cats, Lost Cats, Rescued Cats and Schrodinger's Cat

It's late Sunday afternoon on the Left Coast and, sitting on the second floor of my Sierra Nevada aerie, I'm watching the sun shoot through the branches of the conifers and onto the last remaining deciduous trees, their yellow leaves slowly settling to the rich, needle-covered earth below. I moved wood this weekend, from my big woodpile to the secondary wood source on my deck, and then stocked the pile inside the house next to the stove. Winter is coming and I need to be ready.

I know that winter is here when I remove all the chairs from the deck, the umbrella, the tables, and take them below to the shed. I did that this weekend too. I could use a propane fill; I'm at 65% and it's time to get on the list for a topping-up -- I wonder what I'll pay?

I'm rambling and I know it. It just feels this way. I originally was going to post about the Republicans, about President Bush, and perhaps post my Moonbat of the Week award. That just went out the window. For today, for right now, I'm over politics. Don't want to go there. I'm just going to go where the muse takes me and, for now, it takes me to cats.

I've had cats all my life. I have to admit I'm a cat guy and not a dog guy. Dogs are too loud, too needy, too over-the-top. Sure, I've had dogs but only when I left home. We always had cats at home -- that's probably why I am why I am. I didn't have a dog as a kid. I've had a few dogs but they just didn't satisfy like a good cat. How weird is that? You thought chicks only dug cats? Well, I'm guessing it's my personality getting in the way.

Here I go with the admission: I'm pretty much the iconoclast. I am not by nature a People Person. I dislike big cities, noise, bustle, loud people, too many people, people in general. I would not do well in New York. I lived in San Francisco for a time when I was very young but couldn't do that now. I work in Sacramento, Fornicalia. But if I stay there too long I become anxious. At the end of my work week I cannot wait to flee. I drive over the speed limit up I-80 to reach my offramp, 70+ miles away.

I get up here, amidst the pines and blue skies and clouds and wandering roads and railroad tracks and I know I am home. The weight comes off my shoulders. The second I open the door to my house I feel totally unfettered. Make no mistake; when you get home I wish you the same feeling. If you can find that feeling in a housing tract or an apartment, more power to you. I know people who could not survive if they were more than 40' from a Starbucks or a bus line, or a mall, a theatre, a museum, a Thai restaurant, a freeway, a Pier 1 Imports.

That's them. It sure ain't me.

So this weekend I went looking for another cat. I found a small cat rescue facility in lower Placer County, in Auburn. I found this great place where rescued and adoptable cats are kept in little apartments where actual people could enter the actual apartments and actually touch the cats. What a concept!

That's how old I am. Animal shelters now keep the adoptees from the potential adopters. They cite reasons like cat viruses and diseases and the like. And they're probably right, I must admit. But you can't touch the animals. You can maybe stick a finger into a cage but, if caught, you have to swab gross stuff over your hands and atone. Say three Hail Marys and turn around a couple times. And then they kick you out.

Because you had the actual TEMERITY to want to touch the animal you're thinking of saving.

Yeah yeah yeah, go ahead, rag on my ass: you don't understand, you don't get it, they're keeping the cats disease free, blah blah blah blah. And then they put all those cats to death and they burn them and brush their ashes into bins and they go out with the rest of that day's trash into the green dumpster. No big deal.

Turns out this out-of-the-way shelter has a higher placement rate than all other regular shelters. I wonder why this would be?

In any event, turns out I put in my chit to be a volunteer at the shelter. Because I felt I could actually make a difference in that place. Because it is different. And it's not smack dab in the middle of a Massive Population -- so they can afford to act and be and present themselves as they are. In ancient Egypt, for example, the cat had a special place in its culture. They were highly valued, not least for the practical reason that mice and rats could destroy a town's food supply. Cats were often given golden jewelry and allowed to eat at the human table. Killing a cat was a capital offence and when a cat died the household would go into mourning. The Egyptian god Bast was a cat-god.

Which brings me to this weekend: I got my pneumonia shot and I got whacked in the eye. Both were painful.

I found, by sheer whimsy, a place that was delivering flu and pneumonia shots. I opted for the pneumonia shot for one very solid reason: the avian flu is coming. One does not die from the flu; oh no. One dies from pneumonia contracted via the flu. Hence my shot. I'll be receiving an additional flu shot later this week. I would recommend your doing the same. A day later the injection site pulsed with a dull throb. But I'd do it all over again.

Later, whilst at the shelter I described above, a cat tagged me in the right eye with her paw. I think her claw might have been out for a moment. In any event, my eye swelled shut, teared up and is still somewhat painful. It's sensitive to light and, 24 hours later, is red and uncomfortable. It feels precisely as my eye felt when I once contracted conjunctivitis.

So sorry. No amazing political post. Just a stream-of-consciousness post that doesn't mean much of anything to anyone. Except to me.

I've always had cats and I want another cat. I'll work for a rescue cat shelter. And what of Schrodinger's Cat?

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Here's Schrödinger's (theoretical) experiment: We place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. There is, in the chamber, a very small amount of a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill the cat. The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Since we cannot know, the cat is both dead and alive according to quantum law, in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (dead or alive). This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox: the observation or measurement itself affects an outcome, so that it can never be known what the outcome would have been if it were not observed.

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I posit: was it worth killing the cat?