4th
CAT STUFF/TIME STUFF
Got my dad on the horn the other day. He described a scene from the previous day wherein he’d been “Window Shopping for Motorcycles” and on the way home he’d witnessed a horrific motorcycle-related wreck unfolding, why, not six feet from his very car. A man in a leather coat flew over handlebars and smashed himself right the fuck into oncoming traffic, making all kinds of other causal domino-type stuff unfold in tow. My father pulled over in order to “deliver a statement.” No ambulance appeared (only police and a road crew) which signified (to my dad) that this motorcyle-man was so thoroughly dead that he had merged with the pavement, entered the jurisdiction of the road crews rather than that of your more human-related cleanup. This probably sounds insensitive.
AND:
I tend to take the same bike path to work each day and have done so on most weekdays for about three years now. Back and forth and back and forth, etc. wearing substantial grooves in my personal map and really getting some thoroughly biological-type knowledge about the place (road surface conditions, potholes, possible dangerous intersections, where to power up before a large hill, etc.) But so anyway, when you tred a path like this over and over, there is a somewhat duplicitous sense of SAMENESS, as in “every day is the same” and there is an illusion of a cycle or something, rather than the sense that you are in fact careening forward in time at breakneck speeds past irrevocable milestones.
SO:
The other day I came to a cross street between 38th and 45th street. Pretty residential/quiet stuff. I spotted a small gray cat with a little jingle bell tied around its neck. He stood on the curb
thinking, “Maybe I’ll cross the street, maybe not. maybe I will, maybe won’t” and I was going (outloud): “No no nonono” in my approach.
The little gray cat with the jingly bell then darted out with the suddness that most small-beans mammals often do in road-related scenarios (thinking now and dogs, squirrels, and especially the slightly larger-beans Pennsylvania White-tailed Deer.) I braked in time to miss the cat but then witnessed it get utterly fucking destroyed by the small Japanese pickup truck, making a very slight sound thump type sound. It was shocking and I had to dismount the bike and stand there for a minute and go “woah woah woah” breathing and looking.
But so I think that in moments like this you snap out of cycle-illusion stuff and are reminded that you are in fact careening forward in time at incredible speeds past un-undoable stuff. The cat, like the aforementioned motorcycle-man, had merged with pavement and moved its own physical presence into an entirely different jurisdiction. Standing on the curb and huffing and puffing and going “Woah. Woah woah woah,” viewing the DEAD/ALIVE binary makes the brain think: NOW IS NOW IS NOW IS NOW.
