The Hour of the Cat

Many are familiar with the old Russian saying of the hour of the wolf. It is the time between 3 and 4 in the morning when you aren’t going to get drunk enough or sleepy enough to slip into the arms of Morphous and the wolf is baying in your mind about all your troubles. It would make a good Blues song. My troubles is baying at the door and they ain’t going nowhere. I ain’t got nowhere to hide ‘cause the bottle is too small and my eyes is wide open.


Ah, if only it were that simple. The hour of the cat is quite different. It sneaks in at any time on soft little kitty feet, curling up in the back of your mind and digging its switchblade claws into your tired brain. I suffer from it a lot now-a-days. It occupies my mind like protesters on Wall Street but a lot louder and more violent. I think it has moved in.



When I am an old lady I shall wear a red hat…. Screw that. I’ll wear a purple hat and a red dress because my generation never did conform well. I wear whatever I find comfortable and I should be writing about fluffy bunnies. Fluffy bunnies and reality shows sell well. They are both fictions. I am real. That is the problem.

They’ll go away when they get tired of their little protest said the patronizing politician at the beginning of the women’s right movement. He should have known anyone that goes through 9 months of Hell to spend 18 hours in excruciating pain is not going anywhere when the baby gets a little cranky. We didn’t leave and we got the vote and we got the rights to govern our bodies and he never forgave us. Make no mistake, he hates us for it but bunnies are so cute with their little wiggly noses. They sell soft toilet tissue.

I have a dream, one man said and through pain and death, it was partially realized. Like those fluffy bunnies, it was but a dream of a world that never existed. It was a fantasy of the American Dream, a car in every garage and a chicken in every pot until the car wouldn’t fit in the garage because we had too much stuff and rented a warehouse space for all the stuff so we could get more and more until we choked on it and lost it all. He who dies with the most toys is still very dead.

Hell no, we won’t go, they shouted by the thousands. As my young friend put it so succinctly; I can die here or I can die in ‘Nam. I choose to die on my own soil. Fluffy bunnies are so soft and cuddly until they go to Kent State and die in the dirt, shot while singing songs of peace and love. The American Dream died there. It bled red, white and blue all over the mud, but everyone was color blind. They only saw red. It doesn’t matter where you die, you are still dead. Dead bunnies don’t sell well, I have learned. Peace signs, bell bottoms and incense are all the rage. They must be godless. They don’t look like us. Neither do fluffy bunnies, my child, said the cat.

They have no leader. They have no plan. They have no organization. They have no jobs. They will go away. Ah, you tired old men have missed the point, again. They have nowhere to go. They have no future. They know it. You know it. The dream is dead and when the dream dies, the nightmare takes over. Here, kitty, kitty….

But fluffy bunnies are what I should be writing about. Tell me my future, but not the truth. Tell me of lovers and money and fame like those people on reality TV. Don’t tell me I am losing my job and then my home and then my family because I am doing everything right and all those others in the unemployment and welfare lines must have done something wrong. Tell me sweet little fluffy bunny lies. Unfortunately I am a lousy liar. The cat seems to have had kittens.

My generation was raised on the myth that you worked hard, lived with integrity and retired to that little house with the picket fence and yelled at the kids to stay off your lawn because that lawn was your only job. Then we saw our parents die of cancer from the cigarettes doctors prescribed for nerves that absolutely weren’t addictive, in a poverty created by medical costs that were in the stratosphere and because we got a good education, we actually knew where that was. But, if we worked hard, we could be the next Bill Gates. Unfortunately the Highlander was right. There can only be one. We found our job security was myth and our 401K barely covered a couple years of retirement while old rich men tried to convince us we should wait for the social security we spent every year of our working lives paying into until we were 70. Unfortunately, most men don’t live more than 72 years but hey, the rich old men were making a profit and that is the American Way. We are just lazy, fluffy bunnies in a reality show and starting look like pretty dumb bunnies.

The cat that claws its way to my consciousness purrs in tones of protest. You start a company and work 18 hours a day and then you retire and leave it to your kids or sell it and retire to a nice beach front home awaiting the next hurricane called the housing market bubble. No wait a minute, that was a hundred or two hundred years ago. My grandfather’s father sold that jewelry store to put his sons through medical college and buy my grandfather a general store. He sold the store and divided property up among 8 children who divided it up among even more and all I got was my grandmother’s hair pin. It was nice hair pin. They were bigger back then and much more decorative just like those fluffy bunnies that sell so well.

Some guy they call the 1%’er’s daddy had a granddaddy bought all that property and the store and built track houses and groceries. Then he bought banks because they require no work and produce no ugly goods but just move money around at a good profit. The family business died before I was born and became a multinational corporation while I was learning to walk. Little did I know it was a living, breathing entity with rights that would fight for it survival by every means possible. There never was an American Dream. It was a fluffy bunny we all believed in hopping down the bunny trail.

I was in my early 30’s when someone threw two bunnies out with their cage in the vacant lot. I saw them because I see everything. I really do. Just ask my friends. They stayed by their cage and by some miracle weren’t eaten by wild dogs. I saw them and picked them up and took them home. Fluffy bunnies are so very soft. They have cute little wiggly noses. They also have teeth and can eat a T-shirt off your shoulder before you know it is dropping and they kick like the dickens. Fluffy bunnies aren’t what they seem, my friends. They are a myth. The cat in my brain isn’t.

It was in the 5th grade that my tests became true and false and multiple choice. Before that, you actually had to write your answers in complete sentences and whole words. I didn’t adapt well. I could always see the truth in the false answer and the myth in the true answer and well, the multiple choices all had their merits, too. But there can only be one. There can only be one truth, one god and one color. I found that hard to believe and lucky for me I learned to memorize and spew forth the crap they tried insert in my mind. I had plenty of storage space. I just filed it. I never realized the others were swallowing it whole, inserting into to every cell of their being as the TRUTH. Fluffy bunnies only come in white, you know. The others aren’t as fluffy just as bunny. I never realized the ones that came after me would have their minds washed, folded and fluffed dry into true or false and a through d because those are the ONLY way. Anything else is failure. Anything else is dangerous. Anything else will steal your security and prevent you getting more stuff even if you are still dead.

And then they became spiritual beings having a human experience, all by themselves in a 500.00 weekend seminar with a hundred other bodies because you can’t trust the guy in the seat next to you not to take your spirituality or was it stuff? We are connected to our money because surely I am not connected to that bum in alley who fought for my freedom and got no medical care when he came home. If you don’t believe me, just ask the 1%. The rest of us are lazy bums who are not as smart as them, as connected as them, as good as them and we should just die because we can’t afford insurance and medical care for the poison related diseases from their factories. We aren’t profitable.

The cat is getting ready for bed and whispers, never mess with someone who has nothing to lose and knows it. They have nothing to lose…..Good night kitties. I have fluffy bunnies to write about and sell.