All My Friends Are Cats

All my friends are cats. Actually, I also have a friend who is a dog, but she has a severe identity problem and thinks she is a cat so I just go ahead and call her "kitty" like she asks me to.

And I would be alone in the world if it wasn't for the cats, and my lesbians, my family, my amazing friends, coworkers, neighbors, the homeless man named Dave who drinks behind my fence... or did at least 'til the fence fell down this winter. And like Dave who is always desperate for some human interaction, some false pretense of companionship, it is sometimes just being with ourselves that feels so infinitely hectic. I have always been one of those people... I do well with hectectivity. And I seem to have a strange proclivity for talking to no one but the stars....

All things being equal, is it not the simplest solution that is usually the answer we are looking for? Why is it that when my gut tells me something that is consistent with Achem's Razor, my brain has to stick its fat ass on in and muddy up the waters?

I believe that the landscape in which we are raised determines to a large degree who we are. I know so many people who are trying to shake this place off like a bad case of herpes, but little do they know that it is this place, these mountains, these three seasons of green, white and brown; that formulated the wanderlust that is driving them away.

I am who I am who I am because of the sage brush and the scrubble oak, the great blue heron and the barn swallow that once crapped right on the plate of spaghetti I was trying to eat after an insanely long day of maintaining barbed wire fencing on the ironical bird refuge. Incidentally it was that same summer that I dared a kid to eat a piece of that embarrassingly familiar bleached white marmot poop. Also incidentally he agreed to taste the poo as long as I didn't tell anyone about it. Not so incidentally I immediately got on the long wave radio to broadcast the news. I mean, come on, what did he expect? The Sego Lillis were in full bloom underfoot and the hillside SO alive with Lupine that it wall all I could do to pull myself away from rolling around in the grass in spite of the ticks I knew I'd find later in some very private places.

Every year I stay here, with the cats, waiting for the birds to come back to the feeders and for that blissful season of "green" that lasts for mere moments. We are raised by the landscape, it tells us who we are, it defines our friendships and sets the stage for everything, everything we will become. It is the landscape, its bumps and bruises, and general misgivings, even the cheat grass and tamarisk that whisper to us at night while we are sleeping. No matter how far away we live or travel, one way or another, this place will bring us to our knees.

When I first left for college just a few days after my 17th birthday some friends were planning a trip to come and see me. They called to ask, 'What can we bring you?'.That was the easiest question I've ever been asked. 'The desert' I said, 'Please, bring me the desert'. When they arrived I could still faintly smell it in their hair.