Cats Movie Quotes

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...

When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

Even though he was inside the house, I could still hear Vlad’s sardonic mutter of “Where’s a tissue when I need one?” I turned my face away from Bones after a long moment, ending our kiss, and called out, “If you’re not too busy watching Hitman, I hear Dracula 2000 is a good movie.” “Vicious,” came Vlad’s reply, amusement clear in his tone.

Yuki: "What can I learn from a stupid cat like you? You didn’t even know that Jason isn’t really a bear. He’s a character in a horror film." Kyo: "Yeah? So what if I didn’t? Like I’d waste my time watching some movie about a bear!" Yuki: You truly are an idiot.

shouldn't he pick on more interesting heroes, like the children of Thor? At least their dad had a movie franchise. Frey didn't even have his own cats. He had to borrow his sister's.

Something I am wondering: if you cannot hear do you have no sounds in your head? Do you see a silent movie

Cool. Can we watch one last movie first?" "All right, buddy. What'll it be?" "I think The Boondock Saints, because the Irish guys win. Plus the cat ends badly. It affirms my worldview and I feel validated.

All you need for a movie is a gun and a cat.

Is there even a Cats movie?” “God,” I say. “I hope not.

Well, of course I’ve tried lavender. And pulling my memory out, ribbonlike and dripping. And shrieking into my pillow. And writing the poems. And making more friends. And baking warm brown cookies. And therapy. And intimacy. And pictures of rainbows. And all of the movies about lovers and the terrible things they do to each other. And watching the ones in other languages. And leaving the subtitles off. And listening to the language. And forgetting my name. And feeling the dirt on my skin. And screaming in the shower. And changing my shampoo. And living alone. And cutting my hair. And buying a turtle. And petting the cat. And traveling. And writing more poems. And touching a different body. And digging a grave. And digging a grave. Of course, I’ve tried it. Of course I have.

Cowards say it can't be done, critics say it shouldn't have been done, creator say well done.

should read a book, I should make some friends, I should write some emails, I should go to the movies, I should get some exercise, I should unclench my muscles, I should get a hobby, I should buy a plant, I should call my exes, all of them, and ask them for advice, I should figure out why no one wants to be around me, I should start going to the same bar every night, become a regular, I should volunteer again, I should get a cat or a plant or some nice lotion or some Whitestrips, start using a laundry service, start taking myself both more and less seriously.

Possibilities I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer not to maintain that reason is to blame for everything. I prefer exceptions. I prefer to leave early. I prefer talking to doctors about something else. I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries that can be celebrated every day. I prefer moralists who promise me nothing. I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind. I prefer the earth in civvies. I prefer conquered to conquering countries. I prefer having some reservations. I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order. I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages. I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves. I prefer dogs with uncropped tails. I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark. I prefer desk drawers. I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here to many things I've also left unsaid. I prefer zeroes on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher. I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars. I prefer to knock on wood. I prefer not to ask how much longer and when. I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.

It was a weird thing for me, because I don't read vampire books. I don't watch vampire movies. I'm not into the horror genre. I'm a wuss, I'm a scaredy cat.

I will tell you in another life when we are both cats.

Save the what? I call it the “Save the Cat” scene. They don’t put it into movies anymore. And it’s basic. It’s the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something — like saving a cat — that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him.

Dorothy viewed my mother's propensity toward madness not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something to look forward to, like a movie or a newly released color of nail polish. 'Your mother is just expressing herself,' Dorothy would tell me when my mother stopped sleeping, started smoking the filters of her cigarettes and began writing backward with a glitter pen. No, she's not,' I would say. 'She's going insane again.' Don't be so mundane,' she would yawn, passing my mother a shoebox filled with cat vertebrae. 'She is a brilliant artist. If you want Hamburger Helper, go find some other mother.

Listening, it occurred to Randall that the love people feel for animals is the purest form of love. Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something that would die before you. Like that movie with Ali McGraw. There was no future, just the affection of the present moment. You didn't expect a big payoff, someday.

Like sometimes when you go to a movie and you get so lost in the story that when you’re walking out of the theater you can’t remember anything at all about your own life.

The fancy things I like are sheets. Pots and pans. And the things I really like aren't fancy at all: old aprons and hankies. Butter wrappers from one pound blocks. Peony bushes, hardback books of poetry. And I like things less than that; the sticky remains at the bottom of the apple crisp dish. The way cats sometimes run sideways. The presence of a rainbow in a puddle of oil. Mayonaise jars. Pussy willows. Wash on a line. The tick-tock of clocks, the blue of the neon sign at the local movie house. The fact that there is a local movie house.

GONE TO STATIC it sounds better than it is, this business of surviving, making it through the wrong place at the wrong time and living to tell. when the talk shows and movie credits wear off, it's just me and my dumb luck. this morning I had that dream again: the one where I'm dead. I wake up and nothing's much different. everything's gone sepia, a dirty bourbon glass by the bed, you're still dead. I could stumble to the shower, scrub the luck of breath off my skin but it's futile. the killer always wins. it's just a matter of time. and I have time. I have grief and liquor to fill it. tonight, the liquor and I are talking to you. the liquor says, 'remember' and I fill in the rest, your hands, your smile. all those times. remember. tonight the liquor and I are telling you about our day. we made it out of bed. we miss you. we were surprised by the blood between our legs. we miss you. we made it to the video store, missing you. we stopped at the liquor store hoping the bourbon would stop the missing. there's always more bourbon, more missing tonight, when we got home, there was a stray cat at the door. she came in. she screams to be touched. she screams when I touch her. she's right at home. not me. the whisky is open the vcr is on. I'm running the film backwards and one by one you come back to me, all of you. your pulses stutter to a begin your eyes go from fixed to blink the knives come out of your chests, the chainsaws roar out from your legs your wounds seal over your t-cells multiply, your tumors shrink the maniac killer disappears it's just you and me and the bourbon and the movie flickering together and the air breathes us and I am home, I am lucky I am right before everything goes black

In my opinion, the best time to be alive is always right now. People are aways whining about how they were born in the wrong century, but they really haven't thought things through. They picture the old castle they wish they could live in, but they don't think about the drafts in the winter or the pitch darkness at night, or all the spiders and the lice. They can't imagine the everyday pain of a life without movies or recorded music or... or... Interet videos about cats. And don't even get me started on women who idealize the past. Do you have any idea what it was like to be a woman even a hundred years ago? Horrible! And a hundred years before that, the situation practically defies description. We might as well have been slaves. Trussed up in hoop skirts and corsets, married off like racehorses. Good riddance to history, I say!

She can outstare anyone, and I am almost as good. We’re impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen. We wear long wool coats with tie belts, the collars turned up to look like those of movie stars, and rubber boots with the tops folded down and men’s work socks inside. In our pockets are stuffed the kerchiefs our mothers make us wear but that we take off as soon as we’re out of their sight. We scorn head coverings. Our mouths are tough, crayon-red, shiny as nails. We think we are friends.

follow the money

Your Cat Has More Self Esteem Than I Do There are no billboards for cats advertising feline plastic surgery feline acne gels feline gastric bands feline face-lifts. There are no commercials about feline makeup feline sex toys feline fashion. There are porn movies with cats, but no cats watch them.

But opposites attract, as they say, and that's certainly true when it comes to Emma Marchetta and me. She's the beauty and I'm the brains. She loves all forms of reality television, would donate a kidney if it meant she could pash Andrew G, is constantly being invited out to parties and other schools' semi formals, and likes any movie featuring Lindsay Lohan. I, on the other hand, have shoulder-length blonde hair, too many freckles and - thanks to years of swimming the fifty-metre butterfly event - swimmer's shoulders and no boobs. In other words, I look like an ironing board with a blonde wig. - Cat

The Covenant of the Arc is the screenwriting law that says: Every single character in your movie must change in the course of your story. The only characters who don’t change are the bad guys. But the hero and his friends change a lot.

Out in the stone-pile the toad squatted with its glowing jewel-eyes and, maybe, its memories. I don't know if you'll admit a toad could have memories. But I don't know, either, if you'll admit there was once witchcraft in America. Witchcraft doesn't sound sensible when you think of Pittsburgh and subways and movie houses, but the dark lore didn't start in Pittsburgh or Salem either; it goes away back to dark olive groves in Greece and dim, ancient forests in Brittany and the stone dolmens of Wales. All I'm saying, you understand, is that the toad was there, under its rocks, and inside the shack Pete was stretching on his hard bed like a cat and composing himself to sleep. ("Before I Wake...")

The space behind me in the frame was not so much a space in the conventional sense as a perfectly composed harmony, a wider, more real-seeming reality with a deep silence around it, beyond sound and speech; where all was stillness and clarity, and at the same time, as in a backward-run movie, you could also imagine spilled milk leaping back into the pitcher, a jumping cat flying backward to land silently upon a table, a waystation where time didn’t exist or, more accurately, existed all at once in every direction, all histories and movements occurring simultaneously.

But here’s my little trade secret that I put into every All Is Lost moment just for added spice, and it’s something that many hit movies have. I call it the whiff of death. I started to notice how many great movies use the All Is Lost point to kill someone. Obi Wan in Star Wars is the best example — what will Luke do now?? All Is Lost is the place where mentors go to die, presumably so their students can discover “they had it in them all along.” The mentor’s death clears the way to prove that. But what if you don’t have an Obi Wan character? What if death isn’t anywhere near your story? Doesn’t matter. At the All Is Lost moment, stick in something, anything that involves a death. It works every time. Whether it’s integral to the story or just something symbolic, hint at something dead here. It could be anything. A flower in a flower pot. A goldfish. News that a beloved aunt has passed away. It’s all the same.

Meghan and I talked about music - she loved Ella Fitzgerald. "What about all the hip acts that college kids love? Do you like any of them?" "Like who?" "I don't know all their names. Snoop Diggity Do and all those hip cats." Meghan shook her head and laughed. We talked about movies - she loved anything made before 1964. No wonder I thought she was older; she was an old soul in a young body. "So what's your favorite movie?" I asked. "To Kill a Mockingbird." My mother would have liked Meghan. She made my father and me watch To Kill a Mockingbird with her when I was in first grade. It must have been the twentieth time she'd seen it, but she still cried at the parts that made her weepy-eyed the first nineteen times.

You’re a projectionist and you’re tired and angry, but mostly you’re bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina close-up into another feature movie. This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. In reel three, just after the dog and cat, who have human voices and talk to each other, have eaten out of a garbage can, there’s the flash of an erection. Tyler does this.

Movie premieres and awards ceremonies mixed with the kids and the white picket fence. And a cat. Not a dog. Which I happen to think is adorable. My big old strong, dominant man loves cuddly little kitties. “We’ll

What about Katerina? Is she Head Girl?" "Boss Cat, more like." Isabella wrinkled her nose. "Where's she from?" "Sweden," said Isabella carelessly. Oh, right. So Cassie's movie-star casting had been spot-on. Not that she could imagine Katerina ever Vanting to Be Alone, though. Who else was Swedish? ABBA? Cassie wrinkled her nose. Not a good comparison. "I can see her in a silver catsuit, though," she muttered under her breath.

Imagine that you are watching a movie which is so engaging that you forget yourself. Suppose that the movie is not 3 hours long but millions of years long. Of course, a human protagonist can’t have such a long story. So, the protagonist of the movie is someone who changes forms from human to cow to monkey to tree to dog to cat and so on... Then who are you and who is the protagonist of the movie? Aren’t you the eternal power watching your own story unfold before you?

The imitation lives we see on TV and in the movies whisper the idea that human existence consists of revelations and abrupt changes of heart; by the time we’ve reached full adulthood, I think, this is an idea we have on some level come to accept. Such things may happen from time to time, but I think that for the most part it’s a lie. Life’s changes come slowly…the whole idea of curious cats attaining satisfaction seemed slightly absurd. The world rarely finishes its conversations.

At the beginning of summer vacation, Jeanette Nord sent me a letter inviting me to come and stay at her house for a week. She had enclosed a snapshot of her and the kittens, now cats. Ma said she couldn’t understand why I didn’t take the Nords up on their offer. I couldn’t quite understand it, either; I just didn’t want to. I preferred to spend my summer days watching TV or sitting out on the porch reading movie magazines and thick paperback romances with the top of my shorts unsnapped for comfort.

Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who has changed, and seeing the same film again makes that impossible to forget.

Are these black cats like the hare?" "No. They're smaller; they only want me to play with them. Fly away with them to a place on the other side of the moon. There's a garden there, all silvery-gold, and the cats and hares dance and jump round and round. They can jump so much farther than they can on earth; it's like flying, and they love it so. Sometimes I've felt as if I'd like to dance and jump through the air too, they looked so happy, and I've thought maybe if I did I wouldn't be afraid any more, but when I look they're all dancing round a Figure that sits still in the middle of the garden. A big black Figure with a hood on. And It hasn't got any face. Its face is so awful that It keeps it covered. And then I get so terribly afraid. And everything stops." "And you see all that in the picture?" "I don't know." She hesitated again. "I think it's partly dreams. After I've thought they were at the windows - the cats and the big hare. They sit there and watch, you see, after I've gone to sleep. But they don't come often. I don't usually know what's there." She came closer and whispered, her blue eyes earnest and weird, "I don't think it's an animal hare. I think it's Aunt Sarai's hare, that maybe it came from hell. It isn't swearing to say that word just as the name of a place, is it? That's why people used to be so scared of witches' black cats, isn't it, because they thought they weren't earth-cats, they were from the devil? Mother says there isn't any hell or any witches. But Aunt Sarai was a witch; that's why she can come back. I think they've all been witches here; the house is mad because mother wouldn't be; that's why it wants me now." Carew said, "It was all dreams, Betty. There is no hell. There is no garden on the other side of the moon. It's a dead world, full of volcanic craters, with no air for anything to grow in or breathe. A hare frightened you and, being nervous, you've had nightmares about it - pictures that fear paints on your mind just as an artist would on canvas, with paints and brushes. "Every dream is now a movie we make for ourselves in our sleep...

Phrases offered to the grief-stricken, such as “time heals all wounds” and “the day will come when you reach closure” irritated him, and there were times when he sat silent, seeming half-buried in some sediment of sorrow. “Closure? When someone beloved dies there is no ‘closure.’” He disliked television programs featuring tornado chasers squealing “Big one! Big one!” and despised the rat-infested warrens of the Internet, riddled with misinformation and chicanery. He did not like old foreign movies where, when people parted, one stood in the middle of the road and waved. He thought people with cell phones should be immolated along with those who overcooked pasta. Calendars, especially the scenic types with their glowing views of a world without telephone lines, rusting cars or burger stands, enraged him, but he despised the kittens, motorcycles, famous women and jazz musicians of the special-interest calendars as well. “Why not photographs of feral cats? Why not diseases?” he said furiously. Wal-Mart trucks on the highway received his curses and perfumed women in elevators invited his acid comment that they smelled of animal musk glands. For years he had been writing an essay entitled “This Land Is NOT Your Land.

If you’re trying to separate out the scores of “meaningless things” in the world from everything else, you’ll eventually have to make a judgment about human beings, about our existence. In my case, I think that it’s all the movies that I’ve enjoyed and the memories I have of enjoying them over the years that give my life some meaning. They’ve made me who I am.

The classroom gradually filled up with our other roommates, but one bed remained unclaimed, heightening the air of mystery surrounding its future occupant. Then, suddenly, the door crashed open and into the room strode a human hurricane—a sturdy, confident fellow who greeted everyone with great cheer and a ferocious hug. He was almost four years older than me. He introduced himself to me as Brian Blessed. He was not yet the globally renowned actor, mountaineer, adventurer, and star of TV shows, stage musicals, and movies as disparate as Blackadder, Cats, Flash Gordon, and I, Claudius. But I could tell instantly that he was a one-off; they broke the mold when they made Brian. Like Norman and me, he, too, was of humble origin, from the South Yorkshire mining town of Mexborough. I was beginning to feel more comfortable by the minute.

One thing I have noticed about sensitive souls is that they appear to be fragile. They break down crying at the sight of a dead cat on the side of the road. They can’t stand the thought of killing spiders – and rightly so.” She sat back in her chair. “A sensitive soul steers clear of bad news, depressing movies, and books with sad endings because they feel the pain of the souls suffering these tragedies – they feel it as if it were their own.

In my opinion, the best time to be alive is always right now. People are aways whining about how they were born in the wrong century, but they really haven't thought things through. They picture the old castle they wish they could live in, but they don't think about the drafts in the winter or the pitch darkness at night, or all the spiders and the lice. They can't imagine the everyday pain of a life without antibiotics or anesthetics. The tedium of a world without movies or recorded music or... or... Internet videos about cats. And don't even get me started on women who idealize the past. Do you have any idea what it was like to be a woman even a hundred years ago? Horrible! And a hundred years before that, the situation practically defies description. We might as well have been slaves. Trussed up in hoop skirts and corsets, married off like racehorses. Good riddance to history, I say!

The sound was still off. In the movie, the girl and the woman had gotten into a car and were driving somewhere. They were still arguing. I watched their mouths without anu sound coming out. And the more I watched them, the more I thought that that's exactly how most people are. They move their mouths, but nothing important comes out. They just talk and talk and talk. That's what Cat Poop wants me to do: talk. But like I keep telling him, there's nothing to say. "Suicide Notes

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit--dumps, mopes, Mondays--all that's dismal--low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like the blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that's empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance.

I don’t even want to think about all the animals--livestock, pets, strays--left out to battle the elements. The very idea makes my heart hurt. “You okay?” Ryder asks me. “Yeah, why?” “I dunno.” He shrugs. “You just looked…sad or something.” I’m shocked at how well he can read me. “I was just thinking about anyone--anything--stuck out there in this. You know, dogs, cats, horses. Cows,” I add, sighing heavily. “We’ve got cows!” Rider quips, quoting that old movie about tornadoes--you know, the one with Bill Paxton. I admit, it makes me smile. “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself,” Ryder says.

THE ACCURSED SHIP didn’t sink for a full three hours. By the time it did, I was feeling so traumatized that even watching Dogface die offered little consolation. The dialogue, the acting, the vast emptiness of the whole endeavor! Was that what passed for cinema these days? I felt like I had been violated; violated by a team of accountants. Laura, prostrated by grief, lay weeping on my lap. Frank stared stolidly at the credits, over which, as a coup de grâce, a cat or cats were being strangled to the effect that “My Heart Will Go On,” which at this moment in time was not a sentiment I could endorse.

The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living. An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.

I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.

His coat was white, his eyes as black as ink, his tail pale pink. He was cuter than the kind of mice you didn’t want in your house, an elegant little gentleman. If Amity were Cinderella, Snowball would morph into a magnificent stallion to pull her carriage. That’s the kind of special mouse he was. Now, after she turned on her TV and streamed an animated Disney movie that she had seen many times and that didn’t have a cat in it, she took Snowball out of his cage. She sat in an armchair, and for a while he ran up and down her arms and across her shoulders, pausing now and then to stare at her with what she believed was affection. Then he settled in her lap, on his back. She rubbed his tummy with one finger, and he relaxed into an ecstatic trance.

BLUE pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—all that’s dismal—low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that’s empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky’s turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese . . . the pedantic, indecent and censorious . . . watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it’s stood for fidelity.

It’s probably long overdue for us to throw out what we think we know about love. Girls have grown up with too many fairy tale/date movies/romance bodice-rippers racing around in our heads—the warrior with his rippling muscles and the golden-maned damsel clinging to his breeches. The title is something like Savage Heat or Destiny’s Desire. This is the fairy tale world where men and women always orgasm at the same time or where the man wakes the sleeping princess with a kiss, or where the hero slays the dragon and rescues the damsel from a tower, or where, essentially, everyone lives happily ever after and no one writes what happens next. What happens next is that reality sets in. The golden bubble bursts. There are bills to pay. Someone has to walk the dog and clean the cat litter box and go to the grocery store for milk.

In order to understand what this lady was saying about her upstairs neighbors,” I went on, because no one else was saying anything, “you have to turn the situation around. If the two sweet homosexuals hadn’t fed the cats at all but instead had pelted them with stones or tossed poisoned pork chops down to them from their balcony, then they would have been just plain dirty faggots. I think that’s what Claire meant about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? That the friendly Sidney Poitier was a sweet boy too. That the person who made that movie was absolutely no better than the lady in that program. In fact, Sidney Poitier was supposed to serve as a role model. An example for all those other nasty Negroes, the uppity Negroes. The dangerous Negroes, the muggers and the rapists and the crack dealers. When you people put on a good-looking suit like Sidney’s and start behaving like the perfect son-in-law, we white folks will be your friends.

Tina, who worked at the Hampshire Gazette and drank like a journalist in a movie, was loudly musing about getting her shadow altered to have a cat tail. “Guys love a tail,” Tina proclaimed, to protests by nearly everyone. Aimee thought Tina shouldn’t consider fetishes along a gender binary. Ian wanted it to be known that he thought it was disgusting, and that men did not want to molest animals. The artist agreed it was kind of hot, but his comic was about saucy mice. Charlie told Tina that maybe she had misunderstood what “getting some tail” actually meant. “Mermaids, right?” Vince asked, in such a clueless just-joined-the-conversation tone that it was hard to know if he was joking, or if he’d misheard the earlier part. It didn’t matter. Everyone laughed. It was funny either way. As Charlie poured more bourbon—with ice this time—she decided she was glad she’d come. She was just buzzed enough to feel an expansive warmth for the people in the room. See, she was fine being a normal person and doing normal-person things.

I do not at all have a sense of luring anyone into the poetic by catching hold of them through my subject matter. The idea appalls me in fact. Some events — whether a tree in a certain light, a Mexican family looking at the movie stills outside the cinema, a dream, my own condition of being in or out of love, of some epiphany relating to husband, child, friend, cat or dog, street or painting, cloud or stone, a book read, a story heard, a life thought about, a demonstration lived through, a situation, historical and/or topical, (that’s to say known in the moment of its passing into history) — it doesn’t matter, the list is endless, but some events (selected by some interior mysterious process out of all the other minutes and hours of my life) begin to form themselves in my understanding as phrases, images, rhythms of language, demand to be further formed, demand midwifery is one way to put it. Not all that one feels most strongly makes this verbal demand, even if one is a poet — by poet here I mean prose writer too — … but whatever experiences do demand it are always strongly felt ones. That is my testimony.

I rolled my eyes at him and pulled the sweatshirt over my head, adjusting the deep sweetheart neckline of my dress. I'd secretly and specifically purchased the gorgeous cherry-red vintage cocktail dress for this party. I had found a pair of black cat-eye glasses at a retro clothing store near Pike Place Market to go with the dress, and the combination made me feel confident and sophisticated. "Don't look for a minute," I instructed, shimmying out of my jeans and smoothing the hemline down. The dress nipped in at the waist and flared out in a high hemline that showed off my legs. "Okay, I'm good." Rory gave me a sideways glance and did a double take. "Wow." He pulled up to a stop sign and turned, taking me in head to toe. "You look...wow." He shook his head, seemingly at a loss for words. I felt a flush of triumph. I'd never seen him look at me like that, admiration mixed with astonishment. He seemed genuinely stunned. I slicked on some red lipstick and examined my reflection in the tiny square of Rory's passenger mirror, aware of his eyes on me. I looked glamorous, surprisingly sexy. Like a movie starlet from the 1950s, a bombshell ingenue. I sat back, feeling almost giddy with triumph. I'd worn the dress for only one person. And he had finally noticed me.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can't just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I'll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here's where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I'm a part of it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my word. Not my America. But here we are, at last.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can't just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I'll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here's where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I'm a part of it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my world. Not my America. But here we are, at last.

«It's not easy to believe.» «I» she told him, «I can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.» «Really?» «I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in "War of the Worlds". I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kind of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.»

You remember that documentary they showed us in sixth grade? The one about Hurricane Katrina?” “Yeah.” I shrug, remembering how we’d all piled into the media center to watch it on the big, pull-down screen. I don’t recall much about the movie itself, but I’m pretty sure Brad Pitt had narrated it. “What about it?” "I had nightmares for weeks. I have no idea why it affected me the way it did.” “Seriously?” He nods. “Ever since, well…let’s just say I don’t do well in storms. Especially hurricanes.” I just stare at him in stunned silence. “You’re going to have fun with this, aren’t you?” “No, I…of course not. Jeez.” How big of a bitch does he think I am? “I’m not going to tell a soul. I promise. Okay? What happens in the storm shelter stays in the storm shelter,” I quip, trying to lighten the mood. His whole body seems to relax then, as if I’ve taken a weight off him. “Did you seriously think I was going to rag on you for this? I mean, we’ve been friends forever.” He quirks one brow. “Friends?” “Well, okay, not friends, exactly. But you know what I mean. Our moms used to put us in a crib together. Back when we were babies.” He winces. “I know.” “When we were little, things were fine. But then…well, middle school. It was just…I don’t know…awkward. And then in eighth grade, I thought maybe…” I shake my head, obviously unable to form a complete sentence. “Never mind.” “You thought what? C’mon, don’t stop now. You’re doing a good job distracting me.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. Call it a public service. Or…pretend I’m just one of the pets.” “Poor babies,” I say, glancing over at the cats. Kirk and Spock are curled up together in the back of the crate, keeping the bromance alive. Sulu is sitting alone in the corner, just staring at us. “He’s a she, you know.” “Who?” “Sulu. Considering she’s a calico, you’d think Daddy would have figured it out.

So what did you and Landon do this afternoon?” Minka asked, her soft voice dragging him back to the present. Angelo looked up to see that Minka had already polished off two fajitas. Damn, the girl could eat. “Landon gave me a tour of the DCO complex. I did some target shooting and blew up a few things. He even let me play with the expensive surveillance toys. I swear, it felt more like a recruiting pitch to get me to work there than anything.” Minka’s eyes flashed green, her full lips curving slightly. Damn, why the hell had he said it like that? Now she probably thought he was going to come work for the DCO. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, not after just reenlisting for another five years. The army wasn’t the kind of job where you could walk into the boss’s office and say, “I quit.” Thinking it would be a good idea to steer the conversation back to safer ground, he reached for another fajita and asked Minka a question instead. “What do you think you’ll work on next with Ivy and Tanner? You going to practice with the claws for a while or move on to something else?” Angelo felt a little crappy about changing the subject, but if Minka noticed, she didn’t seem to mind. And it wasn’t like he had to fake interest in what she was saying. Anything that involved Minka was important to him. Besides, he didn’t know much about shifters or hybrids, so the whole thing was pretty damn fascinating. “What do you visualize when you see the beast in your mind?” he asked. “Before today, I thought of it as a giant, blurry monster. But after learning that the beast is a cat, that’s how I picture it now.” She smiled. “Not a little house cat, of course. They aren’t scary enough. More like a big cat that roams the mountains.” “Makes sense,” he said. Minka set the other half of her fourth fajita on her plate and gave him a curious look. “Would you mind if I ask you a personal question?” His mouth twitched as he prepared another fajita. He wasn’t used to Minka being so reserved. She usually said whatever was on her mind, regardless of whether it was personal or not. “Go ahead,” he said. “The first time we met, I had claws, fangs, glowing red eyes, and I tried to kill you. Since then, I’ve spent most of the time telling you about an imaginary creature that lives inside my head and makes me act like a monster. How are you so calm about that? Most people would have run away already.” Angelo chuckled. Not exactly the personal question he’d expected, but then again Minka rarely did the expected. “Well, my mom was full-blooded Cherokee, and I grew up around all kinds of Indian folktales and legends. My dad was in the army, and whenever he was deployed, Mom would take my sisters and me back to the reservation where she grew up in Oklahoma. I’d stay up half the night listening to the old men tell stories about shape-shifters, animal spirits, skin-walkers, and trickster spirits.” He grinned. “I’m not saying I necessarily believed in all that stuff back then, but after meeting Ivy, Tanner, and the other shifters at the DCO, it just didn’t faze me that much.” Minka looked at him with wide eyes. “You’re a real American Indian? Like in the movies? With horses and everything?” He laughed again. The expression of wonder on her face was adorable. “First, I’m only half-Indian. My dad is Mexican, so there’s that. And second, Native Americans are almost nothing like you see in the movies. We don’t all live in tepees and ride horses. In fact, I don’t even own a horse.” Minka was a little disappointed about the no-horse thing, but she was fascinated with what it was like growing up on an Indian reservation and being surrounded by all those legends. She immediately asked him to tell her some Indian stories. It had been a long time since he’d thought about them, but to make her happy, he dug through his head and tried to remember every tale he’d heard as a kid.

A splash of light snuck beneath the a dressing room door. He heard a groan. A shuffle. A bump. A heavy sigh. "Uh, too tight." He walked toward the back, stopping outside the dressing room. The door was cracked a fraction. He rested a shoulder against the wall, and glanced inside. Grace as Catwoman blew his mind. A feline fantasy. The three-way mirror tripled his pleasure. He viewed her from every angle. Hot, sleek, fierce. The lady could fight Batman in her skintight black leather catsuit and come out the winner. After a moment she scrunched her nose, slapped her palms against her thighs. Stuck out her tongue at her reflection in the mirrors. He saw what had her so frustrated. Sympathized with her disappointment. Her costume didn't fit. The front zipper hadn't fully cleared her cleavage, which was deep and visible. She wore no bra. She gave a little hop, and her breasts bounced. Full and plump. He felt a tug at his groin. Superhero lust. He cleared his throat and made his presence known. She caught his image in the corner of the glass, and reached for the fitting room chair, positioning it between them. Like that would keep him from her. He should've looked away, but couldn't. He sensed her embarrassment. Her panic. Flight? She had nowhere to go. He blocked the door. He wasn't leaving until they'd talked. "Archibald's going to love your costume," he initiated. She didn't find him funny. Her gaze narrowed behind the molded cat-eye mask with attached ears. Her fingers clenched in her elbow-length gloves. Inspired by the movie The Dark Knight, she'd added a whip and a gun holster. Her thigh-high stiletto boots were killer, adding five inches to her height. Her image would stick with him forever. She backed against the center mirror, and nervously fingered the open flaps over her breasts. A yank on the zipper broke the tab. The metal teeth parted, and the gap widened, revealing the round inner curves of her breasts. A hint of her nipples. Dusky pink. All the way down to the dent of her navel.

Colette"s "My Mother's House" and "Sido" After seeing the movie "Colette" I felt so sad that it didn't even touch the living spirit of her that exists in her writing. 'What are you doing with that bucket, mother? Couldn't you wait until Josephine (the househelp) arrives?' "And out I hurried. But the fire was already blazing, fed with dry wood. The milk was boiling on the blue-tiled charcoal stove. Nearby, a bar of chocolate was melting in a little water for my breakfast, and, seated squarely in her cane armchair, my mother was grinding the fragrant coffee which she roasted herself. The morning hours were always kind to her. She wore their rosy colours in her cheeks. Flushed with a brief return to health, she would gaze at the rising sun, while the church bell rang for early Mass, and rejoice at having tasted, while we still slept, so many forbidden fruits. "The forbidden fruits were the over-heavy bucket drawn up from the well, the firewood split with a billhook on an oaken block, the spade, the mattock, and above all the double steps propped against the gable-windows of the attic, the flowery spikes of the too-tall lilacs, the dizzy cat that had to be rescued from the ridge of the roof. All the accomplices of her old existence as a plump and sturdy little woman, all the minor rustic divinities who once obeyed her and made her so proud of doing without servants, now assumed the appearance and position of adversaries. But they reckoned without that love of combat which my mother was to keep till the end of her life. At seventy-one dawn still found her undaunted, if not always undamaged. Burnt by fire, cut with the pruning knife, soaked by melting snow or spilt water, she had always managed to enjoy her best moments of independence before the earliest risers had opened their shutters. She was able to tell us of the cats' awakening, of what was going on in the nests, of news gleaned, together with the morning's milk and the warm loaf, from the milkmaid and the baker's girl, the record in fact of the birth of a new day.

I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe." "Really?" "I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in this universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath. Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud.

The Year Of The Cat" On a morning from a Bogart movie In a country where they turn back time You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre Contemplating a crime She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running Like a watercolor in the rain Don't bother asking for explanations She'll just tell you that she came In the year of the cat She doesn't give you time for questions As she locks up your arm in hers And you follow till your sense of which direction Completely disappears By the blue tiled walls near the market stalls There's a hidden door she leads you to These days, she says, "I feel my life Just like a river running through" The year of the cat Why she looks at you so coolly? And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea She comes in incense and patchouli So you take her, to find what's waiting inside The year of the cat Well morning comes and you're still with her And the bus and the tourists are gone And you've thrown away your choice you've lost your ticket So you have to stay on But the drumbeat strains of the night remain In the rhythm of the new-born day You know sometime you're bound to leave her But for now you're going to stay In the year of the cat Year of the cat

Perry had wanted to be an author, but the public preferred movies to books, so he’d become a screenwriter – just before the public gave up movies for watching videos of cats playing the piano.

book The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction as a jumping off point, he takes care to unpack the various cultural mandates  that have infected the way we think and feel about distraction. I found his ruminations not only enlightening but surprisingly emancipating: There are two big theories about why [distraction is] on the rise. The first is material: it holds that our urbanized, high-tech society is designed to distract us… The second big theory is spiritual—it’s that we’re distracted because our souls are troubled. The comedian Louis C.K. may be the most famous contemporary exponent of this way of thinking. A few years ago, on “Late Night” with Conan O’Brien, he argued that people are addicted to their phones because “they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.” (David Foster Wallace also saw distraction this way.) The spiritual theory is even older than the material one: in 1887, Nietzsche wrote that “haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself”; in the seventeenth century, Pascal said that “all men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”… Crawford argues that our increased distractibility is the result of technological changes that, in turn, have their roots in our civilization’s spiritual commitments. Ever since the Enlightenment, he writes, Western societies have been obsessed with autonomy, and in the past few hundred years we have put autonomy at the center of our lives, economically, politically, and technologically; often, when we think about what it means to be happy, we think of freedom from our circumstances. Unfortunately, we’ve taken things too far: we’re now addicted to liberation, and we regard any situation—a movie, a conversation, a one-block walk down a city street—as a kind of prison. Distraction is a way of asserting control; it’s autonomy run amok. Technologies of escape, like the smartphone, tap into our habits of secession. The way we talk about distraction has always been a little self-serving—we say, in the passive voice, that we’re “distracted by” the Internet or our cats, and this makes us seem like the victims of our own decisions. But Crawford shows that this way of talking mischaracterizes the whole phenomenon. It’s not just that we choose our own distractions; it’s that the pleasure we get from being distracted is the pleasure of taking action and being free. There’s a glee that comes from making choices, a contentment that settles after we’ve asserted our autonomy. When

Thinking about him requires so little effort that she can do it while performing mindless activities. Soaping the dishes, replaiting Clare Kelley's hair, drying the dishes. The part of her brain that plays his ongoing reel is unconnected to the neurons and synapses that control things like conscious thought and logic. Ben turning to her at a party. Ben turning to her. Ben turning. What human being deserves to be the nucleus of such high esteem? Certainly not Benjamin, middle name Hal, last name Allen. Five-nine in boots. Who has a car that doesn't start on cold mornings, an unfinished screenplay, a law degree he doesn't use, a romantic's tendency to save movie stubs, and a mannered, unsmiling wife.

It smells like a duffel bag full of dead cats dipped in a dirty grease-trap and dragged through a pool of piss

Scared stiff and not knowing what else to do, the man began to make deafening sounds that resembled a great cat. He roared, he screeched, he wailed, and he hissed. Maybe the burglar will leave if he thinks I have a panther in here, Malcolm thought frantically.

Rich never knew cats snored; unfortunately, he also learned cats fart. Tripod nearly gassed him out during a movie marathon while in his ice cream coma.

After I saw Fantasia (the only Walt Disney movie I saw, as my mother considered it culture; otherwise we boycotted because my mother called him a fascist and a union breaker) . . .

We have a problem.” The cat’s voice sounded grim. Despite everything, I was surprised when it spoke. I’d never seen a cat talk outside of a Disney movie. No wonder everyone had looked at me funny when I petted it. You don’t pet things that talk.

That’s it? C’mon, in the movies you can’t get a Bond villain to shut up. You’re not even going to outline your evil plan for me? Maybe if you pick up your cat and pet it while sitting in an oversized chair, something will come to you.” Was that Bond or Austin Powers? Or Inspector Gadget? It was amazing how easy it was to get those things confused. 

Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She lived in a town four hours away from here, in a house on a street named Daisy Lane. She had a mother and a father and her own room and a TV and sometimes could stay up late to watch movies on the weekend if she ate all her dinner. She had a cat and three best friends and wanted to work with dolphins. She had posters of them on her walls, and her computer screen saver was one, a dolphin with warm eyes and a sweet grin gleaming out at you. All her stuffed animals, except for the stupid ones her grandparents gave her, were dolphins. One day she went to the aquarium. She wore blue jeans, a white shirt (no logos, no designs), and sneakers (white, with white socks). She went with her fifth-grade class, and since it was three days before her 10th birthday, she thought her friends would let her sit by the window on the bus. They didn't. And when they got to the aquarium, there weren't any dolphins and her friends got mad because she wouldn't loan them her lip gloss; it was new, it tasted like cream soda, and she didn't want to share. She was a selfish little girl. She paid for it.

I suppose you could say that my life is like that photograph. A movie that shows my whole life, the comedy and the tragedy. But if you put that all into one still photo, all that would be left is a blank screen.

Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. The cool kids of the 1960s invited the old man who had been cool before they knew cool was cool to join them in a musical romp that nobody took particularly seriously. Crosby enjoys himself. He has nothing at stake, since he’s not the star who has to carry the film. He’s very casual, and appears to be ad-libbing all his lines in the old Road tradition with a touch of W. C. Fields’s colorful vocabulary thrown in: “You gentlemen find my raiment repulsive?” he asks Sinatra and Martin when they object to his character’s lack of chic flash in clothing. Crosby plays a clever con man who disguises himself as square, and his outfits reflect a conservative vibe in the eyes of the cats who are looking him over. The inquiry leads into a number, “Style,” in which Sinatra and Martin put Crosby behind closet doors for a series of humorous outfit changes, to try to spruce him up. Crosby comes out in a plaid suit with knickers and then in yellow pants and an orange-striped shirt. Martin and Sinatra keep on singing—and hoping—while Crosby models a fez. He finally emerges with a straw hat, a cane, and a boutonniere in his tuxedo lapel, looking like a dude. In his own low-key way, taking his spot in the center, right between the other two, Crosby joins in the song and begins to take musical charge. Sinatra is clearly digging Crosby, the older man he always wanted to emulate.*17 Both Sinatra and Martin are perfectly willing to let Crosby be the focus. He’s earned it. He’s the original that the other two wanted to become. He was there when Sinatra and Martin were still kids. He’s Bing Crosby! The three men begin to do a kind of old man’s strut, singing and dancing perfectly together (“…his hat got a little more shiny…”). The audience is looking at the three dominant male singers of the era from 1940 to 1977. They’re having fun, showing everyone exactly not only what makes a pro, not only what makes a star, but what makes a legend. Three great talents, singing and dancing about style, which they’ve all clearly got plenty of: Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Dean Martin in Robin and the 7 Hoods

people from villages like ours didn’t move to the cities through hard work or by immersing themselves in learning. That only happened in the movies.

You never forgot those old movies, Qwill. You still want reporters to type with their hats on and poke the keys with two fingers.

I wanted to do animation for adults; films like Fritz the Cat (1972) that were shown as midnight movies and had an edge to them.

Larry's dog's named Earl P. Jessup Bowers, if you can get ready for that. And I should mention straightaway that I do not like dogs one bit, which is why I was glad when Larry said somebody had to go. Cats are bad enough. Horses are a total drag. By the age of nine I was fed up with all that noble horse this and noble horse that. They got good PR, horses. But I really can't use em. Was a fire once when I was little and some dumb horse almost burnt my daddy up messin around, twisting, snorting, broncing, rearing up, doing everything but comin on out the barn like even the chickens had sense enough to do. I told my daddy to let that horse's ass burn. Horses be as dumb as cows. Cows just don't have good press agents is all. I used to like cows when I was real little and needed to hug me something bigger than a goldfish. But don't let it rain, the dumbbells'll fall right in a ditch and you break a plow and shout yourself hoarse trying to get them fools to come up out the ditch. Chipmunks I don't mind when I'm at the breakfast counter with my tea and they're on their side of the glass doing Disney things in the yard. Blue jays are law-and-order birds, thoroughly despicable. And there's one prize fool in my Aunt Merriam's yard I will one day surely kill. He tries to "whip whip whippoorwill" like the Indians do in the Fort This or That movies when they're signaling to each other closing in on George Montgomery but don't never get around to wiping that sucker out. But dogs are one of my favorite hatreds. All the time woofing, bolting down their food, slopping water on the newly waxed linoleum, messin with you when you trying to read, chewin on the slippers.

I wanna shoot you so bad my dick is hard!” Long after the movie came out, I saw cats wearing that on T-shirts, like it’s an actual slogan. The line wasn’t in the script; it was just something I ad-libbed in the moment. It sounded cool and crazy and believable for

I wondered if perhaps movies, music, coffee, and pretty much everything else had some kind of meaning as well. Once you start down that train of thought, then all those things you once thought were unnecessary turn out to be important for one reason or another

They say it’s excruciatingly difficult to become an animagus and takes years and years of study (except that even flushable wipe Peter Pettigrew figured it out in, like, one year as a teenager, but okay1), yet McGonagall uses it literally exclusively to blow kids’ minds on the first day of Transfiguration class. Ma’am, you are engaged in guerilla warfare against a shadow army of fascists that can do magic. Turn into a cat one time?

One thing you can say about Twilight is that it is not boring. There are a billion characters, they’re always saying some crazy shit, and they’re SO HORNY! Twilight feels like it was written by an AI that almost gets it. Something is just 2 percent off about every line and every interaction, which, taken cumulatively, is like a window into one of those dimensions where everything is identical to ours except cats and turtles are switched and Prince never died. Twilight took me out of my body in a way that did not give me pleasure but did give me fascination, and when it was over, I couldn’t believe it, but I felt compelled to watch the next one just to continue the satisfying, itchy glitch of it all. Twilight kept me awake, which honestly is more than I can say for Top Gun, peace be upon Tony Scott (I stan Déjà Vu). For instance, this is the opening line of the movie, delivered in sullen voice-over by Bella (Kristen Stewart): “I’ve never given much thought to how I would die, but dying in the place of someone I love seems like a good way to go.” WHAT???????????????????????????????????????????? How is that a “good way to go”!? There are zero versions of that “way to go” that don’t involve some sort of violent hostage situation and/or dystopian fascist cull... If you’re picking a hypothetical “way to go,” pick something that doesn’t include your life and the life of a dear one being leveraged against each other in some zero-sum villainous endgame! What!?!? You weirdo!

As Erika Hall, author of 'Just Enough Research' writes, "When the research focuses on what people actually do (watch cat videos) rather than what they wish they did (produce cinema-quality home movies) it actually expands possibilities.

Ned’s bedroom was a museum. It was hard to look at any one thing. There were shelves and shelves of books; of stacked white cardboard boxes he’d labeled, in as many colored markers and fancy letters as there were boxes, COMIX; posters for things Dorry had never heard of, and didn’t know if they were comics or movies or what, but one—her head went light—she did: Sandman; and one wall, the entire wall, floor to ceiling around two windows, was a painting of the tops of the houses across the street, the edge of a tree in full summer leaf, birds, a cat watching from a high balcony, as though the wall itself were one huge window. “I do a new one every year,” Ned said. “This was my first tramp loyal,” and Dorry spent a good hour that night online, figuring out that he was saying trompe l’oeil.

Mom sent me to therapy specifically for my fascination with gory horror movies. She thought I was a psychopath. And really, I just get off on being scared.

My head turns like one of those creepy bitches in an exorcist movie—slow, but instead of an evil smile, I’m sure I look like I just found out that there’s evidence the earth is actually flat or some shit.

By the time I was done, I’d made a bear bus—Just like that famous cat bus from a certain famous anime movie. The face was shaped like a bear’s, and I’d also given it legs, ears, and a tail. It was super sturdy thanks to the bear magic, so that was two birds with one stone.

Tom finds a new skill: ping-pong. Why? Because he does what’s put in front of him without judgment.

So, going by this, it made no sense that the man who had cried when their cat had to be put down, who refused to watch scary movies, who joked that Claire was on her own if an ax murderer ever broke into the house, would be the same man who derived sexual pleasure from watching horrible, unspeakable acts. Claire

To live means: to cry and shout, to love, to do silly things, to feel sadness and joy, to even experience hor-rible, frightening things... and to laugh. Beautiful songs, beautiful scenery, feeling nauseous, people sing-ing, planes flying across the sky, the thundering hooves of horses, mouth-watering pancakes, the endless darkness of space, cowboys firing their pistols at dawn ... And next to all the movies that play on a loop inside me, sit the images of friends, lovers, the family, who were with me when I watched them

A very long time ago, I dreamed that I met a cat. When I awoke, I had returned to being a high school student, and the dream quickly passed from my memory. But as an adult, reading Jennie again, I realized that I had never forgotten the experience of that dream, not even for an instant. Now, as always, I carry Jennie’s meme inside myself. And so, when I declared at the beginning of this essay that I had never had a cat, I was wrong. I had Jennie.

None of these conspiracies derive from antisemitism or Q Anon, but from my own demented imagination, common conspiracies in the media, and a’many occult horror movies my dad used to watch growing up.