Category Archives: Words

Microcosms

In 2017, when Mr Bun was 15 years old, I decided that what the house needed was a kitten. I assumed that Mr Bun would ignore the kitten, which turned out to be disastrously wrong, but although I can’t honestly say the integration went particularly well, it was not for lack of trying. Charlie was the sweetest kitten, and he enchanted my partner – who had not grown up with pets. Charlie had huge orange-cat energy, a loving, people-oriented cat without a scrap of self-consciousness. In the best way.

By the time we got Charlie, I’d had cats at home almost continuously for 40 years. 40 years was a long time ago, and cats were often treated like little contractors that came and went as they pleased. You didn’t do much for them but let them in and out of the house and take them to the vet if they got really sick (maybe not coming back) or got hit by a car (almost certainly not coming back). It seems weirdly chilly now, but it was normal then. And you think you really know the landscape after all that time, but I’d had some hints that it was changing. In 1998, when the Wumpus, a sweet tabby I’d got in college, fell ill, I learned about specialty veterinarians. It didn’t surprise me that there were veterinary cardiologists, veterinary radiology practices, or even internal medicine veterinarians – after all, I’d worked in a local children’s hospital, and knew veterinary hospitals offered a similar level of programs. But that was the first time I’d had a cat that needed those services.

Orange cat lying on a wooden floor, gazing at a grey tabby in a drawer.
Charlie never stopped trying to make friends with Mr Bun.

Shortly after we got Charlie, Mr Bun was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease and placed on a medical diet. He probably blamed Charlie. He really developed a hostility to him, I think just because Charlie got so big and Mr Bun just had no interest in playing or in being “cuddled.” It was a bit of a running joke, although a source of sadness for us, too. Healthwise, Mr Bun did pretty well with minimal management. In retrospect, I think we could have been more proactive about his blood pressure, but a variety of veterinary studies have observed the negative effects of multiple medical interventions for pets. “Just” medication seems easy enough, but every cat owner knows better; giving medication to a pet can be stressful for all involved.

When the internist referred the Wumpus to UC Davis’s veterinary school for surgery, it was pretty easy to ask the right questions – he was so sick, and it was so hard to imagine a long drive and a surgical stay making any difference. I also heard some frankly ludicrous, almost denialist suggestions from other specialists about doing “whatever I could” to prolong Wumpus’s life. I have doctors in the family and had lots of helpful talks with them, so it wasn’t hard to be honest about Wumpus’s condition. My regular veterinarian offered to come to my apartment for his final visit, and it was such a kindness. A necropsy (an animal autopsy) showed cancer in multiple tissues, to an extent that no surgical plan could have addressed. I was determined that I’d do the same for Mr Bun: quality-of-life watch and then the gentlest possible end-of-life care.

An orange cat on top of a fence, staring fixedly at a wasp, just out of frame.
Charlie loved “walking the perimeter” on our fence. And examining any insects there.

Charlie was fine, of course! This was just the kind of melancholy backdrop – to even the happiest arrival of a new pet in the house – behind any person who’s had pets for longer than the average lifespan of a pet. Those loved ones are always with us, succeeded perhaps but never replaced, fading with time and occasionally thrown into sharp relief. But retrospect would catch me with Charlie, too. When he was about 3 years old, he started to have what looked like absence seizures – he stared into space briefly, like someone had pressed pause, and sometimes fell over. I asked the vet about it, and they said to keep a log and we’d review it at his next visit.

Nothing much happened over the next few months, and then, quite suddenly, Charlie started hyperventilating and then rattling. I took him to the emergency vet, who put him on oxygen and a diuretic (to treat fluid buildup in the body by increasing the production of urine). They happened to have a slot open soon after for an echocardiogram, an ultrasound scan of the heart, so we booked that and brought him back. When we took him home afterward, he was sick and frightened and incontinent. It was devastating. He was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – muscle tissue in his heart was thick and stiff, making it hard for the heart to pump blood effectively. He was given several medications. He refused to eat, no matter what we offered him. My partner and I ended up sleeping apart, so each cat could have a person with them, without seeing each other. The emergency vet suggested keeping him overnight because he was “at risk of sudden death,” but we definitely couldn’t face the idea that if that happened, it would be in an exam room or a kennel, and we would be nowhere near him. In daylight, I reached out to the end-of-life vet practice for an appointment.

An orange cat resting his chin on the warp on a narrow-band loom, gazing mischievously at the camera.
Charlie was totally not biting the warp on my little loom. Look at what a good boy he is being.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is the most common form of heart disease in cats. If your vet says your cat has “a murmur,” that’s something they’re thinking about. But there’s a wide range from mild issues to serious, progressive disease. And in cats with serious disease, it can come on fast; cats are experts at hiding their discomfort. A few years before this, a study in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery asked, “Is treatment of feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy based in science or faith?” They concluded that it was a little of both, with a smattering of extrapolation from treatment recommendations in humans and less-than-ideal recourse to the literature (except when it came to what not to do…if they were up on it). The top two reasons veterinarians gave for a particular treatment plan were “1. Favorable personal experience. 2. Probably doesn’t hurt and might help.” I scoured his previous veterinary records for a note about a murmur or any kind of hint. Nothing.

This was a shattering time. I’d had cats with terminal conditions – Mr Bun was shuffling toward his end at the very same time – but never so young. The anticipatory grief of knowing that Mr Bun’s life expectancy was short did nothing to inoculate us against the paralytic sorrow of seeing Charlie get so sick so quickly. If anything, it intensified the suffering, underscored the sheer wrongness of his rapid downward spiral at such a young age. The end-of-life vet wasn’t able to come to the house for a couple of days, a desolate vigil of offering food and water, making sure at least one of us was home at all times, and trying to hold him as continuously as possible.

An orange cat peeking out of a backpack, smelling some flowers on a tree branch.
Charlie enjoyed being taken for walks.

We used Lap of Love for his final visit. The veterinarian was gentle and soothing and talked to us about Charlie. I barely remembered the conversation even shortly afterward, just felt that she fully inhabited two roles: assist the dying and support the surviving.

Mr Bun loved having the solitary run of the whole house again. For many reasons, I later realized, I should have gotten 2 same-age kittens, but although I devoutly wanted him to be comfortable, I resented his … was it … cheer? Looking back at my journal in the week or so afterward, I found, “Mr Bun is as happy as a pig in shit. This is why people believe in curses.” Grossly unfair to pigs, but emblematic of the miserable tension I felt. My partner suggested that Mr Bun would give up after Charlie died, but he lived another 6 months before his quality of life dipped decisively. As I thanked the end-of-life vet for the kind treatment, yet again, I added, “I hope you understand that we hope we won’t have to call again anytime soon.” She warmly agreed.

A painting in the style of a British Regency-period naval officer portrait, showing Charlie as a young cadet, based on an early portrait of Second Baronet Captain Sir Peter Parker (1785-1814). Beside him is a depicted a marble bust of Mr Bun, styled as Admiral Nelson.
It took us longer to choose a frame than it took the artist to complete the painting.

How do you memorialize a pet properly? The year we lost Charlie was a time of global anguish. The COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing, and the first vaccine rollouts happened after his death. Unemployment was rampant, and our usually vibrant, walkable neighborhood was sepulchral, the remaining open restaurants doing take-out only. It was so strange to experience such a small, personal misery against such an enormous sweep of human suffering. We were fortunate that our jobs had been stable, so we commissioned a portrait of Charlie by a local artist, Grace Doyle. Her painting, oil on linen, adapted a portrait of a British naval officer who died – also at an absurdly young age – in the war of 1812. The artist added Mr Bun’s scowling face, in the form of a bust modeled after the famous (one-armed) Admiral Nelson. They gaze out at us in the living room today.

—

Rishniw et al. Is Treatment of Feline Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Based in Science or Faith?: A Survey of Cardiologists and a Literature Search. J Feline Med Surg. 2011;13(7):487-497. doi:10.1016/j.jfms.2011.05.006

Paul Ford Builds It

And almost 2000 people show up immediately.

If you are respectful of others, you will be welcomed, and people will be excited to see your web pages and to meet you. This is not a special characteristic of tilde.club; this is a basic characteristic of decent humans that somehow has become atypical on the Internet.

I got online in 1992, and this piece is making me so nostalgic, even though everything about what he made sounds distinctly nicer than most of what I encountered then. Wait, is that what nostalgia is? Being suffused with a sense of what the good old days could have been if they actually had been good?

Not Strict

“I’m a vegetarian. I’m not strict; I eat fish, and duck. Well, they’re nearly fish, aren’t they? They’re semi-submerged a lot of the time, they spend a lot of time in the water, they’re virtually fish, really. And pigs, cows, sheep, anything that lives near water, I’m not strict. I’m sort of like a post-modern vegetarian; I eat meat ironically.” —Bill Bailey, in Part Troll

Heaven

I don’t have any spiritual beliefs, but when I’ve lost a pet, I always find myself hoping that kitty is in an eternal sunspot somewhere, having a nice nap. It’s just a nice wish for someone you want the best for.

I feel that way about Steve Jobs. Maybe not the sunspot part, but wouldn’t it be nice if he’s someplace warm, maybe looking at turtlenecks with Carl Sagan? (Surely that little legal dust-up is water under the bridge by now—and Steve wasn’t even there at the time, right?)

The Writing Life

Hilary Mantel remains my favourite literary stoic, however. Despite her producing A Place of Greater Safety and other magnificent novels, prize juries overlooked her. After she finally won the Booker in 2009, she had every right to be triumphalist. Instead, she wrote in the Economist of how ‘once, when I was trudging home from my second failure to win the £20,000 Sunday Express award, a small boy I knew bobbed out on to the balcony of his flat. “Did you win?” I shook my head. “Never mind,” he said, just like everyone else. And then, quite unlike everyone else: “If you like, you can come up and play with my guinea pig.”’ I suspect that Mantel knew for years that she was the real thing, and just needed to wait for the rest of us to catch up.

From July 9 Diary, by Nick Cohen, which is mainly about something else entirely.

Love Valve

Not exactly what the article is really about, but:

[E]very Sunday, we would drive over and I’d play around either at the farm proper or the home they had with a couple of acres. And they owned a Pomeranian dog.

First, this is a weird thing for a couple of farmers to own. I later learned that there is a link between old Eastern European folks and Pomeranians. They are very heavily owned by young Asian women and 70-year-old Eastern European dudes. I was in Ireland once and I was told a theory by a farmer there about farming with animals. If you have pigs or chickens or cows, you have to not get too attached to animals because they might get sick and you have to kill them, or if you’re raising a pig for slaughter, you have to kill it and feed it to people. So one of the things that farmers do is buy one spectacularly useless little dog. It’s like a Chomskyan release valve on a farm. That’s why these Irish farmers have little Jack Russell Terriers. They can pet them and love them and not have to worry about having to kill them. —Clive Thompson

The Whole Thing

The Slippery Slope of Silencings

Rebecca Solnit on mansplanation:

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.

Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way

Gawker Redesign

I don’t have much to say about the visual design of the Gawker sites. I am a regular visitor of only one of them, and I usually visit from a desktop computer. I don’t have any trouble getting around the new layout. But Gawker made one big error, and that’s in the functionality for directing visitors who link to specific articles on a mobile device (at least, on iPad and iPhone): visitors ends up at a listing of headlines, which may or may not contain the headline that interests them. If they even know what that headline is, since they may have arrived from a shortened link in a Twitter message, introducing the article with a cryptic remark.

It’s fine to say, “Keep your hair on. They’re working on a fix.” or even “Sounds like you follow faux-clever jerks on Twitter.” You’re entitled to that opinion. But a basic principle of sound Web design is to make sure the user always has a “scent of information” to follow. If users find themselves someplace unexpected, a good design will help them on their way. And that’s just for people navigating the site. If they’re following links to specific pages, getting them there should be a no-brainer.

If a person follows a link to a specific page in your site, it’s just silly to think it’s perfectly fine to send them anywhere else. If your developer knows enough about the device making the request to shunt it to a different layout of the site, the site should be capturing enough about the link the user selected to get all the way there. If it dumps the user on a TOC page, your developer simply didn’t complete the job. And if hash-bangs, or whatever the new hotness is, don’t work well enough or consistently enough with the major pathways into your site, then maybe you should resist the temptation. Who knows? If an iPhone can’t find your page with your newfangled whatsit, maybe Google can’t, either.

Those of us who have been using mobile for a long time are familiar with this half-assed approach. We’ve been seeing it on television and newspaper websites for years, going back long enough that some of us could kind of understand why a Web team’s use cases didn’t capture us. But that’s not the situation today, even for those legacy outlets. So why would a new-media darling, which surely has a massive base of users on the current It Device, whatever that may be, repeat such a classic old-media mistake? Engaged audiences already greet redesigns with suspicion—why not take the time to make sure the functionality is solid?