If I fits, I sits. Meow.
What does it mean? No idea. But trust the process, right?
Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
My brain is a cat, slinking along life’s hallway and suddenly spying a box. Oh! Box! My brain gets in the box. It doesn’t know why the box calls to it, but my brain cannot halt this impulse. It just likes boxes. Squares in general. This is a safe shape for a brain to get in. The corners are always in the same place, and the quiet, unassuming geometry of the confined personal space—just air and cat brain—is a comfort. Box safe. Box good. Brain is cat and Brain like box.
My brain is a cork. It bobs away on the surface of a deep and murky ocean. Mollusks and manatees, sharks and stingrays, the cork drifts in clueless yaw and sway. My brain is a cork of to-and-fro and I dunno, bobbing happily and gaily, with nary a worry in the world. It drifts toward life rafts and messaging bottles that need a good corking, and all the while acts blind, dumb, and compulsively corky. Absorbing and repelling, it has no direction but fate. The strongest current writes the manifest, so cork ends up where it ends. There is no safe here, just the OM-ness of the float until something hits and sticks.
My brain is a cat made of cork. Cork Cat. It bats at balls and paws at strings and seeks bottlenecks of creative stuck-iness to occupy. The slow blinking of its thinking, the circular swill of contemplation. Cork Cat is free. Cork Cat believes it dictates the hunt and chooses the prey. Wrong, of course, because even in its aloofness Cork Cat cannot quell the urge to rub against the warm leg of attention. To perform and communicate thought via its tail twitch telegraph. Feline fate is embedded with cork, now and forevermore—it lives in both box and sea.
My brain is a planet populated entirely by Cork Cat civilizations entangled in war and peace and music and art and love and hate and confusion and swelling and all the while, this planet is pulled toward the sunset of death on the horizon of life. This timeline is written. This intergalactic pull contains the persistent purr of creation.
My brain is a lifeguard. It marks each sunset in the sand and watches as chunks of cat cork—words on a wine-dark sea—float and bob and SOS their flailing vowels and consonants in the wash. One by one, it throws life rings to each, pulling words back in some instinctual sequence. They become a sentence and their sentence is their life, joined forever at the start with a capital and silenced with the cork of punctuation at the end. Over and over. Sunset sunset sunset, life ring life ring life ring. Sentences paragraphs pages, going nowhere and everywhere as my brain floats on.
Words tumble from the open dryer of my mouth, lint covered and static. Hot to the touch. Warm to the heart. Free.
My brain.
Is.
I think the cork.
I pounce the cat.
I write the words.
Meow POP!
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen1
This week’s amends…
"The last eight, nine years of my life have been a mess," he said. "Maybe the last two have been a little better. Less rolling in the trough of the wave. Have you ever been analysed? I was afraid of it at first. Afraid it might destroy the impulses that made me creative, an artist. A sensitive person receives 50 impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; the more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalised, develop scabs. Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much. Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I've been pretty mixed up ..." - Marlon Brando
Excerpt from a profile “The Duke in His Domain” by Truman Capote and published originally in the New Yorker in 1957
Two of my favs doing The Rolling Stones? I’m in. Starts off a little…rocky? I mean, it sure is an original interpretation that builds to something. PJ is stripped down, Bjork is more Bjork than Bjork, and at the 3-minute mark, I get completely on board.
Via Boing Boing
French director and photographer Romain Laurent turns imagery from expressly planned still and video shoots into animated GIFs where only an isolated section is in motion.
Bunch more of these animated gifs here.
Via This is Colossal
Waddles the Duck gets a prosthetic leg. The duck’s caretaker is Benjamin Weinman, the guitarist from The Dillinger Escape Plan—not that that has anything to do with anything.
Via Open Culture
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
If you didn’t click the link in the first para (about why cats like boxes), you’re missing out on what I think is the greatest name for a study ever, so I’m putting it here so you don’t miss it. Study - “If I fits I sits: A citizen science investigation into illusory contour susceptibility in domestic cats”