1. Christy continues to go to Smelterville three times a week for physical therapy and I drove her to her session today and got in a forty minute work out myself. As best I can tell, Christy's is making very good progress as she recovers from surgery. Her reports have been positive and she continues to dedicate herself to exercises at home and excellent self-treatment.
2. The most recent issue of The New Yorker ran an article by Jonathan Franzen about the complications caused by feral and abandoned fertile outdoor cats in Los Angeles. It focused on the efforts of people dedicated to trapping these cats, having them spayed or neutered, marked with a tiny bit of ear clipped, and returning them to where they were trapped. The idea is to reduce the outdoor cat population while conforming to no kill practices.
This story got very complicated. There is a shortage of vets available to treat the cats and most vets reserve only a small block of time to do these surgeries on vagrant cats. Many vet clinics won't take these cats. In addition, cats are capable of reproducing at four months old. Cats are good at reproducing. With their outdoor populations growing, these cats are susceptible to predators (human and animal) and disease and depend on people in neighborhoods or people like the ones featured in this story to feed them. Further complicating the story is the fact that cats themselves are predators and kill a lot of birds. They are also capable of befouling and damaging people's properties, making them an often terrible nuisance.
Ultimately, this story was about the relationship between animals (whether dogs, coyotes, cats, or others) and human beings. The article never used the phrase, "animal rights", but the different perspectives about how humans should treat cats and the efforts to solve the problems of proliferating cat populations reminded me of reading I did in my early days at LCC that raised questions about the rights of animals and what moral and ethical standing animals have in relation to human beings.
My understanding might be mistaken, but I seem to remember that Copper came into Kathy's life as a stray cat and Kathy took him in some years ago. After reading this article, I thought a lot about how safe and well taken care of Copper has been all these years since having a home, first with Kathy and now with me. I know Copper would like to spend time outdoors and if I could confine him, like we can Gibbs, to the back yard, I'd let him go outside. But Copper can leap to the top of all our fences and then he wanders and I have decided I don't want him going into other yards with dogs nor do I want him hiding under one of our neighbor's porches -- which he did for the short time he was an indoor/outdoor cat.
So I keep him in the house where I always know where he is, can keep him safe, and feed him well.
I'm really happy he didn't end up living the kind of life I read about so many cats leading in The New Yorker piece, abandoned, wild, diseased, and in continually in some degree of danger.
3. Debbie had plans to spend time with Diane late this afternoon and I decided to stay home and watch the last movie in Hal Hartley's Henry Fool trilogy. I'd recently watched the trilogy's first two installments, Henry Fool and Fay Grim and now I was ready for number three: Ned Rifle.
Ned Rifle is Henry Fool and Fay Grim's son. As the movie opens, we learn Fay Grim is serving a life sentence in prison and ex-con Henry Fool in on the lam. Ned Rifle is in a witness protection program, living with a Christian minister's family, but early in the story he turns eighteen and decides to strike out on his own.
He is determined to find and kill Henry Fool.
And so his odyssey begins.
This movie takes us deeper into the damaged lives of Fay and Simon Grim, of a graduate student named Susan, (she has a dark connection to Henry Fool, is ghost writing Fay Grim's autobiography, and wrote a doctoral thesis on the poetry of Simon Grim), and of Henry Fool himself.
Hal Hartley's movies do not tell plausible stories.
Rather, they explore the very real and plausible interior realities of his characters. They explore damage. They explore decisions. They explore accidents, fatalities, intellectual ramblings, and human fragility.
So the things that happen in this movie are outlandish, purposely so.
But what we learn about interior damage, about the longing for reparation, about the forces of inevitability strike me as truthful, upsetting, and provocative.
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