When Kenneth was feral he went by the more sanguine name Dark Darting Shadow of Pouncing Sinew.  "Shadow" for short.

Shadow refused to come within ten feet of the house.  And that was even without the door being held open by a human who was beseeching him to "please come in out of that godawful freezing rain, it's coating your coat already and the forecast says the temperature is still plunging." The open door and the pleading human basically doubled the minimum distance Shadow would keep between himself and the house.

Out near the woods or inside the barn it was a different story.  Out there, Shadow was more than happy to climb into a lap to be hugged and cuddled and to allow kiss after kiss on his rodent-stained nose. 

In the summer of his third year, Shadow dueled a neighbor tom for the love of a hot she-cat at the peak of her estrus.  The neighbor tom lost the lady to Shadow, but he also left one bacterial claw and a rotting tooth in Shadow's right shoulder muscle.

After the trapping, the anesthetic, the surgery and three days on an antibiotic IV drip, Shadow was both exhausted and feeling stronger, if that makes any sense.  He also started having bizarre dreams where everybody was calling him Kenneth.

Less than a week after what Shadow had no way of knowing was the last time he would calm the desperate cries of an overly consensual feline in heat, the people brought him home from the vet and carried him, caged, beyond his ten-foot buffer zone, right into the warm house that just about knocked him out, it smelled so strongly of cleanliness. While getting him settled in, they named him Kenneth.

At first, they had to be careful lest Kenneth try to run out a door as someone came in or went out.  These days, though, he enjoys his comfort so much they can leave the door open all they want because he wouldn't trade his bed and toys and crunchy cat mix and the heater vent in the living room for anything in the world.

The people laugh and think it's so cute when Kenneth occasionally licks condensation from the glass as he gazes out the front window overlooking the bird feeder.

Kenneth feels the same way about them when they watch reality television, and he's waiting for the day they lean forward to lick their window on the world they traded for the comfort of seeing it reenacted at a reasonable distance.

One afternoon shortly after I got out of the Air Force, I was in a crowd leaving a cinema complex.  You know the kind I mean, with those plush velvety ropes funneling people shoulder-to-shoulder from each individual theater out into the main lobby and exit.  As I shuffled along with my girlfriend and a visiting friend from my old squadron, I got a little bit mesmerized by the swaying bodies and slowly bobbing heads in front of us. 

All of a sudden, I flashed on a much different scene, involuntarily imagining we were inside a slaughterhouse, as in, we were being led to slaughter.   And I remembered reading somewhere that “the animals know” what’s going on up ahead of them.  I looked at my girlfriend and thought, “God, what if we were like this, side by side, and we knew?” 

Then I was aware of my friend asking me if I was okay.  And without going into the details of what I’d just envisioned, I said, “I don’t think I’ll ever eat meat again.”  He responded with, “I give you two weeks.”

That was the early eighties and I haven’t eaten meat since.  No big deal, there.  But here’s an odd thing I do—I go overboard in trying not to use the word “vegetarian.”   I tend to bend over backward in the effort to avoid evangelizing in any way whatsoever about vegetarianism.  And I’ve noticed others doing the same thing.  It’s almost like we’re apologetic to the meat eaters all around us. 

So, let me just say, not in a pushy way, and totally aside from the whole love-of-animals aspect that totally makes some people want to gag, that vegetarianism is great for the planet.  Why?  Because the cost of eating an animal includes all the resources that ever went into that doomed creature – every bite of hay, each mouthful of grain, each drink of water.  From his first teetering baby steps to his final breath in the abattoir, that animal required  food to fuel each trot across the pasture (if he was lucky enough to be free range), every wing flutter, every yawn, each flick of the ear.  And all those accumulated resources are invested in the meat an animal renders.  No amount of personal recycling could possibly make up for the environmental drain that is a meat eater. 

Practicing the V-word also improves health and probably increases longevity.  But since we’re the ones polluting the air, poisoning the waters, raping the rainforests and killing off species right and left, I’m not so sure there’s all that much environmental advantage in extending our lifetimes.  Everything’s a tradeoff.

For some reason, I've always secretly thought it'd be cool to know someone with narcolepsy.  That sounds mean, I know, but you can't really be held responsible for random things that enter your head.  Can you? Anyway, it's not like I'd wish narcolepsy on somebody.  She'd already be narcoleptic when I met her.

Now I'm wishing I hadn't even started this whole subject, because the deeper we get into it, the more I sound like a jerk.  Maybe I've hit upon a real pocket of political incorrectness in myself here.  There are probably lots of people driving around with narcolepsy support ribbons on their cars who'd find these thoughts downright politically incorrect.

Dang.  Now I'm mentally designing the narcolepsy support ribbon.  It should have a deep, velvet black background with twinkly stars all over it and a half-moon with its eyes closed.  And of course it would say I Support Narcolepsy.

We all entertain odd thoughts like these.  I mean, I wonder how many narcolepsy supporters would have to admit a little twinge of intrigue at the idea of having a friend with Tourette's syndrome, for example?  Probably many.

And all those people would be considered intolerant by the Tourette’s supporters, conspicuously recognizable by their signature bright yellow and red ribbons that blare Fuck, Yes, I Support Tourette's.

At this point, I'm not even sure why I started this whole train of thought.  Hope that doesn’t indicate some short-term memory loss, which would have an orange support ribbon, I think.  And it would read I Support...

Anyway, for some reason, I still think it'd be cool to know somebody who has narcolepsy.

Last year I started up a little horse grooming service, which has me driving to small farms all over 4 counties in Kentucky.  You’d think that in this day of MapQuest and Google Maps, directions wouldn’t really be much of an issue.  

Well, those map apps tend to be citified to the point where too much country air and a lot of unnamed gravel roads render them a trifle indisposed. 

You'd also think nobody would actually say things like, “Take the first right turn past where they tore down that blue shed last year.”  Or the more precisely quantitative, yet less visible to the naked eye, “Our turnoff is 3.26 miles after the underground house.”

Directions are an issue.

But I like to take a Zen approach, especially to that overused gem:  If you come to the such-and-such, you’ve gone too far.  I mean, that’s basically how life works!  You do your best to move along your path, looking hard for signs that may or may not be easy to see, and turning back when you think you passed up what you’re searching for. 

And when going Zen doesn’t work, my default tactic is to let the whole subject remind me of how my father used to love it when a stranger asked him for directions.  He would look reassuringly at the stranger as the destination was described, nodding his head slightly the whole time, and then he’d think on it for a couple of seconds before saying, “Yeah, you can’t get there from here.” 

One of my summer jobs during high school was as an aide in a mental institution.  They assigned me to the hard-core unit.  And by hard-core, I mean these men were not there to get over a rough patch in their otherwise functional lives.  They were battling debilitating mental disorders that would keep some of them from ever really being out in the world again.  I could tell a million stories – some of them even happy or humorous – about that place.  But I just want to touch on one phrase that has always stuck with me from those days.

At the beginning of each shift, there was a brief turnover meeting between the staff leaving and the staff arriving.  Each patient’s day was briefly summarized for those beginning a new shift.  One of the most often repeated statements about a patient was the phrase “inappropriate laughter.”  As in, “Seldon has been exhibiting a lot of inappropriate laughter today.” 

Even though I understood what they meant by it in the context of the hospital, that phrase always triggered in my mind the thought that surely laughter, of any kind, is usually good.  Right?

Well, a few days ago I would have had to write a big INAPPROPRIATE LAUGHTER on my own chart.  Seems I was not mature enough to keep it together during yoga class when we were in Corpse Pose, all silent, eyes closed, doing our post-practice relaxation, and this guy started snoring so hard I’m pretty sure the ends of his yoga mat were flapping. 

The yoga endorphins…the snoring…it was all just too much for me.

Here’s hoping everybody enjoys a great laugh today!  The more inappropriate, the better.

So we were having one of those loose, silly,  free-swinging conversations when my friend said, "Sunday morning I woke up feeling woozy." 

I couldn't help replying with, "Woozy?  What's her first name?"

My friend stifled a laugh.  "Woozy's her last name.  Her first name is Louise, but I call her Weezy."

"So, she's Weezy Woozy?"

"Indeed.  And I woke up feeling her on Sunday morning."

I said that was cool and left her office.  By the time I got back to my desk there was an email containing several links to Weezy Woozy things on the Web, including a Tumblr site actually called "Weezy Woozy."

Along the lines of Schrödinger's cat, the famous quantum theory thought experiment that we don't have to worry our pretty little heads about beyond mentioning, the Weezy Woozy example raises the question: Did Weezy Woozy exist on the Internet before my friend searched for her, or did the search itself cause Weezy Woozy to exist?

I can't answer that.  Schrödinger couldn't answer that. Just please be careful out there.

Well, nobody can say I didn't resist for just about longer than humanly or humanely possible.  But once I decided to start self-publishing, nothing was going to tie me down.

And you would NOT believe how many nonsensical barriers lie between the decision to publish a book and seeing the electrons lined up just right to make it real!

All I want to say in this first blog post is that if you are a writer who wants to get your work out there, don't let the fear of cover art, interior formatting or marketing hold you back.  In my one-week-long journey from Word doc (Yes!  Microsoft Word works, if you know a few tricks) to Kindle and Amazon, I had about one million cut-to-the-chase moments that have given me the confidence to keep on self-pubbing.  Dang, that sounds way more risque than it is.

Bottom line, if anybody out there has some solid lesbian fiction to publish, do not fear the vagaries of CreateSpace or Kindle Publishing.  I'm offering a one-time good deal to help anyone navigate the craggy ground of pagination, section breaks, royalty choices, etc.