#73: Marty

Actual updates

2025 closed on a sad note: we had to say goodbye to Marty.

When I first started writing this month’s issue, I thought I was going to kick off this newsletter, and this new year, by talking about pee. Cat pee, to be precise. Never a good sign, but not the sign we thought it was.

Marty had decided earlier in the month that he could, should, and must pee not only in his litterbox (which he still used) but also on a specific region of our dining-room floor. At first, I worried he was becoming incontinent, or couldn’t get down the stairs to the basement where his litterbox lives anymore, but that wasn’t it: he didn’t pee indiscriminately, and he still used the litterbox and - at that point - still trotted merrily not only up and down the basement stairs, but the stairs to the second floor as well. So I wasn’t sure what the reason was. I’m honestly still not sure it was a harbinger of his imminent demise or if it just meant he had developed poor decisionmaking skills about where to take a whizz.

We first figured it out from the stench. Cat pee has, for those of you fortunate enough not to know this from experience, a particularly intense stink. There had previously been a floor mat thingy under Matt’s chair at the table, since he was worried about his chair rubbing on the floors, and it seems that Marty had been peeing on this. It wasn’t salvageable; we threw it out. I thought he had some kind of obsession with that mat and once the mat was gone, he’d go back to peeing in the approved location. This did not happen. He started peeing on the floor, which was probably the worst possible outcome since I don’t want the floors to get wrecked from the liquid OR the stink. We moved to using those puppy pee pads instead, which he was happy to use (cats love a square) but it was a pretty pricey alternative on an ongoing basis. We thought about putting the litterbox there instead, but we didn’t want to have the litterbox sitting right there in the dining room, where we eat, where I work 4 out of 5 days of the week, right behind Matt’s chair. We wanted the litterbox and all the pee to stay in the original, correct location!

But then, in the way of cats, when he really went downhill, it was abrupt. For awhile, other than the pee thing, he was his same old self - skinny now, slower in his old age, and stuck to me as much as possible (he was into lying across my shoulders while I worked, for a while, and I just realized that the last little scratches from him trying to hang on up there are going to heal soon and then he’ll really be gone). But on what ended up being his last day, he was absolutely glued to me. He just wanted to be on my lap or held against my chest, burrowing his head under my chin, all day, nothing else, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t move much when I set him down, and we knew. We had hoped he could hang on until the next day; Hap was up at his grandmother’s and coming home the next day, and he and Marty had recently become good friends (measured in amount of time Marty spent on Hap’s lap). So we were hoping he’d get a chance to say goodbye in person, but that became increasingly unlikely, and when we went to the vet, they told us it was dubious Marty would make it through the night. So, it was time.

The last time I was at Angell to say goodbye to a cat was in 2020, with Nona, and it was a completely different experience. Since it was high Covid, only one person could come in at a time, so it was just me, and we were in a normal exam room the same as we would be for any appointment. But this time, we got to sit in this lovely little living room type place, with warm lighting and a comfy couch, and we held the old boy wrapped in a couple of blankets until the end of the line. He wiggled his paw out of the blankets at one point and put it in my hand, so I was holding his hand at the end. I hope he knew he was a good boy (even when he wasn’t, which… you know…).

And then something strange happened that night, after we had left the hospital and come home and gone to bed.

So, we’ve kept a baby gate on our bedroom doorway for the last few years to keep the cat(s) off the bed, and what Marty has been doing for at least the last couple of years is, after I go to bed¹ , he comes and rattles that gate with his paw. It’s so loud and obnoxious that it would keep everyone else awake, so I get up and go downstairs with him. I usually gave him something to snack on and then slept on the couch, and he would snuggle up with me there, and periodically wake me up a few more times in the night for more food or attention. This wasn’t great, but it was more sustainable than you might expect.

Anyway, we hadn’t taken the baby gate down yet, and that first night without him, it kept rattling at intervals throughout the night. And it wasn’t just me hearing things, either - Matt confirmed that he also heard it. I don’t know if it was just the old house shifting and settling in the night and making the gate shake, or what it was, but I can tell you two things.

First, when Marty was alive, I can’t remember an instance where the gate rattled and he wasn’t there, doing it (or at least nearby, having done it and then walked off). And second, that morning, after I confirmed that we both heard it, I said - in jest! - “Marty, you know you don’t need to shake the gate anymore; you’re a ghost now, you can just come through it and sleep on the bed. Ghosts don’t shed.” And we haven’t heard it since!

So, who’s to say what that all means - even if this really was the spirit of a cat rattling the gate, why would he suddenly understand what I was explaining to him, or care (have you ever tried sensibly explaining to a cat why they can’t do this or that?) - but: it happened!

Anyway, in honor of the fat orange boy that Marty once was, eat some fuckign lasaga and go give your pets a snuggle.

What am I reading

When I was in high school, I read the His Dark Materials books (shoutout to my mom for finding the first one in a bookstore and thinking I might enjoy it), and they formed a crucial part of my young personality² . A few years ago, the author, Philip Pullman, started a second trilogy. This second trilogy follows the same main character and covers both a few crucial days in her life as a baby - mainly focusing on the other people who were around her, obviously - and then a momentous journey she went on as an adult, so in effect this second trilogy wraps around the first, which takes place when she’s 11 and 12.

I’m currently somewhere in the middle of the third book of that new trilogy, The Rose Field. Here’s something funny: I got this book for Christmas, and I also got a Neal Stephenson book, and this one is by far the bigger one. I guess that only lands if you think of Stephenson as a writer of weighty tomes, which generally he is - but this time, the tome is Pullman’s. It’s also the type of a trilogy where you really do need the other books in order to make sense of what’s going on, so I’ll have to do a little fast talking here to get us to where we need to be to discuss it.

Our girl Lyra, now a young adult, is out in the world, traveling through what is in our world Turkiye and the Middle East, on her way to figure out what’s going on at a mysterious building in the desert - they’re cranking out this mysterious rose oil that clearly (to her) comes from another world, and she’s fairly sure that in this building there’s one of the windows to other worlds that she encountered so many of in her youth. Additionally, she had a fight with her daemon Pantalaimon - she was being a total bitch, frankly, Pan was right - after getting empiricism-pilled by a book by this rather horrible man, and Pan ran off and she’s been trying to find him ever since. In general this is a fine premise, but we’ve now gotten into the habit of describing it as “she’s lost her imagination and Pan’s looking for it,” and that sounds like a picture book, or Peter Pan³ . So that bit I’m not nuts about, but in general she had lost her sense of wonder and possibility and became cynical and kind of mean, and that’s a story I’m interested in.

This is a world I enjoy being in, and seeing more than just Lyra’s semi-feral childhood experience of Oxford and her journey to the Arctic, and seeing it the way an adult does (people swear! people have [had] sex! people are gay and trans, not in so many words but clearly!) is a good and interesting evolution; however, that’s where we run into one of two problems.

The first is that sometimes it feels like Pullman falls back to writing her the way he wrote her as a preteen - the same style of talking, the same type of lies (continuing to have a facility with believable, useful, helpful lies isn’t a problem, surely that’s just a facet of her character, but they come off as being the same types of lies that she told as a child, and that doesn’t land for me). And the second is that he might be doing a bit of fan response in here.

So, one character is a bit older than Lyra - he was a teenager in the first volume, when she was a baby - and when she was older he was one of her teachers. There’s a scene in the previous book where he’s clearly attracted to her during that time as her teacher, although that’s as far as it went. I remember seeing some takes online after that book came out that were very disappointed in Pullman for writing this and on the one hand, yeah - it’s a tired trope and doesn’t speak particularly well of the character, but on the other hand it’s okay for authors to write characters who behave in ways we wouldn’t want people to in real life, because fiction is not actually real and a character doing something doesn’t mean the author approves of that behavior. But now in this book, there’s a scene where a third character who knows them both is interrogated by, basically, the morality police, about this very thing, and it’s played very much as “can you believe these overbearing freaks caring about this?” - which again lands poorly with me. That scene sounds like he’s just replying to detractors, and when an author does that, it’s embarrassing.

I’ve gone on for a long time about this book and I do want to stress that this means I’m enjoying it - I won’t have much to say about a boring, hamhanded book or one that just doesn’t work for me, so all this yapping is an endorsement If You’re Into That Sort Of Thing⁴ . Also sometimes I just feel like doing a little criticism!! Whatever!!

Oh, one more thing: not to judge a book by its cover, but this cover is beautiful. Look:

Some links

Listen, he’s been having a tough time at home lately, work’s not going so great either... Raccoon Goes on Drunken Rampage in Virginia Liquor Store and Passes Out on Bathroom Floor

It might be from the lost city of Ys!! But mostly I’m just trying not to make the obvious joke. Huge Undersea Wall Dating from 5000 BC Found in France

Speaking of France. I want that chattering skull pin. Electric Jewelry and the Forgotten Genius Who Lit Up Paris

When I get a moment’s peace from singing “The Teddy Bear Panic” to the tune of “The Teddy-Bears’ Picnic,” I have a chance to think about how truly fucking deranged these guys were. Oh, having a stuffed bear will make little girls not want to grow up to be mothers? Because they didn’t train themselves on dolls? Please get away from me before I throw up. “A Bundle of Horridness”: The Great Teddy Bear Panic of 1907

The ocean’s haunted, dude! I told you!! Mystery as Hundreds of Victorian Shoes Wash Up on Ogmore Beach

Speaking of the ocean being haunted, I really thought that the Bermuda Triangle was going to play a larger role in my life after the amount I heard about it as a kid. How the Disappearance of Flight 19, a Navy Squadron Lost in 1945, Fuelled the Legend of the Bermuda Triangle

Speaking of airplanes! As you can imagine, given the date, this near-disaster was abruptly pushed out of the public consciousness, but what a story. The Strange Fate of Flight 2069

This is heartbreaking, honestly, and shameful, but the shameful part isn’t the sexy love letters about how much this guy liked going down! Contrary to popular (at the time) belief!! A Revelation Tore Apart Her Fairy-Tale Marriage, and Shocked the Nation

Ok, what they describe is bad, but the fact that there are all these detailed documents of temperature and humidity sitting around in old churches with pipe organs is pretty incredible. Church Organ Tuning Records Mirror Our Warming Climate

You know how lawyers (er, barristers) and judges in England wear big old silly wigs? They’re all made by this shop, and have been for literally hundreds of years: Ede & Ravenscroft, the Specialist Serving the Bar Since 1689

I might be stuck in an old paradigm here but I feel like the types of people backlashing against, e.g., intimacy coordinators are overplaying their hands. Maybe it’s me being old-fashioned by thinking they wouldn’t want to say out loud that they don’t care if actors are or aren’t put into the position of having to agree to something they’re uncomfortable with; maybe saying that isn’t embarrassing anymore. Well, it should be. Do Intimacy Coordinators Still Have a Place in Hollywood?

Unfortunately these are people who will do your birth chart and tell you what to invest in, not … what I was hoping for. The Witches of Wall Street

I had no idea the Queen Mary routinely - routinely!! - rolled almost to the point of no return. How a Near-Shipwreck on a Luxury Ocean Liner Inspired “The Poseidon Adventure” and a Decade of Disaster Movies

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

I can’t think of a good reason not to be listening to Janis Joplin at any given time.

I didn’t pick this because the album has a tiger on it, for the big orange cat himself; he’s never given the impression of a tiger or any relation with the more majestic examples of the cat family. It has nothing to do with Marty, actually.

I went through a Big Thief period this past month and my notes for this section said “that one big thief song, the sexy one” so I present to you: the sexy one. Tell me I’m wrong.

This month’s top 5: Things that can change now that we have no cats in the house

1. Keeping the basement door closed (the litterbox was down there, so it always had to be ajar. I expect this will make the house feel warmer.

2. Taking the baby gate down from our bedroom door, which means the open doorway now looks… extra open, or something. Associated to this is: I get to sleep all the way through the night, in my own bed, for the first time in several years. If I’m suddenly better, that might be why.

3. He used to be our excuse for not going away overnight when we didn’t want to (because he would need his meds, which he would then proceed not to take) ; now we’ll just have to go, I suppose.

4. We could leave an outside door open on a warm day! I mean, probably not, because of bugs, but in theory!

5. The big one. He wouldn’t have survived a move. But now…⁵

Ok, well, I just received the package containing Marty’s ashes and pawprint, so I’m going to go off and have a cry; in the meantime, it’s time to pull out your playbook from the 90s, or the 2000s, whichever speaks to you, because as you know already: we’re doing it again.

1  sometimes as few as 15 minutes after

2  for instance, i have long known that if we had daemons in this world, mine would be a seagull, for obvious reasons (i need to live by the ocean, and i also want fries)

3  ohhh my god if the similarity of names is deliberate

4  specifically, if you read and enjoyed the first trilogy and are now an adult and want to engage with that same world and material on a more adult level

5  we also got our porch rebuilt this past month, which was another pre-move requirement… things are going (but are we?)