Coyote Crossing

Via On The Public Record, Mike Taugher, the Contra Costa Times’ environmental reporter, has a great piece on Carly Fiorina — the rich incompetent wingnut now trying to replace Barbara Boxer as senator from California — and her attempts to blame California’s economic woes on the Endangered Species Act:

For [US Senate candidate] Fiorina, the issue is simple. Less water from the Delta should be dedicated to fish.

“In the short term, an amendment needs to pass the United States Senate to override the biological assessment on the smelt that caused the water to be turned off,” Fiorina said. “The reason she’s not doing it is she’s in the pockets of extreme environmentalists.”

Fiorina blames Boxer for voting against an amendment by South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint in September that would have removed limits on Delta pumps to help fish populations, and for putting the needs of “a small fish ahead of the livelihoods of California’s farmers and farmworkers,” according to her website.

Fiorina said the Delta water crisis is a “huge piece of my platform,” in which she argues that an increase in water supply is essential for creating jobs.

But her attacks are not always accurate. Delta pumps were never turned off last year. They were dialed down, but that was mostly because of dry conditions and not endangered species rules. And she has exaggerated the number of jobs lost.

Boxer, meanwhile, has maintained a relatively low profile on the issue.

There’s more. It’s good. Read it.

1 comment on "Carly Fiorina is a lying, anti-environmentalist sack of crap"

We’re sitting at home today, and in between carting loads of laundry down to the laundry room — taking advantage of the fact that other folks in the apartment seem to be out of town for the holiday weekend, thus freeing the major appliances from the usual conflicting tenant demand — I’m sipping a glass of iced coffee.

It’s my third dose of coffee of the day. That’s one more than I should probably have, but I’ve been out of sorts the last few days. My sleep schedule has been messed up. A combination of financial anxiety and sciatica — the latter of the two, at least, slowly being resolved — has kept me awake, and noisy neighbors don’t help much. I may regret the coffee later. Still, I want to get a few things done today and it was just sitting there in the pot.

It’s the first time I’ve had more than two cups of coffee in a day for the last month or so. It’s a strange and sudden change in my lifestyle. I have been ingesting near-toxic daily amounts of caffeine since Gerald Ford was President. We’re talking double-digit numbers of cups of coffee per day. Back when I was living in Zeke’s house with an espresso machine at hand, I’d drink perhaps 14 double espressos on a good day.

I wasn’t particularly satisfied with the situation. Five years ago I even made a grandiose pledge on the old blog to quit drinking coffee. That resolution lasted maybe two weeks. I couldn’t quit. When I drank alcohol, I drank coffee to sober up or get through hangovers. When I stopped drinking alcohol, I drank coffee to help me manage the ADD that the alcohol had helped me manage. When I started taking wellbutrin to manage the ADD, I drank coffee because caffeine was a monkey on my back. A monkey that had sunk its leech-like roots into the highway of my nervous system. A monkey that I could not toss overboard without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I was a caffeine addict.

In April, though, the Kaiser pshrink changed my Wellbutrin scrip from 300 mg staggered throughout the course of the day to 300 slow-release mg taken all at once first thing in the morning. I soon began to notice that I was unpleasantly speedy in the afternoons and evenings. Trouble was, as you are no doubt expecting me to say, brewing. One day in early June I tried to drink a third cup of coffee and I just couldn’t do it.

As I write this, I’m beginning to feel the effects of that unusual cup number three. They aren’t altogether pleasant, though the throbbing headache now growing in my left temple is warmly familiar.

Have you ever woken up one morning and found that you no longer recognized the loved one slowly waking next to you? That the companion whose company you once craved above all others had suddenly become just a little tiresome? Why, no, me neither now that you mention it. But if I had had that experience, this thing with the coffee suddenly turning on me would probably remind me of it some. It’s just a little poignant, and I might well be picturing a montage of happy, content past moments I shared with my cup of coffee if doing so didn’t give me a slight case of heartburn.

Maybe we’ll patch things up. Maybe we’re just going through a rough spot. Our first moments together in the morning are still wonderful, still give me that little spinal thrill and the feeling that all might just be right with the world.

I wonder if my pshrink could refer me to some kind of joint counseling.

11 comments on "A treasured relationship sadly fades"

[Way back in the first decade of the 21st Century I was briefly a guest-poster over at Michael Bérubé‘s joint, and during that period in which Michael had inexplicably entrusted me with his readership I posted this as a July 4 travelog-essay. I was on my way to the US-Mexico border in the Arizona desert to report on environmental aspects of the cross-border migrant issue. (Thankfully, we’ve got that heartbreaking dilemma completely and humanely resolved now.) I holed myself up in a motel room on the night of July 4 2006 and wrote this. Seemed like an appropriate weekend to dredge it out of Michael’s archives and share it again.]

July 4, Central Valley CA

I spent the Fourth in as American a fashion as possible. I drove a pickup truck at 85 miles per hour in a straight line for four hours. At that, I was slower than some of the traffic I encountered: an obstacle to Angelenos’ speedy transit of California’s Central Valley. Unless your eye is attuned to the pale blonde slopes of the Inner Coast Ranges, unless you find entertainment in counting the red tailed hawks sitting on fence posts or sputtering outrage watching the inexorable spread of suburb from the Bay Area southward, Interstate Five can be a trifle monotonous, and so people hurry through it.

Not to me. I always find something to write home about. Today there were long stripes of discarded tomatoes left by the harvesters, pale green windrows on fields so flat they could have been brown corduroy ironed on a kitchen table, and on one such windrow two ravens jumped in glee at finding so much food. One discarded tomato in a hundred had ripened in the heat, enough to feed a thousand ravens to bursting.

But I have odd tastes, relishing the swoop of barnswallows on the semis’ pressure waves. I’ve traveled this road since my early twenties, a quarter century next year, and I’ve watched the terra cotta carcinoma spreading. If the price of oil does not spike, and soon, the valley will be one suburb from the Grapevine to Sacramento. In 1987 my friend Matthew and I chased the Perseids out to Grant Line Road near Tracy, lay on our backs on the dark shoulder of the road and watched the shooting stars until three in the morning. That stretch of road butts up against an outlet mall these days. I fear the day when Los Angeles drivers find more to interest them along I-5.

Oddly, none of them seem to take advantage of the alternative. Head east on any of a hundred high-speed two-lanes, each of them seemingly termed “Blood Alley” by their respective locals, and you will reach the older, more settled north-south route through the Valley: Highway 99. 99 traverses the Valley of literature. This is the land of oil rigs and orange stands, packing sheds and dusty oleander hedges. William Saroyan, Joan Didion, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Soto, Gerry Haslam, Cherie Moraga, Merle Haggard: does any other piece of real estate in the country boast so many fine writers? The Colorado Plateau, perhaps. And Manhattan I suppose, although that little island’s parochialism wouldn’t last long in a Fresno summer. Wasn’t it a Manhattan-based newspaper that referred to the Californian author of Angle Of Repose as “William Stegner”?

A bank of thunderheads sat atop the Sierra Nevada today, ready to wash more soil down into the Valley. The Valley’s soil, in places, is more than a mile deep. Twentieth-century farmers took so much Pleistocene water from the depths that the land began to settle out from under them. One cannot pump too much from this landscape too quickly. I drove today across the bed of the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River. Or it was. Tulare Lake fell victim to the cotton growers a lifetime ago, its feeder river dammed to irrigate fields, and the lake disappeared: an American Aral.

Turn on the radio most places in the Central Valley and all you will hear is country music. That said, you do have a choice of several different countries.  Norteño and Banda dominate the AM spectrum, a bridge to the homeland for those who braved the crossing to El Norte so that Victor Davis Hanson could exploit their labor on his hobby farm outside Fresno, and a link to the old ways for their American kids. Flip through the FM band and Hmoob, Hindustani and Basque join the broadcast Babel. Sometimes, as I did today, you will get lucky and tune to a station just as they start a torrid Vietnamese torch song by Duy Khanh or Than Tuyen, or a staccato Spanish commercial for auto insurance will fade into Shakira asking where the thieves are.

Brand spanking new pickup trucks and 25-year-old sedans with dragging mufflers. Viscid water sidling along irrigation ditches. In Wasco, a dozen roadside businesses advertise pastrami. I turn east onto state route 46: James Dean went the other way in the last hour of his life. Dorothea Lange might have shot some of the houses I passed today, squeezed up against the stuccoed walls of newly metastasized “communities.” This was once a chain of flower-filled ponds four hundred miles north to south. From there it was supposed to become a haven for the farm family, giant federal projects designed to irrigate plots no larger than a couple hundred acres. The families that use that water nowadays are named Tenneco, Cargill, and J.G. Boswell, and the swelling cities enjoy the dirtiest air and water in the country.

America in capsule form, if you ask me. Happy Fourth.

6 comments on "July 4 2006, Central Valley CA"

I have a Twitter account that I’ve used for the last couple years. I think I started in December 2007 or thereabouts. Whenever I started, it was long enough ago that I’ve published 7657 “tweets” since then, a word that I will now use perversely because the Serious Style Guides officially frown on it.

Twitter’s a bit of a potential time suck, and I’m not going to encourage anyone to use it if they’re not sure they want to. But every now and then you find some curmudgeonly person declaring — usually without any experience — that Twitter must necessarily be useless because of certain assumptions the curmudgeons hold. Those assumptions generally fall into two sets:

• Twitter consists of nothing but egotists who think the world wants to know that they’re eating a sandwich, and
• Nothing of value can be said in 140 characters.

That first class of assumption bears some truth to it. There are a whole lot of boring, self-absorbed people using Twitter. There are also a lot of interesting, witty and perceptive people using Twitter who will go through hours-long stretches of posting things you’ll find self-indulgent. There are people using Twitter who you will find fascinating and worthwhile who will be incomprehensible and boring to most other people. The thing is, following those people — signing up to receive their tweets, in other words — is voluntary. No one’s forcing you.

The second assumption — that nothing of value can be said in 140 characters — is bullshit. For one thing, people who say that seem to have forgotten the existence of hyperlinks. Here, for instance, in 140 characters, we have a sentence worth of important information and a link to a page where one might educate oneself further, with room left over for yours truly to append a stupid joke.

But even without links, if you can’t say something worth saying in 140 characters, I doubt whether you could with more. Sure, the length doesn’t allow for much detail, depth, or nuance. But is this (for instance) not worth saying? Or this? You can tell stories in 140 characters. You can write metareferential haiku.

I’ve used Twitter to keep in touch with people, to get messages to The Raven when I don’t have a cell signal, to announce new blog posts, to make plans with small groups of people,  to stay informed on environmental and scientific news. I’ve also used it to ask the world for favors: getting copies of public domain scholarly articles behind JSTOR paywalls, advice on technical problems, opinions about software and hardware and the like. It’s a wonderful tool if you know how to use it.

All the above said, it’s a social tool and as is the case with any social tool, Twitter use can give rise to a misunderstanding here and there, and occasionally even drama. So in an attempt to manage some of that potential misunderstanding and drama, and because the list of people who are following me on Twitter has grown a bit past the point where I can say this directly to everyone involved, I append below what at the risk of seeming more formal and less nonchalant than is my intention, I will call my Twitter policy. So here we go, as informally and ad hoc as possible:

1) I warmly invite you to follow me on Twitter. My main personal feed is at @canislatrans. I also post on behalf of the Desert Protective Council at @DesertBlog. I have two inactive feeds at @AridCarnival (which will resume if the Carnival of the Arid revives itself somehow) and @WalkingWithZeke, which may become active again if there’s news to report about the book. The Clade also has a feed at @TheClade, which updates when someone posts a new post there, which these days is not often.

2) I do not think there is a “right way” to use Twitter. I don’t tweet every day. On rare occasion I tweet twenty times in an hour. I use Twitter as an adjunct to my blog’s RSS feed, to pass along links I think are interesting, to share poetry and observations, to crowd-source breaking news, and to tell strings of egregious jokes.

3) If any of the above-linked Twitter feeds turn out to be of less than sparkling interest to you, feel free to drop them. I won’t be hurt. I don’t use any of the apps available to see who has unfollowed me. That way lies drama. If I know you and I notice you’re refollowing me — implying that you’ve unfollowed me in the past — I’ll probably just assume you got tired of a string of bad jokes or earworms or something, and mainly I’ll be glad to see you come back. I do pay attention now and then to raw follower numbers, but primarily because statistics are interesting. I’ve lost significant numbers of followers all at once on a few occasions and figured that either Twitter culled invalid accounts or that I said something provocative. Either scenario is good news.

4) I don’t automatically follow everyone who follows me. I use Twitter for work purposes, in addition to all the rest, and keeping my list of people followed to a small mob helps make sure I don’t miss some of the important links and such. This is especially true given that there are times when I can only read Twitter on my phone, and it’s much harder to scroll through hundreds of tweets. Don’t feel bad if I don’t follow you back. If you unfollow me as a result, fair enough.

5) My unfollowing you, should I do so, is not intended as a judgment of your character or my fondness therefor. You might just be tweeting incessantly about the World Cup/American Idol/latest Blog Drama, or something else about which I could not care less, for a stretch of time beyond which I am unwilling to scroll down. I’ll almost certainly refollow you again once the World Cup/American Idol/latest Blog Drama is over.

5a) Unless you whine at me for unfollowing you, which is an easy way to make sure I don’t come back. This has happened.

6) I tend to follow people I know in real life, or who are regular commenters on my blog, or who are consistently smart and funny, or who link to fascinating topics — especially in the environmental and scientific realms. I tend not to follow people who do not fall into any of the above categories, though there are exceptions. I quickly unfollow people who appear to be permanently set on negative, especially of the snark or “poor me” or fanning the flames of online drama flavors, because you know what? Fuck that.

7) Even if I’m not following you, I do try to respond to all messages directed at me if they seem to ask for a response. If you’d like a response and I don’t give you one, nudge me again. It sometimes takes me days to reply to urgent (non-work-related) email, as my close friends will attest. So don’t take it personally.

8) Do say hello to me on Twitter if you like. It makes my day. I do always say “hi” back.

3 comments on "Some thoughts on Twitter"

“Front-paged” from a comment on the previous post, a disappointingly content-free piece of flackery from the Solar Energy Industries Association.

This comment is in reference to your post, “Desert Solar is Not Renewable Energy”:

Which is why I thought I’d move it from where they put it, on a post about my cat. (Social Networking Lesson 1: off-topic posting makes you look inept.) Not that it would have looked much better posted as a reply to the “Desert Solar is Not Renewable Energy” post, because it doesn’t really address any of the points raised in that post, some of which rebut points made here. Though you can be the judge of that.

Solar energy is the cleanest, safest and most abundant energy resource available. As an industry we are committed to solving our country’’s most pressing energy problems. As the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico illustrates, the U.S. needs to quickly move away from the dirty fossil fuels of the past and toward clean, renewable energy sources like solar. In fact, 92 percent of Americans support greater use of solar, now.

All of the above is more or less true, aside from the second sentence. People in the US do support greater use of solar. They don’t necessarily support public lands concentrating solar as opposed to rooftop PV, especially once they learn about the costs of concentrating solar. The trade group uses the Mom And Apple Pie aspect of rooftop solar panels as cover for their land grab.

And about that second sentence.  As an industry, the developers of large industrial solar are committed not to “solving the country’s most pressing energy problems,” but to capitalizing effectively on a developing business opportunity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that: developers of rooftop solar are doing the same thing, and I applaud them. But if the SEIA was truly “committed to solving our country’’s most pressing energy problems,” it would be working on conservation — another burgeoning business opportunity! — not on scraping irreplaceable old-growth desert for short-lived concentrating solar factories. Conservation could cut US energy use by 30 percent in the next year or two, using existing technology and with minimal environmental impact. There’s no way concentrating solar could make that kind of difference in that short a term, even if we removed any kind of environmental, worker safety, and zoning safeguards.

The way we currently generate power in the U.S. not only pollutes our air, rivers, lakes, and coasts, it uses massive amounts of water at coal and nuclear power plants. While water is a necessary ingredient for many concentrating solar power (CSP) technologies, the industry has developed dry-cooling technology that uses 80-90 percent less water and is continuing to develop technologies that use even less water.

Here’s an interesting fact about concentrating solar’s water use. Last month the staff in the office of US Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) put out a report on just that topic [PDF], and based on figures they gathered from the US Department of Energy, they put together a comparison of the water use intensity of different methods of electric power generation: in other words, how many gallons of water per megawatt Kyl, like many Arizona Republicans, has an axe to grind, or at least an axe handle. It may be there’s a flaw in the figures somewhere. Still, they’re interesting:

As you can see, this table shows that concentrating solar uses far more water per megawatt-hour of electricity generated than do most other industrial sources of energy. (Interestingly, the biggest water user, geothermal, is also touted as a “renewable” source of energy.)

The chart doesn’t list the water intensity of dry-cooled plants, which are indeed far more water-efficient. DoE figures put that efficiency at about a 95 percent reduction in water use over wet-cooled concentrating solar. The thing is, dry cooling is less efficient when it’s hot out. Just when the sun’s blazing down in the southwest and people are cranking up their AC, the output of dry-cooled concentrating solar plants takes a hit.

Meanwhile, rooftop PV keeps chugging along just fine as it gets hotter.

Fossil fuels also require a massive amount of land. Currently, oil and gas companies have leased an area equivalent in size to Washington State to drill for fuel. While Americans who live near these drilling sites worry about oil and gas spills near their coast lines and communities, no one is worrying about a sun spill.

Very droll! Also a non sequitur, and a third-grade excuse. And, technically, wrong in a minor way. Yes, fossil fuel extraction destroys an immense amount of the earth’s surface. Mountaintop removal mining, oil spills, poisoning of aquifers by fracking for natural gas, sludge floods beneath mines, yada yada. It’s really, really bad. So why is the answer to destroy even more untouched land? This isn’t a question of “fairness” to industrial public lands solar developers. Fossil fuels’ impact on the landscape is egregious, and industrial solar in the desert makes the situation worse. If it was a question of repairing damage done by the fossil fuel industry — if the big solar plants were going onto old stripmines and oil refineries and land permanently ruined by oil spills, then maybe they’d have a point.

But as it stands, coal involves mountaintop removal mining and solar involves desert removal, and proposing one as an alternative to another is just nuts.

Also? There are solar spills. Here’s an example, in a photo provided by Basin and Range Watch:

It’s called “flash glare,” and it’s a known issue with solar trough installations. Sure, it’s not as devastating as a coal slurry flood or a crude oil spill, but it’s a real problem for highway safety and potentially for air safety, as well as having significant visual impact on surrounding wildlands and unknown effects on wildlife. Saying “no one’s worried about a sun spill” just isn’t true. It may not be the biggest concern over siting of these facilities, but it’s there.

Onward:

Solar energy helps the environment by supplying clean, renewable energy and the industry is committed to ensuring that utility-scale projects have a minimal impact as well. CSP projects proposed for public lands must complete a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) before being issued a construction permit by the U.S. Department of the Interior. This review process involves coordinated analyses by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and other state and local agencies to identify the potential impacts of a proposed project, including on water resources.

And those agencies are contending with so many applications for new projects, many of them with very tight deadlines due to potential Stimulus funding, that they are completely overwhelmed. Applicants are submitting ludicrously incomplete EISes, conducting biological surveys from vehicles, omitting mention of major biological and geological features. Tessera flat out lied by omission, for instance, in its documents for its proposed Solar Two plant near Ocotillo, California, declining to mention the presence on the site of large flood-carved watercourses, ancient creosote and smoketree forest, flat-tailed horned lizard habitat and other delicate and irreplaceable features of the Colorado Desert. BrightSource’s contractors failed to assess the visual impact of the proposed Ivanpah solar site on the protected Stateline Wilderness because they decided it was too hot to hike to the wilderness boundary. Etc.

As federal and other agency staff struggle to contend with the volume of applications, effective oversight and analysis of each proposal increasingly depends on activists, members of the public who devote time and effort to doing the work the agencies should be able to do themselves. And this isn’t enough for the energy developers, who routinely support “streamlining” the permitting process.

And this becomes an even bigger issue when projects start going in. BrightSource, for instance, is having some serious problems installing test poles at Ivanpah. Pile-driving into an alluvial fan is hard work: there are seemingly random boulders strewn all through the top few hundred feet of soil. After all, it’s basically the scree and rubble created as a mountain falls apart. So what’s their plan? To vibrate the poles into place, which will theoretically nudge the boulders out of the way.

The kangaroo rats living in the Mojave desert have extremely sensitive hearing. The noise from a passing Off-Road Vehicle can deafen a k-rat for days. Same goes for desert tortoises. Kangaroo rats depend on their hearing to evade predators. Imagine giant machines vibrating hundreds of giant metal poles into a mass of rock. Imagine the undocumented effects of that process on sensitive wildlife — none of it mentioned or formally reviewed in the permitting process.

If you want to know what the the Solar Energy Industries Association really thinks about environmental protection, check out these remarks contained in the group’s formal testimony on the California Desert Protection Act of 2010:

The proposed legislation would prohibit BLM processing of any right‐of‐way application that could affect native groundwater supplies, both within and adjacent to the proposed Mojave National Preserve. The National Environmental Policy Act and other laws already require the consideration of the environmental impacts of water use by any proposed project, and SEIA believes these existing provisions to be sufficient. The additional requirement proposed in S. 2921 could serve to restrict solar development, even on lands outside protected areas.

Another provision in this proposed legislation would allow BLM to deny a right‐of‐way application for any project which is on “wilderness quality land” or which may impact “sensitive species listed by the BLM.” SEIA is concerned that these provisions are overly broad and could unduly limit solar energy development in the Southwest.

Kinda gives the lie to the pious expressions of concern for the environment.

Back to the blog comment:

Many solar developers are also strategically locating projects on previously-disturbed land to minimize impacts. For example, Abengoa Solar’s proposed 280 megawatt parabolic trough project in Gila Bend, Ariz., is to be constructed on land previously used for alfalfa farming. Once operational, the project will farm the sun, generating clean, renewable electricity while using only one-fourth of the water required for alfalfa irrigation.

That’s potentially a promising development. Depending on the specific site, I might well support the project. I strongly prefer distributed generation: the era of giant power-generating utilities is over, and distributed generation is really the only sane way to go in the long-term. Still, retiring desert alfalfa farms is way better than converting old-growth desert wildlands. Abengoa has another project planned at Harper Lake that sounds similar, to be placed on former alfalfa fields using allocated groundwater, and if it weren’t for the project’s encroachment on the Harper Lake Area of Critical Environmental Concern I might just quietly fail to oppose it. Developing private lands isn’t a panacea. Many private lands possess significant ecological value for wildlife, watershed values, and cultural value for long-time residents. The Marin Agricultural Land Trust oversees a lot of undeveloped ag land that’s privately owned, for instance, and converting it to industrial energy development would be atrocious.

But Abengoa’s at least heading in the right direction: replacing a destructive land use with another that uses fewer resources.

It’s clear that America needs to move toward a renewable energy future and solar energy is one of the quickest ways to reduce our dangerous dependence on fossil fuels.

Monique Hanis, Spokesperson
Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)

See, here’s the thing that frustrates me so much about SEIA’s content-free comment: as is potentially the case with projects such as Abengoa’s, the group supports a lot of good things. It represents installers of rooftop PV as well as giant energy companies seeking to pave the desert. It pushes for net metering and feed-in tariffs, for sensible amendments to Renewable Portfolio Standards, for repeal and amendment of restrictive covenants and HOA rules that slow installation of rooftop PV and solar water heaters. It does a lot of good work. Representing both sides of the industry as it does, the SEIA could have offered a nuanced, informed response to my post that furthered discussion and offered the chance for informed disagreement on certain issues, and consensus on others.

Instead we got PR flackery. It’s an opportunity missed.

3 comments on "The Solar Energy Industries Association visits Coyote Crossing"

N: I’m hungry. You may have meant to feed me and then forgotten you were going to feed me, so I’ll just remind you. Isn’t that thoughtful of me?

C: [sound of keyboard tapping]

N: You probably meant to get up to feed me when I reminded you fifteen seconds ago, but just forgot. It’s okay. I’ll remind you again. I don’t mind.

C: [sound of keyboard tapping even more pointedly]

N: Hey, you know what? I was just thinking you could give me some food. Because the food is in cans and I don’t know how to open cans. I totally would if I knew how. You should teach me.

C: It’s 3:30. You don’t eat until 5:00. Remind me at 5:00.

N: Okay. [Brief pause] It’s 5:00 now. You can feed me.

C: No it isn’t.

N: It probably is now, then.

C: It really isn’t. It’s not even 3:31 yet.

N: How about now?

C: Look. You’ve got crunchies in your bowl. Go look in your bowl.

N: Um, what? I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand that. It sounded like you were telling me to do something. Like I was a dog or something. Which I am not.

C: [Walks over to cat bowl] Look, Nosy, see? In your bowl? Delicious crunchies. [Rattles bowl] Expensive premium crunchies. Which we got for you by paying a lot of money. That we could have spent on things for us. But we didn’t. Because we bought cat crunchies for you instead. Because we love you.

N: Yes, and they’re very nice. But they are broken. There’s no food on top of them.

C: They’re not broken. They’re perfectly good.

N: Broken.

C: You know, Zeke would have been thrilled to eat these cat crunchies.

N: [Haughty ice-cold glare]

C: Here, I know. We’ll put a few of your hairball treats on the crunchies. [Goes to get treats] How many would you like?

N: The Pete Puma joke stopped being funny a long time ago, man.

C: [Puts treats in bowl, puts a carrot in the rabbit’s cage]

N: [Finishing treats]  Hey, it’s not dinner time and you’re giving the rabbit something yummy. I want something yummy!

C: I gave him a carrot. Would you like a carrot? You can have a carrot if you want one.

N: Let me see.

C: [Offers carrot.]

N: [Sniffs carrot, backs away.]

N: I hate you, you know.

C: [Goes back to typing]

N: I read what you wrote about me on the internet.

C: No you didn’t. You’re a kitty. Kitties can’t read the internet. You were probably just watching a fly on the monitor.

N: What do you mean cats can’t read the Internet? Have you seen the Internet lately?  It’s all written by cats.

C: Okay fine.

N: I didn’t say you could write about me. Now all those people are laughing at me.

C: I don’t think anyone’s actually laughing.

N: “Hilarous.” “chuckle.” “heh.”

C: Yeah, okay. But they aren’t laughing at you. It’s more an existential humor at the perennial interplay between the human and feline umwelts, and the commonality of the readers’ exper-

N: [pushes iPhone off desk onto floor, where it lands with an expensive-sounding thwack]

C: Hey! Stop that! [Retrieves phone]

N: What? Did I do something wrong? [Taps at base of full coffee cup poised above keyboard]

C: No! Cut it out. [Moves coffee cup]

N: I’m a good kitty. I only do good kitty kinds of things, ever. [Knocks reading glasses off desk onto floor]

C: This isn’t funny. Stop it.

N: [pulling paper out of printer tray with teeth, tossing to floor] It is funny. It is an existential humor at the interplay between your stuff and gravity.

C: [puts cat off desk, sees cat’s discarded carrot on floor, absently puts carrot in rabbit cage]

N: Oh No. You Didn’t. [Exits]

C: [resumes work]

N: [offstage] HALP. HALP. STARVING KITTY.

C: Cut it out in there.

N: HALP! YOWLP! ANIMAL CRUELTY! SEND SOMEONE PLEASE! NEIGHBORS? HALP.

C: For the love of….

N: HALP PLEASE HALP

SFX: [Unspecified off-stage crash, elephant footfalls]

N: [entering] What? Nothing. I didn’t do anything. You can’t prove it.

C: [exits, groans offstage, returns bearing fragments of plant pot and picture frame and clock radio, tosses in trash.]

N: Hey, you know what would be great right about now? Some cat food.

C: In twenty minutes.

N: Is that now?

C: No.

N: How about now?

C: no.

N: Now?

[fade to black.]

11 comments on "Trouble manifests"

A couple of months ago The Raven was out of town for a while and Nosy was put out. In order to keep him distracted from his separation anxiety I overfed him a bit. Since I’ve known him he’s mostly eaten dry food, so I thought I’d liven things up for him by giving him a couple servings a day of the wet stuff.

Yes, I have had a cat before.

No, I don’t know what I was thinking.

It’s just that Nosy isn’t like any other cat I’ve known. The cats I’ve known have had their culinary idiosyncrasies — Jasper liked cucumber, for instance — but would generally chow down on anything vaguely meat-flavored if it was within reach: pizza, tuna sandwiches, what have you. Nosy, oddly, has no interest whatever in any food people eat, unless said people are eating unadulterated tuna out of a can. Oh, he’ll ask politely if he can examine the fork full of salmon you’re holding, but he always turns away after a cursory sniff as if to say “... I see. How interesting for you.” He reacts exactly the same way after asking to inspect the rabbit’s carrots. He only eats cat food, and nothing else. It’s weird, really. And so, more than any cat I’ve known I thought he might be unspoilable. 

I was wrong, of course, but I think that’s a reasonable excuse.

I started giving him a “pouch” of wet food for lunch and one at dinner, along with his usual ration of crunchies. Given that the pouch manufacturer’s daily serving suggestion for a cat of Nosy’s size ran to approximately twelve times that, I figured it was a modest treat. It did seem to make him happier. He sulked less, he meowed at the door a bit less, and at first I didn’t notice that he asked for lunch about 15 minutes earlier each day.

When The Raven got back home, though, lunch was being requested at about 9:45 a.m. This was a noticeable discrepancy. I’d forgotten that the best possible way to make sure you get up early on a given date is to feed your cat a good breakfast every morning for a few weeks beforehand: soon you will be the recipient of 4:00 a.m. wakeup calls.

We needed to nip in the bud this slow ratcheting-forward of Nosy’s lunch schedule, but going back to crunchies alone seemed Draconian. Besides, depending on the brand and ingredients, canned food is better for cats anyway. So we figured we’d get him some good canned food, and feed him the actual recommended amount of it every day at 5:00 p.m. I don’t recall getting much work done the day we switched his schedule over, but he caught on pretty quick.

The ratcheting-forward commenced at once, but I held my ground. I would walk into the kitchen in the afternoon. He’d be in there with me and yowling in something less than a femtosecond. I’d turn to check the clock on the wall and would see that it was 3:30, or 2:45, or some other time well in advance of food-o’clock, and I would tell him that he had to wait and that he was a very smart and brave kitty and he could certainly hold out that long. Sometimes, if I’d been immersed in my work, I’d look at the clock and see that it was actually food-thirty, and I’d grab the can opener apologetically.

This past week I walked into the kitchen after my one-hour two-o’clock phone meeting ended half an hour late. I poured myself a glass of water. Nosy barreled in, meowling. I looked him right in the eye and told him I knew it was nowhere near time for dinner.

He turned and looked up at the clock.

I’m going to have to start checking it every day now to make sure he isn’t setting it forward.

6 comments on "I may be in trouble"