Things Nobody Tells You About Owning a Geriatric Cat

In my household we had three cats: Moku, a tortoiseshell; Connie, a ginger tabby; and Cyrus, a gray tabby.

Moku died several years ago.  It was probably renal failure.  We took her to her final vet appointment and had her put down. I wouldn't have cried, but my wife did, so I couldn't help a few tears.

Cyrus died a couple of years ago.  He had a massively enlarged heart, was subject to weird fits, and pooped everywhere except the litter box.  I cried when we had to have him put down, too.  He was a very nice little cat and loved everybody.

Connie is still alive.  He's 14 years old, 21 lbs, and has both diabetes and a thyroid condition.  In addition to being a massive cat, he's also a massive pain in the ass.  I suspect that his issues aren't terribly unusual for a cat his age, so I will list some of his idiosyncrasies so you understand what your cat might be in for once he or she reaches a certain age.

• Cleanliness: Connie has decided that washing himself is for lesser beings.  He made this decision a couple of years ago and hasn't looked back since.  So if we don't brush him on a semi-regular basis he just leaves clumps of orange fur everywhere he goes.  It's not unusual to see a cat tumbleweed of fur rolling down the hall, drifting on the air conditioner breeze.  I pick the tumbleweeds up when I see them.
  
• Sleepiness: Connie doesn't like to do much of anything except eat, sleep, visit the litter box, demand wet food, demand momentary affection, and take showers.  95% of his time is spent sleeping on our bed.  This is a problem when he doesn't wash himself because clumps of his fur stick to the covers.  And occasional litter grains.  Yuck.
• Thirstiness: Connie's had a lifelong fascination with water.  This has been exacerbated by his recently-diagnosed diabetes, which makes him thirsty all the time, and his thyroid condition, which makes him hungry and thirsty all the time.  We got him an electric water fountain, but no matter how clean I keep it he doesn't really drink from it: just puts his head under the stream.  He really likes showers, and that's where he gets most of his water.  If either of us stirs in the wee hours to pee or read or something, he figures we're up and loudly demands that we turn on the shower for him.  I haven't had a shower to myself in months: he's always in there, getting soaking wet.  
• Litter Issues: Connie's litter box habits aren't as exacting as they were when he was a younger cat.  He sometimes misses entirely.  He sometimes doesn't bury his poop.  If we leave the bath mats on the floor in our bathroom long enough he'll pee on them.  I don't know why.  I just know that when we're done getting ready in the morning we have to hang up the bath mats or he'll pee on one of them.  This is upsetting, but at least he's not peeing on a rug or something we can't throw in the washing machine.  Yes, we've done the vinegar and baking soda thing. Many times.
• Get Me Mah Medicine: Connie needs medication: an insulin shot twice a day and a thyroid pill twice a day.  These medications are not cheap, especially the insulin.  The insulin's easy to administer: pull up some skin, inject the juice, and you're done.  The pill's more challenging: some wrestling is required.  Don't forget that he's usually wet from a shower during this process, at least for his morning pill.  About a third of the time when I do it, he secretes the pill in his mouth until I've left and then spits it onto the bed or in his food dish.  
• Mah Teef: Tooth decay, a not uncommon condition for ginger cats, has required several extractions, leaving him mostly toothless.  He still eats dry food, but just gums and swallows it. When he eats wet food, he just licks up the gravy and leaves the bits behind.  Also, he's got some weird fluid-filled cysts on his head and face that we haven't addressed because they don't seem to bother him and the vet doesn't think they're serious.  So he's got that going for him.
• Weird Fears: Houses in Florida tend to have ceiling fans in most rooms.  Connie is terrified of ceiling fans, especially when they're running.  So we have to keep most of them off, including the one in our bedroom, or he'll stay under the bed and vomit and piss himself in terror.
• One Weird Trick: Connie's worst trick is to trot out of the bathroom after a shower, use the litter box, and walk back to jump up onto the bed and sleep.  So you've got a big fat wet cat who doesn't wash himself, feet covered in litter, on your bed.  Double yuck.  We wash our bedding often.

So that's our Connie.  I'll probably cry when he dies, too, but there will be a little bit of relief as well.  My little boy vacillates between wanting a new kitty (no new cats until Connie's gone) and hoping Connie lives forever.  

Vester Lee Flanagan: Lessons Learned

Vester Lee Flanagan stalked and murdered two of his former colleagues: Alison Parker, 24 years old, and Adam Ward, 27.  He walked up and shot them both to death on a self-shot video, posted the video on social media, and committed suicide not long after.  This entire crime is an unmitigated horror.

But, as I always say, it would be worse if we didn't learn anything from it.

I've written about personal defense several times before, but there's one element of it that I haven't touched upon, mostly because it's not typically relevant to the average person: if someone really wants to kill you, he eventually will.  You can be aware, avoidant, trained, alert, and strong, but if you've made the kind of enemy that really does just want to kill you and carries out a plan to do so, you're most likely going to die unless you're very fortunate during critical moments of his assault.

"Situational awareness" is a buzzword we throw around that describes being aware of your surroundings, especially in a public space.  The "situational" modifier is unnecessary, as anything can be described as a situation, but to sound more tactical we like to add those sorts of adjectives.  Situational awareness includes the act of looking around to see if someone with obvious malicious intent is nearby.  Muggers don't teleport in to attack you.  If you've ever been attacked by surprise, it's probably because you weren't aware of your surroundings.  Muggers rely on the fact that most people don't pay attention to what's around them.  They profile potential victims by seeing if they're alert and looking around or not.

Would being situationally aware have saved Parker and Ward?  I doubt it.  From the video he shot, it's clear that they weren't paying any attention to him during his approach.  His dark clothing and the way he crept up reminded me of the video of an assassination attempt on Imelda Marcos.  It's not bloody or visceral, so take a look at it here.  Note that everyone else in the crowd going up to talk to Marcos wore white, seemed to be smiling.  And then the assassin walks up: dressed in black, scowling, reaching into his sleeve.  Nobody noticed this guy until he started trying to hack her up, including her bodyguards. Why not?  Because they weren't practicing situational awareness.

Parker and Ward were not in any position to defend themselves: both were deeply engrossed in a task, both were entirely unaware that a deeply disturbed man had fixated on them.  It's also likely that nothing in their lives had ever prepared them for this attack.  They were nice people like you and me.  Who expects to be shot to death doing a 7:00 AM interview in Moneta, Virginia?

I don't think anything could have saved those people from Vester Lee Flanagan.  He stalked them, chose a moment that was least advantageous for them, and struck.  You can practice awareness, avoidance, de-escalation techniques, and physical combat all day every day, but if someone's going to go through the same trouble that Flanagan did to stalk and kill you, you're screwed.

Don't leave the house mad.  Tell your loved ones that you love them.

And be aware, just in case.

DC Metro Stabbing: Cause and Effect vs. Courage

I wrote about this story and its attendant considerations here, but in light of a recent article by R. Douglas Fields purporting to explain why so many able-bodied people abandoned their duties as members of civilization, I thought I would return to the well this one last time.

Predictably, the author sets his and everybody else's default to coward:

"It may be comforting to indulge in speculation about how you would have responded to the deadly attack on Sutherland, but the fact is that it is difficult to know how anyone will react to a sudden threat."

Pre-determining that in a dangerous situation you'll act to save another human being's life isn't an indulgence, nor is it comforting to do so.  It's an acknowledgment of our shared burden as members of society.  Just because it's difficult to know how you'll react, it doesn't mean that you can't react courageously, or that you shouldn't do it, or that you shouldn't prepare yourself to do it.

"The multiple factors and uncertainties mean that there is rarely one correct response to a sudden threat."

This is where we get caught up in minutiae to justify inaction.  Hick's Law notwithstanding, there really is one correct response to the threat that has led me to write two articles: stop the guy stabbing someone else to death.  This response can take many forms, of course, but all of them are correct if you're stopping the killer.

"Bystander apathy is a psychological phenomenon in which witnesses to a person being harmed are less likely to intervene the more people there are present. This is thought to be a consequence of the herding instinct of human beings to do as they see others do. But when many people are present it is a much more complex situation. This leads to confusion. Is the person being attacked a victim or another criminal involved in, say, a gang fight? The Metro riders who saw the assault on Sutherland experienced neither apathy nor confusion, however. They experienced terror."

Your worth as a person is measured, in part, by doing the right thing despite what you see others doing.  The number of people present in the subway car didn't create confusion or even lead to it, unless they were engaged in mass telepathy and were all thinking the same thing.  This was obviously not a gang fight.  Experiencing terror does not excuse you from acting properly.  Courage is determined by how you act despite your terror.  Ask any soldier, firefighter, or cop.

"I cannot know what those witnesses lived through on that train, but I am confident from my knowledge of neuroscience that they did exactly the right thing. Their response was not a matter of bravery or cowardice or apathy—it was a matter of mortal strategy. Engaging the homicidal robber physically could have resulted in mass casualties. From all the situational information those people rapidly assimilated, that was their collective conclusion. So the passengers tried to appease the robber with cash instead and no one else lost their life."

C.S. Lewis must have known R. Douglas Fields, because he described him perfectly in his Abolition of Man: "We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."  The witnesses on that train did not do exactly the right thing: Kevin Joseph Sunderland, were he able, would likely agree.  Neither a scientific explanation of cowardice nor a redefining of the term bravery excuse the shameful inaction of the passengers on that train.  Your mortal strategy needs to be flexible enough to take monsters like Jasper Spires into account.

Spires was one man with one knife.  Against numerous assailants ready, willing, and able to subdue him, he would not have prevailed, and mass casualties need not have been the result.  Appeasing monsters never works in the long term: they'll always come back to eat you.  If not now, later.

"Honed by eons of evolution in a dangerous world of survival of the fittest, the reaction these neural circuits trigger is usually correct; otherwise our species would have gone the way of dinosaurs. This is why rational Monday morning quarterbacking about the passengers’ response on the Metro is misguided. No fault should be leveled against any individuals on that train. They did as their brain and evolution equipped them to do."

Thousands and thousands and thousands of human beings have overcome what their brains and evolution equipped them to do over the course of civilization, from the Vigiles of ancient Rome to the modern United States soldier, from the blue-painted Pict to the grandfather punching out a would-be mugger.  Scientists like R. Douglas Fields would simply distill us into mere products of brain chemistry, despite the overwhelming evidence that we, as thinking people, transcend that every day.  We're not products of cause and effect.  There's more to us than evolution.

July 4 DC Metro Stabbing: Four Things to Consider

This is an absolutely horrific story from start to finish. The only way it could be worse is if more people had been murdered.

If we're going to be grown-ups, we need to confront stories like this, analyze them, and draw reasonable conclusions. As always, it's horrible when things like this happen, but it's worse if we don't learn anything from it.

When you're done reading the article, read this Redditor's account of what happened, and then read this analysis of the behavior of the bystanders.  

There are a number of issues that need to be unpacked before we can slot this into its proper context.  

• He's Got a Knife: The weapon Spires used was a "small, black folding knife." Knives are very difficult weapons to deal with in a self-defense context. It doesn't take a lot of muscle to power a knife: one touch and you've been cut. Knife wounds are particularly horrific. When I worked in the self-defense industry, just about every person I knew who taught personal defense said that they'd rather go up against a person with a gun than a knife any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Guns miss. They jam. They run out of ammo.  Knives don't have those problems. If you've ever seen surveillance footage of knife attacks, you'll learn how fast a knife can do life-threatening damage to an opponent. Even if you don't bleed to death when cut, the aftermath of a knife attack can be permanent: a colostomy, nerve damage, disfigurement. Across the board, it's all bad.  
• Batman Fantasies?: Once you've read a story like this there's a temptation to think, "Well, if I was there, I would've done something. I would've tackled the guy." Good. You need to think this way. Visualization is immensely helpful to success. If you take the opposite view, "Oh, if I was there, I would've cowered like the rest," or the ever-popular wishy-washy, "Well, I don't know what I would've done in that situation," then you're setting your default position to coward. You're virtually guaranteeing victimhood. Don't do that. General James Mattis of the USMC famously said, "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." When you're out in public, that's a far better thing to internalize than, "What I don't wish is that I had somehow tried to attack the assailant. I am a little bit larger than he was, but I would not have won."
• I've Got a Family: A common explanation used to excuse not getting involved is, "I've got a family." Kevin Joseph Sutherland had family who loved him. I've got a family. So why should I put myself at risk, potentially make my wife a widow and my child fatherless on behalf of someone I've never even met? Because to not do so when circumstances call upon you is far, far worse. One vital part of living in a society worth maintaining is doing the moral thing despite the cost, especially when lives are at stake. Spires has already forfeited his right to be a member of polite society; he's a blight on civilization itself. The price of DC metro trains and internet and Game of Thrones On Demand and the right to free speech and Pizza Hut Limited Edition Hot Dog Bites Pizza is sometimes paid in blood, and if you've decided that your blood is too precious to be spilled above all others, then you're not pulling your weight. Pediatric brain surgeon? Millionaire philanthropist? Schoolteacher? It doesn't matter. Answer the call or get out. How can you look at yourself in the mirror afterward if you don't? Civilization occasionally demands us to act in an uncivilized manner to protect itself. You don't get to opt out of the tough stuff because you've got a family.
• What Second Amendment?: Part of what contributed to the mass cowardice in this situation was that nobody on that train was armed. When you're unarmed, you're putting yourself at the mercy of vermin like Spires. Places that deliberately disarm their citizens like Washington D.C. have an absolute responsibility to protect their citizens. The DC Metro police utterly failed in this case, and Sutherland's death is as much on their hands as it is the sheep who watched him die.  

It's fascinating to read the comments on the Reddit thread and see just how many people have normalized victimhood. The comments congratulating the eyewitness on his consoling the dying man are disgusting when you consider that Sutherland need not have died at all. Had the other riders on the train accepted their responsibilities as American citizens, the outcome may have been different.

Yes, knives are unbelievably scary. What's scarier is being stabbed to death by a drug-addled monster in full view of able-bodied but passive citizens who will only step forward when the monster has fled. Don't hold my fucking hand. Grow a backbone, carry a weapon, and fight alongside me.

Idaho Shooting: Takeaways

This is a nasty, dirty, shitty story, one of the absolute worst I've heard of in some time, but if we don't dig into it at least a little bit, we'll just paper over it and no one will do the hard work of learning anything.

What happened was that Veronica Rutledge left her handgun in her purse where her toddler son could get to it.  Her son got to it and shot Veronica in the head, killing her.  The details are in the link.

The family is, for all intents and purposes, ruined.  I don't know how you come back from that.  I pray God that they can find comfort in the fullness of time.

Like so many terrible things, it's bad that it happened, but worse if we don't learn anything.  As part of that process, take a look at this story; does it ring any bells?  A 9-year-old girl was handed a weapon she couldn't handle, and as a result her firearms instructor is dead.  Another ruined family.

It's a mistake to call these "accidental" shootings.  Any time a bullet goes where it isn't supposed to, it's because the responsible party was negligent in handling the weapon.  Neither a 9-year-old nor a 2-year-old are responsible parties.  So the responsibility, unfortunately, falls on the victims in these cases.  There are no accidental discharges, only negligent ones.

So how do we learn from this?  What can we take away?

With weapons, familiarity doesn't breed so much contempt as it does casualness.  This is problematic.  If you're going to take on the burden of carrying a weapon (which is your God-given, inalienable right), you have to include the whole raft of responsibilities along with it.  It has to be something you think about.  You have to cultivate mindfulness in its presence, because once it turns into just another accessory, you've put one foot on the path to negligence.

Hand-flapping about blaming the victim won't prevent this from happening again, nor will renewed cries for harsher gun laws.  It's absolutely awful that Veronica Rutledge's name is in the public eye now.  The only good that can come of it is increased mindfulness: a gun owner's most valuable tool.