SHORT DARK

When the cats come to wake me up at 4AM (I can stall until 4:30 but no later), I get up and stagger to the kitchen to open cans of catfood and drink a cup of water myself because I dehydrate in the night.  Not much of a problem -- I just go back to sleep unless I've got a pressing idea.  Then I write for a while like this to drain the buzz.  

This morning, staggering in the semi-dark (the health busybodies forced me to install nightlights in spite of Valier's very bright and close street lights) I mistook a kitten for a shoe and trampled it.  It screamed but seemed to recover.  Nevertheless, it cracked my shell of habit and muttering.  Now a lifetime of evil things have come to plague me.  Mostly car accidents (none in which people were killed or some were hurt) and accidental cruelty to animals.  More crimes of negligence, omission, and delayed awareness.  Snatches of driving in blizzards, loading balky horses, or last winter's shoulder dislocation.  Painful things but no permanent damage and mostly self-rebuke for not being more skillful, more thoughtful, more careful.

This is not true.  There are many knotty deaths.  My brother Mark's was unexpected but not surprising.  My mother's was attended by all three of her children.  The doc had given Mark the swabs with morphine, fentanyl, or whatever and he used them liberally.  At the end some people arch their heads backwards, like the movie tropes for someone having an orgasm.  It's actually an attempt to get air.  The covid-19 victims must do it.

In the kitchen I kicked a cat's bowl and a dark insect scuttled out from under.  It might have been a spider but it seemed heavier with different legs.  I stomped it.  I did not scrape it off from the bottom of my slipper to see what it was.  I think it was a dermestid.  Google says it could be called a "skin beetle."  They eat what's dead.

When the provincial Alberta museum in Edmonton was knew, we were there on the way north to hunt moose.  In the hall was a padlocked box with a big sign:  "DANGER!!  DERMESTIDS  DO NOT OPEN."  The bugs were used to clean bones but if they escaped they would eat all the indigenous artifacts since most were made of tanned skins, sinews, bone, and other bits of bodies, both human and other species.

The dermestids are in my house.  For much of my life my job has been to cheer people up, to look for the silver lining, to promise good things later, to "re-frame."  At least to explain.  But a lot of that has been denial, blocking out, covering up. I am an American with much clinging rural culture.  But at night I dream of vast empty university halls.

Born in '39, I was too young to understand WWII.  I took in the patriotism, heroism, the fighter airplanes, the exhausted but determined men, the healing nurses.  This drama is what I understood to be the basis of life and worthiness.  After the war came a bit of relief and then the images of destruction and loss, the revelations about torture and mutilation.  The accounts of betrayal and deals between nations.  Those scandals went deep and vivid.  I suppose it's a form of PTSD that it comes back without being asked.  Most people shoved it down deep.

Call it depression, call it grief, call it lack of energy -- I'm not getting much done.  There's not much I can do for anyone else.  The idea of family is just historical now.  I'm not dead and don't intend suicide, but sometimes it would be good to just suspend existence for a while.