It may have been Friday evening, Little Vincento, now hiding in the catty-corner cabinet he likes, unexpectedly leapt onto my scarred shoulder, which, for those of you who recall, was the result of a hair fire in 2005 when I struck a match to light a last morning cigarette that might have conversely been my last morning had I not been such a shoddy housekeeper. He was all over me with rump bumps and head rubs and kisses. "Fuck that mom," he seemed to say, "you still love me and you're not giving me up, and you know it." Even if mother descends into dwindling resource insanity, well, then I do not know.
I was greatly influenced by the books of James Herriot growing up, which shows that sentimentality about animals has been a force in the Western Hemisphere for a long time, but also that men are surprisingly good chroniclers of feline stories. There were a number of such authors in the seventies, but amid this swirling empathy, and its decadent indulgence, there remains the issue of primate abuse to our domesticated species. Some of it by accident, as in my case with power chair mishaps, some of it due to mental defect, stress, aggression, which an observer might be able to find a shared identity, even if we do not cross those lines, but even I have lines, and we have had at least two instances of dogs set on fire in the Philadelphia region, and this is what I wrote in the comments section that did not deploy because I lack an FB account:
I can enter into a great deal of the triggers that motivate negative human behavior, but not this, and the sad fact is, animal torturers usually graduate into human torturers and murderers, and our justice system fails, in the first instance, to intervene early enough, with appropriate penalties and treatments. Not catching these perpetrators leaves us all in danger.
But, taking off my freelance cap, if these motherfuckers are caught, fry them. Deliberately doing this to an animal is beyond the pale, and when human wiring goes off like this, it needs to be eliminated.
Case closed.
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