Common Mountain

I suppose I should let you know that I have no reason to hold myself up as anything but an abject failure. I’ve tried to be an artist all my life and the results, a few nice words of encouragement aside, have been disastrous.  My income has been dramatically lowered from what it would have been if I’d continued on a more normal path, and nothing I’ve ever done, be it musically or as a writer, has led to any real payday.

People like me, who are still trying to make it after decades on the ropes, often use some click-bait like the title for this piece to get people to read and then comment on their work.  I’m sure many see comments, and threads on their Twitter feed, as justification for their efforts. See world, they are reading me!

Now I’d dearly like people to read my work. That is why I do this after all, other than my somewhat harebrained enjoyment during the act of writing, and my extreme enjoyment if I create something funny. But your comments? Why would I care what you think in a space where you don’t have to use your real name? Truth be told, I wouldn’t care about your comments if they came with your name, address, birth date, and social security number.  I’ve never left a comment myself for a similar reason. If I like what you write, say, sing, or play, perhaps I’ll send a family member or friend the link, and that’s it. I don’t need to let everyone know my supposedly important insights and, truly, no one cares what I think.

For those trolls who believe their snarky and sometimes hurtful responses are so funny, I give you an especially emphatic fuck off. You people deserve a place in hell where your eyes are kept open and you must comment for eternity on everything, but in under 25 characters.

Perhaps comments are a way of thinking you belong to a community. That of course, is bullshit. Being part of a community is actively engaging in dialogue, being able to admit you’re wrong when a superior argument comes along, or someone gives you supportable facts you didn’t know. Commenting merely shows the world how smart you are and often, how dumb others are in turn. Like this writer perhaps.

So go on, comment away. Indicate how ancient and out of touch I am for this anti-comment outlook. Just understand I will never, ever, look at what you say. If you want, you can email me at commonmount@gmail.com with some interesting take. Just don’t expect me to comment on your comment.

I’m proud of the young men in the NBA willing to risk money to call out the injustice of America’s white supremacist policy that allows people of color to get shot for a taillight being out on a traffic stop, or for just doing what police say to do, or, as in Wisconsin, for being a good Samaritan and breaking up a fight. These extremely hard-working athletes are putting their livelihoods on the line, but more than that they are saying that we have a voice and we will not be ignored. They represent the best this country has to offer.

Remember these are people who’ve worked extremely hard to enjoy the fruits of a very short career. The time they really shine is right now. In the playoffs. That’s where the endorsements come. Forget the outliers like Lebron James who’ve already made gazilllions, how about the Fred Van Vleets of the world who need this kind of exposure to get a lucrative sneaker deal?  They could be risking untold millions if they cancel the season in protest, and injured next year. Their ability to make generational change money could go down the drain.

Don’t think of them as pampered athletes, think of them as smart, hard working young men who are fed up and are stepping up. The same kudus goes to the WNBA players who are using their voice to say enough is enough. I also applaud the soccer players, the baseball players and any other young athlete willing to take a stand for racial justice.

But these young men and woman can’t touch the dark heart of racial subjugation in America. Systemic racism in America, built on the racial justification of slavery and then the brutal Nazi-like Jim Crow that pervaded the south but set the tone for all of white society in America, is built on white people ignoring its consequences. The core problem to addressing racial inequality in America, which everyone sees on a daily basis, stems from the inability of white people to discuss the problems of racism without seeing it through a lens of their hurt feelings. Systemic racism has for generations both denied access to the good life to people of color (grand scale here, not individuals) through redlining, through crumbling, poorly funded schools in poor neighborhoods that both degrade and fail young children of color, through denial of access to good paying jobs open to whites with and without college degrees. And for generations white people have looked away, or if we’ve looked at all have tisked and said things should change and then looked away again.

It’s not that every white person is racist. It’s that our economic system and our system of governance are both built on racist ideology that we have not taken part in dismantling. When I discuss this with conservatives and liberals they often get angry, as if I am calling them out personally. Yes, racism is both personal and societal. But the personal has limited power, ugly as it is. Until white folks are able to look at how white America’s implicit embrace of the systemic subjugation of people of color has poisoned the dialogue, we’re going to be like the rat on the wheel. We’ll have more killings of unarmed men and woman whose only fault was skin tone, we’ll have more of the dismal generational skin-tone-based poverty that destroys community cohesion.

The answers to our problems are pretty clear, invest in schools and job training, invest in development in communities of color, invest in changing our hearts so we look closely at the problem without trying to get out of that by saying “I’m not a racist.” Until we look at the problem and address it through changes in laws and the distribution of funds, until we appreciate the sacrifice of athletes who want to make a stand, until we get to a place where a black person sees a cop car and is not worried that they might die in a traffic stop, than we are all implicitly (and, for too many outright haters like Donald Trump, explicitly) part of the racist problem at the heart of the American Dream.

I operate a retirement center for one persnickety resident, my cat. We named him Pandemonium as a kitten because he was tons of both fun and trouble. Long, strong and large enough to weigh upwards of 17 ponds before he slimmed down to a fighting weight of 11, Pandy has become a wise 15-year-old cat who has arthritis and kidney trouble. It’s he who graces my blog because, damn, I love him.

A digression, Pandy refuses to acknowledge his name in short or long form but does respond to the generic “kitty-cat” quite well. By quite well, I mean he will acknowledge that someone is calling him and, if he thinks it’s in his best interest (either food or getting some behind the ears rubbing) he will even come on over and say hello. I think I’ve called him Pandemonium twice in the last decade, both times when annoyed at him, like a displeased father calling a child by their full name, including middle.

A lifelong indoor/outdoor cat and inveterate mouser, Pandy now relies on pain meds to get through the day with just a serious limp. He still loves sleeping under my flowers, or going on walkabouts on our half acre property, as well as the lands immediately adjoining ours. And, since cats want to be cats till they die, limp and all he’s still chasing after prey. Quite spectacularly, he still gets about one kill a week, mice, rabbits, voles and other small prey.

These days I try to monitor his movements, but there is really no protecting an independent minded cat when they’re outside. Not without costly surveillance technology. I thought of a collar cam but besides the cost, Pandy’s never worn a collar. If you’re tisking about his lack of a collar, don’t. I’ve asked Pandy if he wants one and the answer is a definitive “No.”

Pandy’s such a good mouse that he’s kept our old farmhouse, with its myriad small inlets perfect for rodent invasions, fairly free of rodents since he arrived here full of love and mischief in equal measure.

One type of kill is exceedingly rare, perhaps twice in fifteen years my cat has killed a bird. And I fed the birds for about ten years too. Pandy would stay in the bushes near the feeder, but still had little success hunting them. I’ve asked others living with cat hunters and they report similar results. This makes sense. With the advent of farming and larges scale stored food, rodents became more of a problem which attracted that segment of the hunting population that already lived on rodents, cats. Cats are literally built for killing mice and other small mammals. Humans are nothing if not adaptable, so we adapted to cats. Over the course of their time with us, cats unlike dogs, never really became domesticated. There’s evidence for this in cat DNA compared to wild sources and dog DNA compared to wolves. There’s much more divergence between domesticated dogs and wolves than between cats and their baseline stock in old Eygpt and the Fertile Crescent. Interestingly the biggest divergence is in their coats. We like cute killers with a tabby coat.

For something like half their tangled relationship with people, which only goes back about 10,000 years compared to dogs 40,000, cats kept to themselves. They stayed in the shadows and ate the rodents who were also busy becoming part of our messy story.

And now we get to my pet peeve (forgive the pun). There’s shitty science out there claiming that cats kill an enormous number of birds. I’ve had cats for about 45 years and not one has killed birds with any regularity. Pseudo-science articles using highly questionable data sources (like the remembrances of pet owners in one study in New Zealand) have come up what every cat owner has suspected is wildly exaggerated data about cat bird kills. I’ve had bird lovers tell me I’m akin to a mass murderer for disregarding my four-legged avian menace. When I ask them if they’ve ever seen evidence of cats successfully killing large amounts of birds, I’ve never heard people say yes.

This is not to say a cat wouldn’t want to kill a little bird. I’ve already admitted their cute little barely domesticated killers. Birds probably taste like chicken, which Pandy loves. Perhaps a small percentage of cats achieve a high success rate killing birds. The majority of kitties just aren’t built for success at that endeavor. But the idea that scientific journals could deny the evidence in front of their face and publish articles proclaiming outdoor house cats are participating in avian ethnic cleansing seems absurd. Consider this, where outdoor cats exist in their millions, suburbia, is where birds are doing spectacularly well. The argument goes that cats are outrageous killers who without human intervention, i.e. imprisoning all cats inside, will decimate cute little bird populations. But in the Suburban landscape, the biggest test scenario for this theory, the place where cats and birds exist together in large numbers, birds are doing extremely well. When real world facts contradict a flawed analysis, in order for the facts to be ignored someone’s been sipping the cool aid laced with stubbornness.

This blog post https://outthefrontdoor.com/2015/09/17/bird-conservationists-whats-wrong-with-this-picture/ does a nice job pointing out the holes in the cat killer idea and has links to other pro-cat information. But all you really need is to look at a cat. They may try to kill birds, but birds have one significant advantage. Cats can only fall when they try to fly.