Thursday, October 03, 2002

In this my week of sloth, I turn to the one subject that can always consume me when food is not in immediate evidence – my pets.  It’s true, my faithful readers; though I have tried to keep it a secret, the sad reality is that I am an animal lover, one of those drooling baby-talking babbling ones that utterly bores everyone she meets.  And during this fallow culinary period, we’ve been having a pet problem.  A Cooper problem, to be specific. Cooper is a handsome gray long-haired cat that we found as a tiny kitten in the coyote-ridden wilds of New Mexico when we were first married.  I named him Cooper because I thought of him as a quietly courageous type.  Not so much, as it turns out.  I should have named him Lorre.  Gibbering Coward for short.  His few feral days or weeks have left poor Cooper marked, I’m afraid.  Strangers send him running for the hills, or under the box springs, as the case may be.  And the move very nearly reduced him to utter imbecility.  He did for awhile seem to be recovering from his shock, though.  Coming out of hiding, ceasing the constant yowling, occasionally even purring or torturing the other cats as in days of old.  Until he discovered The Ceiling. Imagine if you will an apartment over a Greek diner in Long Island City.  Imagine that the owners of this apartment were the type to paint coins and hairballs into the floor when they did touch-ups.  Imagine that when they decided to install a drop ceiling of acoustical tiles rather than fix their rotted tin roof and get the electrical wiring up to code, they had a problem with the upper cabinets in the closet which reached to the ceiling, and that to solve this problem they sawed the cabinet doors in half, leaving them hanging precariously by one hinge.  If you were to open these doors, you would find yourself looking at a scary but much needed storage place, which you, as the sort of person who would not paint a floor before sweeping away the hairballs, would commence to clean out.  What you might not notice as you are hacking and coughing and sweeping away decades of crap, is that behind your head, above the level of the shitty acoustical tiles, there is a crawlspace over the entire apartment, a tangled thicket of dust and wiring and who knows what else.  You might not notice this, but Cooper, super hidey-hole snooper, would.  It took us awhile to figure out where he’d gone.  For a time we thought we had a serious rodent problem, though the meowing relieved us of that notion quickly.  For a full day he stayed up there, occasionally yowling when he got lost, the padding of his feet clearly audible.  Eventually he came down of his own accord.  So, no problem.  We shut the cabinet doors, end of story.  Only – hoo hoo – the cabinet doors, one-hinged and shittily painted as they are – have ceased to function.  So no problem, we’ll shut the doors in which the cabinets are.  Only – hoo ha – those shittily painted, poorly fitting doors turn out to be Cooper’s play to open.  So our cat now has taken control of the ceiling. The best part is when he comes down in the middle of the night and crawls into bed with us.  Mmm, rat shit and insulation…. Last night we ate at Bice, a very nice, old-school Italian restaurant in midtown with a seriously bridge-and-tunnel crowd and an extremely conscientious bathroom attendant.  I ate champagne and asparagus risotto with lamb ragout, which was some seriously good shit.  Very layered and clear tasting, and something I think could be recreated at home fairly easily.  Oh and we saw Greg Kinnear.  What is it with movie star sightings, they always look so utterly normal, like someone you’ve known all your life, but simultaneously immediately, obviously different from anyone else in the room.  If only it were so for secretaries at government agencies.  Alas, not so.  Speaking of, it’s about that time again.  Fuck. 8:18:35 AM    comment []