war is heck

There is a four foot railing around the balcony with the posts close enough that they can’t get their heads through them, though they do get their heads partway through and stare, as if fascinated by what goes on below. I don’t know how much they see of it because cats are very near-sighted. Of course so am I, but even without my glasses I can tell that it is pretty far down.

A strange thing is that falling from great heights doesn’t necessarily kill a cat. They have that agility you know, and I think they do that spread eagle thing like flying squirrels, and there are stories about cats jumping out of burning buildings and living to purr about it. Well maybe not purr so much, they do sustain injuries, so it’s not the sort of thing a cat might do if it were bored.

But sometimes a foolish bird will fly down from the railing to the floor where there are morning glory seeds to eat, and that’s where my former cat, Annie, nailed a couple birds. Once I had left the door propped open so that kitty could come and go as she pleased, and a bird flew in. It had the whole outdoors full of food and adventure and romantic love and it flew into my apartment where death by tooth and claw dwelt. She didn’t notice him at first, and so I ran around trying to shoo him out before she noticed him, but trying to not make such a ruckus as to rouse her. But you know how it is trying to get a bird do what’s good for it, like telling those kids uplifting stories. 

Eventually she took notice and then the two of us were chasing the bird through the house. Well you know who got to the bird first, but then she got into that torture thing which allowed me to swoop him up and carry him outside, and when I opened my cupped hands he flew away, born free, and with a hell of a tale to tell the kiddies and the wife when he got back.

But these cats, even when the bird is on the ground, they stalk to a certain point and then they stop, like they’ve run out of instructions. I think it’s like those internet photos you see with the cat cuddled up to the mouse or bird, they just never learned that they were supposed to kill it.

I think what it was with our ancestors is some were easy going and some were hotheads, and the hotheads killed the easy going guys so only the hothead genes remained in the pool. Of course you can’t have all hotheads because you are fighting all the time and nobody is hunting or gathering, so that hotheaded thing got watered down, and now we have what we have.

The thing is I can see fighting for myself, or my family, or the people I hang with, or the people I see on an everyday basis or even now and then, but complete strangers fighting other complete strangers seems kind of odd, and yet we do it all the time, well not all the time, and not necessarily we. Well war has gotten weird of late, in the sense that it’s not really nation against nation anymore.

I don’t think we hated the Vietnamese, or the Koreans, so I think we have to go back to WW II. We did hate the Germans, and the Japanese, and I am pretty sure that they hated us back. So you didn’t just have the guys in the trenches glaring at each other, you had the guys on the home front. You had like the barber who formerly just cut hair for the cash, but was now cutting hair so that people could look better and feel better and fight the Germans and the Japanese even harder, everybody was a part of the war effort.

And speaking of people being happy, I’ll bet that the barber started feeling better when we at last rolled the Germans back, and I’ll bet he got drunk and kissed strange women when we won the war. But the next day when he opened the shop he must have realized that he was no longer cutting hair to beat the Germans, he was just cutting hair for money. Must have been a bit of a letdown.