This one was a bit of a shock. When we left town a week ago, he seemed to be perfectly fine. A couple days ago when I checked in, he was hanging out at the neighbor’s house, where he’d maintained a second residence for more than a decade.
Then yesterday morning said neighbor texted that he was not well and suggested taking him to the animal hospital. By midafternoon, after a couple of increasingly dire phone calls with the vet, we were discussing Youth in Asia. And that was the end of that. It was a stern reminder that the Stark Fist of Removal can come for anyone at any time.
Sid was a true free spirit who would not tolerate being cooped up for more than an hour or two at a time. He also had the kind of freedom that comes from being — how to say this nicely? — a cat of not a lot of brain. Worry never creased his brow in all his days; he slept less like a cat than like a human child: deep and hard and with an angelic glow. He was handsome and charming and he knew it. He was a good boy.
His departure means that our formerly four-cat household is down to a single feline resident. I will say no more about her, lest the wrathful gods be watching. Hug some creature that you love today.
Today, for whatever reason, I was inspired to go on at great length. Needed to get something out of my system. If you’re pressed for time, just skip to the end; that was the whole point anyway.
The Times obituaries were a particularly rich vein this week, featuring several examples of my favorite kind of obit: that of a person who lived a full, rich, complex life and was much older than me when they died.
One of them was “Peter Fenwick, 89, Leading Expert of Near-Death Experiences.” After appearing on a BBC documentary about life after death, he became a sort of clearing house for people’s stories on the subject, and wrote several books about it.
He was a believer. “Describing it as a hallucination does nothing to explain the underlying mechanism and leaves many of the same old questions unanswered,” he said. “Why should everyone have more or less the same hallucination in the same circumstances? And why should it seem so real?”
I have no good answer for that and my official position remains agnostic, though I’ve never personally experienced anything to make me think consciousness exists separate from the body. My dad seemed like exactly the sort of person who would have things he wanted to say from beyond the grave, and I haven’t heard a peep from him. But maybe Peter Fenwick will come back and clear it all up for us… certainly he is qualified for the job.
Unlike Pete Hegseth, who as I write this is being grilled by the Senate about his nomination for Secretary of Defense, a position for which he is pathetically unqualified along numerous dimensions. I can’t watch it because, you know, sausage being made; but I’m glad to see there’s going to be some public airing of all his issues, rather than the backroom rubber-stamp That Fucking Guy wanted.
His most recent boudoir photo. A handsome boy to the end.
There will now be a brief mourning break following the departure of my cat Johnny, who at 19 was roughly the same age as this blog, for the Western lands. This is sad, not tragic — he had a good long run and enjoyed his time. But he will be missed. I’ll be back with more of my nonsense in a day or two.
Of all the obituaries I’ve read lately, this one — of conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell — is the craziest. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, though it is full of details that will make you sit up and go “What?!?” It’s actually pretty inspiring that they were able to lead real lives despite all they had to deal with. Makes my bitching about how the wifi is slow today seem pretty dumb. Read the whole thing — it’s worth it, trust me.
Another recent departure was this one:
After he was paralyzed by polio at age 6, Paul Alexander was confined for much of his life to a yellow iron lung that kept him alive. He was not expected to survive after that diagnosis, and even when he beat those odds, his life was mostly constrained by a machine in which he could not move.
But the toll of living in an iron lung with polio did not stop Mr. Alexander from going to college, getting a law degree and practicing law for more than 30 years. As a boy, he taught himself to breathe for minutes and later hours at a time, but he had to use the machine every day of his life.
He died on Monday at 78, according to a statement by his brother, Philip Alexander, on social media.
He was one of the last few people in the United States living inside an iron lung, which works by rhythmically changing air pressure in the chamber to force air in and out of the lungs. And in the final weeks of his life, he drew a following on TikTok by sharing what it had been like to live so long with the help of an antiquated machine.
His story, too, is a wild one full of twists and turns, and similarly uplifting. Here’s a link to the whole thing.
Upon hearing that O.J. Simpson had died, my first thought was: And he never found the real killers!
The O.J. saga was a tragedy, of course. It was also a comedy. It was a bizarre, enthralling spectacle with so many surprising twists that there was no way to keep track of them all.
For instance, I knew that O.J. had written a book called If I Did It, where he described how he would have killed Nicole and Ron, if he had. (He did.) I grabbed a copy out of a free library box a couple years ago, and though I’ve never read it and don’t intend to, I hold on to it as a talisman of… well, what?…. weirdness, I guess.
I knew but had forgotten that around that same time, he gave an interview where he more or less confessed, saying that he drove to Nicole’s house with a knife in the passenger seat and doesn’t remember what happened after that. I actually find this somewhat plausible — maybe O.J. committed the murders in a fugue state and was surprised afterwards to find out he had done it. And maybe he looked so surprised when the glove didn’t fit because he was thinking, wait, could it be I didn’t do it after all?
Well, it’s a theory.
But I never knew until this week that in 2006 O.J. starred in a reality prank show called Juiced. This is so grotesque on so many levels that I don’t know where to start, except to say that if he had played a prank on me, I would have run for my life.
But apparently I’m in the minority. In the This American Life segment where I learned about Juiced, Harmon Leon — who was O.J.’s sidekick on the show — marvels at how much people seem to love The Juice despite everything. (It was Leon who provided the title of this piece.)
I think all of you dear, precious few who read this thing are fellow geezers, so all of you have probably already had the dreaded Procedure I underwent this week. On the whole, well… could have been worse. Everything seems to be hunky-dory down there and I got to see a picture of my colon, which looks not unlike the famous picture of the black hole.
Anyway… one of the reliable pleasures of my geezer life these days is reading the obituaries in the print edition of the Sunday Times. A well-written obit is a thing of beauty, a capsule biography that can be absorbed over coffee… unlike that fking Einstein book that I bought so casually and has been mocking me for the last decade.
This week there were four. The two on the first page were for relatively young people, starting with…
Buddy Duress, a small-time heroin dealer living on the streets of the Upper West Side who became a sensation in the New York film scene as an actor and muse for the movies “Heaven Knows What” and “Good Time,” which helped launch the careers of the filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie, died in November at his home in Astoria, Queens. He was 38. The death, which was disclosed only in late February, was from cardiac arrest caused by a “drug cocktail” including heroin, his brother, Christopher Stathis, said.
Buddy Duress — one hell of a moniker, that — was a stage name, one he adopted while making the first Safdie Brothers movie. His real one was Michael Constantine Stathis, born May 21, 1985. He had a troubled life and he had his reasons. In the article his lawyer is quoted thusly:
I represent so many people with the kinds of problems he had, and they always have excuses. Michael never did. It seems paradoxical to say that an admitted and convicted thief was honest, but he was honest. He was honest about who he was.
Duress/Stathis’s obit takes up about 9/16 of a page. Below the fold is this one:
