Chernobyl

 So Joan had her knee surgery, finally. Now she's home recovering and I'm, you know, handling everything. We had two people running a household and we're suddenly down to one. Me. I'm doing my level best to keep everyone fed, medicated and reasonably content, including the cats. Especially the cats. The first couple of days, when Joan could do basically nothing, were really hard, but it's getting better now. She'll be tooling around here just fine in a week or so, I'm sure. She's still a little loopy from the pain meds, tho. I'm keeping an eye.

Meanwhile, back in April 1986, when I was a junior in high school, there came a news report from Peter Jennings. "There has been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union."

And everything just stopped.

At least, for me, everything stopped. Probably most people saw Peter's broadcast, said something like "Those crazy Russians," and then looked at the price of eggs. But for me, at least, time stopped. There had been a nuclear accident. A reactor was damaged. Radiation was spewing into the atmosphere. We were all going to die a horrible death.

See, if you grew up on Reagan propaganda, and I did, the Russians were going to bomb us all to oblivion and humanity was going to end in a great big nuclear fire. We had "earthquake drills" in Salt Lake City but we all knew they were really "nuclear bomb drills." We also knew that if there was a nuclear bomb, nothing could save us. If you missed the initial blast, the radiation would get you; your body would dissolve, you'd bleed out and you'd die screaming. That movie "The Day After" came out when I was fourteen. Nikita Khrushchev famously said "We will bury you!" to Western ambassadors in 1956, and virtually every Reagan speech about the Russians mentioned that quote at least once. (And Reagan made speeches a lot.) We had to destroy them before they destroyed us. Mutually assured destruction and 12,000 warheads was the only thing keeping any of us alive.

That was my life up to 1986. And now there was a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union. Radiation was being detected in Sweden and Finland. Whole swathes of Germany and Poland were keeping kids inside and telling people not to drink standing water. Sting recorded "I hope the Russians love their children too." I had nightmares. I was distracted during the day. Google didn't exist yet but if it had, I'd have been busily Googling "radiation poisoning symptoms" and checking the skin of everyone I knew.

My death-by-nuclear-radiation angst eventually faded. Probably the basketball team won some championship and my boyfriend kissed me and I failed a math test. And I did not, apparently, die of radiation poisoning, though an estimated 93 to 300,000 eventually did (no official figures are available). And the news moved on to other imminent causes of the demise of the human race, including acid rain, global warming and, eventually, the Trump Administration.

There have been lots of other ends of the world. A meteor was going to hit us in the late 1980s and cause a dinosaur-like mass extinction. A supernova was going to blow up and sterilize the planet with gamma rays. (That's still going to happen, but we now think in maybe 500,000 years or so.) And in between, there were plenty of Biblical end of time dates, including but not limited to the Heaven's Gate cultists, who dramatically "left their bodies" in San Diego to join Comet Hale-Bopp on its way through the solar system. (It was still a nice comet. Better than Halley's.)

There was also the Long Emergency, if you remember that. The Saudis, who at the time pumped much of the oil that we use to power our cars and heat our houses and make plastics and pharmaceuticals and, well, pretty much everything, were past the halfway point, and it was all downhill in the desert from there. Cheap oil was at an end. This meant there would be the energy crisis to beat all energy crises, we'd be reduced to living in grass huts and subsistence farming, and there would be no more video games. Of course, we've since found lots of other sources of oil and invented fracking, and although we will indeed run out of oil someday, it's probably not going to happen before we've cooked the planet's weather past the point of any homo sapiens being able to live on it. Yay for us.

I dunno if you guys remember this, either, but in 2020 this thing happened called the Covid-19 virus. It's like we're dealing with a collective amnesia about it now, but at the time, there was no treatment and no cure. People were dying like flies in New York and Pennsylvania. Bodies were being kept in refrigerated trucks because there was no room in the morgue. People were wearing masks to go out in public, and people were yelling at the people wearing masks because "masks don't help you anyway so you might as well take it off and get sick, like us", which I don't quite understand. I personally didn't leave the house for approximately a year and a half. The high point of my day was listening to the kids next door come out and play about noon, when they apparently finished their schoolwork. Just to be reminded that there were other people in the world.

On Max, the streaming channel, is a mind-blowing docuseries simply called "Chernobyl." It's mostly factual and somewhat also dramatized, so you have characters standing in for the ordinary people caught up in the whole thing. It starts with an explosion in the middle of the night, and a shockwave that rattles the nearby town of Pripyat. But, like any good drama, you don't actually find out what happened until the last episode, where there's high courtroom drama. The series does an amazing job of capturing the Soviet Union of the 1980s, with its dour utilitarian apartment blocks, its taciturn officials clinging to ideology in the face of all logic and its men, women and kids just trying to have a life while all that's going on. There's a little old lady in Episode Four, whom soldiers are trying to evacuate, who sort of sums it all up. She's 82 years old. She's lived on her small farm her entire life. She lost her brothers to the Great War, her sisters to Stalin's famine, and the whole time, soldiers with rifles showed up periodically telling her to move. Do they succeed in evacuating her? I'm not gonna say. But it's worth sitting through ten hours of Chernobyl for the last episode to find out what all happened to everybody. Really, check it out. You may be horrified and saddened but you won't be disappointed.

(And Reagan flattered himself. He thought it was because of him that the Soviet Union finally collapsed. It wasn't. It was Chernobyl. The cleanup cost an estimated $700 billion in late 1980s dollars. That's a little over $2 trillion in today's money. Hard to imagine any government, even of a country with 278 million people, shouldering that kind of cost AND all of their day to day expenses maintaining a population and paving streets and, you know, producing newspapers, and remaining intact. They spent all of their resources and borrowed to their limits and it still was not enough.)

Anyway, all that is one of the reasons that I'm not freaking out about everything going on with the current administration. Well, to be fair I don't watch the news, so I don't really know what's going on with the current administration. And my lack of knowledge does not seem to have done me any harm. I hear plenty. And any of you guys who ARE freaking out, please consider if part of it might be because you watch too damn much news. I mean, the guy doesn't get to live rent free in your head unless you decide to let him. I'm just saying.

But yeah. End of the world? I've seen it a few times. I'm still here.  

The Saga of Cricket the Cat

 So I think I forgot to tell you guys, what with Christmas and the ongoing catastrophe that is government, but we have a new cat (!). This makes a total of three. Her name is Cricket and she is, we think, about ten years old. Here she is.  That's the photographer in the background there, too.  

Cricket is, or was, my neighbor's cat. I have actually known her since she was a kitten. I was feeding several ferals, and she would come over to get snacks. Gradually, I began to notice that she was coming over all the time. At some point, I had become her sole source of food, apart from things she might catch (I saw her running like hell after a rat once, and that was one lucky rat because he was able to dodge into a hole at the last second. Unfortunately, the hole was in the side of my house. So had to get that fixed and rat removed.  So maybe unlucky rat).

Anyway, I kept feeding her. For years. She was always outside. A couple of times she came up to me during driving rainstorms and yowled. I would grab her and put her in the laundry room overnight, then let her out in the morning when the rain stopped. When the nights got very cold, I did the same thing. I could not figure out what was going on next door, but I can speculate.

A. They have young kids. I think their youngest at the time was about three. Young kids and cats rarely get along unless they are properly supervised. Young kids tend to want to grab cats, especially their tails, and cats are less than happy about being grabbed most of the time. Especially their tails. B. They got a dog. So what I'm speculating here is that the cat probably got grabbed once too often and swiped at one of the kids, or didn't get along with the dog, or both. So from then on she had to live outside, and at some point they even quit feeding her.

(I don't, by the way, want you to think that my neighbors are horrible people. They're not. They manage four kids in a house the same size as ours and their kids are not only clean and well-cared for but, that rare thing, happy. I always hear them laughing and playing. They are from a different culture and they have different views of pets. Which is unfortunate for Cricket, but her story ends happily. Read on.)

About six months or so ago, Cricket disappeared (!). She was like clockwork every morning at seven, but I didn't see her for three days. I went out looking for her, calling and checking under bushes and around the house. (Cats usually don't go far.) I also went over to the neighbors' and asked them if they'd seen their cat. (The kid who answered the door said, "What cat?")

I did not find her, but the next morning she finally turned up, so she must have heard me calling. She was obviously sick. I packed her up and took her to the vet. She had an infection, which they treated with antibiotics, and a fever. In doing the blood work, though, the vet discovered that she had feline leukemia.

Feline leukemia, in case you did not know this, is a disease that can kill you but usually doesn't. It makes you more prone to infections and other problems, can cause kidney failure, and you really don't want it, but once you have it, you can pretty much live a slightly shorter span of years than a regular cat, as long as you have good nutrition and good veterinary care. It is also, annoyingly, a totally preventable condition that a simple vaccine would have fixed. Now, I know Cricket is spayed. If she weren't I'd have Kitten City every summer and I don't. So she's clearly been to a vet at least once before me. Why she wasn't vaccinated at the time, I have no idea.

The vet said that, categorically, she should no longer be outside. Any other cats that encountered her, and more importantly got bitten by her in a fight, were in danger of also getting feline leukemia if they were not vaccinated. Here I had a problem, because my big male, Grayson, has an Issue with Cricket. It started some years ago when he saw her and managed to get out of the house. He chased her, they fought and she handed his ass to him. He ended up at the vet getting some stitches. So obviously he did not want her in the house with him. (Though, ironically, her feline leukemia was really not a problem because both my guys are vaccinated. This reduces the risk of transmission down to almost nothing, though Grayson and Artemis would need to get regular boosters forever.)

So I began putting her in the laundry room every night and started a campaign to get her into a shelter or a foster home. This was not easy because A. she is not young and B. she has feline leukemia. I wrote to shelters and cat rescues all over the state. I quickly narrowed down the number of rescue outfits to about seven, all outside of Dallas, because they were the only ones that took feline leukemia positive cats. All of them were full. I wrote to them again a few months later. All of them were full. I guess I could have kept doing this until the end of recorded time, but two things happened while that was going on.

The first thing was that, despite logic to the contrary and several Big Discussions with Joan, I got emotionally involved with Cricket. She is a sweet cat. She likes people, likes to be petted and held, and as long as you treat her gently and don't mess with her tail, she loves you. She was also, you gotta admit, in a very bad situation through really no fault of her own. And also potentially sick. I have a long and sordid track record of standing up for people and other beings that are being treated unfairly.

The second thing was that Cricket disappeared again. She didn't show up for her evening feed and to be put in the laundry room one night, and it happened to be the night we had a big storm.

I barely slept. If she disappeared again and never came back, I didn't know what I would do. I was frantic the first time. I could NOT handle it happening a second time. Fortunately, she was there in the morning. She was also soaking wet. And that was it. I grabbed her, put her back in the laundry room, and just didn't let her out again.

After which Joan and I had a big fight. Because, you know, Joan woke up in the morning and we had a third cat, after I'd specifically been trying to find another solution all this time. (I said "I'm sorry" a lot.) Joan was most concerned about maintaining harmony in the household, especially considering our big male. (Like a Muslim husband, it is my job to maintain harmony in the household. Says so in the Koran.) So it was up to me to find some way to integrate the cats.

Right around this time, I finally got an intake application from one of the cat rescues.

I deleted it.

And I took Cricket back to the vet, got her other shots, got her microchipped, and she's our cat now. In essence, I stole my neighbors' cat. Though, if they were looking for her, they could have come over here and asked, since they know I was looking for her before. Or put up posters or something.

Integration has been challenging. At first we kept Cricket in the laundry room with the door closed and the cat door (conveniently located in the door between the laundry room and the kitchen) also closed. Then I began opening the door halfway, so that the cats could see each other but not touch. As of now I've pretty much removed the locking panel. Cricket can come and go as she pleases, but she still spends most of her time down there. She comes up into the kitchen when Grayson is not around, because he tends to growl and hiss at her, though he does it from ten feet away. Grayson is all hat and no cattle.

(Artemis, my diva kitty, oddly does not care. She's not getting all buddy-buddy with Cricket or anything, but for the most part she's like, "Eh. Another cat. Whatevs.")

One time, Grayson attacked the cat door after Cricket went back through it. After he'd swatted it with his paw a half-dozen times, he turned around to leave the kitchen. Cricket popped back through the cat door, SWATTED HIM ON THE BACKSIDE, and disappeared through the cat door again. Grayson spun around, didn't see her, and looked wildly around for several seconds, his fur puffed up like a punk rock Mohawk. I laughed for about ten minutes. Cricket is not putting up with his shit.

Another time, quite recently, I picked Cricket up to give her a little skritch to the head and she FELL ASLEEP on me. She was purring, and the purr got softer and softer, and then she went all boneless. She probably slept that way, with her head on my shoulder, for half an hour. I had no idea she trusted me that much. I mean, we barely know each other.

So, anyway, we have a third cat. It was not planned, it just happened. This has to be the max, though. We're outnumbered now. And if we have to evacuate in a hurry, one of us is gonna have to carry two cats.

Guess that'd be me. Says so in the Koran.

One Of Those Blog Posts We Don't Share With Family Members

So guys, my dad has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He is 86, so he's had a great run, and it seems to be mild right now, but it's not like it's going to get any better. I was just out there and I'm pleased to report that he doesn't seem to be unhappy. He just seems to kind of not-be-there sometimes. He was an engineer in his former life, so for him to space out once in a while and be totally unaware of what's happening is not new. It's just different now, and maybe happening more often? It's hard to tell.

 My sis thinks things have been off with him for a couple of years, but it takes ages and lots of scans to get diagnosed with this thing, and even then they apparently don't know it for sure unless they do an autopsy after you die. Scans can pick up likely signs of amyloid plaques but you can't confirm them without going in there and looking at them, and there's some controversy about whether or not amyloid plaques even cause Alzheimer's symptoms or if they just tend to co-occur, but I don't wanna get into all that right now. Anyway, he's been off for a couple of years and now we know why.

Obviously I need to be out there as much as possible while he still recognizes me. I was supposed to go over Christmas but both my parents got Covid, so I had to cancel. I finally got there in mid-January and I'm still reeling from this trip.

Strap on your seat belts. This is a long story and it gets kinda rocky.

The main problem with my dad having Alzheimer's, besides the fact that he sometimes forgets to put on clothes (!), is my mother. Mom has the same severe anxiety disorder that I do, and possibly also ADHD (which she thinks is made up), but she never got treatment like I did. What she does instead is try to control everything and everyone around her so she can have some sense of certainty, and this hasn't gotten better in the face of my dad's diagnosis. For the record, this drives everyone around her figuratively and literally crazy, and people, if you need mental health help and you don't want to get it for you, please oh please do it for the people who have to be around you. Crazy people make sane people crazy. Okay? Okay.

My mom won't entertain any kind of long term plan. There's no point in asking her about what she wants in possible assisted living for my dad, or memory care if that eventually warrants, because as far as she's concerned, he's fine and he's not going to get any worse and they can't afford that, anyway. (They totally can.) I've got her going to an Alzheimer's support group for spouses, which is a big step in the right direction. My sis is also trying to get her to accept more help around the house so they can stay in it, but that's been an uphill battle all the way.

Also, I don't trust her. Not that she'd deliberately neglect my dad or abuse him, but see above re: he's fine and he's not going to get any worse. Which means that she may not wanna do what needs doing, get him treatment he needs, or otherwise do anything that disturbs her view of the universe. She was also emotionally abusive to us when we were kids, and any illness that impacts the brain is gonna impact emotions and I don't want her brushing him aside if he gets sad or angry or any of the fallout that you would normally get when somebody slaps you with a life-changing and in this case, life-ending diagnosis (eventually).

Now, my sister's there, and she's boots on the ground, so I'm deferring to her and doing what she asks me to do. But she doesn't live with him every day and may not see what's going on with him. My dad was born just before WWII and Nothing Bothers Him so it's not like he'd say he's unhappy, he's scared or anything like that. You kind of have to intuit this from his behavior, like you would a cat. (Too bad people don't have tails. "Hey, Dad's tail is down, I'm gonna go find out what's going on.")

Which brings us to this trip. First thing, Mom totally overscheduled us. I didn't push back on this nearly as hard as I should have, and that's on me, but being as I wanted to be with my dad, I was kind of stuck with whatever the plans were. Now I know better; I need one afternoon where I can lie in my hotel room, watch junk TV and munch on Gummi Bears. I'm autistic, baby, and peopling wears me out. Except my dad. The Australian Open was on and so all he wanted to do was watch tennis. I sat there with him and watched tennis for three hours and that was the best part of the trip. I still know nothing about tennis but much witty banter happened (between moments of spacing out).

The second thing is the emotional abuse. Several things have just kind of come to a head as far as that goes. It's hard to capture all the nuances of this in a single sentence but my sister and I were treated like we were little robots, and if my mom inputted the right data, we would turn around and cough up the right result without question or argument.

In my case, I hit puberty at about 100 mph when I was nine years old and began growing breasts, hips, the whole nine yards. I also shot up about six inches and made my full adult height before I was thirteen. My mom and apparently also the pediatrician interpreted this as "shes' getting fat." My mom walked into my room and asked me (again, I was nine) if I wanted to go on Weight Watchers or Nutri-system. I'm sure lots of nine-year-olds everywhere are able to determine the pros and cons of each and arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. Anyway, from then until I moved out it was forced dieting, forced exercise, "You can't have that, you're too fat" said in front of other people. "We're not going to visit your cousins if you're going to eat all the junk food in the house so you have to promise me you won't before we go" said in front of other people. I could go on, but I won't. The result was that I had an out of control eating disorder from then until about ten years ago, when I looked at all the effort and wasted time that had gone into trying to lose weight and decided I Just Wasn't Going To Do It Anymore. 

Imagine my surprise when we watched some home videos and I saw myself at nine and I was -- not a fat kid. Fast forward to some more videos from when I was about 20 and -- I wasn't fat then either. If I'd stopped trying to lose weight when I was 180 lbs I'd probably still be there instead of way, way past it, but hey, this entire society tries to convince women they need to be so skinny that they disappear, and I know what I know now. (Part of what I know: Only between 5-15% of the population can lose more than 10% of body weight and keep it off for 5 years. Hundreds of studies from the last hundred years show that the rest of us gain it all back, usually with more, regardless of method used or the amount of time it takes to lose the weight -- yes, even bariatric surgery. Most of us then go on another diet or "lifestyle change" or "exercise plan" and do it over and over again, causing measurable heart damage each and every time, which probably accounts for the heart disease that people with "ob*sity" supposedly have because they are fat.) When you can't fix it, at least you can try not to do any more harm. And I can't fix it. Still trying to get my doc to accept this but I think we'll get there.

My sister, though. We had a Big Talk about this. My sister learned through watching my parents yell at me that she had to not do what I was doing, ie, having normal emotional reactions to things that a kid would have. There's a series of pictures of a photo shoot when I was maybe seven and my sis would have been four, maybe a youngish five. She remembers this photo shoot very cleary. I got upset about some of the poses they were trying to push me into and started to cry. Which of course made my makeup run and so my dad started yelling at me, which made me cry even harder. "So that's why you look red and blotchy in those pictures, because Mom insisted on going through with the photo shoot anyway," my sister told me. "And I learned I have to never ever cry."

Fast forward a few years to when my sister was seven. She was over at a friend's house and the dad came home from work and started a domestic abuse thing with the mom. She and her friend ran upstairs and hid in the closet until he stomped out again. While they were hiding in the closet, my sister decided not to tell my parents about this because she wasn't supposed to ever get scared.

That second story in particular hit me like a motherfucking Cat Five hurricane. I was furious for days, weeks; now I'm not furious anymore but I'm just totally, inexpressibly sad. And I feel like I didn't do my job. I was the big sis and I was supposed to protect her from things like that. I mean, logically, I was seven in the first incident and maybe nine in the second, and it's not like I didn't have my own shit going on. But logic often has nothing to do with the way people feel. Kind of like nine-year-olds who are told they have to lose weight because they are too fat and therefore they can't have birthday cake at the party like everyone else don't always smile cheerfully and say "Okay, Mom." That's just not how it works sometimes.

I mean, I knew this shit was happening to me, and if it was happening to me it had to be happening to my sister, but on some level I guess I thought she missed the worst of it. But she didn't. What happened to me is just easier to categorize and put a name to. My sister dealt with ceaseless, grinding attempts to turn her into a machine, which must have manifested in so many ways I'm not sure I can count them all. One of the big ones, though, is that she's sneaky. Not in a mean way, but she'll just not tell you stuff if she thinks you're not going to like it. She and her husband moved to South Korea, for example, to teach for a year, and she literally told my parents after all the contracts were signed, the airline tickets were purchased and there was no turning back without a huge lawsuit. My mom still freaked out six ways to Sunday. More so because she couldn't control it. (South Korea is, by the way, a First World country with literally the best health care system on the entire planet.)

So that's where I'm at. I'm sad, I'm worried and really, I'm not sure how to even begin to deal with all this. Yes, I have a therapist. I've had a therapist off and on most of my life and some have been bad and some have been good but all of them have helped me learn something. This one has helped me figure out that a big part of this monumental chip I have on my shoulder is about being pushed around and forced into things the way I was. I constantly expect that people are going to want me to be and act in ways that are convenient to them without any thought to what that means for me, and the only way not to do that is to explode in rage at them when they try it. Shockingly, this is not necessary. I am an adult and "No" is a complete sentence and I don't have to consent to certain cancer screenings or get into big political discussions or go out to bars on Friday nights. I have Options.

Except with my dad. The only option I have there is whether or not to show up.