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Bruce (Who’s Healing Who And Who’s Refusing Healing?)

filed in bts, the journey
tagged Bruce, cats, crossed signals, intimacy

The fires still rage. The Altadena fire, which is being largely ignored by comparison, is now threatening all of north Pasadena. The Palisades fire, which has everyone stupidly pointing fingers, is now threatening the nearby neighborhood of Brentwood. As of this writing, everyone can agree that the situation is not much better right now than it has been, and all the meteorologists, and all the fire captains, and all the hardworking people who have to suffer an investigation because somebody created a billionaire culture and it led to this——all those people agree that, starting tomorrow, Tuesday, we may be truly fucked. Here’s how I put it to Zsolt yesterday:

Day whatever. 4? 5? The fires continue. They’re trying to stop the Palisades fire from taking out Brentwood now. We’re talking historic devastation. Unimaginable. Everybody’s ignoring the Eaton fire, which continues to destroy Altadena completely and really threaten all of North Pasadena. Nothing is better than 11% contained at this point. Day after tomorrow winds come in that nobody can stop and everybody agrees may make things tremendously worse. I’m in a city full of smoke and fingers pointing blame. Blame? Point all your fingers at oil and shut the fuck up and just help. Jesus motherfucking Christ already.

I said in my last post that, even as we anxiously stare out the windows, and even as we face the reality of people not handling this very well——even as we deal with the horror of being regular people working through an unimaginable tragedy, watching other working people get blamed for doing a good job——even now we are both focused on doing things.

With our hands, with time. Something to do. This is what you do in a crisis. But there’s not much we can do right now. That may change tomorrow. So, for now, working our jobs and just being creative or productive with our time so we don’t just sit here and suffer and wonder and worry is our focus.

With all of that in mind, and knowing that writing this, in fits and spurts, helped to calm my nerves over the past twenty-four hours, I offer you the following thoughts on intimacy, of all things.

I’ve got a new single coming out in a few weeks. I’m getting ready to shoot the cover, and then I will have to immediately start strategizing the video. The single’s called Baby Can’t Be Helped. It’s about that part in our brain that simply refuses help, for one reason or another.

Usually having to do with ego, but always because we hurt, and we hurt in very specific ways. And we need to be healed in very specific ways, unique to us. Healing is a very unique thing, as any doctor can tell you. It’s specific to the individual, even if it’s general knowledge applied. Bad healthcare ignores the individuality of the patient. All of us have a Baby Can’t Be Helped (never by Mattel) in our brains who would rather suffer than be helped, who doesn’t care if you suffer right along with it.

A baby throwing a tantrum. A crying baby who won’t be healed.

You can really begin to understand the dynamic of help being offered and refused if you look at it from both sides at once. If you look at an example where the healing, or the refusal, is going both ways at once. My specific example today, in that regard, is Bruce.

Bruce, the cat that adopted me and Christal and then tried to help me with something. And, even as I tried to help him, this amazing cat, who appeared at first homeless and lost (turns out, eventually, not the case at all, but wait for it), I wasn’t able to recognize how he was trying to help me. I think Bruce and I learned a little from each other about that BCBH part of the brain, and how it might even still be there when you’re not throwing a tantrum.

Yesterday the costume for the Baby Can’t Be Helped album cover came, and I can’t wait to take the photos for it. Or for Christal to take the photos, if she’s available (because she’s working hard on a film right now), since she’s an amazing photographer. I can’t wait to take the photos and then play with them in the apps and try to work with them to produce just the right cover. The baby doll that I will be holding (more on babies wanting babies, especially girl babies wanting girl dolls, later, because Christal had a great epiphany on this topic just a day or so ago) arrived the day before. The adult pacifier arrived today. Supposedly the life size toy box that I’ll customize for this project arrives today, too.

(Thanks for the speedy delivery, Jeff. I’d rather be using your infrastructure to deliver food and medicine, but until we bring you into this dance party fully, I will be using what is at hand in any way I can to support VISION 2025, and that includes making the most of the release of Baby. I don’t like the way you treat your employees generally, but you have a tremendous number of them, and at this point, so late in the game, buying from you is essentially helping to keep the American workforce going, as much as it pains me to say so. So I’m giving in to your efficiency in the spirit of VISION 2025. In the spirit of using what’s at hand to achieve peace on Earth as efficiently as possible.)

Because of the connection I made yesterday between Bruce and me, and our relationship, and how it relates to the Baby Can’t Be Helped brain phenomenon, I will be sort of celebrating Bruce as I make the cover and video. And that’s awesome, because Bruce is awesome. Because Bruce is a seeker. A real wild seeker. And he sought me out specifically. And we’ve been co-healing for several months now together, sharing our energy through a bunch of crazy changes, and seeing how it goes. It hasn’t all been a smooth ride, as I will now describe.

Here is an incredible photo that Christal took of me and Bruce two days ago. It shows where we are, Bruce and me, today. We were also just about here a few months ago. But then things took a turn. Damn turns. But before going into the twists and turns of what happened next, let’s just enjoy what this relationship is about, and what we were both seeking, me and Bruce, when he came into our lives. Here it is. You can see it.

But what a ride to get here.

About a year and a half ago, Bruce started showing up on the sidewalk that encircles our corner house and doing his dangerous Bruce trick. It’s dangerous because it’s an old, really old bait and switch. And the ancient bait and switch that Bruce pulls is very interesting to me, because in a lot of ways it mirrors human behavior.

If you think about the fact that I began writing Baby Can’t Be Helped about Christal, and about what we now call her dragon, then you’ll keep in mind that Bruce is really just another person. As are most human-attracted cats. Baby ended up being about so much more than Christal’s dragon, because I like to try to make my lyrics more generally applicable, the way that Hafiz and Sufi poetry in general is.

Some great writers, in fact most great writers, now that I think about it, are so great at writing specifically because the stories they choose to tell in great detail are stories which, if told in just the right way, become generally applicable to all of us through our brain’s amazing capacity to think in metaphors.

These stories we all agree are great are really so relatable because of all the specificity and detail they provide. The more detail the author puts into the story, the more opportunity to arrange the pieces in just the right way to touch your heart one way or the other.

The short story writer or novelist can pull off this great trick of diving so deep into the story’s specific details that it magically, at the bottom, becomes a universal story. They can make you go so far into the details that you’re at the beginning of general observation again. But, when I write a song, I take a specific story, and then I try to carve out, or extract, a kind of stylized (we all need style, we writers of anything, even if we want to be exceptionally genuine), a stylized and generalized meaning from it so that it double-backs on the writing like a cool electric-guitar-meets-amplifier feedback loop.

So that the song story becomes less specific than I originally intended, not more, and then even more relatable, especially with the vibrations of my specifically chosen chord progressions and my voice being used to relate the story. I think this process that I’m describing, now that I’m describing it, may be a crucial piece of whatever separates short story writing from songwriting. They’re similar in ways, for sure. But the talents are really very, very different, the talents required to produce them. So different that it’s fun to think of the ways they’re similar. (If they were really similar processes, this wouldn’t be so fun.)

But I digress. (Deliciously.)

Let’s get back to Bruce, now that we all know and agree that he’s actually a person and we’re going to think of him that way.

Bruce comes with his own story. About a year and a half ago, Bruce starting showing up on and around our property without any collar or sign of ownership. He’s a beautiful cat, but he really acted homeless, and after the first six or so encounters with him, we started assuming that he had somehow, in this world, become detached from his owners. He never seemed in need of actual food or medical help ever, and some of our neighbors whom we like in particular (retired public school teachers from the golden era of public education, of course, which happened to coincide with the golden era of the American middle class) were also interacting with him and keeping a kindly watchful eye on him. So, honestly, we never bothered to gather him up and check if he was chipped. And this was, in part, because of Bruce’s ever-so-human Bruce trick. The trick that I feel inspired to call the intimacy-oops trick. But after I write this I’ll probably just refer to it as the Bruce trick.

Bruce is actually the perfect vehicle for describing the intimacy-oops trick. Here’s how it goes with him. He comes up to you on the sidewalk from out of nowhere, looking like he’s a wonderful guy who wants to play with you. A wonderful guy with this amazing face. Look at that patterning. He’s like, did someone drop $5k for me? Maybe. You don’t know. I might be Gucci. I might be homeless. But either way, my face says I’m love. And you say, hey Bruce, and you’re delighted. And then you reach down to pet Bruce. Bruce, on his back now, showing you his rug of incredible deep shag. White fur running all across his undercarriage. Bruce saying, yes, I want this. And then your hand is bleeding.

Perhaps you know of this behavior. Perhaps you’ve seen it in a human. If you love that human, and you’re trying to befriend that human, perhaps you’ve eventually come up with a pet name for this exact kind of behavior. Maybe, even, that name is dragon. Maybe. But there’s no time to think about that because your hand is bleeding and now Bruce is kind of a fucktard, and now you have to go into the house and deal with antibiotic ointment and bandaids. Fucking Bruce. He’s so good at this trick that I fell for it not once, not twice, but fucking three whole times before I realized that there’s no approach that I currently have access to in my head——no approach that I’ve ever had with any other cat, or any approach I’ve ever read about——that is not going to end up with me bleeding.

So I had to change my approach. That much was clear. I liked Bruce. I thought, maybe, even, he was an above average cat. Maybe even a diamond in the sidewalk rough. But if I was going to explore that possibility, I was going to have to be aware of the intimacy-oops trick. I really had to fucking keep that in mind, because cat scratches hurt a lot, and they take a long time to recover from. After three tries, if you’re a relatively smart guy, you’re going to reassess your approach. And I did.

So no more attempted belly rubs. Instead, I just loved him from about two feet away. I talked to him, I bent down, I gestured, I gave him all the love I was trying to give him, but from just two feet away. And he liked that, but I’ll tell you something surprising. I put Bruce in a position where he was forced to reassess his approach. So, being the genius cat that he is (I would come to learn), he adjusted his approach as well. He knew the intimacy-oops trick wasn’t going to give him what he was looking for.

And now we will pause for a critical moment to note that Bruce, I believe, did not know what he was looking for. I believe, now, that when he pulled the intimacy-oops trick, he was really craving human affection. An actual human touch. And not, to my surprise, just any human. It became clear that Bruce wanted to touch me, and he didn’t know how to do that. So, with his motivation (as the actors say) in play, he also adjusted his approach.

And guess what. It really wasn’t all that less lethal. I mean, a little bit. We made slight progress. But it really was an incremental step. Because, after I stopped reaching out my hand to be mangled, Bruce decided that he would be the toucher, and his way of touching me as I was loving from two feet away was to just jump on my leg and hold on. Like a flying squirrel landing on a branch. Bruce wanted that touch. But that was the best we were going to get at that point. Four paw marks on my jeans, and four paw marks on my bleeding legs. Oh Bruce. You furry fuck.

So thus began a grand journey over the course of the next eighteen months, whose story can be summed up basically like this. We tried to get less and less bloody while encouraging Bruce to find a way to communicate with us that we could all live with. It takes time. Especially with a cat. If you’ve been reading, you know I have thing about cats and patience and how that might relate to God/Dog. So, over time, and a lot of patience, we got to a point, if you can believe it, where Bruce was basically our cat. He wasn’t interested in cat litter, but he could communicate when he wanted to go outside.

And he loved Fancy Feast. Boy did this little fucker love Fancy Feast. So smart, and so pretty, but he goes for the McDonald’s. But what am I saying? It’s what I chose for him. We thought he was feral. We really did. He was so beautifully groomed, but over time we learned that he grooms himself constantly, it’s almost something that needs to be medicated. And we might get to that, having to medicate him.

But the point is, we didn’t know how far to invest in Bruce. He was a big unknown, and we hadn’t taken him in to see if he was chipped, because he never failed to show up in perfect condition, and he wasn’t going to be picked up. Just as that standoff was becoming a kind of settled rhythm, we found out that Bruce really did belong to someone else.

After about four months or so, we found out that Bruce belonged to a neighbor. Not really close by. More down the street about a block and over a few houses. But he was not feral. He had a fucking sister, this guy. A sister who knew how to use cat litter. And he knew how to use cat litter, too.

But you know what? Bruce had had enough of the not-feral life. Apparently. Because Bruce went wandering. And, as far as Christal and I can figure out now, it seems that, in his wandering, he discovered that this is a house where a lot of great, wild activity happens in a very controlled, structured way. And Bruce was nothing if not wild. But the very core of Bruce was craving some kind of combination of structure and wild living that he didn’t know how to pull off exactly yet, for all of his game.

He wanted to be wild, but he wanted to be controlled. Sound familiar? So I had to become Bruce’s master. If you’re into domination at all (and I’ve only ever been into it as a stylish way to have fun, really, though I’ve been told I should go much further as a top and I would have fun)——if you’re drawn to the world of domination, even if it’s the kind that has filtered all the way down through all the bleached filters to twenty shades of grayness, then you probably understand the conundrum, the paradox, of wanting to live a controlled, wild life. This was Bruce’s problem. And, with blood, he assigned me the quest to fix it.

We didn’t know how to do that. But over time, with patience, he became our cat. But then we learned he was not our cat. So what now? Bruce had found a place where the squirrels were fed daily. Where the crows were befriended, not shooed away. Where wildlife was managed, for fun, for spectacle, for appreciation, for delight in wild magic. And Bruce definitely wanted a piece of that action. He wanted to know how to live like that, I think. And he wanted me to show him. And he sure as fuck didn’t have any problem determining that it was my duty and I should just go about figuring it out because it mattered. So I got it. I got the message. And I did go about trying to solve his predicament.

Bruce’s owner is a wonderful person whose feelings were really hurt when he started wandering away for days at at a time. His owner didn’t understand. Because, for many, many months, it wasn’t just us. It was many people around us, too. Our neighbors also were being frequented by Bruce. Bruce was having visits with several households, and pretending to be nobody’s cat. He had a true game going.

As a biological and deeply identified man of the human species, I kind of have to give it to him. This guy has the best game I’ve ever seen in a cat. His game was so fucking good that Bruce even had several identities. For example, if we had never, eventually, met Bruce’s owner, Bruce would have been Jack, and Jack would have been the title of this post. Because Jack is what we called him the whole time we were befriending him and trying to have touches without blood and maybe using treats and fresh water to get there. He was Jack before he was Bruce. When we found out his true identity, we tried Bruce Jack (BJ) and Jack Bruce as a compromise, but really, he’s Bruce. That’s his name, and he knows it, and now we know it.

You want to know how much motherfucking game this cat has? This cat was happy to be known by not just two, but several different names around the neighborhood. Can you believe that shit? The game on that guy. I am schooled. Truly schooled. Not that I want to play Bruce’s game. Not that I’ve ever been all that interested in playing that much of Bruce’s game, because my game is to be the master who bleeds. That’s my game, and it’s organic and natural, and I know how to play it. But Bruce has the kind of game that gets on TV. The kind of game that marries a celebrity. A first-rate celebrity. That’s the level of game Bruce has. Bruce’s game was so good that one of our dear neighbors just called him Mick Jagger. That’s how incredible Bruce’s game is.

Over the course of eighteen months we befriended Bruce, learned his real name, made friends with his owner, figured out his game, and offered him a home. And he kind of took us up on the offer. Eventually, we were the house where he hung out the most. I think it’s because of that problem Bruce had to solve about being wild and controlled at the same time.

He couldn’t stop his fascination with what was happening in our little walled garden, our little Tokyo (if you’ve been paying attention). He loved it even more than I did, if that was possible. Remember, I don’t have kids, so even though I’m always hand to mouth, and have always been, I have just enough in my pocket (not really when it comes down to it but everyone’s got debt) to buy real raw almonds and real cashew pieces for the squirrels and crows and house sparrows and finches and all the exotic birds that come around every once in awhile and get chased off by a hawk.

And even the hawks, though a hawk will never deign to eat a raw almond or cashew. Please. A hawk? No way. I’ve had hawks that hang out like Bruce and watch the action. Very, very curious hawks. They’ve learned not to take from my flock unless they’re trying to communicate something to me. So they usually just watch now. But when one’s around and curious, especially if he’s crow sized or younger, he’ll come right down and hang with us all, just like a crow.

And some of the more playful hawks will really give the crows a run for their money. And the crows will scream and screech and complain and howl as they speed away from the very precise hawk, but the hawk never really gets them, not even a feather. Not anymore. Because we’re setting an example here in Tokyo. And, while hawks are ruthless fucks to the heart, they are also very curious and very wise. But I digress here. Again. We’re talking about Bruce.

So we got to a place where Bruce was kind of living with us, and hanging with some other folks sometimes, and maybe off on night journeys with nobody sometimes, and still visiting his owner often, and even eating there and still accepting love with gratitude, but mostly crashing at our house. It was pretty easy. We still didn’t know how much to invest in Bruce. And, to be honest, we didn’t until just recently.

We didn’t know how much to invest until additional drama developed around Bruce, drama that always follows the real game player in the neighborhood, drama that now gets a player on TV, but drama around Bruce that we had to deal with, and which pushed us to stand up and co-claim him with his original owner.

You know, sometimes the guys with game, the guys who are so energetic and fun that they are pleasing multiple people in a kind of rotation…sometimes those guys get scapegoated. And so it was, as it turns out, for the game champion Bruce.

You see what happened was. There are other cats in the neighborhood. Cats with real bad attitudes. Cats who don’t have Bruce’s looks, Bruce’s game, or Bruce’s awesome energy. Shitty cats. But these cats also carry piss in their bladders, and they also walk around exploring, even though their consciousness is not evolved like Bruce’s, and they make territorial wars. And some of these cats were starting to encroach on our territory here at the house. Territory that Bruce was now guarding.

And you know what? That’s probably because cats that don’t have an evolved consciousness are just as drawn to the idea of controlled wildness as cats like Bruce.

But, eventually, Bruce had to really defend our yard. And, in so doing, things got all confused, and Bruce and I had a kind of falling out. It’s healed now, but it’s this falling out that is the real example of co-healing gone wrong, like an episode of Three’s Company, that I want to share with you. An example of how people of any fur stripe are apt to miss the boat on healing sometimes and misunderstand each other.

I’m just going to describe it in retrospect. I’m going to tell it like it looks from here, now. It’s the easiest way to explain what happened. And it will be pretty quick, after this unexpectedly long post. You know, it’s creeping up on Tuesday. We’re bracing. Maybe I’m writing more today to deal with that. I don’t know.

What happened was Bruce started loving our Tokyo, and defending it, and then other cats got involved. Cats that had no relationship to me at all. Only encroachers, with no real direction or purpose other than to test boundaries and be a fucking asshole. And these cats were invisible to me and Christal at first, because (for reasons that aren’t relevant now, or maybe they are, but we’re not going into them now) I wasn’t checking our security cameras the way I used to, including for animal behavior.

So we didn’t know that other cats were fucking with Bruce, and maybe trying to win me over too. But they didn’t know how to approach me. I mean, Bruce didn’t either. His approach was off. But he was smart enough to know that Christal and I were the ones to befriend if he wanted to hang out and watch all the bird, crow, and squirrel action that goes on here.

These other cats, I now think, tried to infer what I want. And most cats earn their territory rights with humans by catching mice and leaving them at the door. That’s how we evolved with them. They have that in their bones. And they can be taught otherwise, but if a cat is going to guess at what a human master might want without just approaching him and trying to touch him, that cat’s probably going to default to leaving a mouse. Which is awful. Or a bird. Which is heartbreaking.

Every single time. Just fucking heartbreaking. I couldn’t stand it. Birds are gods. Christal couldn’t stand it. It was just awful and it was happening all of a sudden and we, in retrospect stupidly, attributed all of it to Bruce. But now I don’t think all those birds and mice were Bruce. I think they were some of these other scrubs trying to get my attention. And I’m ashamed that I didn’t know that. I was caught up in my own drama.

So we had a falling out, me and Bruce. And I would shoo him off the garage roof where he loves to watch the action. Sometimes, even, I had to use the hose. Because Bruce is stubborn, and so am I, and nobody’s killing any more of my birds.

But now we are in a glorious new future where Bruce is our cat. We have his vet records, and we are in regular contact with his original owner, whom he still visits, and Bruce is learning how to communicate all kinds of wants and needs, with actions and with his voice. It’s awesome. He’s truly an amazing cat who did, apparently, cost a bit of money. He’s supposed to be a Maine Coon, but those get huge, and Bruce, while looking like a Maine Coon, is regular sized. So who knows. It certainly doesn’t matter to me and Bruce.

So the fires continue to rage and Bruce is out there somewhere, I’m sure safe, but still. I’m gonna go check out the kitchen window to see if he’s sitting on the hot tub waiting to be let in, this wild thing. He was. He was calmly curled on the hot tub. Now we’re all inside and Gordon Lightfoot is playing in the background. Carefree Highway. I have some things to say about that song. Later.

Bruce and I healed each other, but along the way we got confused. Everybody got involved somehow, and somehow everything became terribly confused. I actually had to make this for Bruce’s original owner so she could deal with some neighbors who are still scapegoating him like I stupidly did. Check it out:

I have no pithy wind-up for this long story. Other than to say, you might be misreading someone who’s actually trying to heal you, who is actually trying to defend the most important core of you. You might be. It’s worth a look.

While you’re looking, wish us luck over the next day or so. Cats get nervous. And so do people. Burning planets can be regenerating, but there’s a lot of loss, and a lot of grief, and the whole damn scale of it all, the timeline, it just changes. Some people are screaming at the wind now. Especially people with money in their pockets. But they can’t control the wind. Donovon coulda told ’em that.

The fires still rage. The Altadena fire, which is being largely ignored by comparison, is now threatening all of north Pasadena. The Palisades fire, which has everyone stupidly pointing fingers, is now threatening the nearby neighborhood of Brentwood. As of this writing, everyone can agree that the situation is not much better right now than it has been, and all the meteorologists, and all the fire captains, and all the hardworking people who have to suffer an investigation because somebody created a billionaire culture and it led to this——all those people agree that, starting tomorrow, Tuesday, we may be truly fucked. Here’s how I put it to Zsolt yesterday:

Day whatever. 4? 5? The fires continue. They’re trying to stop the Palisades fire from taking out Brentwood now. We’re talking historic devastation. Unimaginable. Everybody’s ignoring the Eaton fire, which continues to destroy Altadena completely and really threaten all of North Pasadena. Nothing is better than 11% contained at this point. Day after tomorrow winds come in that nobody can stop and everybody agrees may make things tremendously worse. I’m in a city full of smoke and fingers pointing blame. Blame? Point all your fingers at oil and shut the fuck up and just help. Jesus motherfucking Christ already.

I said in my last post that, even as we anxiously stare out the windows, and even as we face the reality of people not handling this very well——even as we deal with the horror of being regular people working through an unimaginable tragedy, watching other working people get blamed for doing a good job——even now we are both focused on doing things.

With our hands, with time. Something to do. This is what you do in a crisis. But there’s not much we can do right now. That may change tomorrow. So, for now, working our jobs and just being creative or productive with our time so we don’t just sit here and suffer and wonder and worry is our focus.

With all of that in mind, and knowing that writing this, in fits and spurts, helped to calm my nerves over the past twenty-four hours, I offer you the following thoughts on intimacy, of all things.

I’ve got a new single coming out in a few weeks. I’m getting ready to shoot the cover, and then I will have to immediately start strategizing the video. The single’s called Baby Can’t Be Helped. It’s about that part in our brain that simply refuses help, for one reason or another.

Usually having to do with ego, but always because we hurt, and we hurt in very specific ways. And we need to be healed in very specific ways, unique to us. Healing is a very unique thing, as any doctor can tell you. It’s specific to the individual, even if it’s general knowledge applied. Bad healthcare ignores the individuality of the patient. All of us have a Baby Can’t Be Helped (never by Mattel) in our brains who would rather suffer than be helped, who doesn’t care if you suffer right along with it.

A baby throwing a tantrum. A crying baby who won’t be healed.

You can really begin to understand the dynamic of help being offered and refused if you look at it from both sides at once. If you look at an example where the healing, or the refusal, is going both ways at once. My specific example today, in that regard, is Bruce.

Bruce, the cat that adopted me and Christal and then tried to help me with something. And, even as I tried to help him, this amazing cat, who appeared at first homeless and lost (turns out, eventually, not the case at all, but wait for it), I wasn’t able to recognize how he was trying to help me. I think Bruce and I learned a little from each other about that BCBH part of the brain, and how it might even still be there when you’re not throwing a tantrum.

Yesterday the costume for the Baby Can’t Be Helped album cover came, and I can’t wait to take the photos for it. Or for Christal to take the photos, if she’s available (because she’s working hard on a film right now), since she’s an amazing photographer. I can’t wait to take the photos and then play with them in the apps and try to work with them to produce just the right cover. The baby doll that I will be holding (more on babies wanting babies, especially girl babies wanting girl dolls, later, because Christal had a great epiphany on this topic just a day or so ago) arrived the day before. The adult pacifier arrived today. Supposedly the life size toy box that I’ll customize for this project arrives today, too.

(Thanks for the speedy delivery, Jeff. I’d rather be using your infrastructure to deliver food and medicine, but until we bring you into this dance party fully, I will be using what is at hand in any way I can to support VISION 2025, and that includes making the most of the release of Baby. I don’t like the way you treat your employees generally, but you have a tremendous number of them, and at this point, so late in the game, buying from you is essentially helping to keep the American workforce going, as much as it pains me to say so. So I’m giving in to your efficiency in the spirit of VISION 2025. In the spirit of using what’s at hand to achieve peace on Earth as efficiently as possible.)

Because of the connection I made yesterday between Bruce and me, and our relationship, and how it relates to the Baby Can’t Be Helped brain phenomenon, I will be sort of celebrating Bruce as I make the cover and video. And that’s awesome, because Bruce is awesome. Because Bruce is a seeker. A real wild seeker. And he sought me out specifically. And we’ve been co-healing for several months now together, sharing our energy through a bunch of crazy changes, and seeing how it goes. It hasn’t all been a smooth ride, as I will now describe.

Here is an incredible photo that Christal took of me and Bruce two days ago. It shows where we are, Bruce and me, today. We were also just about here a few months ago. But then things took a turn. Damn turns. But before going into the twists and turns of what happened next, let’s just enjoy what this relationship is about, and what we were both seeking, me and Bruce, when he came into our lives. Here it is. You can see it.

But what a ride to get here.

About a year and a half ago, Bruce started showing up on the sidewalk that encircles our corner house and doing his dangerous Bruce trick. It’s dangerous because it’s an old, really old bait and switch. And the ancient bait and switch that Bruce pulls is very interesting to me, because in a lot of ways it mirrors human behavior.

If you think about the fact that I began writing Baby Can’t Be Helped about Christal, and about what we now call her dragon, then you’ll keep in mind that Bruce is really just another person. As are most human-attracted cats. Baby ended up being about so much more than Christal’s dragon, because I like to try to make my lyrics more generally applicable, the way that Hafiz and Sufi poetry in general is.

Some great writers, in fact most great writers, now that I think about it, are so great at writing specifically because the stories they choose to tell in great detail are stories which, if told in just the right way, become generally applicable to all of us through our brain’s amazing capacity to think in metaphors.

These stories we all agree are great are really so relatable because of all the specificity and detail they provide. The more detail the author puts into the story, the more opportunity to arrange the pieces in just the right way to touch your heart one way or the other.

The short story writer or novelist can pull off this great trick of diving so deep into the story’s specific details that it magically, at the bottom, becomes a universal story. They can make you go so far into the details that you’re at the beginning of general observation again. But, when I write a song, I take a specific story, and then I try to carve out, or extract, a kind of stylized (we all need style, we writers of anything, even if we want to be exceptionally genuine), a stylized and generalized meaning from it so that it double-backs on the writing like a cool electric-guitar-meets-amplifier feedback loop.

So that the song story becomes less specific than I originally intended, not more, and then even more relatable, especially with the vibrations of my specifically chosen chord progressions and my voice being used to relate the story. I think this process that I’m describing, now that I’m describing it, may be a crucial piece of whatever separates short story writing from songwriting. They’re similar in ways, for sure. But the talents are really very, very different, the talents required to produce them. So different that it’s fun to think of the ways they’re similar. (If they were really similar processes, this wouldn’t be so fun.)

But I digress. (Deliciously.)

Let’s get back to Bruce, now that we all know and agree that he’s actually a person and we’re going to think of him that way.

Bruce comes with his own story. About a year and a half ago, Bruce starting showing up on and around our property without any collar or sign of ownership. He’s a beautiful cat, but he really acted homeless, and after the first six or so encounters with him, we started assuming that he had somehow, in this world, become detached from his owners. He never seemed in need of actual food or medical help ever, and some of our neighbors whom we like in particular (retired public school teachers from the golden era of public education, of course, which happened to coincide with the golden era of the American middle class) were also interacting with him and keeping a kindly watchful eye on him. So, honestly, we never bothered to gather him up and check if he was chipped. And this was, in part, because of Bruce’s ever-so-human Bruce trick. The trick that I feel inspired to call the intimacy-oops trick. But after I write this I’ll probably just refer to it as the Bruce trick.

Bruce is actually the perfect vehicle for describing the intimacy-oops trick. Here’s how it goes with him. He comes up to you on the sidewalk from out of nowhere, looking like he’s a wonderful guy who wants to play with you. A wonderful guy with this amazing face. Look at that patterning. He’s like, did someone drop $5k for me? Maybe. You don’t know. I might be Gucci. I might be homeless. But either way, my face says I’m love. And you say, hey Bruce, and you’re delighted. And then you reach down to pet Bruce. Bruce, on his back now, showing you his rug of incredible deep shag. White fur running all across his undercarriage. Bruce saying, yes, I want this. And then your hand is bleeding.

Perhaps you know of this behavior. Perhaps you’ve seen it in a human. If you love that human, and you’re trying to befriend that human, perhaps you’ve eventually come up with a pet name for this exact kind of behavior. Maybe, even, that name is dragon. Maybe. But there’s no time to think about that because your hand is bleeding and now Bruce is kind of a fucktard, and now you have to go into the house and deal with antibiotic ointment and bandaids. Fucking Bruce. He’s so good at this trick that I fell for it not once, not twice, but fucking three whole times before I realized that there’s no approach that I currently have access to in my head——no approach that I’ve ever had with any other cat, or any approach I’ve ever read about——that is not going to end up with me bleeding.

So I had to change my approach. That much was clear. I liked Bruce. I thought, maybe, even, he was an above average cat. Maybe even a diamond in the sidewalk rough. But if I was going to explore that possibility, I was going to have to be aware of the intimacy-oops trick. I really had to fucking keep that in mind, because cat scratches hurt a lot, and they take a long time to recover from. After three tries, if you’re a relatively smart guy, you’re going to reassess your approach. And I did.

So no more attempted belly rubs. Instead, I just loved him from about two feet away. I talked to him, I bent down, I gestured, I gave him all the love I was trying to give him, but from just two feet away. And he liked that, but I’ll tell you something surprising. I put Bruce in a position where he was forced to reassess his approach. So, being the genius cat that he is (I would come to learn), he adjusted his approach as well. He knew the intimacy-oops trick wasn’t going to give him what he was looking for.

And now we will pause for a critical moment to note that Bruce, I believe, did not know what he was looking for. I believe, now, that when he pulled the intimacy-oops trick, he was really craving human affection. An actual human touch. And not, to my surprise, just any human. It became clear that Bruce wanted to touch me, and he didn’t know how to do that. So, with his motivation (as the actors say) in play, he also adjusted his approach.

And guess what. It really wasn’t all that less lethal. I mean, a little bit. We made slight progress. But it really was an incremental step. Because, after I stopped reaching out my hand to be mangled, Bruce decided that he would be the toucher, and his way of touching me as I was loving from two feet away was to just jump on my leg and hold on. Like a flying squirrel landing on a branch. Bruce wanted that touch. But that was the best we were going to get at that point. Four paw marks on my jeans, and four paw marks on my bleeding legs. Oh Bruce. You furry fuck.

So thus began a grand journey over the course of the next eighteen months, whose story can be summed up basically like this. We tried to get less and less bloody while encouraging Bruce to find a way to communicate with us that we could all live with. It takes time. Especially with a cat. If you’ve been reading, you know I have thing about cats and patience and how that might relate to God/Dog. So, over time, and a lot of patience, we got to a point, if you can believe it, where Bruce was basically our cat. He wasn’t interested in cat litter, but he could communicate when he wanted to go outside.

And he loved Fancy Feast. Boy did this little fucker love Fancy Feast. So smart, and so pretty, but he goes for the McDonald’s. But what am I saying? It’s what I chose for him. We thought he was feral. We really did. He was so beautifully groomed, but over time we learned that he grooms himself constantly, it’s almost something that needs to be medicated. And we might get to that, having to medicate him.

But the point is, we didn’t know how far to invest in Bruce. He was a big unknown, and we hadn’t taken him in to see if he was chipped, because he never failed to show up in perfect condition, and he wasn’t going to be picked up. Just as that standoff was becoming a kind of settled rhythm, we found out that Bruce really did belong to someone else.

After about four months or so, we found out that Bruce belonged to a neighbor. Not really close by. More down the street about a block and over a few houses. But he was not feral. He had a fucking sister, this guy. A sister who knew how to use cat litter. And he knew how to use cat litter, too.

But you know what? Bruce had had enough of the not-feral life. Apparently. Because Bruce went wandering. And, as far as Christal and I can figure out now, it seems that, in his wandering, he discovered that this is a house where a lot of great, wild activity happens in a very controlled, structured way. And Bruce was nothing if not wild. But the very core of Bruce was craving some kind of combination of structure and wild living that he didn’t know how to pull off exactly yet, for all of his game.

He wanted to be wild, but he wanted to be controlled. Sound familiar? So I had to become Bruce’s master. If you’re into domination at all (and I’ve only ever been into it as a stylish way to have fun, really, though I’ve been told I should go much further as a top and I would have fun)——if you’re drawn to the world of domination, even if it’s the kind that has filtered all the way down through all the bleached filters to twenty shades of grayness, then you probably understand the conundrum, the paradox, of wanting to live a controlled, wild life. This was Bruce’s problem. And, with blood, he assigned me the quest to fix it.

We didn’t know how to do that. But over time, with patience, he became our cat. But then we learned he was not our cat. So what now? Bruce had found a place where the squirrels were fed daily. Where the crows were befriended, not shooed away. Where wildlife was managed, for fun, for spectacle, for appreciation, for delight in wild magic. And Bruce definitely wanted a piece of that action. He wanted to know how to live like that, I think. And he wanted me to show him. And he sure as fuck didn’t have any problem determining that it was my duty and I should just go about figuring it out because it mattered. So I got it. I got the message. And I did go about trying to solve his predicament.

Bruce’s owner is a wonderful person whose feelings were really hurt when he started wandering away for days at at a time. His owner didn’t understand. Because, for many, many months, it wasn’t just us. It was many people around us, too. Our neighbors also were being frequented by Bruce. Bruce was having visits with several households, and pretending to be nobody’s cat. He had a true game going.

As a biological and deeply identified man of the human species, I kind of have to give it to him. This guy has the best game I’ve ever seen in a cat. His game was so fucking good that Bruce even had several identities. For example, if we had never, eventually, met Bruce’s owner, Bruce would have been Jack, and Jack would have been the title of this post. Because Jack is what we called him the whole time we were befriending him and trying to have touches without blood and maybe using treats and fresh water to get there. He was Jack before he was Bruce. When we found out his true identity, we tried Bruce Jack (BJ) and Jack Bruce as a compromise, but really, he’s Bruce. That’s his name, and he knows it, and now we know it.

You want to know how much motherfucking game this cat has? This cat was happy to be known by not just two, but several different names around the neighborhood. Can you believe that shit? The game on that guy. I am schooled. Truly schooled. Not that I want to play Bruce’s game. Not that I’ve ever been all that interested in playing that much of Bruce’s game, because my game is to be the master who bleeds. That’s my game, and it’s organic and natural, and I know how to play it. But Bruce has the kind of game that gets on TV. The kind of game that marries a celebrity. A first-rate celebrity. That’s the level of game Bruce has. Bruce’s game was so good that one of our dear neighbors just called him Mick Jagger. That’s how incredible Bruce’s game is.

Over the course of eighteen months we befriended Bruce, learned his real name, made friends with his owner, figured out his game, and offered him a home. And he kind of took us up on the offer. Eventually, we were the house where he hung out the most. I think it’s because of that problem Bruce had to solve about being wild and controlled at the same time.

He couldn’t stop his fascination with what was happening in our little walled garden, our little Tokyo (if you’ve been paying attention). He loved it even more than I did, if that was possible. Remember, I don’t have kids, so even though I’m always hand to mouth, and have always been, I have just enough in my pocket (not really when it comes down to it but everyone’s got debt) to buy real raw almonds and real cashew pieces for the squirrels and crows and house sparrows and finches and all the exotic birds that come around every once in awhile and get chased off by a hawk.

And even the hawks, though a hawk will never deign to eat a raw almond or cashew. Please. A hawk? No way. I’ve had hawks that hang out like Bruce and watch the action. Very, very curious hawks. They’ve learned not to take from my flock unless they’re trying to communicate something to me. So they usually just watch now. But when one’s around and curious, especially if he’s crow sized or younger, he’ll come right down and hang with us all, just like a crow.

And some of the more playful hawks will really give the crows a run for their money. And the crows will scream and screech and complain and howl as they speed away from the very precise hawk, but the hawk never really gets them, not even a feather. Not anymore. Because we’re setting an example here in Tokyo. And, while hawks are ruthless fucks to the heart, they are also very curious and very wise. But I digress here. Again. We’re talking about Bruce.

So we got to a place where Bruce was kind of living with us, and hanging with some other folks sometimes, and maybe off on night journeys with nobody sometimes, and still visiting his owner often, and even eating there and still accepting love with gratitude, but mostly crashing at our house. It was pretty easy. We still didn’t know how much to invest in Bruce. And, to be honest, we didn’t until just recently.

We didn’t know how much to invest until additional drama developed around Bruce, drama that always follows the real game player in the neighborhood, drama that now gets a player on TV, but drama around Bruce that we had to deal with, and which pushed us to stand up and co-claim him with his original owner.

You know, sometimes the guys with game, the guys who are so energetic and fun that they are pleasing multiple people in a kind of rotation…sometimes those guys get scapegoated. And so it was, as it turns out, for the game champion Bruce.

You see what happened was. There are other cats in the neighborhood. Cats with real bad attitudes. Cats who don’t have Bruce’s looks, Bruce’s game, or Bruce’s awesome energy. Shitty cats. But these cats also carry piss in their bladders, and they also walk around exploring, even though their consciousness is not evolved like Bruce’s, and they make territorial wars. And some of these cats were starting to encroach on our territory here at the house. Territory that Bruce was now guarding.

And you know what? That’s probably because cats that don’t have an evolved consciousness are just as drawn to the idea of controlled wildness as cats like Bruce.

But, eventually, Bruce had to really defend our yard. And, in so doing, things got all confused, and Bruce and I had a kind of falling out. It’s healed now, but it’s this falling out that is the real example of co-healing gone wrong, like an episode of Three’s Company, that I want to share with you. An example of how people of any fur stripe are apt to miss the boat on healing sometimes and misunderstand each other.

I’m just going to describe it in retrospect. I’m going to tell it like it looks from here, now. It’s the easiest way to explain what happened. And it will be pretty quick, after this unexpectedly long post. You know, it’s creeping up on Tuesday. We’re bracing. Maybe I’m writing more today to deal with that. I don’t know.

What happened was Bruce started loving our Tokyo, and defending it, and then other cats got involved. Cats that had no relationship to me at all. Only encroachers, with no real direction or purpose other than to test boundaries and be a fucking asshole. And these cats were invisible to me and Christal at first, because (for reasons that aren’t relevant now, or maybe they are, but we’re not going into them now) I wasn’t checking our security cameras the way I used to, including for animal behavior.

So we didn’t know that other cats were fucking with Bruce, and maybe trying to win me over too. But they didn’t know how to approach me. I mean, Bruce didn’t either. His approach was off. But he was smart enough to know that Christal and I were the ones to befriend if he wanted to hang out and watch all the bird, crow, and squirrel action that goes on here.

These other cats, I now think, tried to infer what I want. And most cats earn their territory rights with humans by catching mice and leaving them at the door. That’s how we evolved with them. They have that in their bones. And they can be taught otherwise, but if a cat is going to guess at what a human master might want without just approaching him and trying to touch him, that cat’s probably going to default to leaving a mouse. Which is awful. Or a bird. Which is heartbreaking.

Every single time. Just fucking heartbreaking. I couldn’t stand it. Birds are gods. Christal couldn’t stand it. It was just awful and it was happening all of a sudden and we, in retrospect stupidly, attributed all of it to Bruce. But now I don’t think all those birds and mice were Bruce. I think they were some of these other scrubs trying to get my attention. And I’m ashamed that I didn’t know that. I was caught up in my own drama.

So we had a falling out, me and Bruce. And I would shoo him off the garage roof where he loves to watch the action. Sometimes, even, I had to use the hose. Because Bruce is stubborn, and so am I, and nobody’s killing any more of my birds.

But now we are in a glorious new future where Bruce is our cat. We have his vet records, and we are in regular contact with his original owner, whom he still visits, and Bruce is learning how to communicate all kinds of wants and needs, with actions and with his voice. It’s awesome. He’s truly an amazing cat who did, apparently, cost a bit of money. He’s supposed to be a Maine Coon, but those get huge, and Bruce, while looking like a Maine Coon, is regular sized. So who knows. It certainly doesn’t matter to me and Bruce.

So the fires continue to rage and Bruce is out there somewhere, I’m sure safe, but still. I’m gonna go check out the kitchen window to see if he’s sitting on the hot tub waiting to be let in, this wild thing. He was. He was calmly curled on the hot tub. Now we’re all inside and Gordon Lightfoot is playing in the background. Carefree Highway. I have some things to say about that song. Later.

Bruce and I healed each other, but along the way we got confused. Everybody got involved somehow, and somehow everything became terribly confused. I actually had to make this for Bruce’s original owner so she could deal with some neighbors who are still scapegoating him like I stupidly did. Check it out:

I have no pithy wind-up for this long story. Other than to say, you might be misreading someone who’s actually trying to heal you, who is actually trying to defend the most important core of you. You might be. It’s worth a look.

While you’re looking, wish us luck over the next day or so. Cats get nervous. And so do people. Burning planets can be regenerating, but there’s a lot of loss, and a lot of grief, and the whole damn scale of it all, the timeline, it just changes. Some people are screaming at the wind now. Especially people with money in their pockets. But they can’t control the wind. Donovon coulda told ’em that.

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