I'm about to become a pot-smoking cat-killer.
The pot-smoking is fairly straightforward. My headaches get ever worse, which I really didn't think was possible, as they seemed pretty damned bad before. I have exhausted all the legal options and I have depleted my admittedly fairly scanty emotional and spiritual resources. That leaves medicinal marijuana.
Of course, it's not actually all that straightforward. I live in Louisiana, where pot in all its forms, medicinal or not, is illegal. And I've never smoked pot. I've never smoked anything, in fact (the result of growing up in a household of cigarette smokers--it was truly vile: one of my most vivid childhood memories is my disgust at having to wash dishes because my dad and brothers would stub out their dinnertime cigarettes on the plates. . . those crumpled butts, squished down into leftover puddles of ketchup and meatloaf grease. . . and then there was the horror of car rides in the winter, all the windows rolled up, the cigarette smoke swirling around my head like a thick woolen scarf). So, I don't know how to smoke. And I don't know how to get pot, other than to ask certain of my sons' friends, which of course I cannot do. Good lord. Can you imagine: "Hey dude, tell your mom I got a new supply in and it's really sweet"--??
But I will surmount these problems and I will score some medicinal marijuana and I will, at last, find relief from the pain. And I will live a happy and successful and productive life.
Except for the cat-killing.
I wrote in a previous post about our peeing cat. All cats pee, of course, but this one pees on the sofas and beds. Constantly. And I just can't take it anymore. I have tried everything. Really. Truly. I'm a historian. I research for a living. I have researched peeing cats. I do not believe in discarding animals because they are inconvenient, but. . . this is beyond "convenience." As Laurie, my very wise nail lady said to me on Saturday morning as she clipped away at my cuticles, "We're talking about your home here." And my home reeks of cat piss. But the cat has no claws and couldn't survive outside and is not exactly adoptable. Who wants an incontinent indoor kitty?
But if I have my cat "put down," aka killed, I will also become a liar of the worst kind. Because Cleaning Sarah, who has cleaned our house, babysat our kids, petsit our dogs and cats, and basically been a solid part of our family life for 20 years, will never speak to me again if she knows what I've done. So I will have to lie. A really Big Lie. One I will have to think about, concoct and then sustain for years to come. It will be like a Victorian novel. It will go on and on and on.
So the Scripture text in church this morning was the famous passage from Jeremiah about God sending the prophet to watch the potter at the wheel and saying, "Look, go tell Israel [or is it Judah?], you've all really fucked up and I'm going to throw you back on the wheel and start all over." (Yes, the "fucked up" is in the original Hebrew. . . OK, not really, but you know it's what God wanted to say except He/She/They knew there'd be all those kids listening in.) And I'm sitting there in the pew and I'm thinking, "Oh geez. I'm 50 and I've got a headache and do I really need to be reminded that I more and more resemble a lumpy, squishy, lopsided pile of clay?" And then there's this continual reshaping, this constantly-on-the-wheel thing, round and round and round and round. . . . I mean, no wonder I have headaches. But I gotta say, the shapes this funky cosmic Potter comes up with--well, they are surprising, to say the least. I truly never expected to be a middle-aged, weed-toking, cat-killing, cleaning-woman-deceiver. I mean, couldn't I be a nice, graceful salad bowl? Or perhaps a butter dish with pleasing lines? Or even a gravy boat?
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