Had a bit of free time tonight and wanted to catch up on blogging. Then I realized it’s July 4th, and I have this odd proclivity for writing on the 4th of July, usually something dripping with nostalgia. I just tried to fix the tags so you can find them all here although the two best reads (I think) were 2024 and 1997. I also had this entry in 2003 that was later anthologized in a book and at some point I removed it from the blog. I just looked at the book and it’s a slightly stupid entry because half of it was a review of the book Jarhead, and who cares about my throwaway thoughts about a book from 20 years ago. Anyway.

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Here’s one out of left field I haven’t talked about yet, and an explanation of the picture above. It’s 1991. I’m living in Elkhart, towards the end of a year in exile where I lived at home and went to IUSB, but desperately wanted to get back to the main IU campus in Bloomington. Since Memorial Day weekend, I’d been dating someone down in Bloomington. We talked on the computer almost every night, got a few long distance calls in at ten cents a minute, but otherwise kept this new relationship percolating between visits. She didn’t have a car, but I had this $500 diesel VW Rabbit and every other weekend, I’d leave work at midnight, drive four hours south, spend two days back on campus, then leave Monday morning and drive straight to work. I talked about this in my first book, I think. I used to talk about Bloomington a lot.

I know I’ve told this story before, but the 4th of July plan for that summer was going to be epic. I think it was a four-day weekend, and we planned a big trip to Chicago. This involved me driving four-odd hours to Bloomington straight after work, picking her up, turning back north, and driving another four hours to the windy city. We had a hotel booked somewhere near the O’Hare airport, and we planned to bivouac there, then explore the big town.

Trying to find the hotel with no maps and no information, we cruised around Schaumburg in this little rusty silver four-door diesel with the windows rolled down because it was like 90 out and it didn’t have A/C. And I turned off on a road that was all ground down for repaving, but this manhole cover and the concrete tube underneath it stuck up from the ground-down cement like a chimney. I aimed the little car over it, and that protrusion grabbed the exhaust of the VW and ripped it off entirely from the exhaust manifold. That little 48-horsepower four-banger suddenly sounded like a Panzer tank, and this exhaust system dangled behind the car, clanking on the pavement. I pulled over in a parking lot and wiggled the exhaust system back and forth to break it free of the car so I could drive. (See above).

That weekend’s plans completely changed. We racked our brains for any contingency scenario, and she realized she knew some VAX buddies who lived in Schaumburg. We somehow got ahold of them at a pay phone and they said we were welcome to crash with them for the night while we regrouped. This was a couple, Jeff and Pam, and this was at his parents’ house. I vaguely knew them by username, and maybe I’d casually met them in a computer lab or a VAX lunch, so the whole thing was slightly bizarre. We went to a neighborhood fireworks show; it seemed like this was a well-to-do suburb with several other well-to-do suburbs in the vicinity, so there were two or three different pro-grade fireworks shows on the horizon, too.

I wish I had any archaeology to remember the rest of the weekend, but we found a muffler shop somewhere off Golf Road that could do up the exhaust, and walked to a nearby motel where we crashed for the night. There was also a trip on the CTA from O’Hare to the city, where we went to the Marshall Field to look at that giant retail outfit in its prime. And we (for some reason) triangulated through Elkhart on the way back, and stayed a night at my mom’s. Then I brought her home, then left the next morning for work. For those keeping score, that’s Elkhart -> Bloomington -> Chicago -> Elkhart -> Bloomington -> Elkhart, all in a tiny little can of a German car with no A/C in a Midwestern heatwave.

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I was thinking of this recently, and it’s not because I love the 4th or I miss Bloomington. It’s because I found out she’s dead. I’d recently done my biannual-ish High Fidelity let’s-nose-around-and-look-up-exes thing for whatever damn reason. And when I pulled up her facebook page, the first post was from last December from one of her kids, announcing her funeral arrangements. Turns out she had a massive stroke in the spring of 2025, went in a recovery center, and never made it out.

This, of course, blew my fucking mind, on several different levels. I’ve never had an ex-girlfriend die. I have this box of memories of her, and they’re mired through this time distortion field. We probably started talking over email in late 1990 or early 1991, then started dating over Memorial Day. I returned to Bloomington in August. By December, the relationship was effectively over, although she didn’t officially dump me until we returned in January. That split was absolutely ugly, but we somehow started talking again maybe a year later. Bloomington’s a small town, and we had many common friends. We were on and off social until we both left in 1995. On a Boston trip that fall, I met up with her for brunch and an afternoon of wandering around record stores. There may have been a few pings after that, but nothing else.

The last seven months seems like it was a few weeks of time, but that seven months we officially dated seems like it was seven years long. So many things happened in that one semester, in my life, her life, our shared time together. And all of those memories are deeply intertwined with her. When I think about some detail of my computer job or how I was first learning how to program the NeXT or how I spent all my time fighting this 200-level physics class or how I stumbled through a group therapy experience for the first time, every one of those memories is somehow connected to the memories of her.

And to be clear, I’m not pining for her because it was all pleasant and wonderful. I think a hard aspect of this experience is the saying “don’t speak ill of the dead,” because this relationship was, to be as polite as possible about it, very… mercurial. We fought a lot. I’ll avoid details, but it got ugly. And now, I feel like an asshole even thinking about how much we butted heads. To be fair here, I am mentally ill, and I was not in a great place in 1991. But she knew how to push my buttons, and she did.

There was nothing to resolve post-1995, no need for amends or apologies or anything else. But the absolute finality of having someone dead bothers me in such a fundamental way. I always need to apologize, make things right. I’m always trying to think of the thing I can say to fix the situation, keeping arguments ruminating in my head for hours, weeks, months, decades. I frequently have these fantasy conversations with people from my past, thinking of what I’d say to somehow neatly wrap things up in a big bow, or correct the things I left broken years ago. And knowing I absolutely can’t do that now - that’s a new one to me.

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It’s a quiet 4th this year. Sarah went to Davis to help out her dad. I’m just about over a cold I’ve had for a few days. I went for a bit of a drive in Berkeley, and oddly ended up at the same Whole Foods where I was in 2024. I came back home, got out the new bike, and did a big loop, following the shore line down to the Park Street bridge on the east side of Alameda, crossing over, then crossing the island at the Jean Sweeney open space park, where I saw the people picnicking at the park shelter as I zipped past on the bike trail. Up at Alameda Point, I caught a water shuttle, the boat named the Woodstock, and that was my bike’s first water crossing. Lots of headwinds as I made my way west, but it was a good 13.5 mile loop, plus the short water journey.

I woke up horribly depressed for no reason, maybe from being alone on the holiday, or maybe the last residual bits of the head cold putting the zap on me. I hate to be one of those assholes that talks about runner’s high and how exercise helps, but of course riding the bike for 90 minutes did shake things loose. Part of it may have been aerobic exercise or the production of whatever chemical. I think a lot of it has to do with seeing the world at a different speed, looking at the things around me without being confined to a car. I always notice new details I don’t see when I’m driving. I’ve driven from that Park Street bridge over behind the Coast Guard base a million times, and I never noticed the little Hawaiian shack restaurant on Oak and Blanding, or the little Boathouse Tavern, which looks like a bar that’s half Bukowski, half Jimmy Buffett. I saw the sunken boats on the Oakland side of the estuary, and the million-dollar yachts on the Alameda side. It’s great to see the small details, and it’s something I need to do way more in the future.

Anyway, happy 4th.

My cat Loca died two weeks ago. I don’t even know what snippy trite introduction to say about this post, because the whole thing is so horrible, especially after just losing Squeak, and I’m still trying to get past it, and it’s not easy.

Like I mentioned in my previous post about Squeak, we got both cats in 2007 from Humane Colorado, and Loca was the more outgoing alpha of the two, and a year older. She was a black Turkish Angora, an absolutely beautiful animal. She was very social, vocal, playful, active, and crazy, hence her name. In many ways she was a cat’s cat, and loved to eat, hunt, play, be brushed, and get her way about everything. In other ways, she was very non-cat like, more like a dog. I think because I worked from home so much, she became very attached and would follow me everywhere, and demand everything according to her schedule. She also slept far less than other cats. Squeak would be out for 18 or 20 hours of the day, spending the other time transitioning between sleeping spots. Loca probably slept only eight hours a day, and most of it very lightly, as she always had to be aware of everything going on.

Squeak’s health was a long, slow decline. Pretty much for the last two years, we watched her weight drop and her mobility become more of a problem, and wondered how much time she had left. Loca’s health was never a question. She never got fat, always stayed active, and never had any major issues other than hairballs and general fussiness about food. She did start to have hyperthyroidism and a slight weight drop a few years ago, but medication seemed to stop that. I had a lot of worries that Loca would not be able to cope as a single cat after Squeak was gone, but she seemed to be making the adjustment. I knew this was not going to go on forever, but she was still running and playing and eating, and I thought we had a few more years with her.

This all happened quickly. She was very on and off with her food, and would have these coughing episodes that we assumed were hairball-related, but she’d never throw up and no amount of hairball medication or cat grass would help. I came home from work on a Monday and found she hadn’t eaten at all and was doing more of the coughing and brought her to the ER, fearing the worst.

I don’t want to get into the blow-by-blow details, but it was chronic heart failure, and we thought we had a few weeks to make her comfortable, and I had to quickly change that to a few days. On Saturday, we had Lap of Love come over.

Loca’s birthday was a week before, on Halloween. We have one of those Womb chairs in the living room, and right before dinner, I was sitting in the sun, looking at my phone, and Loca crawled up unprompted, stretched out on my chest, and sat there for twenty minutes, purring and looking at the sunlight. I knew this was a core memory that would be burned into my head forever, even though I did not know it was her last birthday.

On Saturday the 8th, I sat in the Womb chair again and she died in my arms. I cannot put into words how horrible this felt. I am glad it was this and not an agonizing end while I was asleep and she was suffering. I’m glad I was able to take a few days off and spend them with her, even if she was now unable to climb stairs and we had to set up camp in the middle of the living room with pillows and food and a heating pad and a litter box. But this was my familiar, my best friend. I’d spent a third of my life with her, 18 years. I worked from home almost the entirety of her life, and talked to her every day. I’ve had many rough years in the last decade, and spent a lot of time thinking I was completely alone, but Loca was always there. Now she’s not.

Two things happened at the very end that were quintessentially Loca. When the doctor came on Saturday and Sarah went downstairs to let her in, Loca got up from her bed, went to the bowl, and pigged out on Churu, her absolute favorite food. It was hilarious that we spent all this time worrying about her food and getting her to eat, and here she was, two minutes before her end, chowing down on this smelly chicken goo in a tube that she loved so much.

The other thing. When they do this, they give a first injection of ketamine, and then after a few minutes when the cat is calmed down, they give them the big shot. With Squeak, Sarah was holding her when she got the ketamine, and she just stayed in her arms and relaxed. With Loca, the vet came over to her on the floor and gave her the first shot. And instead of sitting there waiting for me to pick her up, she had to get up, do a lap of the room, then go under the kitchen table and stare at me, telling me that I had to come to her. She would do this diva stuff all the time: beg for attention, then when you came to give her attention, she would walk away and say, “No, you follow me.” I absolutely love and cherish that she had to do this one last time. She was Loca until the end.

I am suddenly not a pet owner. There has been this awkward transition because now we realize every piece of furniture we own is either cat furniture or has been damaged by cats or is covered in cat hair. And I can’t bear to do a full sweep of the house and dump it all in the garbage. The food and the medicine all got donated. The litter boxes are gone. Her favorite toys are sealed in plastic and packed away. But it’s so absolutely quiet now. I wake up in the morning to feed them and… fuck. It’s been hard.

I know there will be others. I think we’re waiting until after the holiday travel and then we’ll find two more. But we got damn lucky when Loca came in our lives, and it’s a monumentally huge hole to fill.