Devine Providence: This week my father finds himself in another place which was once inhabited by the Romans. The Romans, as you my know, have since evolved into the people who now inhabit present day Italy and Vatican city...This is not to say that my father is anywhere near either of these two locations.

The subject is out of his fucking mind.

There has been a change in intensity of existing tendencies in the subject’s physical relationship with other objects/ entities in his environment in the last two weeks.

For a time there was a toy consisting of a plastic dowel about 2 ft long with a string (also about 2 ft, maybe a little longer) connecting the dowel to a weighted end made from a bead, a bell, and a feather. The feather went first. The toy could coax the subject to leap 3 ft in the air, over and over again, for as long as any playmate could hang in there. We used it through several complex knot repairs and broken strings, but, after a while, it was just broken.

For a couple of days things got bad. We wandered aimlessly the floor plan of the “snug” apartment, all of us regretting that one, last tug that broke the subjects toy. I should have made the next one, because it is such a simple design, but instead I spent my last seven dollars on a new one with some crazy feathers and a stuffed fish with a bell as the weight (maybe I just felt like going shopping in the middle of the day… maybe I was drunk… who knows).

With a couple of practice sessions the new toy was working splendidly and we even began to track what tricks/ flips we can make him do with different wrist flipping techniques. Pat did teach him a back flip which apparently is showing up quite a bit in the “hilarious things the subject does when startled” charts. Back to work.

Within a few days of these events there came to be a massive, two part influx… no, Diaspora (Note: I was once in a band that was called Diaspora. We called it dee-a-spora or is it die-ass-pora?) of sticky products into the environment.

Phase 1: Holy shit, giant stickey hands in the target Halloween section… hurry (steal them if you can. This isn’t a commercial). I got two packs for the temporary headquarters but opening night most of them made there way back to the permanent space for the “after party” and mayhem ensued (mostly wrestling, though). There was quite a mess after that first night and there is still even as I record these words. Over the course of the next few days the subject would wade fearlessly into the masses of trash and cowardly flailing bodies ten, maybe twelve times his size to join in the violence and hopefully reclaim his modest new subject hood. When not engaging in public events, he pranced around showing off his new toys, building roads in the debris and picking fights.

Phase 2: After several days of this, pat (again, on an unrelated CIARD mission) found himself at a target in aurora and decided to double check the Halloween section. Enter, more giant sticky hands, giant sticky rats, and lots of bouncy balls. The subject went insane with the divine providence we had bestowed upon him. He bit my feet and screamed for me to wake up. “look at all of my toys,” he would say, if he could ( but he cant and its not just the thumb thing either) And there he would be, haunched at the end of a path of flattened garbage, knocked over beer bottles and recently scattered vitamin containers, gloating. Gloating because he knew where all of the toys were.

Bouncy balls: all in the bathroom

Rats: hallway strategically placed between my room, pat’s and the bathroom.

Stringy toy: stuck in an impossible knot somewhere or, all the way under the door and into pats room.

Sticky hands: scattered about, in pieces, getting pretty dirty.

So: we took the biggest stickiest, most intact rat and whipped it up at the ceiling. It stuck for hours while the subject alternated from pacing furiously, directly below and climbing to the highest, most precarious point and stretching a few more inches into the huge gap between his paw and the rat on the ceiling. All of this he did without taking his eyes from the rat (for hours) and so great was his grief that he screamed at the top of his lungs and seemed to go mad from the loss of one of his flock.

The subject later retaliated by breaking several ceramic cups and refusing to drink his own (fresh) water.

back to the issue at hand

it was just the other day that i was boasting of my cats not having rung that poo bell any where he shouldnt since we moved here. he poops and pees on top of his litterbox house. twice now. he needs to get petted?