Well, I finally added to 17 Cats, something I've been aiming to do for a year now, and managed to acheive in a day. For some reason I feel like I'm going to able to continue, at least for a while. Next I'm going to talk about Larry's father and about "clocktown." I'm pretty sure these surreal rantings have no plot, but I have a good grasp on the environment of Crazyland. Plus its fun to do experimental writing, which I haven't done in a while.

7eventeen Cats     

(Prelude)

There were seventeen cats living in Larry's basement. Looney Tooney Larry attempts to preserve the Cat's Meow in an assembly of different colored jars aligned upon multiple levels of shelves and tables and rocking chairs, ready to be opened to the interpretations of a man on the verge of genius and madness. Larry is 78 years old and as splendidly crazy as me. For years he has been building up his plans of trapping wild evolutionary cries in various stages, to put a halt to their metamorphisms required of them by nature. For years he has been wishing to live in isolation in an old rickety house with many cats about to feed his labratoric notions. Settled down in a dust-entrenched ghost town mixed with the inhalations of crazy old men who lost all their marbles in the fake plastic trees and tangerine skies blind us with their euphemisms. Nicotine Larry lives across the street from us in a self-proposed barn house and he is the crooked man in the crooked house with seventeen crooked cats that are the years we wish we could take back or the years we wish we could be. But the pinballs will keep on spinning and the grass will weave out its time despite our desperate pleas to stop and the octaves will never stop falling for those cats who stage the choir by the broken piano notes otherwise known as Mrs. Bagwell's Rhumba.

II
Everything is tepidly arranged—no labels to define the contents, each glass container of a different shape; some with steep long necks, others short and squat with a round belly, pregnant with the shrieking molecules that bounced off another, ready to burst, while others were decidedly square, strictly caging in trilling musicalities, keeping them in line. A few were of the common sort, your average cylinder, those used containers never chucked to the recycling bin, hoarded because of an old man’s revelations on their usefulness of…containing. Individual containers of the market, contents consumed, still with their old peeling labels hinting at their previous common sense purpose, now shaking in protest at the life forms they were used to support. There were beakers with cellophane wrap for the more fragile things, test tubes with old rubber stops, pitri dishes glowing with crystalline colonies banging up against the plastic, not microbes or algae, but the likes of which no man had ever seen before.

The jars were a cluttered mess taking up the whole house, greedily impeding, swelling, and threatening to inch forwards gradually until the inhabitants found there was no place left to stand. Yet there was the vague impression that they were arranged purposefully, if not organized, for each was neatly polished and given the utmost scrutiny. Each was carefully recorded in scrawling ink upon the yellowing pages of a used leather notebook. They were chaotically placed, in categories and sub-categories, an intricate web of connections, ordained in such a way that only the scientist himself could comprehend, and the loops in his memory would leave several unaccounted for. Even he would forget why he put them there, forget the codings he left in the notebook if he ever bothered to leaf back through its pages.

Larry was always doing something, always busy polishing away at these glass idols of his. Each in perfect condition, never cracked; it was a marvel they never broke and clattered to the ground, glass shards and fragments of a savage breath exhaled in a puff of air and unleashed. Irretrievable, lost to the world forever. But if they ever clattered to the ground in a tearing agony, twisting mercilessly at the soul, I wouldn’t know. For Larry was the kind who worked in those timeless cracks of time, when the sky transitions from a pungent royal blue to the faded blue of tulle clad by Degas’ pale dancer as she sleeps, tiny inhalations unfathomable and the vaguest sense of sleep held over the townspeople like a drowsy fog, not to wake for three eternal hours. His were the hours extending into gray shifts of time, energies exerted endlessly towards the ineffable, day guided less by accomplished tasks and more by the act of doing something. He dedicated individual attention to each bottle, polishing them to a point of clarity, with a dank and limping rag, as he whispered to them forgotten theories of dead philosophers had implemented but never finished. Nothing could break his line of reverie and contemplation, labyrinthine scrawls upon the blackboards and whiteboards in every room. Some thoughts etched out in screechy scratch of chalk scraping against black clacky surface. The click of a cap flicked off, marker’s odor escapes a nearly faded old marker swirling over a hastily washed and dried white surface, over transparent inky stains made permanent through neglect.

The cats lounged in the few spaces found between the jars, curled up, stretching, yawning extended over the seconds, fur as multitudinous and varied as the jars themselves. Rough rusty orange striped against faded tawny red. Scrappy ears and amber eyes. Pale jade irises, blue musky gray in velvet purrs. A feline the whiff of the scent of jasmine. Mysterious, posing challenges in their glances or their obvious avoidance. If you came too close they scattered away, an idea you almost grasped and almost voiced but never found out what it was you were about to say. You know it was brilliant, but the idea was gone, as if it had never been formulated in the first place but for a vague sense of longing and curiosity. At times they mewed in a sigh of exasperation, other times they communicated telepathically. They never rubbed against Larry’s leg or demanded his attention. Even after they had their fill of stale tuna or lapped the last bits of water from the many dishes left lying about, they stayed on. They seemed detached from this business with the jars, disinterested, yet in some indefinite way unfathomably tied in with it.

They were less a source of distraction, and more a source of inspiration, the seventeen muses of Egypt, heirs of wisdom set in parched scrolls and brought by their forebears, each named after the musical intonation of a hieroglyph in respect. Long since abandoned by the scribe who raised them, ancient texts on which they pried their eyes were embedded into their memories. The old scribe, heedless of their memorizations, slaved away at his cryptic scribble, muttering nonsense much in the same way Larry did now.  No one knows where they came from, these otherworldly beings, or how they came upon the place. One day they simply appeared, and the whole thing seemed natural, as if they always had been, their existence gone unquestioned.

And they would cry a cacophony of verbation, the same chilling melody again and again, enchanting sirens, glasses vibrating as they were polished to a strange beat, until either Larry or the cats shrieked in desperation at the endless repetition of a song that would never end. At these times Larry would put on old records, a creaky gramophone spinning in wild gestures, rumbling in the background of static its quirky old time tune, near frightening in its warbled voice, Chat Noir don’t let them see you’re afraid. In its untended age, the record would get caught in he same repetition until it choked off and sputtered with a cough. Then Larry would set off music boxes at intervals of thirty seconds while they tinkered out for hours until finally the turn of the gears would slow, metal clinks fading off, forgotten while the notes hung suspended in the air and floated off. Then the cats would go off again. Spontaneously, a new thought would spring into Larry’s mind and take a hold of him, possess him. He went off tabulating the new formula, working out its tangles until he hit upon a knot, and all the time, the cats were singing…