Me and the cats

Reporting on the latest

Crisis in the news

The house is quiet. Culley Jane has gone somewhere for some kind of an appointment. It’s just me and the cats, and the cats are quiet, watching me like waiting for me to explain what was going on at this moment in metaphysical time because I was a people and people kept their food bowls full and so peoples must be the authorities on just about everything… or think they are.

One of the things newspaper reporters have to learn is how to sound authoritative even while stumbling around in the dark. You do that by repeating what anybody would see for themselves with their eyes wide open on a clear and sunny day -- street repairs on Main Street; the arrival of triplets at the county hospital; a cold front moving in; budgets; man bites dog.

If you did a good job at the small town daily you might get to sound authoritative at higher levels -- the state, nation, the world. Maybe get to meet Cronkite at a social event.

But after you become a writer on top of being a reporter, you start repeating what you see with your eyes closed.

I closed my eyes.

I could still see the cats watching me, but with my eyes closed I saw the past in the present creating a future.

For instance, in 1978, after a couple of years out On the Road, walking in step with Kerouac’s “rucksack revolution,” meeting the writer Eric Chaet and becoming a writer, myself, I went back to work in a newsroom where I got a weekly paycheck to be a reporter, this time in Detroit.

With eyes wide open, Detroit in 1978 was an entropic scene, winding down towards motionlessness.

But I was a writer now.

Leibniz was a writer too. When he closed his eyes he saw the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire made fun of him in Candide. Hollywood's version was a Pollyanna. But Leibnitz insisted that whatever was possible demands to exist. He invented calculus to show how it was done. He said that the demand to exist was the cause of all of Creation’s motion.

In 1978, in Detroit, reporters scrambled to be the first to repeat the story that anybody could see by just looking around – a once great industrial city descending into the motionlessness of rust.

That’s when I started writing about fusion.

Eventually I was exiled from the press. At first I blamed it on the CIA, or something like it. But when I closed my eyes, I could see that I had done it to myself.

When I open my eyes, the cats are still observing me, waiting for something that only they could know for sure.

Suddenly, there’s a rustling.

The cats scramble to the back door.

Culley Jane is home!



She’s a writer too.