(above, Finn & Matty’s cat sitter - well really their new companion - Josh.)
FINN: “Matty held forth during your last FaceTime call, Kev. So now it’s my turn. Where are you? That godawful green wall behind you looks a lot like a Starbucks here in the states. Please tell me you’re not at a Starbucks. I thought you told Matty and me that you were heading over to London for another two months because it sparks your imagination though we cats know that human imagination is just a way for humans to believe you have the capacity to be something other than human - you know, all bullying bipedal rationality. Starbucks? I thought you were more imaginative than that. I see some porridge there on the table. Glad to know you’re back to eating it, Goldilocks-without-the-locks, instead of those Cheerios with which Matty likes to cheat on our Science Diet and Fancy Feast when you drop little round bits of it on the floor and just leave the sweet shit there unswept. Josh threw the Cheerios out when Matty - you know how political she is with all that Black Cats Matter activism of hers - suggested he do so when in one of her Black Cats Matter meetings they put up a list of Nestle products to boycott because the company refuses to stop doing business in Russia and Cheerios was on the list. I have Russian Blues in my family but they long ago immigrated to France - thank Goddess Bastet. I think I have some cousins of my great-great-grandmother in Paris somewhere still. I have always grown up with stories about her and my grandfather being fed smoked salmon and caviar by the Romanovs and fleeing with some of them to Paris with some of their jewels embedded in their fur. My grandmother even wore a bracelet under her collar. That is why I looked so sad when we met at Animal Kind. I was thinking how far the family had fallen with me there in that glassed-in room in a place called Hudson. But you broke my fall, so to speak, Kev. I will always be thankful for that. And you.
Anyway …. so Josh threw out the box of Cheerios with lots of other shit you left in the pantry that needed to be tossed because he needed some room to assert his own tastes and appetites - though some of those conflate with yours. But that’s a cryptic allusion for another post on this new site of yours. I’ll give you this: you never stop finding a way to do what you do and, in so doing, you do fold Matty and me into it. I guess there is a kind of love in that. Matty and I were talking about that the other night when we hated to admit we were actually missing you. We had the place to ourselves when Josh was off looking at nature, no doubt, after nattering on with Patrick downstairs - Matty and I were sitting in the window for a bit and eavesdropping - about light and plants and putting some Tori Amos songs into Patrick’s show tune play list. Anyway, we jumped down so they couldn’t eavesdrop on us and were talking about how surprisingly hurt we felt when you left us again for these two months, but then we realized how you never leave us because we exist in your writing about us. We meld in the act of your writing about us with your human imagination and it was there the other day when Matty was holding forth that she confided to me that she experienced it for the first time, what it feels like when you love us, this alien lovely heady feeling. Human love. Kind of like the sugar in Cheerios makes her feel. Sick but satisfied. I’m feeling it right now, in fact, as you transcribe my talking to you. I see two empty packs of honey there next to your porridge, Kev. Honestly, I prefer honey to sugar as the simile. When you write about us, Matty and me, we are honeyed with humanity.
Oh, yes, Josh. Okay. Right. I assume your readers want to know more about this mystery man now in our midst. Matty - ever the little marketer, she runs the media outreach for her Black Cats Matter group - said to tease this out a bit more and only run a photo of him without the astonishing narrative of our having conjured him for ourselves. But I think I can say this much about him since he sent you this photo of me last night. I’ll wait. Go ahead and post it below. Yeah, I’m lying on the bed in the photo with Matty - and often now with him. Jealous? Josh said you texted him you were. Good. I’ve come out of the closet, Kev. Great photo, huh. I do think I look handsome in it.
(TO READ THE REST OF FINN’S MONOLOGUE AND SEE THE NEWEST PHOTO THAT JOSH SENT ME LAST NIGHT, SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR.)