Blocky Cats Extravaganza

Attempting to make sense of truly purposeless random thoughts in an effort to dispel the tendency towards entropy

Sep 14, 2021

The room is yellow. The windows are dressed with macramé pot holders and plants in various states of struggle. A woman who looks something like me stares out of a canvas onto the neighbour’s rooftops.

I’m short on time, uninspired, slightly queasy. I’ve had arguments over the last couple of days and I hate confrontation.

Someone is hammering in the distance. The sound reverberates around my frontal lobe, and since I can’t think of anything to write, I pull out my phone. The next two point five hours are spent organizing and stacking pieces of various shapes in an easier, cuter version of Tetris. The blocks have bolstering, smiling cat faces on them. My high score is nine thousand five hundred and ten, and I have six hundred and fifty-nine thousand one hundred and three cat coins, denoting depressing frequency of play and proficiency at the game.

I’ve hit an entropic rock solid bottom and this - picking my scattered thoughts out of mesmeric patterns of disappearing cat cubes - is my attempt to recover some sense of order.

The random influx of disjointed rumination leaves skid marks, such is the speed at which the thoughts come crowding in. I’m paralyzed by their momentum and slide my fingers around my phone’s screen, leaving my head to navigate the confusion. Everything gets imbedded in everything else.

I evoke, despite my better judgement, my struggle with the eroticism of the French beaches during my summer holiday, reimagining the sunscreen slathered nubility. The words Crispy Cream keep flashing through my mind like a neon sign over a backwater motel.
I think about the number of times I’ve offhandedly sworn at people, spinelessly from the anonymity of my car while driving, and I wonder how many times I’ve been called a c**t or a variation thereof, unbeknownst to me.
I got to be my son’s first follower on Instagram.
I briefly note that I have exactly fourteen followers on Twitter. The account is new, I say. Anonymity is a blessing, I say. Success is built over time, with consistency, hard work and dedication, I say. My system violently rejects these bromides, but I manage to hang onto the quality of my very small following with every fibre of my increasingly anxious being while contemplating the depths of the downward spiral. We’re all familiar with the venomous sting of social media, I say, this time with conviction.
I recall an aesthetician telling me that the most common male hair removal treatment is referred to as a “back, crack and sack.”
I sometimes feel like a deepfake version of myself. Then I think that “deepfake” reminds me of “Deep Throat” and I wonder whether I should write an article about feeling like a simulacrum using unsparing sexual profanity.
I pull up a quick mental visual of my procedural masks wearing the imprint of my lipstick and foundation upon removal, like bargain basement reproductions of the Shroud of Turin.
I remember three different people telling me that I look like Uma Thurman, Kate Hudson and Mike Myers by turns and in the same week.
I reflect on how some Americans say “exspearmint” for “experiment” and “apprishiate” for appreciate. I want to market a new brand of gum called ExSpearmint, but I wouldn’t know where to start with recipes and patents and manufacturers and what not.
It occurs to me that we’ve failed to inculcate the placing of others first in the way in which we express ourselves. People rarely say “<other person’s name> and I went to blah blah blah...” They’ll typically say “me and <other person’s name> went to blah blah blah…” Not only is this bad English, it’s bad manners. Once my attention was drawn to this fact, I noticed it popping up everywhere like vexatious targeted advertising.
If I were the frontman of a band, assuming I could carry a tune outside of the Disney repertoire further than halfway down a short block, I would call it Lianne and the Hot Peppers.
I would sing an “evening elevational” which would be like an evening constitutional with a church choir.
Coco Chanel’s famous advice to “look in the mirror and take one thing off” before leaving the house is decidedly dated. It is difficult to further pare down the contemporary body’s attire without running the risk of public indecency. What would one remove, at this point? Shoes? Underwear? Contact lenses? A hearing aid? I, who have an unbridled love of textiles and adornment, attempt to repel the asceticism and austerity mandated by stylish society, and the flaccid, oversized elastane-dominated ensembles displayed everywhere else, with occasionally conspicuous results. I once wore a pair of pants that a colleague described as resembling those of Obélix, with as hip-slimming an effect. The pants, made of bouclé but not by Chanel, are now encased in a moroccan pouf. I would have been better served listening to Coco.
My therapist says I have attachment issues.
A joke my father once told me goes something like this:
A schoolteacher asks her students to use the words “defence,” “defeat” and “detail” in a sentence. Little Tommy raises his hand and says “de dog jumped over de fence, first de feet and den de tail.”

One of the best things I’ve ever read is the French sentence “le peuple ému répondit”, translated to English as “the purple emu laid another egg.”
I think that I would like to employ the word “outstanding” only in a literal sense, and that from now on I will instruct my students to go stand outside with their graded papers when they’ve handed in particularly accomplished work.
I believe that insecurity is the root of all evil, and have tried and failed to ferret it out of my system. Why is it so easy to warp the lens through which we observe and thus interpret the behaviours of others, bringing the chimera out of quiescence?

The room is a deeper shade of yellow as the day sinks below the neighbouring treetops. I’m nowhere close to completion and the well is dry. I collect all the desiccated ideas and decide that despondency is a niggardly generator. The Blocky Cats app tells me I’ve lost my game after working my way up to three thousand points, and I figure I’d better shove this thing in a drawer if I’m going to sort myself out.

What random thoughts are obnoxiously elbowing their way into your head? I’m curious.

Mad Make Party

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