Howard Moss, in his poem, Horror Movie, wrote, "beginnings spin a web where endings spawn." I would have preferred a transposition reading something like, "endings spin a web of new beginnings," or words to that effect. It's like the dandelions that transmogrifies into perfect orbs staged to submit to the wind and spawn. The eternal 360, the paradigm of life itself.
When I was a little boy, circa 1966, I was seated in the back seat of a sprawling, two door burgandy Pontiac Bonneyville with a black vinyl top with Jan and Lindie with their parents, Ben and Dee up front. The surroundings escape me now, but I suspect that we were riding a dirt road on their farm. Simultaneously all eyes were fixed on a mother cat and her four, maybe five little kittens following their mother, all in a row. Ben quickly grabbed his rifle and without exiting the drivers' seat, shot them all, one by one with an automatic rifle. I remember his wife, Dee, picking up the hot casings from her lap and quickly exchanging them from one hand to another while blowing on down on them. The memory stops abruptly.
That kind of unimaginable cruelty, in this case committed by a "friend" of the family in front of their half son, effectively pisses in the psychological pool inside the brain and the drain never empties. I also remember watching a televised depiction of baby seals get clubbed on the head inside the farmhouse. His farmhouse. I, too, recall a televised depiction of a bloody open-heart surgery two deer lifted with chains and being skinned. The Mexicans call it sangree. Boys and girls know it's blood from a very young age.
My childhood father figures: Ralph, Billy Joe, and significantly, Ben Spangler, DDS. I thought that he was a good template for my posterity. I was already violent. I was born both violently and violent. Thus the fit. "How things have changed," I thought as I drove away in the tiny hours of March 1, 2026, leaving my Blackie behind in New Market after putting my face on his fat belly as he slept, crying uncontrollably. I looked up at the pictured moon as I left the New Market Animal ER and those kittens and their mother and baby seals and sangree flooded me. That another senseless war began than night is so subordinate to the effect of driving away reminds me of the full moon and Blackie's place among the stars. That was the turning point. Everything changed, like a pond turning over in Spring. Frank can no longer stay all night with me because he and Blackie slept together. "Too painful right now, Dad." I get it. Most nights I say aloud, with Mommy cat and Vergel snuggled deep into my covering, "I love you, Blackie." I never knew. . .
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