Jessica has Shiva beetles.

Bessie was born in 1865, I’m not sure where. There are Mohawk ancestors on my mother’s side of the family, so I guess the Great Lakes region someplace but I have no idea.

Bessie married at some point and went with her new husband to Alaska. This would still be well before the turn of the century, sometime between 1885 and 1895. They arrived at their destination, he showed her his house – a dirt-floored cabin and she said, “You expect me to live here?” He said, “Yes, you’re my wife.” Bessie never saw him again after that day. She returned to the continental United States, but she also traveled to Hawaii by sailing ship. By the time they reached Hawaii, which back then was still a kingdom, they had run out of anything to eat on board except for lemon meringue pies. So she arrived in Hawaii eating lemon meringue pie.

Bessie was a painter. In Hawaii, she painted the king of Hawaii. Her pictures hang in some Hawaiian museum. This is all family legend, you understand. Bessie was a great storyteller.

She was the spinster aunt the girls in the family loved to see arrive on a visit. She had wild stories to tell about world travel and adventure, something that surely brightened the days of girls growing up under strict parents in the cultural desert of Southwest Washington State. My mother often quotes Bessie, who said that girls should absolutely wear bright, flowery clothes, since they’ll have time enough to wear black when they get old. My mother still buys my daughters flowery duds, I’m guessing because of Bessie.

Bessie, as she got older, moved in with her younger brother and took care of him until she was 97. At that time, she went to the doctor for a checkup. She was 100% healthy, but she fell off the examination table and broke her hip. She spent the next 10 years in a nursing home, since the hip never healed right.

She died in 1972, Oregon State’s oldest registered voter, at 107. I don’t remember much about her, since I was 12 when she died and old people scared me. I remember that she was sweet and always knew what to say – how big you were getting, how much you looked like your dad, and so on. But she was over 100 when I met her, and getting that monkey-man look ancient people get, and the rest home had that unfortunate smell.

So I was too stupid to get much out of her magic as a kid. But others weren’t. She brightened the lives, permanently, of generations of kids into whose lives she brought color and Hawaii and standing up to your husband and lemon meringue pie and painting. Relatives like this are national treasures. Slowly this dawns on me, better late than never. Not all old people are old people, at least not in their souls. I’m relieved to see that my kids aren’t afraid of old people.

Alpha! Alpha, get a load of this search! Feral Living comes in first at google for this search!
Alpha, put down that spork.

We’re all sitting around the table eating chicken breast, vegetables and japanese rice. The cats are begging.
Alpha: “Aw, give the cats something.”
Miguel: “I’ll give them a knuckle sandwich.”
Alpha: “You have a little thing sticking out the side there, give that to the cat.”
Gamma: “Daddy has a little thing sticking out the front, too. Bwahahahaha!”
Beta: “Bwahahahahaha.”
Alpha: “Bwahahahahaha.”
Miguel: [sigh]

After I saw a man underneath my shopping cart this morning, I knew something had to be done. If it had at least been an actual man, I could have said, “hey, you down there, hand me the kitty litter.”

However, it was a non-existant man. The voice telling me to eat a bishop, okay, that was still funny, managed to work that into a pilot for a sit-com, a new Feral Living spinoff, Demon Shrink. But seeing things, man. It wasn’t a genuine hallucination, it was more like a tired and stressed mind seeing a dark shape (shadows) and jumping to a conclusion (must be a man crammed in underneath your shopping cart, hey, makes sense!).

So I did what any sane person would do in the situation: I went and finally saw “Lord of the Rings” with Beta. Now everyone in the world has seen that movie. We were the last ones. We won a prize.

My favorite detail was how the super-orcs put warpaint on their faces. That tells you a lot about how the orc mind works. Here are creatures, half orc and half something else even worse, born in molten mud in a fiery subterranean place half hell half factory amidst heavily-pierced (with what look like industrial staples) orc blacksmiths pounding out swords on their evil anvils and casting armor and shit; they have faces based I suppose partly on baboons, only worse, with really awful pointy teeth. Black slime drools out of their mouths when they stand there receiving evil instructions from their evil overlord Sauroman or however he spells it. Huge guys, muscles, claws, long black matted hair or dreadlocks, pointy ears, and so on and one says to the other, “Hey, let’s put some white paint on our faces and make ourselves scary-looking.”

I also decided to try getting more sleep today and ease up on the diet for a meal or two (this is me talking again, not the orc).

The Wheetabix is a versatile English breakfast food product.

[Editor's note: the correct spelling of the breakfast cereal is "Weetabix"]
The Wheetabix is of course happy serving as the centerpiece in an old-fashioned still life with flowers.

Or recumbant on a chaise-longe with cello and cat.

The Wheetabix is equally happy with a reclining nude.

Or in a Rousseau-esque jungle scene.

But it is modern as well. Modern like Vincent Van Gogh, here with sunflowers.

Modern like abstract minimalists.

Modern like Louis Wain with his schizophrenic cats.

Modern like Cindy Sherman, and fond of masquerading as other genres, such as dinner.

Modern like the Mirror Project.