THAT OTHER THING IS BALDFACE

Now I’m not one to quibble over words any more than I quibble over things.  Unlike your lunatic modern assertions that perfidiously bifurcate the word and the thing, the two are eternally one and every competent cat knows this.  But to offer you yet another revelation of yourselves (I suffer no illusions that it will make any difference), I say to you that that a definition of the human is—an incompetent, hairless, graceless, spurious cat.  And I’m not sure I’ve yet found a better example of the human—that is, a better example of an incompetent cat; that is, a better example of incompetence—than Baldface, who feeds and pampers me like an Italian grandmother … and if it weren’t for this, he would be dead.

Unlike me—the Noblest and Wisest of Cats, perpetually uniting all opposites on the Grand Tightrope of My Furriness—Baldface slips and slides on time’s icy surfaces with no fixed identity, no fixed face, no fixed mental state, no fixed direction, no fixed idea or vision, no fixed expression, no fixed address.  He’s tossed like a salad in the hands of drunken gods, never knowing whether he’s coming, going, barfing, sleeping, lying, stuffing or being stuffed, lurching, dying, drinking.  The only thing constant about him is his scatological effusion, which he talks about as if he’s just made his first deposit in that Deep Brown Bank.

Words for him are not solid and proper, like a cat’s paws as they glide across a fence, but gaseous and dissolute, filling your nostrils with the most noxious odors, then wafting away until the next belch, which he’s inclined to think is clever.  And for him, I suppose, it is.  Like an 8-year-old boy, farts, belches, and scats are what he lives for.  Like any charlatan, he calls them art and only because there are humans even shockingly denser than he, a few believe him.

Never in the history of you sorry bipeds has one been so ineptly named.  A true Baldface would be transparently who he is—not a constantly melting wardrobe of disposable masks.  He is a void, a smelch, a smulch, a whirl of nothingness in the greater whirl of human nothingness, a fart of flatulence in the greater wind of human indigestion, a slimy toad without a lilypad, a tongue without flies but many lies, a skank and skink, a skoonk and woebebootle.  He is never who he is for he never was or even is; he can never be a has-been for he’s never been a has.  They call this homo homo homo sapiens!  They call it Baldface!  Nay nay!  They should just call it Homo Plus.  Or Plus Homo.  Or maybe Noface.  Or maybe just a sad sad No.

Nevertheless.  He feeds me.  I let him live.