Moments

November 8, 2025

When I feed my cats wet food in the afternoon, I have to sit between them and maintain order. If I don’t, Maya will finish her food, walk across the room, bully Mars out of the way, and eat all the food in his dish too. So, I have to stand guard beside Mars and hold Maya at bay until he’s finished eating. Most of the time, Mars doesn’t finish all his food; he’ll eat between half and two-thirds and then leave the rest for Maya. Sometimes, though, he’ll lick the whole bowl clean, and on those days I feel kind of bad for Maya.

Maya has a style of eating where she sticks her face in the bowl and munches away until she’s done. Mars, on the other hand, will lean down to grab a piece and then sit back up to chew on it. When he’s eating dry food, he’ll pick out a piece and drop it on the floor next to the bowl, then pick it up again to chew it. So, it takes him quite a bit longer to eat. The reason he doesn’t eat as much wet food as Maya is that he eats throughout the day, every few hours or so, whereas Maya will eat in the morning, and then save her appetite for the wet food, which she clearly likes a lot more.

I’m more similar to Mars in this respect. I can’t eat big portions, and if I go more than five or six hours without eating, I get pretty miserable. I bring snacks to work and eat during every break; pears and granola bars in the morning, a proper lunch at lunchtime, and then a cookie or two in the afternoon. I have coworkers who won’t eat for the entire day — they don’t even eat breakfast.

The greatest cat-feeding scene in cinematic history is in The Long Goodbye. It’s the very first thing that happens. Philip Marlowe wakes up in the middle of the night to his cat jumping on his chest and screaming. He goes to the kitchen and finds that he’s out of cat food. So, he heads over to the all-night grocery store to pick some up. They don’t have any of the brand his cat likes; he even asks the guy stocking the shelves, who suggests that he just buy a different brand. “Do you have any cats?” Philip asks. “No, I have a girlfriend,” the guy replies.

When Marlowe returns with the wrong brand of cat food, he locks his cat out of the kitchen, and empties the new can into a can of the regular stuff. Then, he lets his cat back in to watch him fill his bowl from what looks like the correct brand of cat food. The cat is not fooled by the ruse; he takes one sniff and walks out the door into the bright darkness of LA.

All I want is to be a loser guy in a movie. Sometimes, I realize with perfect clarity that that’s the extent of my aspirations. I want to be Philip Marlowe, but without all the detective stuff: just the part where he feeds his cat. I want to be Rocky Balboa, but not the part where he fights Apollo Creed; just the bit when he walks into his apartment and feeds his fish. I want to be Hirayama from Perfect Days, spraying his plants in the morning.

It seems like all I want is a pet and a house. Trouble is, I already have both of those things. I come home and one of my cats runs up to the door and stares at me as I take my shoes off. Then, I carry him up the three steps to the kitchen, where I put him down. My other cat is asleep in the cat tree, so I go over and give her some pets. Then...

Then what? The movies show just enough to suggest a routine; then, they disrupt it. My life doesn’t get disrupted, so I end up on my computer or on my phone. I skim the surface of a thousand stories without acquiring any real knowledge. I think about reading a book, and then I read the book, and then I have to start another book. But it’s hard to tell if I’m really living.

Christopher Marlowe is living. You know he’s living because he’s the main character in a movie. I don’t want someone to make a movie about me. I don’t event want my life to be a movie. I just want it to be contained within a structure; I want my self and my circumstances to form some sort of object that I can look at and derive meaning from. If I could look at it, it might seem important. As it is, it just feels formless and meandering.

I feel distracted. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be paying attention to, but whatever it is, I’m distracted from it by other things. I’m thinking about a lot of things, but none of them are what I’m supposed to be thinking about. It’s quite possible that I’m not supposed to be thinking at all.

I’ve been writing down my dreams again. I had one the other night about a Chinese woman with a bowl cut. She had just won a tennis tournament, or maybe it was table tennis. She had won several championships in the past as part of a team, but this was her first time winning by herself. I was watching all this unfold — on TV, I suppose — and I felt very happy for her. It was a beautiful moment.