18:38 - August 01, 2002
kittens
I was walking out to my car today, arms loaded down with boxes to ship out to Boulder, when I noticed the same three little kittens that had been living on my fence until the dog came home from vacation were walking into my neighbours' yard. I dropped the boxes on my car's hood and began creeping toward them. Their tails fuzzed up and two turned and ran through the fence into the backyard, but one stayed to hiss at me. The closer I got, the louder it hissed, its mouth making that snakelike V that they think is so threatening, but in actuality this kitten might have weighed two pounds. Since they started out life on my back fence, I thought they might sense I was a friend, and I spoke kindly to them, but as I got within a few feet of the hisser, he finally turned and ran through the fence slats as well.

I was going to just get back in my car and go to work, but I didn't really want to, so I rang the bell of my neighbour's house to tell them there were kittens in their backyard, and D answered the door, in shorts, wiping sleep goo from his eyes. D was my best friend for a long time; since he was born, really. He's a little over a year younger, and since he lived across the street, we used to get together and do all sorts of stupid shit that he usually thought up, like tossing stuffed animals at the ceiling fan to see how far they would fly, or dropping parachute men out my attic window into the prickly bushes and then making me fetch them, or coloring all my Barbies green, or trying to make my cat swim in the inflatable pool. I once tried to have a crush on him in fifth grade just because I was bored, but it didn't work. We stopped hanging out when I got into high school, I think, or maybe even before that. He was into school and into track and other sports, and I liked to hide out at home and write or play music. The only thing we ever had in common anyway, even before high school, was video games. We used to play them for entire summer days while our parents yelled at us to go outside and enjoy the weather. When I got better than him at Mario Brothers, he made us switch to Baseball Stars and Stinger and Russian Attack, 'boy' games that I couldn't comprehend. I think we were on Donkey Kong 2 or 3 when we stopped seeing each other.

Anyway, I told him that there were kittens in his yard and he told me about his cat and what a spaz she is and then we sat down on his front porch and talked for a half hour. I have a completely different sense of humour than I used to and he retains only a semblance of the one he used to have, but we were still able to communicate, which surprises me, since he runs with the same crowd as the boys in my math class, who I was never even able to translate a sentence for. But we communicated, and he even laughed when I teased him about being a sadistic little child, which he was. He's someone I would never begin a conversation with now, not because one of us is inferior or superior to the other, but because our paths would never cross, and if they did, we'd mumble figurative 'excuse me's and keep going. But I guess I'm still grounded enough to hold down a normal chat between old friends. It's good to know, I guess.

But it's making me remember all these things we used to do, and how much of my life he occupied, and how much less twisted I would be if I hadn't succumbed to his strange games. Cat in the pool being one; still have scars from that. But I mean mostly things like that one day where he put some red food coloring in water and filled a headless Barbie with it, and put her head back on, and then took her downstairs to where my mother was cooking dinner and cut the Barbie open with a kitchen knife so her 'blood' spilled all over the counter. When people hear stories about kids doing that, they assume (and justifiably so) that the kids are going to grow up psycho. But he just finished a summer internship at Stanford, and is taking all these AP classes, and wakes up at 5 to run on the track team and goes to sleep at 3 after working for hours on homework. I may view this as psycho, of course, but... it's just funny how absurd some preconceptions are. Kids are kids. Of course, now that I've said that, he's going to bomb a city just to prove me wrong. That part of his humour is still around.

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