I have struggled to write this past week.  I did anyway.  As my late friend Chuck Close used to say “Inspiration is for amateurs.”  You have to trust the process.  If you sit down to write, you often discover that writing occurs whether you want to or not. Creation is doing, not waiting.

Now let me be candid. I’ve had to force myself to the process.  Bart, my dear friend and lover, has got cancer.  Roberta and mike noticed it.  Bart told me she was fine.  When Roberta forced her into a kitty carrier for a trip to the vet, Bart was in shock.  She had never felt better.  Sure, she had a lump or two, but then some vet started examining her.  Do these vets know anything other than gloomy hypotheses?  Being nattering nabobs of negativism, as Bill Safire once wrote, is their speciality.

Without getting Bart’s informed consent, Roberta scheduled her with a vet surgeon.  

The vet’s henchmen assaulted Bart, drugged her, and then the chief witch began carving on her.  If human women mourn the loss of two nipples, imagine how a Molly with nine nipples feels.   Bart awoke to discover the slicers had done a bilateral mastectomy.  She lost all her nipples.

Poor Bart came home and it took her a full three weeks to be rid of an E collar and out of a onesie.  She didn’t even have the strength to plot vengeance on vets and their ilk.  

If it weren’t for my fear of injury, I might have done more to rescue her; however, don’t the wise say that discretion is the better part of valour?  So, what good would it do Bart for me to be injured defending her?  I did write a letter to KPS (kitty protective services).  The loafing incompetents there have yet to get to me.  And so I wrote few futile feature stories on the evils of veterinary medicine did no good either.

I did tell Bart that I would have done more if only I hadn’t been travelling.  Being a natural fink, Fielding ratted and said I, whilst she was being cut, sat around stress eating.  Satisfied to have ratted me out, Fielding delivered a few rabbit punches to my head.  I’d have taught Fielding a good lesson after that if she weren’t meaner, tougher, and stronger than I am.  If you’re a guy, what I put up with from Fielding is the price Toms pay in Kittyland for the smart choice of choosing tough, fearless wives as bodyguards.  Sometimes they have mean mouths too.  What Tom likes being called a worm? 

The negativist vets estimates that Bart won’t last another year.  I cry bull shit.  If anybody thinks Steve Seagal is hard to kill, he hasn’t met Bart or Fielding.  Bart will go down swinging.  Don’t bet she’ll be gone in a year or less.  She is 15 or so now.  But I expect her to wage war on cancer.  Even now, she has gained weight.   She is back up to seven and a half pounds.  She has no plans “to go gentle into that good night.”  She is a warrior.

In the years since the Lithuania bombing, I never told her I had any role.  Neither she nor Fielding recognised anybody else as having a right to put me in danger. And if Lucky had settled for hiring somebody to kill Wolverine, Bart and Fielding would have offered her a deep discount.  

But I never have claimed to be a bravo chap.  I adore luxury.  I am, despite the people I know, a safety addict.   What I have had over the years is an invincible faith in my ability to love my way out of any trouble, especially when I take the elementary precaution of doing what I can to minimise risk to me.

Hence my horror at what I began to suspect was Lucky’s plan to do something to one of Wolverine’s bots.  My intuition was sound.

So, one day I arrived in Waynesville to see Lucky.  She had parked a rental truck was in the driveway.  In the back of the truck was a largish tub of an evil-looking concoction.  It was a vile fluid if anything was.  She had a jack in the truck, rope and what appeared to be some kind of pully system. Don’t hold me to that.  I’m no physicist.  

She didn’t take long to tell me about a plan she had to “inspect a bot.”  According to Lucky, she wanted to make sure that Wolverine was not building a bot army for a heinous but unknown purpose.  I doubted that.  Given my journalism training, I assumed she wanted to get one to reverse engineer a specialty of the Chinese.  Why make something when you can wait until somebody else does?  Let the suckers pay.  You spare yourself the costs of R&D.

Still, I don’t pretend to know all Lucky’s women.  From what I witnessed, she enjoyed violence for its own sake.  It was seasoning for her life.