My cat is dying. It’s a slow, probably painful, dying. A few months ago, he gained a small, weird sore on his front paw and it didn’t heal. It was weird: bloody on occasion, crusty on others, green on others. It changes constantly. I’ve taken Inky to one vet and then another and then another. The first one I went to was okay. Honest and trying, he ultimately recommended I talk with a veterinary surgeon to have his paw removed. But at 15 or so, it’s doubtful he would make it through that surgery; or so says the fourth vet we’ve seen and I think he’s right. At this point, it’s palliative care. It’s hard to know how far the cancer has spread from his paw, though it’s definitely spread. An x-ray shows that it’s near his heart. This has been going on for about six months now and it can’t be painless for him. We’re doing a “pulsing” regimen of antibiotics to keep the infection from overwhelming him and now he’s also on daily pain relief drops. Inky is the smartest cat I’ve owned or seen. He knows what is happening, I think, and he’s taking it on like the tough guy I know he is.

I bought the new Stars album the other day. It’s okay. It sounds like they learned, somewhere on the wide road between their home in Toronto and their fans in the States, that they need to take themselves seriously. I’ve met one of their managers but I’m sure it’s not her fault.
In the August 30, 2007, New Yorker, David Owen writes about humanity’s lack of contact with the heavens that have been with us since forever, before it all. “And civilization’s assuault on the stars has consequences far beyond its impact on astronomers. Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping, wonder.”
Adam Gopnik, another of my favorite writers, in the same issue speaks of Philip K. Dick’s new relevance today, despite his death in the early 1980s. Gopnik writes about the central metaphor of Dick’s work: “The social arrangement of power is always that of a brute oligarchic minority forcing its will on a numbed population, with amusements the daily meal and brutality the implicity threat; for all that has changed technologically, that fatal pattern has never really altered.” And this: “The vision of an unending struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it always senses but can’t quite see, and a deranged cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary and real–this thought today does not seem exactly crazy.”
Today, Google <a href="announced that users of Google Earth could now see the stars above their location with the application’s latest version. This is perhaps the last way humans will see the heavens above.