Halloween 2022
I was a Black Sheep long before I was a Black Cat, although my beloved and dearly departed black cat, Annabella, would, and doubtless does, heartily disagree.
I can hear her “Caw” her displeasure regarding my assertion. “Caw” was her meow-sound that, in my opinion, was the auditory consequence of her having killed and eaten one too many birds.
Yes, it is true that the Black Cat in me was in its earliest stages of formation during my earliest formative stages on the East Coast, where I was the well-established Black Sheep. I didn’t seek out the state, or status, of pariah. It came to me naturally; and I did not refuse it. Regardless of the setting, public or private, I was the Outcast, the quintessential Black Sheep — though not for the reasons one might expect.
I was the Black Sheep among immoral and amoral individuals. Making them look bad, by virtue of my virtue, started young for me, and only got more obvious as I grew to maturity with a sense of ethics that was sharply honed against the whetstone of the sins they enjoyed committing. In short, I lived in an upside-down and inside-out world in terms of owning a conscience. I diligently strove to protect mine from the adults, and more than a few children, who’d destroyed their souls, some with glee.
I soon discovered, however, that being a social and family outcast has its advantages!
Nowadays, it is all too easy for a person to become a black sheep; but that kind, or species, is a phony, fabricated one. There are flocks of faux black sheep, just as there are flocks of faux white sheep, not to mention the flocks of wolves in sheep’s clothing, both black and white.
Media, government, corporate, and herd-pressure propaganda have been proliferating regarding just about anything — The Science, The Politics, The Sports, The Fashion, The Virtue, The Planet, The Food, The Energy, The History, The Future.
These onslaughts of hyped and hyper-hysteria have given rise to aggregated legions of black sheep. Those reprobates, lepers, and outsiders are, in actuality, ethically pristine and nearly pure in their love of humanity, truth, virtue, and, here in America, the American Way.
Having worn the Outcast Cloak for most of my life, I do protest the wooly warping of the term, the usage, and the dignity of any person who stands up to the loony mob, and thereby gets viciously labeled, excoriated, shamed, and silenced. I think it’s the White Sheep we all need to beware of, in our present cosmos of an upside-down morality.
I’m not sure that I can don the Virtue-Signaling Cape very well, or at all. I tend to look better in black than I do in white, which has its seasonal restrictions, at least the ones that I learned during my childhood about not wearing white before Easter or after Labor Day (ergo the creation of “winter white”.)
The problem with white-washing the truth, or covering up lies with (lucrative) made-up layers of pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow integrity and rectitude, is that even the phoney virtue wears thin. The pretense cannot be played out forever, regardless of how much money and myth-making get tossed at manufacturing an illusion that is a crass lie. Sooner or later, the jig is up. What was seen as the sanctity of white is viewed as the darkness of black, white equating to virtue, black the core of evil.
In technical non-artistic terms, neither white nor black is a color. In physics, a color is visible light with a specific wavelength; both black and white lack a specific wavelength. Visible light is electromagnetic radiation, with wavelengths ranging from roughly 400 to 700 nanometers, or Roy G. Biv.
White light contains all the wavelengths of visible light and is the sum of all possible colors. Black, on the contrary, is the absence of visible light. The visual arts define these two opposites as distinct colors, but the concept of spectral color in physics excludes black and white as true colors.
When someone shows his or her true colors, however, then a person really does see the light!
The Black Cat in me was always trying to teach me about the true colors of people who hid their fraud and deception from me through cleverly crafted camouflage: the cover of probity, the sonority of sincerity, the image of upstanding authority, the paragon of high-mindedness.
By the early to mid-1990s, Debra was beginning to see the light! During that Decade of Greed and Deceit, The Black Cat attire entered my holiday wardrobe; it’s never exited my aesthetic arsenal of apparel.
A new phase of my life began during the spring of 2008 when I adopted Annabella, along with her “sister”, Gabrielle. Those two abandoned cats had escaped from the abandoned hovel behind my house, and they became forces with which to reckon in my household. My life would be forever changed by my unexpected act of mercy. I scarcely realized that truth at the time, but certain certainties and verities take time to become fully realized by their recipient.
For this Halloween, I sewed a new pair of feline ears, to honor my Annabelle, but also to pay homage to the steely soothsayers among us.
We see things others chose not to see, but we also divine conclusions, mostly from intuitive insights and undeniable common sense, that have become highly unpopular amongst, and despised by, the delusional crowds. Driven by fears, coddled by fears, and controlled by fears, those wrong-headed persons invest in those fears, not in facts or accuracy. They move recklessly within their own orbits of falsehoods and self-willed panic, averse and hostile to factual information.
They claim to be wise, and well-informed, and morally superior even as they behave with bigoted hostility to anyone displaying the courage of his convictions, the audacity to mouth unpopular actualities, and the fortitude of faith in the certitude of what is real and what is fake.
Those delusional crowds and their warped world views do not comprise the majority — no matter where the pollsters count them, but the fortissimo effect — of that small but smug and messed-up mob — is achieved through the megaphone moron media. That fortissimo effect is achieved for the most treacherous of intentions and purposes by the malevolent in the world.
Those nefarious goals, once realized, typically do the most harm to their most zealous advocates, that ignorant group of blind-faith believers: which is to say, the people devoid of true faith who refuse to face, head-on, anything real.
For those of us who prefer to see things as they are, warts and all, grotesque and beastly, mis-shapen, hideous and horrible — the spirit of the black cat thrives within us. Seeing things as they are — not as the Outside World profitably plots and plans them to be — that is the essence of a black cat.
Cawing at the reality of life around you is but one apt response to accepting life as it comes to you, and thereby advancing toward some level of serenity. It was with such a comical, whimsical, mystical, and magnificent spirit that Annabella took me into hand, or paw, and showed me the ropes of aspiring to a higher dimension (in spite of our mutual fear of heights).
My Annabelle fascinated, delighted, and fortified me during those long nights and furiously busy days of composing THE DAWN. She pulled me away from the noxious magnet of Media Alerts that announced very little of reality. I felt safer and more informed in my fiction. Indeed, I was! Serenity sustained me from within the scenes, plot lines, and narration of a novel set in France during World War II.
My hope, my fervent hope for the coming year, or years, is that the corporately-dominated Internet will face the cruel cruelties of capitalism, and will begin to free up those electrons for a scintilla of sanity in which the webmasters can function. I’d gladly subscribe to an online journal of information that has been zealously researched, cautiously and cleverly written, and which aims to inform, instruct, entertain, even uplift and enlighten.
I have searched, believe me, I have search-engine searched, but have not been able to find such a source of timely truth and verified fact in a typed format on-the-screen. It’s possible that websites of humor, comical but truthful information, and true-news are somewhere in the pipeline, or the electron flow. It’s also likely that too many many people are presently too busy, trying to survive the latest contrived crisis not of their own making, to bother delving into Online Agitprop Awfulness, disguised as Articles of Facts and Illumination.
The globalist-propaganda started out as a boring but vulgar yawn, and it’s only gotten more abhorrent, fake, and boring. Faux News has put just about all of us to sleep!
It’s more than likely that millions of individuals — hordes, in fact — are black sheep who have found their inner black cat. There are far worse creatures with whom to inwardly commune.
In Japan, the black cat represents good fortune, abundant harvests, wealth, and prosperity in business.
The black cat not only brings good luck but is a talisman against bad luck and danger, and augurs auspicious consequences and events. The black cat possesses strong powers of good. Most wondrously, the black cat can engender treasure.
My Annabelle was a treasure in herself. She “became” Gisèle in THE DAWN, and explored the barn in Roussillon that was a true treasure trove. That French cat fit in quite well with the French peasants of Provence, those canny, shrewd individuals with backbone. Historically, the French peasant has believed that a black cat placed upon any crossroads — where five roads intersect — will lead those provincial prophets with pluck to treasure.
The Black Cat in the south of France is known as the magician cat and is called “matagot”. One must grant to this bewitching animal the proper respect through Gallic customs that I diligently tried to follow with Annabella, the miniature panther of Newcastle, California.
She did not receive the first bite of dinner, unless, of course, Dinner consisted of small quails that she stalked and killed, just for me. She lovingly hid them throughout the garage as Christmas presents, des cadeaux de Noël, in December 2012.
Annabella was also dutifully and happily granted a nice bed, many nice beds, in fact. In return, I was blessed with blissful fortune, fanciful and fortuitous flights of imagination, good luck, fine health, stalwart protection from danger — and the joys of a love that does not end.
For me, those joys, of the endless love, are the greatest gifts from my black cat. Those treasures a black sheep cannot mysteriously design, dream up and bring to fabulous fruition!