He can just about get to the point where he admits that the Democrats don’t actually have empathy, and are objectively cruel, wasteful, and hostile to white Americans, but then he has to stop and re-fly his Good Boy flag. He will grudgingly, and with apologies at every step, allow as how women are able to be narcissistic and abusive just as men are, but not without three times as much text proclaiming that women are not bad and men mostly are.

He signals that he’s still a Good Boy in ways like this:

-”But it’s not their fault. Structural deprivation/malnutrition/white supremacy/his granda’s sadness over Jim Crow made him do it. We’re still at fault, as white people.”

-”It’s appalling that the Democrats still want to chemically castrate children, let in unvetted foreign nationals, and confiscatorily tax whites so that welfare can keep flowing to black single mothers and illegals, but the real problem is Trump’s patriarchal white supremacy.”

-”It seems to be sadly true that we’ve discovered that women are capable of cruelty, as much as it pains me to admit that I can see that falsely accusing men of sexual harassment and ruining their careers is a thing that some women are doing. I hasten to add that it’s only a few, and we shouldn’t put together any patterns from that, and also did you know that one in four women are raped in their lifetimes?”

I’d be surprised if you haven’t seen this man; he’s an archetype. There are many of him on Substack. I recognize him as a former version of myself.

He has spent his life socially gelded, and he’s in the process of getting his testicles back. This is difficult for him, as he was usually raised gelded from early childhood. Maybe he had an explicitly feminist mother, like mine. But that’s not necessary. Even if he grew up with a mother and a father, neither of whom would call themselves feminists, he still grew up with a mother and father who were default feminist and default liberal because that is, in fact, the default stance of modern respectable Americans.

Conservative men say “happy wife, happy life” just as or more enthusiastically and often as liberal men do.

Liberalism, feminism, Marxist-inflected views on the distribution of property, endless “compassion” for anyone who appears “unfortunate” is the received status opinion of the respectable modern American. It’s gone on for so long that those born before this was universal have almost forgotten the world before. Those born after this became universal literally do not believe the world was ever different, could be different, or that it would be acceptable for the world to be different.

American reader, you think this isn’t you. But it is you. You may have heard those stories of defectors from North Korea who didn’t believe that fully stocked (absurdly abundant, really) grocery stores existed until they saw them in America. They’re often overcome with emotion when they see it for themselves, but it’s not the existence of so much food that triggers their emotions, it’s the profound shift in world view. It’s confronting the real-world evidence that everything they were taught about the world from birth was a lie. The people who raised them lied, or were passing on lies that they believed. Their government never cared about them, it only abused and lied to them.

It should be no suprise that people find this overwhelming, that it provokes laughing and crying at the same time. It should be no surprise that this new awareness of the world brings nightmares and anxiety, as it did for the North Korean lady in the video above. She had tense dreams about how to select from so many varieties of tomato.

Similarly goes the man who is waking up to reality, but who applies the brakes on the way repeatedly so he can still be a Good Boy. For the North Korean defector, she has a lifetime of moral commitment to overcome. Even though she now sees with her own eyes that the world is not an evil place, but that her government was evil, this clashes with her internalized view that the North Korean government is “her family” and how could her family be the bad ones?

It’s the same for the struggling Good Boy. He can see with his own eyes that it’s blacks who are violent to whites, not the other way around. He can see that the women of his clan (the liberals) insouciantly mock and degrade men constantly while any man who objects is called “abusive,” he can see that the confiscatory tax policies of his Democrat party punish productive people like him and give his money to Fatima and Lashanda so they can feed their kids without working.

But this reality is horrifying. It means that the people he knew as Good were lying to him, or were trapped in the same lie themselves without knowing it (they might not actually be good and that’s terrifying). It means that his place in the world, his means of seeing himself as a Good Boy, was a cruel exploitative joke at his expense. Living this way did not actually make him Good, and worse, it cost him money, clarity, and self-respect.

This feels so awful that he wants to deny it.

So he dithers. He vacillates between acknowledging reality for what it is, but stopping to protest that it shouldn’t be the way it is. And anyway, maybe it was always wrong, but THE TRUMP. And The Trump, The MAGA, is BAD, and Trump/The MAGA says some of the same things I’ve been thinking, so that means I can’t think them, because THEY’RE BAD AND IF I SHARE ANY BELIEFS OR BEHAVIORS IN COMMON WITH THE THE TRUMP/THE MAGA THEN I AM BAD TOO AND I KNOW THIS BECAUSE MOMMY SAID SO.

The faltering Good Boy finds this intolerable. He knows now that he can’t pretend real things are fake anymore. But those things that are true are still emotionally contaminated (current lingo would say that they are “right-wing coded,” which means “evil”), so he can’t just accept them without being seen to protest. That’s key: He has to both see himself as resisting them, but he also needs other people to seem him performing that resistance.

So he writes columns where he throws in 1 teaspoon of truth acknowledgment but blunts its effectiveness with three more teaspoons of “Of course, I’m not saying Trump could ever be right,” and “Of course, women are still most affected by bad men,” and “Surely we can all still agree that structural racism against blacks is real and is of much more pressing moral concern than anything that could happen to a white boy like me.”

It’s the dynamic I described on Disaffected last night. Men raised by narcissistic mothers have inverted values instilled in them from birth. They grow up believing they were born bad because they were born male. If all humans contain original sin, then he has two original sins. He is fallen both as a human, and also as a male.

Here’s last night’s episode.

The struggling Good Boy is frustrating to me. I owe him a charitable stance, since what he’s going through is normal and understandable, and most in his circumstances would react as he does. I also owe him that because I was him, and other people were patient with me as I struggled and I have a duty to be as good to others as others have been to me.

But I can’t get all the way there. Not yet. The struggling Good Boy is not trustworthy, and he will very likely throw a person like me to the wolves in one of his regressions where he stops and performs Good Boy for the huddled group of fellow liberals watching him for moral missteps.

If he gets too close to the truth, he’ll back off and apologize to them. If I’m standing in the room and I tell the complete truth (that he knows is true) without simpering apology, he will re-join the liberal huddle and point at me as an “extremist.” If there’s some evil male has to have his head displayed on a pike, he will make sure it’s my head, not his. He won’t say, “No one’s head belongs on a pike, not even his.”

That is, he will act immorally and duplicitously. I did this for a time, and other sensible, sane people were correct not to trust me. I was not trustworthy while I remained in that state.

The struggling Good Boys I see around today are not trustworthy while they remain in this state. Those who get past this state will usually become trustworthy. That’s what I hope for the Good Boys.

But until they stop trying to be Good Boys entirely, I will keep my distance. My heart would like to extend an olive branch and say, “Hey, we’re brothers,” but I will not. It would be objectively foolish to do so; I’m old enough to have synthesized predictable patterns based on past behavior. I’m objectively correct that a struggling Good Boy will turn on people like me. Having been genuinely cancelled—lost my job, my career, and nearly all of my friends, and all of my reputation—I’m not going to cooperate in self-immolation again.

But I wish them well, and I’ll be silently, undetectably, rooting for their success at becoming true grown up men. Once they do, I hope we can be friends.

Watch on Rumble

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-Men with narcissistic mothers learn a false lesson. They believe their moral duty in life is to serve their mother (and then their wives) with no limits, even if it hurts him and gets in the way of his needs. Stories from Josh and guest host Scott Kim show what it looks like.

-A six-point plan to bring back something creaky and like, totally ancient: customer service

-Let’s hear it for the rich. Without the wealth and philanthropic impulse of the wealthy elite, America would be so much poorer in beauty and history. Take a tour of the 45-acre repository of American history in buildings, machines, and crafts, right in Vermont, thanks to a rich sociliate named Electra Webb

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Today, I know. My mother has borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. That is why I had spent years paying off her back rent, begging landlords not to evict her, running interference for her with creditors. My mother was poor because she was lazy and irresponsible. She was able to continue this because, trained from childhood as my mother’s servant, surrogate husband, and savior, I believed it was my moral duty to sacrifice for her.

It has been 10 years since I’ve spoken to her, and I will never do so again. She is functionally dead to me.

We were standing in the kitchen of the upstairs apartment. My handyman who was helping refurbish the property was coming in and out finishing up odds and ends. “Paul” is a working class redneck, the proverbial rough-around-the-edges guy with a heart of gold. He has very little filter on his mouth as many of his type do, but that has nothing to do with the decent, helpful person he is. Paul’s work renovating this foreclosed-on house I bought was what gave my mother a clean, equipped apartment to live in for half the going market rate.

Paul made some off-color joke at me involving women. I don’t remember what it was. I do remember that it was the kind of working class bar humor that was common in many places in the 70s and 80s, especially for working class people like my family. It was the kind of bawdy male humor about women and sex that would get a man affectionately bopped on the nose by his wife or the women at the bar, who would laugh along and serve back a joke about his small dick.

That is to say, it was the kind of joke that was considered normal, if low class, banter forever until it became the kind of joke that women scream is “misogyny!”

We’ll pick the story back up shortly.

I used to be a simpering man. A leftist male feminist. A servant for my mother, and an emotional doormat for most of my female “friends.” I mean it when I said I was raised this way from birth; I thought it was normal. My deep fear was that I was actually born bad, because I was born male. My mother made sure that all men who had contact with our family growing up were violent or irresponsible, and she made sure to use that to excuse her unforgivably bad choices in men and in what her children were exposed to by those choices.

Too many men today think this is normal. What used to happen only in homes with a personality disordered mother like mine now happens everywhere, at every level of culture. Women can utter the word “misogyny” any time they like, and respectable, “normal” society will succor her. Society will often go further and punish, shun, de-bank, or make unemployable the man she has accused, whether he did anything punishment-worthy or not.

That day in 2014 happened before I had my “great awakening” about the fact of my mother’s personality disorder. That awakening turned into a much bigger realignment of my cultural, political, and moral priorities. It was the catalyst that changed my mind from leftist liberal to conservative over a period of years.

But I was beginning to get clues. I had not lived near my mother since the age of 12 when I was insitutionalized in a juvenile delinquent boys’ home. After escaping as an emancipated minor at 16, I lived on my own, far away from my mother, until I brought her back into my life (into my own house) at age 39.

Those decades of distance did two things that contradicted each other:

a. They allowed me to “forget” the abuse and rewrite in in my mind as “not so bad” so that I could live out my fantasy of living together as a loving family.

b. Being away from my mother for so long made her usual behaviors—fake victimhood, false accusations, reversing the truth, screaming and calling names—seem foreign to me for the first time in my life. I had lived around enough normal people for long enough to now be able to notice how insane and disordered my mother’s behavior had always been.

Let’s pick it back up. When Paul made that off-color joke, my mother put on a face of aggrieved horror. She shouted that she was a woman, and as a woman, she was offended. She didn’t quite lose her shit all the way, but it was squirmingly uncomfortable. I knew she was expecting me to immediately chastise Paul in front of her, and I didn’t do that (that was the first time in my life that I didn’t perform white knight for my mother).

When he left, the rage came out. She screamed at me. “How could you let that man say such a misogynistic thing about me! I’m a woman and that’s about people like me! How DARE YOU NOT DEFEND ME!”

I cowered. My heart was racing and my stomach was in knots. If you are a man who has not been raised by a truly abusive woman from childhood, you may have a hard time understanding that feeling. It seems strange to be that deeply, mortally afraid of your mother’s judgment, I know. But I was, and it was deep fear. It wasn’t just a fear of “she’ll be unpleasant if I don’t give in.” It was a fear that my lack of defending my mother in that moment meant that I was bad and corrupt on a fundamental soul level, because I was male, just as my mother had said since I was old enough to have memories.

So I apologized. I said I had failed in my duty. I told my mother how very sorry I was. It was pathetic, but it needed to happen. I needed to have my nose rubbed in it, and I had to witness my own complicity in my degradation in order to learn some lessons. I didn’t learn them all that day, but the memory of that interaction stayed with me (obviously since I’m telling you about it).

Over the next few years, my mother’s behavior became psychotic. I mean that clinically and literally, as defined by professionals—I am not using “psychotic” as a metaphor or an intensifier for rhetorical effect. She threatened to put a hole in her disabled husband’s head and bragged about it. She threw heavy skillets at him so hard she put a hole in the drywall (and then laughingly bragged about it to my sister as an example of women “not taking men’s shit” anymore).

She became paranoid and insisted that strange people were “driving up the road” and that she needed motion detector lights and security and all sorts of things “just to be safe.” In reality, what my mother wanted was to see my running at her every command, spending money at her direction, and centering her emotional thunderstorms in my life to the exclusion of my own needs.

For those interested in more detail there are several episodes of my weekly show, Disaffected, that tell the story:

Mommie Issues
Over The Borderline Part I
Over The Borderline Part II

At the end of this post, I’m going to upload the first episode of my show, titled “Mommie Issues.”

In 2016, with the help of my sister, I woke up to my mother’s personality disorder. My first action as a truly grown man was evicting my mother in court, forcing her off my property and out of my life. Before this, I was not a man. I was a scared little boy who had been turned into a servant for an insatiable and cruel woman, and I thought that’s what made me “good.” I was a boy, not a man. And I cooperated with my own emotional stunting and emasculation for years until I stopped.

Some of you men reading this right now are still boys, not men. You are serving a mother like this, a sister like this, a wife like this. Stay with me fellas—I’m not degrading you. I was you. When I say you’re still boys, I’m saying it as a friend and fellow traveler, not as an insult.

But millions of chronologically adult males in the U.S. are not men. Millions more than have ever existed before our era. The kind of simping I did for my abusive mother used to be much less common. You saw it in abusive families, but it was not part of mainstream “normal” culture. Remember how we used to mock “mama’s boys”? When was the last time you saw that? Have you noticed how the stock character “mama’s boy” is now held up as what normal men should aspire to?

Have you ever said “happy wife, happy life?” If the answer is yes, you are not being a Good Boy. You are being abused, you are cooperating in your own degradation, and you have Stockholm Syndrome.

The magical spell of feminism has fully saturated every level of our society from our most private thoughts and family moments to the baseline assumptions we operate on in public and at work. It is real-world witchcraft. That’s what witchcraft and magic is—verbal spells and incantations work, whether you believe they do so for metaphysical or mundane reasons.

I watched it happen over 50 years. Even conservative women are likelier than they should be to be “default feminist.” Even conservative men are likelier than they should be to act as “default feminists.”

This is because our culture is default feminist. “Feminist” is not a term that means “only wanting to be treated fairly and like a human.” “Feminist” is narcissism and ressentiment. If you’re about to object and say, “But women should have legal rights the same as men,” you’re making a mistake. You think that’s what “feminism” means. That is not what feminism means. That is is what grasping, exploitative narcissistic people want you to believe that feminism means. They want you to think that if you believe that women should have equal rights under law, then you are a feminist.

Not true. I am as anti-feminist as they come. I also believe women should have equal rights under the law (though the details are debatable when it comes to things like military combat service, etc. That’s for a different article.)

Feminism has been brilliantly branded and marketed. It has convinced most modern people that it is a synonym for “I think women are human and shouldn’t be abused.” In that way, feminism has insulated itself from any normal critique, investigation, or outright rejection on grounds of unfairness and incoherence. It’s a bait and switch. It is, at bottom, just plain old clinical narcissism.

The unspoken assumptions that we operate on are:

-Women have always been, and are today, in a state of subjugation to men. All normal heterosexual interaction puts women at a structural disadvantage

-Men are naturally born and wired to exploit women. What appears to be duty, loyalty, or natural sexual desire is actually an inborn male proclivity to abuse, rape, and extract resources from powerless women

-Women’s claims are to be believed at face value always and by default. To question them is itself an act of misogyny

[Notice: “misogyny,” meaning hatred of women, has silently replaced “sexism.” Do you find that as telling as I do?]

-Women are born and wired fundamentally good, fundamentally harmless, and fundamentally “empathetic”

-If a woman is violent, if she hurts her children, if she kills them, if she kills her husband, it is because some men or some patriarchal system “drove her to it.” Even when she acts, and the action she takes is murder, she is not performing an action. She is, instead, being acted upon by patriarchy. She just “snapped” because of how she was treated.

She dinnut do nuffin’. And if she did, then it wasn’t her fault. And if she did, a man made her do it. And if she did, it was understandable. And if she did, well, maybe it was a good thing?

Men and sons: It is not your job to serve your mother or your wife or your girlfriend (and for you gay men, your female besties) the way I describe above. That is not being a man. That is being exploited. Honorable, normal service to women in the context of healthy family dynamics looks nothing like what I’ve described.

Women and daughters: Personality disordered mothers abuse you just as badly as they do sons, but in different ways. They compete with you sexually, they try to drag down your self-image, they may accuse you of being a slut because they themselves are out painting the town red and they’re jealous of your youth and beauty. You are not obliged to be your mother’s dumping grounds for this.

This week, I didn’t appear on the weekly show Disaffected as I was dealing with personal business. My friend Scott Kim sat in for me, and the episode he put out is one of the best we’ve done. Scott tells the inside story of what it’s like to be raised by a truly psychopathic Korean mother whose extreme behavior went beyond even my mother’s insanity. He’s also extremely funny, so don’t miss it.

Our culture’s lurch to the left, to woke, is bound up at the root with feminism. We cannot change the leftward lurch without coming face to face with the narcissistic, abusive, normalized societal assumptions that come from feminism. If you recognize the feminization of society as a problem, intellectual honesty (not to mention any chance of being effective at changing it) requires you to recognize feminism for what it is.

It is not anything positive. No, it didn’t “start out OK but then went off the rails.” Go back as far as you like, find any historical waves you like, and really read the women who started the wave. You will find that it is narcissism and ressentiment all the way back; it’s just that we got taken in by the bait and switch.

Are you about to point out that until the 70s, women as a class were not allowed to have credit cards or even their own bank account?

It’s not true. And it wasn’t ever true the way it has been presented. Retired academic and former feminist professor Janice Fiamengo gets at the truth. Perhaps it will be palatable coming from a woman (or, perhaps, if you don’t like the message, you will call Fiamengo a ball-cupper and a pick-me).

Be you man or woman, it is not, was not ever, and will never be, your moral duty to subjugate your mind, your money, your own self interest, or your self-respect to serve a resentful woman. Not your mother, not your sister, not your wife.

Decent, normal women would not demand this of you. The trouble today is that too many decent, normal women, women who don’t have personality disorders, women who are not inclined to be abusive, believe the feminist pied piper’s narcissistic lies.

I believed them for a long time, too. The episode of my show embedded below tells the story of my first awakening to what feminism really was.

We know you’ve been waiting and thank you for your patience. This week has been hell for me (Josh) and hard for Kevin (the other half of Disaffected) who’s been going through Internet outages at all the wrong times. My cat’s death at the last minute fouled up the show schedule, but you’ll enjoy this.

Our friend Scott Kim sits in for me with blood-curdling (yes, literally) tales of his spicy, Korean-inflected Cluster B monster mom.

Enjoy “Miso Traumatized.” Special for you with free egg roll!

Livestream Thursday, May 28, 12 pm US Eastern (New York) time

Join me and a panel of guests at a new time for a discussion of the Cluster B takeover of all things “autism”. People with clinical narcissism and borderline personalities are rebranding themselves as “autistic”, and the professional mental health people are going right along with it like flying monkeys.

Just as deranged people with borderline personality disorder managed to get themselves sympathetically misdiagnosed as “bipolar” (manic depression) for decades, they’re now working the same con with claims of “autism.”

Autism is not a personality disorder. Autism is not a synonym for “dishonest” and “emotionally manipulative.” But that’s what it’s becoming as personality dysfunction is morally laundered into phony “autism” for sympathy points.

The result? Abusive people are getting sympathy points while genuinely autistic people and their needs are neglected.

When: 12 noon US Eastern (New York) time, Thursday, May 28. TWELVE NOON, NOT 6 pm as usual. Be sure to note that!

Where:

Youtube
Rumble
Twitter

Shredder was such a big personality, and so physically striking, that he got more “air time” around here and on the show than Mina. But Mina has been my sweet love since I got her as a tiny kitten taken from her mother too soon (I didn’t initiate the too-soon-taking, but I took her in after it was done). You would be hard pressed to find a more loving, affectionate, bonded cat than Mina. I think she imprinted on me as a parent figure.

Shredder’s dad cat instincts were there from the start; he obviously knew what a baby was, and he treated her like one. They took to each other immediately, and stayed close friends and nap partners for life.

Here they are on Mina’s first supper in her new home, in 2016:

You see Shreds? Chonker was 22 pounds when I adopted him. I got him down to about 15 pounds, and he stayed there most of his life until he declined. He was tough and strong, defending his territory against neighborhood cats (and just as often barging into their territory like an asshole and then fighting them). I broke up a number of tom fights in the back yard and paid for it in shredded skin (see what I did?).

But at home he was gentle and paternal with Mina. As she grew into adulthood, the play got rough and tumble between them and they wrestled and swatted and hissed at each other. But he never exerted too much force on this much smaller kitty, and they always ended up cuddled together. In all those years, I don’t think they ever had a real fight, only play.

Mina knows he’s gone. She’s meowing in ways she hasn’t before in a way that almost seems like she’s asking me a question. She looks around the house in a way she hasn’t before. No, animals are not humans, but yes, they are conscious, they have feelings, and they know who their family is. They know when someone is gone.

She has always been firmly attached to me, but she’s even more near me now. Mina is the kind of affectionate cat who pushes her purring face into my face, or into my hand, to get her some love. Happily for me, she likes to have her face and head smooched over and over again (I’m a compulsive cat smoocher). That’s how she woke me up this morning, sitting on my chest where Shredder used to sit.

Thank God for her.

This summer, I will get us a kitten and start the cycle over again. Having a baby to take care of was good for Shredder, and it will be good for Mina.

Something wonderful is going to happen for me in about a month, and it’s connected. My sister, my brother in law, and my nephew, are moving into my house at the end of June. They’re coming in from New York state and will take the upstairs apartment.

I have lived apart from family since I was placed in a boys’ home at 13. By choice, I’ve lived alone most of my life. I’ve been lonely for a long time (though I wouldn’t admit it) and that’s about to end. It’s time to gather family in a homestead.

My sister and I hope to find a mama cat with a litter, and each take a sibling kitten. She’s lost all her cats to disease or old age in recent years, and needs a feline back in the house. I hope it works out this way.

‘I know nothing stays the same, but if you’re willing to play the game, it will be coming around again’

Kevin, the other half of Disaffected, will be putting something together for our show tonight at 9, thankfully, as I can’t do it.

My cat Shredder died yesterday. He’s buried in a lovely spot in the corner of the stone wall. I can see it from my writing desk.

In a while, I’ll put up a stone with his likeness etched into it.

As deaths go, this was as peaceful as it could be. My dear friend Holly basically lived at my house the past three days. She brought me food (always a comfort), and she talked me through my doubts about putting him down. I’ve had so many cats die, and the bad deaths are always traumatic, and then I always forget that when the next one is dying and have a hard time bringing myself to “kill” them.

See? I want to avoid the reality by putting “kill” in quotation marks, but that’s what it is. It is killing. Putting Shredder down was merciful, I know, even if not all of my heart knows it it yet. But it’s not “not killing.”

The housecall veterinarian, Erika, was as kind as you could hope. She explained everything, and she goes slow. First the sedative so he was more relaxed than he’d been able to be for months of his sickness. Then, when I was ready, she gave the fatal injection. I saw him stop breathing before the plunger was fully depressed. He was gone before the needle was removed.

I have his paw print curing on the piano. I clipped four bundles of his beautiful majestic white fur and tied them up in blue yarn. They’re in the special drawer for keeping things like that.

The night before, Shredder’s other person, my former housemate Mary, came over with her husband. I’m so glad Shredder and Mary got to see each other-we adopted him together, and he was as much her cat as he was mine, though she moved out a few years ago.

Both Mary and Holly’s counsel helped me stay the course, and I’m glad. There was no undue suffering this time, no long nights of seizures and howling that I couldn’t soothe.

Now he’s gone except for his ghost. It’s started, as it always does. I thought I saw him in his high window perch, but it was just imagination. I saw him walking beside my legs in the kitchen, but it wasn’t real. I just thought I saw him behind the computer I’m at where he slept on his quilted mat with the warm light bulb.

But he’s not here. It’s just my imagination.

Yes, it’s true that pets are not humans. They’re not children. It’s also true that too many modern people are substituting having pets for having children. Many of them do it in a way that’s pathological and pitiable to watch. No, of course I don’t begrudge them the love they have for their cat or dog.

But also yes, I feel paternal toward my animals. Yes, I too am trying to give a father’s love in the only way I can because children are not in the cards for me. Cats have always been close to my heart, but I suspect I’m even more protective and loyal to them because in childhood every cat I loved was disappeared and taken away, or given away, when they weren’t convenient any longer. I will never do that.

My heart will never understand how anyone could do that to an animal. They are dependent, and they are at the mercy of the people who take care of them, or who abandon them. Once you take responsibility for a cat, a dog, a donkey, or any creature, he is your responsbility and your family. There is no end to that, except death.

They have feelings, and fears, and needs. They are God’s creatures as surely as all of us are. They need us, and we have a moral duty to care for them.

I have loved all of my cats, but there was something more special about Shredder than any other. He was neglected and scared and alone, having been abandoned by his old folks when they couldn’t take care of him anymore. He was morbidly obese, matted to the skin, and ready to kill anyone who tried to hurt him or encroach on his space.

That he came to me, let me take him home, and learned to trust me is a miracle. He didn’t just tolerate me, he trusted me. He ran to me when he was scared at the vet. He jumped to my arms and asked to be held on my shoulder. At the end of his life, he would not be anywhere but near me. On my pillow at night. On my lap in the morning. On his mat at my writing table all day.

Now I’ll see him out of the corner of my eye, in the window, on my pillow. This will happen for a while, until it doesn’t. I want to hold him.

When I’m low, I avoid listening to music because it affects me so strongly in my emotions even on good days; I can’t take it when things are bad. And there’s one song I can almost never stand, because it was my favorite as a child. I would beg my mother to sing it to me, even though it made my cry. I know now why it made me cry as a child—a small part of me knew the words weren’t true, that they couldn’t be trusted.

But I can’t get it out of my head these past few days as I think about Shredder. This time the words are true.

The other night dear, while I was sleeping
I dreamed I held you in my arms
But when I woke up, I was mistaken
So I hung my head and cried

Shredder
2007-2026

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He was my friend, and my love, for the 10 years since I adopted him at 9 years old in 2026. He died at nearly 20 years old. He was emaciated in advanced kidney disease and in mental confusion, but thank God, he knew me to the last, and came to me to be held all this time as he declined.

I can’t do better for an obituary than the piece I wrote about him a few years ago, which is re-posted below.

Today, after Mina has a chance to see and smell his body, I will wrap him in a shroud and bury him in a nice corner of the stone wall near the tree where the robins have nested to raise their babies this spring.

Here he is on the first night I brought him home in 2016. He chose me, and I chose him, and he climbed onto the bed with me, but we were still negotiating boundaries.

Here he is in the first month with me, having made it his home. This traumatized cat trusted me; it was fate. We were made for each other.

A month in: He was so beautiful, and so very much his own personality.

One of his last nights with Mina. He knew her from kittenhood, and they have not just tolerated, but truly loved each other. She had just got done gently grooming him. This picture is from May 21, 2026:

Ecclesiastes 3:18-20
I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.

All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

The Love of a Cat

-First published 2022

It’s special, because you have to work to earn it with so many cats.

They are not dogs. They do not have dog ways. They are not pre-disposed by selective breeding to immediately unconditionally love humans.

They have a cat temperament, and a cat disposition. It is naturally more reserved and suspicious. Like me. There’s a reason I get along with feline kind.

This is Shredder.

He is about 15 years old, and 15 strong pounds (down from 22 pounds when I adopted him).

Shredder was nine years old when his former owners, an elderly couple, brought him to the shelter. He was matted down to the skin. They couldn’t care for him properly.

He languished there for months because he was a biter. Ever in bite quarantine. They warned potential adoptors about this.

Well, I’d bite too if my humans abandoned me in a concrete building filled with 20 other animals squawking and no place to get away from it.

On my first visit, he came to me when I called him and let me pet him. And then he scratched me hard and drew blood.

On my second visit, he came to me again, and let me pick him up. And I did, because I was in love and my heart would have broken to leave him there.

I think Shredder had some feline version of PTSD. He wanted love and attention, but he’d turn aggressive and fighty in the middle of it.

In the first few months, he bit me several times, hard. Sunk his fangs right into the web of my thumb.

Didn’t care. He might be a biter, but he was my biter now. You don’t ever abandon an animal you’ve taken the responsibility for. He’s yours now.

As a boy, I loved cats more than most people. They were always good to me, and I was good to them. My mother, being who she is, gave away every cat who came into our lives and who we children bonded with and loved. When they became inconvenient, they disappeared to someone else’s house, or to a shelter.

It’s been six years since Shredder came to live with us. Several cats have come, and died, during that time. One, little Mina, came the same year as a kitten and they fell in love with each other. This little tabby cuddles with her big brother, and he bathes her every morning with his tongue.

Over these six years, Shredder has learned how much he really does like attention and affection from humans. He asks for it. Sometimes by putting his paws up on your legs and asking for a shoulder ride.

This past year, he’s taken to coming to my bed after breakfast and laying on top of me, or right beside me. This is a big change from when he was new to the house.

I like to think that Shredder and I did some PTSD recovering together during that period. In 2016, when I adopted him, I had the final confrontation, the “divorce” from my mother. My three cats died that same year, including my best girl of 17 years, Mink.

It was such a horrible year I didn’t really want to live, and I sure didn’t think I’d ever be close to “happy” again. Thankfully, I was wrong.

We helped each other, this cat and me.

I love you, Shredder.

We’ll be on Mike’s “MIKEroaggressed,” but I promise to MACROaggress-maxx.

See ya there!

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