Español
July 5, 2025
by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher
When my cat, Fellini, died late last April, I started feeding an assortment of neighborhood cats. There were the eight or nine, who hang out two doors down, in front of the house on the corner. They never ate like they were hungry nor let me pet them. I asked and learned that they were being cared for by the woman who lives in the house on the corner.
It may be that the ones who live across the street, in the garden where I do my morning yoga, are also being fed by someone. Either that or they are completely wild because they never showed any interest in the feedings I conducted each afternoon, on the street/sidewalk in front of my house.
However, one seemingly ownerless black and white cat came up fearlessly, ate the food I poured onto the concrete, and let me pet him. He even came up the stairwell and, very nonchalantly, into my second-floor apartment.
However, our budding relationship soured quite soon, first when he jumped up onto my kitchen table, and later when he scratched me after I had been carrying him around (both of us quite content) for a minute or so. He didn't draw blood, but it was very undomesticated of him.
My Fellini had street cat genes, and I didn't, and don't, want another barely affectionate cat. The final nail in the coffin was when the black and white cat started squeezing under the front carport door, and, yeowling up at length from the patio below, announced his hunger day and night. I've always described my sensitivity to noise as "hyper-vigilance," but my close friend Veronica recently suggested that I am on the autistic spectrum.
Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn
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After knowing me for ten years (seven years in the biblical sense) Veronica suggested autism as an explanation as to why I rub some people the wrong way. Having practiced medicine for decades, I don't like this medical labeling of life, because diagnosing, slapping a name on a set of symptoms, often gives the false impression that we understand the phenomenon. One of my mottos would have to be "Resist the medicalization of life." There are other, richer, more nuanced vocabularies to describe our experience. One of these, I believe, is astrology.
The only thing I really know about astrology concerns my own natal chart. Even then I don't know much: my Sun, Moon and Pluto are conjunct in Virgo, in the twelfth house. This means that my internal world (Moon) and my underworld (Pluto), both usually private and hidden away, are given great daylit expression in my ordinary, commonplace presentation of self (Sun). For example, case in point, here I am publishing my now not-so-secret world. Then the twelfth house is the final house, the mature form, the thing expressed in its depth and fullness.
Most charitably towards myself, I think that some people, who are not comfortable with their own shadow side, become upset with how conversant I am with mine. I remind them of their own repressed baggage, of things that they are trying to forget. Slightly less charitably, I am the type, from a long line of types, who tolerates fools poorly. The Buddhists say, "If you are in a toxic environment, leave." If I can walk away, I do. I'm not looking for trouble.
But sometimes it's hard to tell. Sometimes you want to try and save what's worth saving, before you hit the road. And there, in that gray zone, what really pulls my chain is to have someone blame me when they are causing the trouble between us.
With all my twelfth house energy, I easily grow impatient with people's superficial understandings. If you are only swimming along the surface, don't tell me how it is deep down. I'll tell you how it is deep down.
I think of myself as Spencer Tracy, with enough sensitivity for high society and Katherine Hepburn, but unwilling to put up with any silliness when push comes to shove.
When I stopped feeding the black and white cat, the family downstairs started. Now, Bigote, as they call him (Whiskers, or much less appropriately, Mustache), has his own bowls of water and kibble outside their door. Now also, Bigote, who once ranged freely over the outdoors (there is a lot of open land where I live), spends his time lounging around our patio/carport or aggressively guarding the gap under the carport door, keeping other cats away from his bowl of food. Wasn't it Lao Tsu who observed, "Accumulating treasures encourages thieves"?
Decades ago, another girlfriend of mine recorded for my birthday a cassette tape with a mix of songs which included a talking bit by the poet and commentator (National Public Radio) Andrei Codrescu about Burger King. In it he imagines a prison with the bars spaced wide enough for the prisoners, at first, to come and go. But the jailors feed the prisoners on Burger King until the prisoners get too fat to leave. I wonder when Bigote will grow too fat to squeeze out under the carport door into the wider world. In a related metaphor, sometimes we are like the raccoon who reaches into a nail-studded hole easily enough, but once he has grabbed hold of the attractive object cannot extract his fist.
All of this reminds me of Diogenes, who eschewed personal possessions and rubbed a lot of people the wrong way (how's that for a charitable self-association?), and in particular one of my favorite stories, Alexander the Great's meeting with Diogenes:
