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This cat will do nothing.
She will neither tumble through the air in a desperate attempt to seize an elusive laser
as it skitters across the crumbling plaster of a tenement wall.
Nor will she slide across a well-polished granite floor,
excited to a frenzied state by the false proposition of yum yums from her off-camera owner.
No.
She will do nothing.
Yet in that nothing, she shows me the profound miseries of religion and death and life itself.
For it is in repose, in my un-woken hours
that truth provokes me most,
like a garter snake lying in wait to scare me in the beer garden.
Perhaps she dreams of sprinting through the jungle.
But is it just a dream?
Or is she like Schrodinger's cat --
neither here sleeping on this carelessly arranged fleece blanket,
nor running through the irriguous landscape of her dreams --
unless she is observed doing one or the other.
But who is the observer?
Does watching this video now allow me to force existence upon her flocculent kitty-cat fur
somewhere in the recorded past?
Does her former dream life cease to exist for my mindless entertainment
and exuberant *** for escape?
Should I give her a thumbs up or comment below?
And what of my own dreams?
Are their *** and base nature made real because I, the dreamer, observe them?
Or must some omniscient third party view my sticky visions to conjure them into existence?
I recall once walking down a cobbled alleyway in Berlin,
observing the decrepit back wall of a haberdashery,
its bricks overcrowded with blue-green moss,
their simple leaves and wiry stems interwined in a copulatory display.
Did the moss see me? Did it exist because I saw it?
An endless loop of observer and observed;
with any single witness removed, the world would crumble.
This cat does nothing.
No light sabers or army hats,
toilet paper rolls or cold water spigots.
And yet I watch, drinking tepid Coca Cola from a dirty glass
and craving more Funyuns to cram in my mouth.
I wonder what video YouTube will suggest next.
I wonder if I will click it.
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