Last night I had a dream.

I was checking Myspace.

In my dream.

Have I really become this dependent on/addicted to the Interweb? Is my life really this unchanging and meaningless lately?

So it would seem.

Since I got a comfortable and slack-as-hell government job; my creativity, formerly brimming, has been a shallow, tepid puddle. I had more and better ideas when I was depressed, unemployed, and fearful of the future. I have never been more comfortable in my life. I have also never produced less artwork. This realization is not a comfortable irony for me. Once a Starving Artist, it seems that I need to starve in order to do art. It is then true that art comes from suffering?

The other great driver of my artwork has always been love. I don’t make stuff for myself, but I’ll make it for the woman I’m with. I’ve been single for two years, and again…no art. And I’m becoming increasingly fond of my singletude. I still ain’t gettin’ none, but I have a cat now, so at least I’m not lonely.

So I’m comfortable, and I’m happy. And completely uninspired. I don’t know how to fix this. With no suffering and no love, the only option that seems left me is Art for Art’s sake, and I dunno…maybe I’m just not cut out to be an artist?

Input would be welcome on this point.

I renamed my cat again. It’s not as easy as you’d think. I got my last cat in Grade 9, and I wanted a really great name. I took forever thinking of one, and finally came up with Syrinx (from a Rush song). In the meantime my Mom had taken to calling her PussCat, in absence of a name. Of course Mom did much of the feeding of the cat, so she started to respond to PussCat. So PussCat she was, until her quiet death last Spring.

I’ve since had a mental block about naming my cat. When I got her from the shelter she was called Martha. That stank. For years I’d wanted to name something Thrusty, because it’s an awesome name. So for the first while she was Thrusty, but it just didn’t stick...she is fast, but she is not male...perhaps you get the idea. She then became Brontosaurus, because of this stompy thing she does. That was too long, and it’s hard to use to yell at her when she’s bad. Then she was Pouncyface, for obvious reasons, but that one tanked because I reckon she’s not always going to be as pouncy as she is now.

In the meantime I have been calling her Quiton, pronounced as it would be in French (KEE-ton), but again, she will not be a quiton forever.
She is not an outside cat, and she totally loves me, so is rarely further than a few metres from me when I’m home. I never need to call her, so she wasn’t really learning any name. I started calling her random things that would make her head pop up when I said them. For one drunken evening at home she was Flactoid, but well...

Then I remembered that the first girl I ever had a crush on in elementary school had a cat called Critter. Critter is a pretty good name. It was the best one I’d had yet, and the most descriptive at least. And her head would snap up if I sort of hissed it. For the last few weeks she was Critter, and it looked like that would stay.

Last Friday, I was at work talking to a lovely co-op student named Shirley. And then it hit me.

Squirrelly.

My cat moves like a squirrel. She has an abnormally long puffy tail. She is bizarre, crazy and random; more so than most quitons. And sometimes in the dark, in the wee hours, she has a tendency to pounce on my nuts.

Quiton: I dub thee Squirrelly.

And Squirrelly she shall remain.