Lairs with Chairs, A Pink Tiger Story.
🐅 The Tiger That Therefore I Am.1
The Tales of Tigertail about a Coconut Grove-dwelling pink tigress. The tiger that therefore I am not. This is a whimsical, unedited creative nonfiction story with a magical surrealist twist.
*suggestion: read the footnotes at the end. I included them to add to the story (which is a tad cryptic and pretentious ngl) 🐅🐾
Note: as of Dec 26th, the story views are thousands-upon-thousands percent higher than my subscription rate! Unknown inter-web sources. Thanks for reading (and sharing…a lot)!
Robert Lowell in letters to T.S. Eliot: [June 1964]
I want to apologize for so many telephone calls last November and December. When the “enthusiasm” is coming on me, it is accompanied by a feverish reaching to my friends. After it’s over, I wince and wither.
The whole business has been very bruising, and it is fierce facing the pain I have caused, and humiliating to think that it has all happened before and that control and self-knowledge come so slowly, if at all.2
Tigertail “Tiggy” Wild in WhatsApp text to Hunter Cage: [January 2022]
I feel the need to apologize and explain the incessant growls, roars and all the hissing in November and December. And texting T.S. Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats in its entirety over the span of thirty minutes. I haven't been able to sleep since October. It has made me very irritable and impatient. I am losing control of my mind and behavior.
The whole business has been very wounding to those around me, and it is ferocious facing the pain I have caused. It is humiliating that I do not remember mauling you. I am not feeling grrrreat. Sorry for all your injuries. I trust you will make a full recovery. I’m on 2Catamine
“I never wanted to tour with my ex-tamer,” Hunter Cage confesses.
He follows with a pitch-perfect combination of laughter and lingering dread, an aftershock that he evidently still feels after over a decade. You’re not sure if you’re expected to console him or find this abrupt overshare charming. You do neither. You look down for a raw steak you know isn’t there, off to an awkward start.
“Oh. Wow. Really?” No. Not really…
His jaws send a wave of adrenaline through your normally unshaken tail. It is a feeling you can’t quite place. He seems pleased to watch you retreat so quickly. He takes a slurp of his spicy mezcal cocktail.
It is one o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. He invited you to select, in his words, “the most glamorous restaurant” of your choosing, contingent upon your promise to practice civility going forward. You have a bad track record of destroying eating establishments. It’s not very polite, but you’re usually welcome back when renovations and repairs are completed. “You’re comping my meat? I slashed that man’s leg! You’re too kind…,” you purred just one month ago in Coral Gables. In the typical scenario, he is a mere spectator who is paying to attend the Tiggy freak show. You note the distinction today. You are in the show together at Jaguar Ceviche3 restaurant in Coconut Grove.
“You know what I like. Throw my record on. Keep the leche de tigre flowing, por favor,” you tell the visibly shaking waiter. He promptly returns with two more glasses of the Peruvian concoction. Belle & Sebastian’s album Tigermilk4 plays.
Hunter’s yellow eyes remind you of the eyes of a pride on a World Wildlife Fund poster you had in your banyan tree as a cub. You had a collection of printed photos of animals you had “adopted”. The male lion stared straight into the lens, a stoic and intimidating creature. Of course, as one of their adoptive saviors, you viewed this animal as vulnerable. You notice that he averts his eyes either sideways or upward each time you make eye contact.
“Yeah. My ex-tamer is five. years. older. than I am.”
“Um, okay. Is that bad?”
He says nothing.
“Ha. Anyway, I did the right thing. This is what a good lion, a real lion does. He steps up. I tried.”
He stepped up, and he jumped through hoops. In the most degrading display in trained Panthera history, he once danced in France…wearing cargo pants. Grrr. You believe him for reasons that you tell yourself are not Panthera-centric. Like you, he seems to be an honest, trustworthy cat. He fatally attacked a tamer in Northern France5 in what was, thus far, an isolated incident. You're there for it. That is, the fatal attack is the primary reason you accepted his invitation.
Hunter Cage continues, “It’s been tough.”
“Out like a lamb…I suppose?” No, you didn’t.
“Oh, ha. Good one. Tigertail, I am, I’ll admit, a bit lost. Would you tell me which way to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to go,” you say.
“I don’t much care where—”, says Hunter.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” you say.
“—so long as I get somewhere, but I don’t want to go among mad cats.”6
You hiss at this remark.
"Oh, you can’t help that. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad,” you say.
“How do you know I’m mad?” he said.
“You must be,” you say, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
His European “dream” life had come to a chaotic halt, lobbing him here in the dense, tropical greenery of Coconut Grove in Miami. He continued the family business, which is circus performance. His family is known for sitting in chairs. You are not very impressed by performing lions of any sort. Chairs are better than dances, for God’s sake. Here people call it “a sunny place for shady mammals,” an oft-repeated phrase. By “mammals”, of course, we mean People and Panthera who had Names and faces and manes, in real places like New York and the Etosha Pan. Mammalia whose lives had been fractured and would never fully recover, but lives that had never fully shattered. No, don’t be ridiculous. Now life is simply different, and there are mezcal cocktails and dead meat at lunch, adding smoke and spice and death to what was once clear and sweet and, once in a great while, living and human.
You’re wearing your Celine cat eye sunglasses, blue Swarovski crystal Chanel robot cat cuff, your Gucci cat flats, and naturally, you’re carrying your tongue-in-cheek Meow! Balenciaga Loves Cats handbag. Your dress is human print because fuck those people.
Somehow, Hawaiian shirts are worn by non-native, pale humans and chair-sitting lions as badges of honor here in the subtropical Atlantic. Incorrect cultural and geographic references are an exotic pet peeve of yours, and you loathe the presence of Hawaiian shirts and tiki bars alike in Miami.
Naturally, Hunter has both.
If you insist: a guayabera, for fuck’s sake.
“You hang with the wrong kind,” he states definitively about your wild crowd.
“I mean, I have lots of tame male friends. It’s not really the same.”
“Because they all want to jump you?”
You say nothing.
“So, they do?”
“Want to ‘jump me’? Um, no. I mean, what?”
“You’re not sure.”
“No. YES, I mean. That’s monkey business…”
He laughs and drops the subject.
Animals surround him. Not your circus, not your monkeys, you think, but it seems it is his circus. These are his monkeys. His monkeys form a circle around him, feeding his love for the spotlight.
Three hours have passed.
In a non-sequitur, he tells you he gained two hundred pounds.
“In fur?”, you hiss. His mane is what needs taming beyond anything else. You are majestic and sleek, and you have no time for unkempt, overweight lions.
He’s not that lion. Never. He’s the good, tame lion. He’s the well-behaved lion in all contexts, it would seem, except for those you’ve witnessed. He keeps telling you more and more about himself. Something feels off.
“I was very sad when the meerkats next door retired and moved out. Very sad.”
Meerkats might be barbecued imminently in his neighborhood today.
He is a friend to all. Message received.
“As I’ve mentioned, I am separated with a French tamer. I was always doing my own thing all over the world, and I always thought I was having an incredibly unique and priceless experience.”
Piagetian7 four-year-old kinda stuff. Aren’t we all having incredibly unique and priceless experiences? You did your “own thing” for several years, roaming three continents without a chair or a hula hoop in sight. Does he even recall this information? Are you a nameless tiger throw on a sofa or a living being with whom he is conversing? Inconsequential, it seems.
“When the hammer came down, my best friend gave me the best two words of advice I have ever heard. He said, ‘You are living a dream, but when it comes to sustainability and long-term dependence: BUY PANTHERA’!”
You suspect that he thinks quite highly of himself. You envy him for it. The sole adversity life handed him, “Return TAMER!”, is duly noted. You cannot imagine that anyone agrees with the notion that a human being dictating actions and behavior, keeping a cat in line, so to speak, is “a dream”. He must have kind friends. On another note, would you be some sort of consolation prize following that logic? This is off.
“Anyway, if you think he meant that females are objects, well, trust me, he didn’t. I would nev--, I mean, my friend’s female jaguar is our alpha, and we love her! Really!”, he continued.
The implication that females are objects did not occur to you, although now you’re considering it. You wonder what in the world it means to be an alpha female and why they really love her and why that might be difficult to believe.
“Heh, uh, so...in terms of shared values and interests, in terms of communication. Look, especially communication…hah…it’s important. I think it really is.”
You ate a tamer in Qatar. Inconsequential, it seems.
You summarize your global experience using terminology like “cultural humility” and “living a nightmare”. Nuanced. Maybe if you could do it all again, all over the world, with an alpha tamer, you’d be living a dream.
You’re on the prowl at Untitled Art Fair on Miami Beach. You pop into the booth featuring Cult Exhibitions’ work, a small gallery in San Francisco8. You notice a painting with the word “Hunter” across it as a neon sign. Some Enchanted Evening, indeed. Hindsight is 2021... To your astonishment, you notice a lion in a death pose toward the bottom of the artwork. Hunter has a series of photographs from his days in the ring performing a morbid trick. He plays dead. The crowd cheers. It’s a grotesque display. It angers you as you recall the night you were tranquilized and awoke in a Thai tiger tourism facility in a limp death pose. You survived, but just barely. Hunter finds this all a laugh, doesn’t he? The Center-of-the-Ring-all-eyes-on-him in his thanatosis-inspired performance. You consider mauling the gallery director and eating the painting. Instead, you’re kind enough to text Hunted, er, Hunter a photo of the work. He has you liaise over the potential acquisition like his personal assistant for an hour, and you miss most of the fair. The Entitled Art Fair… He decides against the purchase, to your exasperation and the director’s disappointment. Across from Cult Exhibitions, you spot a painting of yourself. Uncanny synchronicity. A pink tiger surrounded by people taking photos without permission in a Houston suburb. It’s you. You appear forlorn. You’re weary of humans and their horrific encroachment. You’re out of place and out of patience.
You got to keep on moving and find yourself at Loewe store opening in the Design District where the pink elephant in the room is a pink tiger, in fact.
Pay no attention to this tiger in front of the wall drawing.
It’s a stare down with a Sol LeWitt9 “Wall Drawing”. You are concrete. You are abstract10. It is a duel of duality. It is the Kubrick Stare11 versus the Cubic Stare12. Loser about-faces these reimagined faces careening around a maze of “Puzzle” bags . If only you, concrete wall, could communicate. This exchange of views would flow like the lava of abstractions13. You're manic-minded and wild-spirited and soon-to-be delusional. You’re awaiting the arrival of a tame lion with sinister intentions. (At least, that will be your recollection following temporal emotional memory-impairment according to cognitive neuroscience research.) Later, not now. Not here. Here, in this final arrondissement14, an irreversible zone in the Art Basel-tangential hell-scape.
The precious wall-to-wall moment is interrupted by a luxury purveyor or, better, an arbiter of expensive taste or whatever sales assistants are called here. You kind of know her, but you have never seen one another sans face masks.
She opens with, “Oh. My. God. Were you a kitty model? You totally look like a former kitty model.”
Never will a compliment top this masterpiece. Here’s the ex-kitty model, whose rare surgically-unaltered facial features evoke print catalogs and newspaper department store advertisements. This assertion resurrects uninvited imagery of human poachers, which you replace with a one-second-fantasy that you kitty-modeled as a Black-Footed Cat kitten in the wildly popular nineties World Wildlife Fund symbolic species adoption campaign. Black-Footed Cats15 are the smallest cats in Africa, but they prey upon animals twice their size.
You swipe yet another glass of champagne from a tray with your clawed-paw and siphon it like an alcoholic squid right in front of her.
The “raised by wild jaguars” speculation about you is a valid one. Some “pet” animals are put outside for bad behavior, a puzzling concept. Is it punishing to frolic in lost landscapes of wild origins? You identified as a jaguar at a young age (and still very much do in certain respects). In jag fashion, you skulked in tropical forested corners, sometimes ambling up trees. Other cats in the neighborhood pushed baby dolls in carriages. you once tethered a feral-born fanged and fluffy black cat to the interior of a toy carriage. “This is Rosemary’s baby16,” you’d explained, before being tranquilized and transported to the Miami Zoo. Your solo excursions provided much temptation for a tiger cub with Pica disorder, your first diagnosed mental illness. In secret and slowly over time, you consumed an entire section of a sidewalk.17
Curiouser and curiouser about the taste of the handbags…oh, but saved by the cat. The lion has arrived.
“I went to the Brooklyn Zoo, so I’m wearing this Brooklyn Zoo jacket I found at Goodwill.”
How the hell did he end up there? Both places.
“Nice! I sketched caged cats at the Brooklyn Zoo after your time. Awful stuff. It fueled my hatred of most people. I maimed someone in The Brooklyn Museum of Art when I escaped to see the Walton Ford exhibit...” https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/tigers_of_wrath
You both stalked people during nighttime events at the Central Park Zoo, which is an expected coincidence.
“Were you at the Belvedere vodka-sponsored event in 2004?”
“Yes!”, he confirms.
“Oh my God. I was so close to pouncing on this absolutely hammered dude near the penguins, but I reigned myself in. Good times.”
“It still amazes me that those events happened,” he says.
“Yeah, well, that was pre-#tiggertoo, right? Tigresses have a long way to go. Look at that buffoon, The Tiger King. I plotted to kill him, and they locked me away in a Veterinary Hospital in their Behavioral Health Unit. The fuck? It’s sickening. ”
“Oh, oh, trust me, I am the biggest tiger ally. I knew some tigers growing up, and it just eats me alive inside,” he exclaims, teary-eyed. You’d like to eat him alive.
“You’re killing me. King of the Jungle and all that bullshit. You’ve never even lived in a real jungle. Concrete and Coconut Grove do not count. I’ve roamed jungles worldwide. I was throne-less! Shed no crocodile tears for me, man.”
Now you’re getting preachy. Perhaps you’re both self-righteous. Further down the game park path, he will be kind enough to point out a character flaw dating back to the good old days on the panther-walk. The reverse psychology tricks work on tigers, kinda like masks worn on the back of Indian workers’ heads to confuse striped stalkers. Anyway, he will be all like, “You made me feel like a sexual predator.”
Oh, no. You’ve done it again.
Once a kitty model, always a kitty model.
For now, you elect to spend the rest of the night with him on a wild tear.
It’s a new day. You’re on the prowl once again, this time early in the afternoon, following a lunch that ended badly. You swished your tail into the face of a woman you suspected to be a tiger trafficker. You dashed out, wreaking havoc throughout the rooftop restaurant. Hunter followed you, humiliated but swiftly.
He went to The Dwight Training School in Manhattan. You are familiar with its bacronym.
“Oh, dumb whipped kitties— ”
“Yes! Dumb Whipped Kitties Getting High Together!”, he says.
“Yeah, so, I know you’re dumb,” you’re already laughing, “but I’m sure you can spell the name of your training school.” Dumb Whipped Idiots Getting High Together18.
You regret the jab because you’re well aware that whipping continues behind closed doors. He is loving the jab, so much so that he’s contacting distinguished Dumb Whipped Idiot alumni (no longer getting high together).
A waiter approaches your outdoor table along a road lined in tropical greenery.
“Hi, I’m Dwight. I’ll be your waiter today.”
Cosmic synchronicity.
You recall your time roaming Purr-sia for a moment. Dwight, this synchromystic shaykh, has arrived to usher dumb whipped idiots into a ritualistic sama19 performance, taken “out of themselves” to the ecstatic state of wajd where boundaries are annihilated and existence is suspended in primordial symmetry.
Dwight is soft-mannered and proves to be unflappable. He has no idea what he’s in for today. The little apartment you will purchase within a week of looking while on a manic high is within walking distance of this Grove original sidewalk restaurant and outdoor bar. You will apologize to him more than once.
Meanwhile, Hunter’s feelings have been bitten, and they’re bleeding out onto the table.
“I thought we connected.”
“I know. I just—“, you say, but you don’t know. You don’t know what you did wrong. You’ve been maimed in the past, and you’re not emotionally equipped, or rather, you’re too emotionally equipped to repeat past experiences.
“You made me feel like a sexual predator.”
“I’m truly sorry for that.”
What a monstrous beast you are, you tell yourself repeatedly in your pea-brained, manic depressive tigress head of yours.
He continues his diatribe against your behavior with man and beast with irrefutable evidence that past entanglements meant nothing to them.
“Well, he flew from London to see me the day after a three-week work trip. It’s just not possible. He definitely cared about me.”
“Ouch. No, he really never did, and now he’s really just gaslighting you. All these guys are.” (The good lion hath spoken.)
“No. The other guy is genuinely caring, too. You don’t even know these people."
“Tiggy, this is nonsense. You make no sense. You just told me yesterday that you hate people. You’re only interested in cats.”
“I’m only interested in talking about something else. I’ll be right back.”
You head into the bathroom to cry in solitude where you notice tiger-print wallpaper. The rage of a thousand tigers permeates your soul, and you begin ripping it down. Moments later, you shred toilet paper and tear apart wooden stall doors all whilst roaring your most ferocious roar.
You prance back to the table as if nothing happened.
“Hey,” you say. “Let’s keep going.”
More spicy mezcal cocktails are ordered. You’ve both abandoned any trace of domestication in an inevitable act of defiance.
An hour passes.
You’ve been downing thousands upon thousands of calories in wine and mezcal cocktails, leaving no bottles left behind. He is right beside you, every lap of the way, your Bacchanalian champion, your benefactor of booze and “bubbles”. It’s beginning to crystallize now: the Metamorphosis20 into a mezcal distillery, teetering on four giant paws, is nearing its completion. The denouement: a staggering blow! Your gargoylish, striped face releases one last dolorous tirade: “Where’s my Chanel bag?!”.
It’s a five-thousand-dollar black quilted caviar flap bag with a zippered front pouch, burgundy interior and gold hardware, “The classic CC clasp!” The handbag contains the following: a four-thousand-dollar gold-and-pave diamond single-scarab bracelet by Pamela Love, four-hundred-dollars in cash, little bags of catnip, a crisp 20-pound banknote, no longer legal tender in The UK, and an American Express black card you recently swiped, quite literally, at Soho Beach House. You forgot to give it back, although you’ve promised to do so when you return for Jewish Christmas. You charged more than planned: two women who gave the insecure-superiority-sneer as you sauntered past the pool. Your phone is missing separately, an unimaginable concept from which you instantaneously dissociate. Disaster zoo psychiatry will be a hard-to-swallow antipsychotic for you, the disaster tigress of higher order psychological dysfunction status.
You act like animals. It is beyond the bounds and constraints of social expectations for two big cats in restaurants. Big Cats are (usually…) expected to behave as civilized as Big Cats are capable, all things considered.
What does a mauled Emily Post-humous have to say about her own dinner? Any etiquette tips?
You are fully grown, long time fully grown cats acting like hyenas, those bottom-feeding and ill-proportioned cackling fools. You’ve got a thing against them. You never behaved this way in the jungle as an adolescent. You were timid then.
You arrive at hunter’s home and destroy two chairs. You spot Temptations on his bed, and you devour the entire bag. You are unhinged.
[author’s note: some people keep Temptations on their quilts.]
The following day, at Panthera Coffee21, feeling quite disillusioned (emphasis on ill), you pace back and forth until you’re eventually asked to leave. Sure, fine, you’ll leave, but wait: you’ve been threatened with the flick of a lighter.
The tiger’s achilles heel. Pyrophobia. Burn, motherfuckers.
You slash a woman in the back while she FaceTimes with what sounds like fifty-three people before gracefully pivoting to upend an entire espresso machine. For good measure, you kick a small stool in the general direction of a tattooed barista on your way out through the impossibly heavy door.
Hunter, or Hunted, the name you’ve entered into his contact, texts you several hours later.
you’re far too wild for me. please never contact me again.
You plan to kill him the following day. This has never happened to you before: your plan is thwarted.
“Misogyny often involves distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women, by the lights of their conformity to patriarchal norms and values.”
“The good guy can do no wrong; so we won’t hear a bad word said against him. I call this the ‘honorable Brutus’ problem.”
- Kate Manne, philosopher and author of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women22 (quote 1) and Downgirl (quote 2)
You’re slashing lines into your walls, in a frantic fit. Post-it notes cover the slash marks, which denote the connections between your scribbles.
Oh, no. It can’t be, but it is. A Cult. THE cult. Enlightenment’s Gate! OF COURSE. A bunch of fucking psychopathic hippies. They’re all in on a malicious plot to tranquilize and kill you and send you to China. “Buddhists”. Bunch of freaks. Wild Tiger supporter?! How could you be so daft? You notice a woman you met at a book signing for The White Tiger23 stalking your Instagram account. She's a fellow Books & Books24 lover. Oh, fuck. She knows Hunted. Fuck. She appears to be a close friend. Have you met her? You have. It hits you. You were introduced to Hunted by a zoologist you once befriended at the Miami Zoo. It was all a ruse. Fucking. Hippies.
You confront Hunted about the cult, and he calls the police. You bound down the street from your condo, cannonball-ing into Biscayne Bay. Onward, to the Gulf Stream and away from these fucking lunatics! The police boat finally catches up to you. You try to explain. You try to warn them!
[author’s note: I was not chased by police nor were police involved in my hospitalization]
You, tigress, will land in the Feline Behavioral Health Unit, held against your will for “psychotic delusions and hallucinations”. For the past three weeks, you’ve slept only a few hours every four to five days, ripping tile from floors and walls. Spanish, Italian, Cuban, Persian, Portuguese. Any goddamn tiles you can get your paws on.
You’re deeply ashamed when a psych tech finds you scribbling on pages and growling. She jumps backward and shrieks. Sleep won’t find you in the ward.
The nurses sit behind glass, chanting, “You can’t come out yet!” each time you crack your door to check the clock. There’s NO outdoor time, which sends you into a tailspin of manic rage. You apologize to each nurse the following day, assuring them that you’re having an “epic time” in the psych ward.
You befriend a schizoaffective, recovering crack addict named Yero you recognized upon arriving. He plays saxophone in the streets of Coconut Grove. He’s legendary.
The assigned psychiatrist in your half of the ward is Dr. Judd. You hand him your request for early discharge. His smirk follows raised eyebrows as he scans the pages, next a tell-tale guffaw and then the mark of death: your early release document carelessly tossed onto his desk.
“He’s not letting you leave?”, asks the Head RN who signed off on the discharge request.
You shake your head.
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. It’s okay. I’ll be okay. I’ll need some more pencils. I just need some pencils tonight.”
You return to the recreation room where you’re greeted by Yero. you’re wearing your softest t-shirt by the French designer IRO featuring a 1993 Hawaiian surf competition design.
“You okay? Can I get you a chair?”
“NO!!! I definitely DO NOT DO CHAIRS! Sorry…ha…ha”
author’s note: WWF exchange is TRUE, as is the entire psych ward section.
He offers a chair and “anything else” to each person who enters the room, and in the same manner whether they be they catatonic or punching walls. You sit in front of the TV, and a World Wildlife Fund commercial featuring African elephants catches your attention.
“That’s sad,” Yero turns toward you.
“Those elephants weren’t poached. They were filmed for the commercial,” you assure him.
“Wait a minute! Those are actors?”
“No. They’re elephants. Not people.”
“Are you sure?”
“YEP.”
“Okay, so, then specifically, I mean I was not aware that elephants could become actors,” he explains to you.
You shrug. “They’re not getting paid though.”
“Yo, that’s fucked up.”
“They’re not actors. They’re elephants filmed for the commercial. Cats and dogs are paid when they’re in movies. My cat is a feral asshole, so she’ll never help pay the bills.”
You both laugh at the thought that a cat could help with anything.
“I adopted a Siberian tiger from the World Wildlife Fund once when I was a little depressed. I have the Certificate of Adoption hanging in my office!”, you tell him.
“Aren’t they like—”
“Related? I mean, kind of. You know, they’re not even found in Siberia anymore. They’re in some corner of northeastern Russia. Fucking people are the worst.”
“Don’t let them get you down,” he says.
Two months later, in his backyard, you’re haunted and followed by rabbits.
Dr. Judd, the psychiatric veterinarian assigned to you, leaves you with a word of warning and several prescriptions for sedation under the guise of “new mood stabilizers” and “anti-psychotics”.
He says,“I can’t help you. But I can warn you. These hallucinations approach insanity…I can’t help you. You can only help yourself. You keep going back to the mad legends of your birthplace. Forget them! You surround yourself with cat objects, pictures. Get rid of them! Lead a normal life!”
- Dr. Judd in Cat People (1942)25
You pick up the prescriptions, and you store the large bottle of Depakote exactly where it belongs: in the trash.
[authors note: bad past experiences and I refuse to take two mood stabilizers. Not condoning off-meds life.]
The next time you see Hunted Cage, he has lost two hundred pounds. He looks amazing. How obnoxious. He is paired with yet another lion tamer. A human being. This tamer is not Western European or Central American or Australian. No, lion taming no longer exists in these places. The circuses have closed, due in no small part to the Wild Tiger movement. Tigger, too, indeed, you tyrants! The old school continues, it seems, only in Miami and equivalent backward locales. The tamer is from the Eastern Bloc. Indeed, nearly every lion tamer attack in the past fifteen years has been in either the Ukraine or Russia. There is one exception, of course: Northern France with the escaped perpetrator at large, hiding in this sunny place for shady lions. Good for him though. He found one of the last tamers. You wonder if she’ll survive, if she has any idea what happened in the past.
Buy Panthera, you realize, was never a viable option for this chair-sitting creature.
He tells you that he’s very very happy and doing very very well and very very sober. You’re sober in the sense that you no longer engage in excesses. He claims he had to learn to become a “new lion”, which is quite convenient for him. He claims he had to seek serious psychological and physical medical assistance following your wild (your manic) few off-the-proverbial-chain, uncaged encounters, despite evidence that help was sought months later. It feels like a weak attempt to “one-up” psychiatric institutionalization in a last-ditch effort at condemnation. Is this a joke or am I assumed to be easily manipulated?
Once a monstrous feminine beast, always…
You were screened to return to the hospital before being transferred to a fourteen-but-please-will-you-stay-twenty-eight day “rest and relaxation” facility26. This never happened. You discovered that you were with potential tiger cub against all odds. You’re struggling with the aftermath of a very ambivalent abortion. Texas bans abortions and yet allow tigers as domestic pets. There are over four-thousand tigers living in Texan suburbia.
No, you’re not doing very very well nor are you very very very no commas happy. You’re very deeply sad, and you do have yourself to blame. You hold yourself accountable and make no more excuses citing manic behavior.
Now, you remain less tame than many, but you are less wild than others including your super-manic-tiger-attacktivated self.
Today, the paws are back on the ground. No thousands upon thousands of calories in alcohol. No metamorphosis into a mezcal distillery. In fact, you seem to be incapable of imbibing, and your body’s “off switch” blocks consumption beyond a single glass of wine. This disappoints certain people. You’re alright…ish.
During a discussion about psychiatric medications and pregnancy, your obstetrician memorably stated, “We don’t want Holly Tiggy. Standing. On top George Washington Bridge. HOLDING KALASHNIKOV!” as he stood and assumed position. Dr. Dubrovkine, a Russian Wild Tiger ally, booked another appointment for you following your abortion with a clinic doctor. He opened the post-abortion visit with the best three words of consolation you’ve ever heard: “Life isn’t fair.” He died unexpectedly two months following your abortion.
Life, friends, is not fair. It is not a fair. It is a circus. It is a zoo. It is a shrinking natural habitat. You will feel out of place in this world being born wild. You might awaken tranquilized and unsure of your surrounds or what they’ve done to you.
Never allow it to stop you from destroying manmade property. Keep tearing those walls down, friends. The best advice is to paw, claw and gnaw it all into oblivion. Chairs do not belong in lairs. Big Cats do not belong around chairs.
artist of pink tiger painting, among other masterpieces, Lisa Sanditz27 was inspired by the “domestic tiger” in a Houston suburb who escaped from “home” in 2019. (link below)
tiger missing in Houston suburb found (BBC)
What a world we have created.
Hopefully, some tigers will tear it all down.
people suck.
special thanks to: the Russian tiger ally/computer nerd who extends VIP art basel things to me, a few good men, everyone else I like…including all cats everywhere and more or less everyone who inherited madness.
Henri Rousseau:
SURPRISE!
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/henri-rousseau-surprised
Adopt a Tiger
Derrida, Jacques (2008). The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press.
quotes from the lecture/essay:
Let us not forget that the Cheshire Cat had told her, in the course of a scene that deserves a long meditation: "'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad'" (AW, p. 72). After that he undertakes to demonstrate to her this collective folly.
I therefore admit to my old obsession with a personal and somewhat paradisaic bestiary. It came to the fore very early on: the crazy project of constituting every- thing I have thought or written within a zoosphere, the dream of an absolute hospitality and an infinite appropriation. How to welcome or liberate so many animal-words [animots]27 chez moi?
I must make it clear from the start, the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn't the figure of a cat. It doesn't silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literature and fable.
Jamison, K. R. (1993). Touched with fire: Manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament. Free Press.
*The first time I read this book, in my early twenties, I couldn’t stop crying! I finally began to understand myself.
Respected and revered for thousands of years, the largest feline in the Americas has played a prominent role in the mythology of many ancient indigenous American cultures, including those of the Maya and Aztec. yes! the symbolic species of American indigenous knowledge with a range from the tip of South America to Mexico! https://jaguarrestaurant.com/
Tigermilk is the 1996 debut album from Scottish pop group Belle and Sebastian. Belle & Sebastian, Tigermilk
Lisa knows a girl who's been abused
It changed her philosophy in '82
She's always looking for a fight
She keeps the neighbours up all night
I go to her when I'm feeling slack
The girl's using me as a punching bag
I think that I could help her out
But the girl's got a lot to be mad about
A tamer was savaged by a lion in front of an audience in northern France, footage has shown. The animal can be seen on top of the trainer while screaming children are heard in the background. lol couldn’t resist adding this https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-lion-attacks-tamer-circus-video-footage-slash-throat-a7726386.html
Carroll, L. (1893) Alice's adventures in Wonderland . [New York, Boston, T. Y. Crowell & co] (and four lines above it from the same oft-quoted Cheshire Cat passage)
Three Mountain Problem theory by Jean Piaget The findings showed that at age 4, children would choose the photograph that best reflected with their own view. At age 6, an awareness of perspective different from their own could be seen. Then, by ages 7–8, children can clearly acknowledge more than one point of view and consistently select the correct photograph. *This is a dumb joke in the story, not a mean-spirited criticism of the character
Cult aimee friberg https://www.cultexhibitions.com/index.php Artsy: Cult Exhibitions Untitled 2021
LeWitt has been characterized as “a founding father of both minimalism and conceptual art.” We don’t accept that things have to be a certain way. But instead, look for what is possible when you strip away convention. https://floydhome.com/blogs/livedin/conceptual-artist-sol-lewitt-didn-t-paint-he-imagined
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstract-objects/
“…consider a work of fiction such as Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It, too, has some claim to being abstract because it (or at least its content) is non-spatial. But one might suggest that works of fiction as paradigmatic abstract objects seem to have causal powers, e.g., powers to affect us.”
“One promising approach is to say that an object should be reckoned mind-dependent when, by its very nature, it exists at a time if and only if it is the object or content of some mental state or process at that time. This counts tables and chairs as mind-independent, since they might survive the annihilation of thinking things.”
every entity falls into one of two categories: concrete or abstract. The distinction is supposed to be of fundamental significance for metaphysics (especially for ontology), epistemology, and the philosophy of the formal sciences (especially for the philosophy of mathematics); it is also relevant for analysis in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of the empirical sciences.
“The Kubrick stare is a very specific type of shot composition. It’s only probably useful if you’re making a horror or suspense film. Want to make someone look particularly psychotic? Give the Kubrick stare a shot.” link here *I entered a psychotic state later that evening. I’ll explain in an upcoming tiger tale.
Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Sol LeWitt designed elaborate sculptures that investigate permutations of a single cube. A prime example of LeWitt’s approach to Minimalism and geometrical composition, Eight Unit Cube (No. 7402) (1976) Institute of Contemporary Art Miami: Cube by Sol LeWitt
Lava of abstractions is a phrase from the Robert Lowell poem A Suicidal Fantasy in The Land of Unlikeness (I compare myself to him…as we coincidentally sent similar post-manic episode messages to friends)
A Suicidal Fantasy
Slouching on an elm overhead
The solemn and outraged cat spied
The maimed man stooping with his bag;
Then the apprehensive whiskers bled,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death-definition/ “Examples include death as the irreversible cessation of organismic functioning and human death as the irreversible loss of personhood.”
threats: Habitat loss
interesting facts: The smallest wild cats in Africa and some of the smallest in the world, these tiny predators kill and eat prey up to two times their own weight. https://gifts.worldwildlife.org/gift-center/gifts/Species-Adoptions/Black-Footed-Cat.aspx
Rosemary is caught between two terrible possibilities, as she’s either the victim of a supernatural plot or entangled in a domestic nightmare. Either way, in living with her husband, she’s actually cohabiting with a horror. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/27/house-of-horrors-cinema-rosemarys-baby-the-shining
I ate concrete, an entire blanket, stuffed animals’ fur, pebbles, dirt, paper, crayons, medicine, pointsietta flowers, et al. I did not eat anything human or animal. (Pica disorder compels patients to consume inedible things.)
Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together: The Dwight School in Manhattan
The Whirling Dervishes of the Mevlevi order are probably the best-known practitioners of Sama. Art is "self expression" and Sama is "selfless expression"-an experience of "fanaa". Fanaa (Arabic: فناء fanāʾ ) in Sufism is the "passing away" or "annihilation" of the self. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sama_(Sufism)
by Franz Kafka: Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a "monstrous vermin". He initially considers the transformation to be temporary and slowly ponders the consequences of this metamorphosis. Stuck on his back and unable to get up and leave the bed, Gregor reflects on his job as a traveling salesman and cloth merchant, which he characterizes as being full of "temporary and constantly changing human relationships, which never come from the heart". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis
It is called Panther Coffee, and I wrote a lot of this story there. I like it a lot. I thought the pacing tiger would be funny. It’s a local group of coffee shops. The coffee is excellent. I often order the blue butterfly iced tea (recommended): https://www.panthercoffee.com/
Manne, K. (2020). Entitled: how male privilege hurts women (First edition.). Crown.
“Entitled tackles a wide range of ways in which misogyny, himpathy, and male entitlement work in tandem with other oppressive systems to produce unjust, perverse, and sometimes bizarre outcomes. Many of these stem from the fact that women are expected to give traditionally feminine goods (such as sex, care, nurturing, and reproductive labor) to designated, often more privileged men, and to refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods (such as power, authority, and claims to knowledge) away from them. These goods can in turn be understood as those to which privileged men are tacitly deemed entitled, and which these men will often garner himpathy for wrongfully taking from women—when it comes to sex, most obviously, though by no means exclusively.”
Adiga, Aravind (2008). The White Tiger. Free Press.
Literally…the best book store. I lived a block away from the original, main location in Coral Gables before moving to Coconut Grove. I live near the Coconut Grove location now. I spend more money there than I do at Chanel these days.
“The ‘safe’ relationship triumphs, however, sending a message that giving into sexual desires releases a monster that can only lead to destruction. Oliver’s and Dr. Judd’s inability to control Irena is empowering, however, although it does lead to her death, which seems to be the only way for Irena to be free.” Representation of female sexuality as both empowering and destructive in the 1942 horror classic Cat People. https://morbidlybeautiful.com/digging-deep-cat-people/
kinda liked the book lol: https://www.booksandbooks.com/books/my-year-of-rest-and-relaxation/
Find more from pink tiger artist on her site here: Lisa Sanditz