>Man, I don’t know about you but I’m so fucking weary of Firefox users proselytizing all the time about Firefox. I’m weary of the slack-jawed, eyeballs-rolling-into-the-backs-of-their-heads reactions I get whenever a Firefoxer notices that I’m using Safari. They act as if they’ve just learned that I have a metal plate installed in my head. 

>The latest installments of Internet’s Fastest Game Reviews are posted.

>Today on Internet’s Fastest Videogame Reviews, I take a look at Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Slayer.

Flew down to Florida last Friday. My mother picked me up at the Sarasota airport.

It was late in the day, nearly dinner time. “What are we having tonight?” I asked.

“L.O.’s,” my mother said, pulling away from the curb.

“What?”

“Leftovers.”

My mother’s car had been broken into the two nights before. As we drove down I-4, she launched into an agonizingly detailed rendition of the event.

“I thought you lived in a nice neighborhood?” I asked.

“We do live in a nice neighborhood,” she said. “That’s what the sherriff told us. ‘Criminals don’t rob the bad neighborhoods.’ What’s to rob there?”

My mother works for a visiting nurse service. The thief had stolen a bag out of the backseat of her car. The bag contained hypodermics, a stethoscope, thermometers, things like that.

“I blame your father,” mom said.

I asked her why.

“His routine is, just before dark, he goes outside and puts up the windows in the vehicles then locks them. But that night, he forgot. He was watching something on TV, and he forgot. When we lived on Powell Road, we never locked our doors at night, on the house or the cars. Most of the time we left the car keys right in the ignition. It’s different down here. Bad things happen all the time.”

The three of us ate dinner. We sat in front of the TV, hunched over the coffee table. Then my parents squinted at the TV Guide channel for about 20 minutes and complained that there’s never anything on. “It’s all repeats now,” my mother explained.

“What about Hildalgo?” my father asked. Hildago. 2004. Viggo Mortensen plays a Pony Express courier who travels to Arabia to participate in some kind of marathon desert horse race.

“Fine,” I said. I’d suffered through far worse during my visits. Far, far worse.

We watched Hildago. It wasn’t bad. My dad and I drank beer. When the credits rolled my dad moved the coffee table out of the living room and began to inflate the air bed.

“How firm do you want it?” he asked over the din of the air compressor.

“Pretty firm,” I said.

My parents took turns brushing their teeth. Then they went into their room, shut out the light, and the two of them began snoring almost immediately.

My mother has a wall clock in the living room that plays a variety of instrumental themes on the hour. Somewhere Over The Rainbow began to play. Eleven o’clock.

I got up and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. I checked the sliding glass door, making sure it was locked. I peered through the glass. I could see my mother’s car in the April moonlight. I pictured a man. A stranger. Someone bold enough, or crazy enough, or unbalanced enough to walk onto my parents’ property and open the door to their car.

That mysterious person, were I there a few nights earlier, would have been only 15 or 20 feet away from where I was standing.

My dad talks tough. He acts like nothing could scare him. He eats his hot mustard, brags about his masculinity. But I think this theft scared him. He tried to lay on some of his tough talk over dinner. It wasn’t very convincing.

I’m still peering through the glass. There’s nothing outside, no movement. It’s a still night. No wind.

But I feel the weight on my shoulders. I feel the air going out of my chest. This is exactly what I do not want to see when I visit mom and dad: their frailties, their insecurities, the ways in which the world threatens them. I listen to them snore in the next room. I look through the glass at the night.

I’m pissed. I’m angry. “Come back, you motherless cocksucker, whoever you are,” I whisper. My words are fogging the glass. “Just try to come back here, and I’ll break your goddamn pencil neck, you fuck.”

Was sitting at my desk having a cup of coffee yesterday morning when the kitten, as is her habit these days, leapt onto the desk and began her search for pens, paperclips, rubberbands, batteries, etc. Basically anything she can knock to the floor and bat around for 10 to 15 minutes.

As she surveyed the desk, she spun around, turning her backside towards me. Her tail happened to be hoisted high, giving me a bird’s-eye view of her butthole. And there, pinned in the halo of fur surrounding her butthole, was a dark pebble of poop.

With all the time she spends grooming herself, and, in particular, grooming her crotch, I figured I’d leave the pebble there and let her take care of it. It was only a matter of time before she found it. So, I went about my morning, sending various emails, etc. An hour went by, and the pebble was still there. Two hours…and the pebble was still there.

Finally, by noon, I figured I had no choice but to help her out a little.

“Hold still,” I said, gently lifting her tail. With nervous fingers, I plucked the pebble of poop off of her. Once the extraction was complete, the kitten let out a polite meow, which I interpreted as, *Thank you.*

If this isn’t true love, I don’t know what is.

An ice cream truck has been patrolling my Queens neighborhood nearly 24 hours a day for the past month, always blaring a Casio keyboard rendition of “Turkey In the Straw.” I get so fucking depressed during the summer months. It’s not just the overwhelming heat and humidity in New York, the blinding sun. It’s picnics, watermelon, BBQs, fireworks, popsicles, parks, beaches, pools, margaritas, camping, state fairs, badmitton, hot dogs. It’s ice cream trucks that play “Turkey In The Straw” all night. It’s summer culture itself.

And it’s the way people are hellbent on doing something, going somewhere, desperate to make something, anything, happen. The way everyone is always determined, no matter the cost, to have themselves a ball. The way the newsanchors on the local channels are always pretending to beg the weatherman for a sunshine-filled forecast. (The sun icon used on the screen is inevitably a smiling face.) The way everyone is forever asking one another, “So, what are your plans for the weekend?”

Implying that to not have plans is somehow abnormal.

Well, fuck you. Those are my plans.

There’s something false in all this relentless cheeriness. Something that doesn’t ring true to me.

One of my neighbors invited me out to his Hamptons house. A college friend tried to get me to go down to Breezey Point in Brooklyn last weekend. Still another invited me to a cookout in his tiny backyard in Park Slope.

Thanks, but no. Instead, I draw the blinds. I run the air conditioner. I sit in the dark and watch DVDs. I drink beer and play videogames. I get more pale, more mushroomy, by the second. I rarely go out, and only then if I absolutely must. (For more beer, or DVDs, or kitty litter.)

Sometimes I think I suffer from a rare brand of seasonal affective disorder. Only instead of being afflicted during the dark, bitter months of winter, as most people are, I get it during the summer.

Or maybe I’m just on my way to becoming a cranky old fuck.

So I got a cat. A kitten. 10 weeks old. 2 pounds. She was a street cat who was rescued a few blocks away from my apartment. (It’s a rags to riches story; she was homeless, but now she’s moved on up to my deluxe apartment in the sky. And yes, I’m quoting The Jefferson’s theme song.)

I named her Humtum, but I usually call her Pewey (which is short for Pewey-head). I’m not sure why I do this.

I love her dearly, but she’s a pain in the ass sometimes. I’ve got steel wool stuffed into cracks and crevices around the apartment, which is designed to keep out bugs and mice. Pewey has made it her personal mission to locate every bit of steel wool she can find. This drives me insane, and I’m terrified that she’s going to eat some of it. And she climbs all over my keyboard when I’m at the computer. This was sort of endearing at first, but quickly became annoying, especially whenever I’m on deadline.

I realize that she won’t be a kitten for very long, so I wanted to make sure that I properly record her kittenhood for posterity. So I follow her around nearly every day with a camera, snapping pictures of her, trying to catch her in the act of napping (not hard to do), or doing something cute.

One day last week as I followed her from room to room with my camera at the ready, it struck me that there might be something more than a little sad about a 36-year-old man alone in his apartment in Queens trying to take photographs of his cat.