I thought that ex-Seattle people might be interested to learn that DNA evidence has led to the arrest of a Florida resident on charges related to the 1993 murder of Mia Zapata.

Mia was the singer of The Gits, who survived her death in various variations, and was a member of the Comet-centered Capitol Hill music scene here in Seattle of the early nineties, which ran parallel to but generally under the radar of the nationally-recognized scene here at the same time.

I had a long, sad conversation with indie filmmaker John Behrens shortly after her murder. We were seated outside at Café Paradiso, catty-corner from the illustrious Comet, the tavern where she’d spent her last few hours among friends. He’d just shot footage for a video that I think never made it out the door. Even though I’ve played in bands here on and off for at least a decade, I never got deeply involved in the ‘scene’ aspects of being a musician here; I’d been there, done that (mostly without being a player) at home in Bloomington, and never saw any real reason to exert myself in that direction here.

Consequently, and also because of Mia’s pronounced resemblance to my sister, her death came as a kind of echo to me, a painful reminder of my own loss (closer in time to Mia’s death than Mia’s death is to now). At the same time it was a parallel moment for many people that I knew here.

Heroin deaths notwithstanding, Mia’s death was the moment when Death’s wings first gently brushed the nape of the social circle of people I had nodding acquaintance with from nights at the Comet. As my sister’s death redirected my life, Mia’s death would redirect those of her peers as well. It was the end of childhood.

In more ways than one, as well – shortly after her murder, the city’s economy began to power up and the great majority of my neighborhood’s genteelly underemployed college graduates found themselves sucked into the go-go tech industry. College dropouts of my acquaintance fared less well, underlining the privileges of class that have grown stronger all my life.

Something about her death directed me away from that scene thereafter. I think it was both too close to my loss and at the same time a reminder of the price of community. People die, and you have loved them, and it will be forever painful. An awareness of the reality and inevitability of these losses led me to invest more energy in work than friends for many years, possibly including the present day.

To an extent, then, perhaps that’s a justifiable decision. I have, it seems, lost count of the numbers of drug deaths among my acquaintances. What, at least three heroin deaths since then, probably more.

Well, that was cheery, wasn’t it?

To my recollection, I read and re-read The Lord of The Rings series of books with some frequency after that initial foray into the land of the written word. I am certain I read it when met a new cohort of boys in fifth and sixth grade; I probably read it in the same copies as I had when a tot, the four-volume Ballantine paperbacks featuring Professor Tolkien’s own art on the covers.

The period between my initial run at the books and this later reading marks the highest water of the grand seventies Tolkien marketing spree that culminated in the 1977 publication of The Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien’s posthumous publication of the most coherent of his father’s notes and legends of Middle Earth. The Silmarillion stands to the characters of the events in Middle Earth as the Old Testament stands to the peoples of cultures influenced by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam: it’s the creation story and formative events in the early days of Middle Earth, and of the events that lead to the first great war, depicted in the prologue to Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring.

Since it’s biblical in import, James Ronald Ruel must have reasoned, let it be biblical in tone, and so it is. Abandoning the plot and character driven narrative that he employed for The Hobbit and for The Lord of The Rings, The Silmarillion is, um, turgid.

It represents my introduction to the betrayal of marketing. I had the highest hopes for the book, having awaited it, really, nearly as long as I had a memory; I found it utterly unreadable.

In Tolkien’s defense, the book was prepared for publication posthumously, and generated criticism at the time of his son’s decision to publish it; since then, Christopher has gone on to edit many, many volumes of his father’s stories and notes, and shows no sign of slacking off. Make of it what you will.

At any rate, the gift-buying decision for my father until around 1982 was always simple: go to the bookstore and find the latest Tolkien gimcrack, calendar, book, or whatnot. The Silmarillion came out in 1977; in 1978, Bakshi’s ill-fated animated adaptation was released to poor reviews and low attendance; and the First Age of Tolkien was coming to a close.

In 1982 my family moved to Switzerland for a year or so; I reread the books there, amid castles and mountains and adolescence. I enjoyed them, but they seemed both dated and childish; furthermore, I detected a certain, oh – how should one put this – anti-industrial ideology, which surely did not fit so well with my fancied teenage Marxism. Not to mention the romantic depictions of royalty and feudal political systems.

Additionally, by then, I had read widely in the larger realms of fantasy, and Tolkien’s fairly gelded sense of the world was sorely tested when compared to the charms of Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, and other more conventionally literary or pulpy fantasy authors.

At about this time I had my first discussions with my dad about what lay behind Tolkien’s book. I’d read fellow-Inkling C. S. Lewis’s juvenile Christian fantasy series, The Narnia Chronicles, several times by then as well, as well as a survey of the social milieu at Oxford that these gents smoked their briars in (The Inklings). So I was well aware that Lewis was deeply involved in prodding Tolkien to complete the books and was largely inspired to experiment with the fantastic (in the forms of Narnia and the Perelandra trilogy) due to Tolkien’s example.

Yet while Lewis freely acknowledged allegory and pedantic intent with regard to these works, Tolkien was legendarily touchy about the facile mapping of observable events into his invented mythos. The War of the Ring is not World War Two, even as he borrows the very language of Allied propaganda (“the free peoples of Middle-Earth”), Sauron is not Hitler, and the Shire is not England.

So the good don claimed, with varying degrees of disingenuousness. The Shire, actually, really is a kind of specific myth about England that most people who grow up speaking English absorb, sometimes in part from The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit was written partly as a direct response to Tolkien’s experience in the trenches of World War I, and it’s easy to recognize that The Hobbit is a kind of literary foreshadowing for The Lord of The Rings.

My father, an engineer and systems analyst with no background in literary criticism or art history, was only able to help me along with the barest of introductions to the idea of allusion, mimesis, and authorial theme as we discussed the books. But it was enough. Rather than seeking a literalist, one-to-one interpretation of the events, places and characters I was reading, or accepting them as a kind of alternate reality, I began to understand writing as a kind of scrim between a work’s author and the reader, the perspective of the reader changing each time the work is read, and therefore a fruitful and multiplying field of meaning unique and specific to each reader.

The Lord of the Rings may not be a retelling of World War Two, but it is certainly a reaction to the events of the past century and a half. Tolkien’s starting point is the Arts-and-Crafts movement of the late 1800s, which championed neo-medieval methods of creation and eschewed mass production in favor of the careful work of individual craftsmen, a salutary programme offered in place of the factory’s awful gilded fripperies – all of which is great if you happen to be landed gentry, like, oh, Bilbo Baggins of Bag-End, Hobbiton, The Shire, Middle Earth.

Tolkien’s response to the industrial revolution and the social upheavals it engendered is to wish longingly for a feudal past that never was. If there’s no heavy industry, how can there be sin, to paraphrase the Sex Pistols, and of course the Anabaptists.

Yet, I loved the books, and indeed still do.

Could it be possible to deeply love a work of art, be aware of formative debts to it, and yet completely stand at odds with the underlying ideologies of the work? It was such an uncomfortable question, like realizing a favorite relative is an unreconstructed racist, that I put the books away for a long, long time.

Other fantasy authors, Moorcock in particular, were much more in tune with the questions and ideologies that interested and involved me for the next few years, and I continued to read, still in great quantity, but not very deeply as yet. I had the tools but didn’t fully know how to use them. It would take Samuel R. Delany’s masterwork Dhalgren to truly teach me to read through a book. That book liberated me from the SF and fantasy ghetto and taught me to read books and writing without concern for plot or narrative or character or setting. I still prefer the fantastic, but I can appreciate the more conventionally accepted works of the modern era and earlier now as well.

Unfortunately, so much of Tolkien’s creative energy went into constructing his monumental backstory – The Silmarillion, the languages, and so forth – that it set an unfortunate template for the marketing and development of fantasy. Multi-volume opii, padded with reams of nonsense about ancestors, grammars, and political histories replaced both old-fashioned plot-driven adventure and rarefied literary formalism in fantasy. By the late seventies and early eighties, the flood of such works reinforced my interest in SF and fact-based reading.

SF is another genre in which literary approaches were often shouted down in favor of precisely machined works with an engineer’s eye to problem, story, and character. Yet by this time the approaches of the authors termed New Wave (interestingly, often having worked with Michael Moorcock at New Worlds magazine) were really becoming widely available, Brian Aldiss blended worldbuilding, historical novels, and literary fiction in his Helliconia books; Phil Dick was not quite the icon he is today, but he was available. There was a plethora of fascinating literary SF published between 1969 and 1984 n the shelves of my local library.

In 1973, my family lived in the Boston-area town of Brookline, where I walked to Devotion School a few blocks away, and I had my first taste of city life – one that formed many of my tastes as an adult. We lived on the second floor of a large turn-of-the-century house in a neighborhood of such houses, peppered with small brick apartment buildings and all shaded by large, mature trees.

Between my elementary school and my home was the in-city Kennedy family home, open for free as a museum, to which I would sometimes detour on my way to school in order to wander the empty house, pressing doorbell-like buttons that activated recordings of the quavering voice of Rose Kennedy, reminiscing about life in the house with her children. I don’t recall the house as either special or large, but I’m sure it was free, as that independent bit of first-grade hooky sticks in my mind.

There was one other forbidden activity, which I cherished at the time. On the main thoroughfare that fronted my elementary school, about a block away, was a dingy little shopfront run by an elderly couple known as Irving’s Candy Store (I am STUNNED to see this web page, BTW). Irving’s was dimly lit and in the back of the store there were wooden bins mounted as drawers, cut down somewhat so as to be open in the front in which very, very inexpensive, tasteless candy was stored. I recall in particular meringue-like dry things stamped and dyed into the likeness of ice cream cones which simply had no flavor at all, but had the great advantage of costing about a nickel, or perhaps less.

Occasionally, announcements would be made at school that we were not allowed to patronize Irving’s, presumably because children were spending their lunch money on tasteless, brightly colored candy instead of tasteless, dully-colored cafeteria food. It always struck me as unfair to Irving and his wife, who were always so kind to a kid that came tentatively wandering through the door.

I recall seeing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my parents at the Coolidge Corner cinema, still in business, so reliable sources inform me. I was quite terrified of the psychedelic journey by boat through the tunnels of the factory and consternated by the fate of Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, and the rest of the bad children in the film. I knew that I had been bad – hadn’t I purchased penny candy and listened to the forbidden samizdat of Rose Kennedy’s crackly recollections? A similar fate awaits me, one day, as all evildoers; I live in fear. I will be hunted in my hole, and sucked through the transparent plastic pipes to meet my fate at the majestic hands of a just universe.

I must not neglect to mention the ancillary trauma of the revealed cruelty of President Nixon as he fired many senior staff in what would come to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre. The event so bothered me I made a little book about it from a cut-up box for Crest Toothpaste, a book I have to this day, depicting the bawling and newly unemployed former members of the Nixon Administration.

Rounding out my litany of terror was the fearsome Pop imagery of a two-foot silk-screened mouth that decorated my bedroom wall, a painted press-board plaque from which issued boiling storm clouds each night as I slept, to transfix me with bolts of lightning like spears, lifting me from my bed and over the open staircase there to dash me against the landing and certain death below. I can’t count the number of times I dropped down through the darkened and silent internal sky, screaming soundlessly. I still have this dream from time to time.

Beyond these childhood traumas, however, was a family ritual that led in another direction – my father read the entirety of The Hobbit to my sister and I in the evenings there, the two of us piled about him on the family beanbag. He read the whole book through aloud to us. In first grade, I was having great difficulty with the memorization components of basic literacy, my parents tell me, but somehow I became fascinated by the realization that within that book, accessible only by reading, lay a different world than this one, with different hazards, and warm firelight, and no perfidious authority to confound and frighten me.

As I understand it, I simply made off with the book one day, and to my parents’ surprise did not stop reading until I had actually completed not only The Hobbit, but also The Fellowship of the Ring and sometime later The Two Towers. I may have continued on to The Return of the King as well, but if so, I skipped the last half of The Two Towers; Tolkien’s prose in certain sections of the book is deliberately crafted to emphasize the onerous monotony and drudgery of the hobbits’ journey to Mordor, and I know for certain that I was so bored with this section of the book that it was no longer enjoyable.

I do not know how long, in calendar terms, it took me to tackle this. I’m reasonably sure that I was done with both The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring before we returned to Indiana in 1974. Upon returning to the Midwest, I’m told, I began to read the things one expects a six to eight year old to read, Richard Scarry books, Where the Wild Things Are, Encyclopedia Brown, Arnold Lobel, and so forth.

I still read in vast quantities, however, and at one point my parents forbade me to read in bed (a habit I retain to this day), as I would read an entire book in a night at the expense of sleep. I’d choose instead to snooze through subjects such as math, which gave me no pleasure and retained the basic challenge of rote-based learning as a prerequisite to comprehension.

In response to the ban, I simply began rising at 2 am and reading in another room until my family arose, at which point my parents kind of gave up.

At any rate, the very first book I ever read on my own was certainly The Hobbit, and very shortly thereafter at least The Fellowship of the Ring. I’ve re-read it any number of times since.

The sheer pleasure of a slice of one’s childhood remaining unchanged in form of external stimuli, so unlike physical landscapes or people, is deep indeed. It contains an element of experience that for many years of this world’s history belonged primarily to religious experience, religious texts being the most widely disseminated and easily available for children to consume.

The warmth and pleasure my mother gains from scripture is unavailable to me; but I recognize in my experience a cousin to that consolation. A difference is in my regard of the material; Lord of the Rings is fiction, pastiche, constructed deliberately by a conservative scholar with a Romantic streak a mile wide and a marked inability to write about the internal life of women.

My mother’s devout relationship with the Bible is open to learning about the cultural conditions of the production of the book, from initial authorship through multiple translations. But the special quality of the book, for her a document which embodies literal spiritual truth, is a quality which I do not attribute to Lord of the Rings.

Nonetheless, I have been able to gain a sympathetic understanding and appreciation of my mother’s beliefs, and of others’, by observing my own non-rational emotive states which stem from Rings as a primary vehicle for both childhood escape and retention and expansion of childhood memories.

My contribution to pre-opening frenzy for The Two Towers this week (the Peter Jackson film opens on December 18 in the U. S. to remarkable anticipation, I note for posterity) will be a series of essays about my relationship to the books. I’ll begin with my earliest recollection of Tolkien.

The primary storybook of my earliest childhood was “The Golden Treasury of Children’s Literature,” edited by Brenda and Louis Untermeyer, which I am fortunate enough to retain a copy of today. It’s a good-sized book, about 9-by-12 inches, hardback, and running to 544 pages.

Profusely illustrated by a wide variety of mid-century commercial artists, the book introduced me to hundreds of stories and authors, including C. S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Aesop, the Grimms, Bradbury, Milne, L. Frank Baum, and on and on.

The Tolkien excerpt is the opening chapter of The Hobbit, in which Gandalf calls upon Bilbo at Bag-End in the company of a party of Dwarves, who proceed to help themselves to the discombobulated Baggins’ larder and to sing a memorable song:

Chip the gasses and crack the plates!
Blunt the knives and bend the forks!
That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates –
Smash the bottles and burn the corks!

and so forth.

The excerpt concludes before Bilbo leaves Hobbiton on his way to meet Smaug, but it had a profound effect on me, much more pronounced than the other stories in the book. I was surprised upon rereading it in the last year that the lavish descriptive passages detailing the precise appearance of a flame-lit hobbit-hole’s parlor and dining facilities I recall so well appear no where in the chapter.

The basic information is present, but the Bag-End of my mind is the product of my own imagination, not Professor Tolkien’s.

My father remains an animated performer when reading aloud, making up stories for children, or teaching his classes at UNC, and I suppose that his concurrent reading of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings while I was very young strongly informed his recountings of this chapter to myself and my sister as children.

Despite this, I have no direct memory of my father reading this specific chapter to us as children, although I know he must have.

Why?

My first appearance on television came sometime between 1969 and 1971 on a local station in West Lafayette, Indiana, presumably the Purdue University affiliated public channel. Rather incomprehensibly, one day, my parents asked us if we wanted to appear on a children’s show which consisted, as I recall, of children being read to by young adults.

I have direct and clear recollections of listening to this chapter of The Hobbit under bright television lights while on a set which featured brightly colored oversize models of children’s wooden spelling blocks. I know that my father had read this to us in the past because my recollection of the event includes my disappointment in the comparatively colorless performance of the young woman who read to us that day.

Seattle man finds it’s his lucky day

SEATTLE, December 13, 2002 – Embittered, alienated cynic Mike Whybark opened his email today to find a note from another Michael, one Michael Griffin of the Fort Worth area. Mr. Griffin, also known as “tater-haid,” informed Mr. Whybark that he had mysteriously qualified to receive a commemorative promotional lunchbox featuring the design work of Mr. Griffin and the branding of Mr. Griffin’s vanity web site, or “blog”, known as “ultramicroscopic.”

Mr. Whybark’s qualification for the prize? He’d left the one-thousandth comment on the other man’s site. The comment? After an interregnum in which Mr. Griffin had not added new material to his site for a few days, the proprietor asked “What’d I miss?”

Mr. Whybark noted in reply, “Halle Berry was widely celebrated in the media.”

The promotional product is reproduced below.

Somewhat later in the day, Mr. Whybark ventured into the palatial lobby of his apartment building to retrieve his mail, a mysterious box was noted, with a Seattle return address, and yet also credited as emanating from Maakies.com, the website of the prodigiously talented Tony Millionaire, and his hilarious, totally merciless alt-weekly comic, Maakies.

Mr. Whybark has reviewed both of Mr. Millionaire’s books favorably in the pages of Cinescape, but it’s unusual to receive a review copy without having some correspondence with a publicist or creator first. The box, however was about six inches square, not a book-like size.

Upon opening it, a six-inch Drinky Crow collectors’ figure was revealed, with no note or explanation. The vinyl figure comes with interchangeable eyes and a jug helpfully marked XXX. The jug may be fitted to the corvid’s mouth.

Credit has not yet been taken for the delivery of this item.

I just drove our formerly perfectly-maintained ’97 Corolla into the support pylon of our street-front garage.

Score: one garage door, one side fender. Match to pylon.

Maybe I don’t really need a driver’s license after all, and all these years of avoiding it were for a reason.

From an email I dispatched on the morning of December 2, 1999:

“Demonstrations yesterday, last night and today appear to me to be spontaneous expressions of resistance to the abrogation of our constitutional rights – for example, by mayoral decree, only the police or military can posess a gas mask within city limits. The decree does not appear to be within the powers granted the Mayor by the city charter.

The disturbances in my neighborhood (Capitol Hill) last night were provoked by the police, who, in attempting to prevent some vandalism aggressively gassed and charged a crowd of very largely calm and peaceful protestors who, in accordance with the rules of the emergency, had left the downtown area after 7pm.

The protestors were on a very busy commercial street, Broadway, that was crowded with many happy and excited people, mostly white professionals and children, who were packing bars and restaurants. So the police use of force necessarily also fell upon people who were simply out, rather than necessarily protesting.

This drew many more people out and the evening ended, several hours later with the police working to keep a crowd of a couple thousand away from the precinct station. The police gassed and used rubber bullets several times. At least five city and county elected officials were present, concerned, attempting to get people to go home.

I was standing in a small group of people on the sidewalk, in compliance with the police instructions, listening to King County Councilmember Brian Derdowski (was clearly very unhappy with the situation); the crowd was singing sitcom theme songs (Gilligan’s Island and the Brady Bunch). Then the crowd sang “Silent Night”.

A few minutes later an explosive device fired by the police landed about six inches in front of me, directly between me and Councilmember Derdowski, and the explosion and gas temporarily blinded and deafened me. Everyone ran; I was struck in the legs several times with rubber bullets.

So last night I was very very unhappy with the police response.”

I don’t recall who the other elected officials were, or what my source was. Additionally, I’ve since been educated that the rubber bullets that tore up my ass and legs were in fact pellets, probably from another grenade thrown by the defenders of the peace. I can’t say that the distinction was central or palliative.

You’ll all be happy to hear I’ve decided not to post the gory pix of the bloody welts.

My companion at the start of this venture into my friendly local riot zone?

None other than Mr. Ken Goldstein.

I saw Harry Potter II at a downtown mallplex after noting that the Cinerama showing we had tix for was too crowded.

I reflected on my privileged childhood exactly as I did when I saw the previous film – why, for example, does Harry go back to his horrible foster parents when every international ruling class school has summer residencies, for, for example, the children of deposed dictators, kids of their underlings, and other victims of the undertow?

(Really, I attended a private school in Switzerland, and that was the way it was done for such unfortunates, I kid you not. You were welcome to join the landscaping crew if your father’s international killing machine failed to deliver the tuition. I am not making ths up, and I’m not ate up about it. After all, did you ask for your parents? It’s humanitarian, if elitist.)

Ths leads to odd reflective moments during the films which, at the time, are really not worth explaining to my wife, or anyone else, for that matter.

Then Viv read the latest book out loud for a few before we snoozed (I, sneakily, have her working on the Amber Chronicles in the hopes that geek reading habits can be slipstreamed into the wake of the boy wizard and the grand grey one yet to open – although he’ll be wearing white this year, of course).

Today, after awakening, we went thrifting in the ‘hood, and BOY, my locale is now the home of Seattle’s grandest concentration of secondhand shops, which is just too cool. It used to be in Fremont, to our north and west, but then the developers got to it, and well, if you like Starbucks and Jamba Juice, they are looking out for your best interests as consumers, lemme tell ya.

If you prefer the crabby, foulmouthed business person that waves sex toys about if too many straight people show up, or the black-hearted antiquarian that keeps real human corpses behind the counter (no joke!), then Fremont circa three years ago or my neighborhood, Capitol Hill, is more the place for you.

I still, however, was disappointed to not find a single spare ADB cable at any of the shops or charity thrifts. Looks like eBay is a necessity for the next harebrained computer project.

Also, today was very foggy, and once the sun went down, watching the cold tendril drift and billow under the lamps was a pleasure. As we walked up the hill toward home, a phalanx of bicycle cops, (also known as “playground supervisors”) filed by. Viv and I looked, and I wondered, “Does that mean the kids are coming up here again?”

Today was November 30, the third anniversary of a little thing that happened here in my city, neighborhood, and on my ass in the form of rubber pellets from a police stun grenade. There was a comemmorative rally downtown today, and the drifting fog and biking cops recalled clouds of tear gas, chanting and unhappy neighbors, and lots of open bars to my mind.

I believe I may share some recollections.

As you may have noted, I am getting my steam up on ye olde alternative comix reviews.

But, alas, I got the call which indicates the end of funding for the reviews. Which is a drag. It’s not like the reviews pay well – they don’t – but they cover the cost of publication and almost the time investment for reading and writing them, and I’ve established sufficient credibility to make it relatively easy to get review copies from the burgeoning field of independent comics publishers.

So I have to figure out what’s next on that front. I imagine I’ll keep writing the reviews.

I also spent a pleasant half-hour on the phone with a reporter for one of the Seattle newspapers this afternoon. She was doing a story on online resumés and had come across my resumé site, and was curious about how effecive the site has been for me.

“Well,” I told her, “it was great, back in the day. But lately? Nothin’.”

I look forward to her story. Apparently, that little boost will be needed when I start looking for a job again. Not that I have any expectations of actually finding a job. I sent out ten or more resumés a week for more than a year, resulting in a grand total of three call-backs, two email enquiries, and two freelance jobs.

The dot-com bubble was so vast here that it’s actually still not done receding. Which means I’m bound for a couple more years of joblessness. Or a transition into midlife professional slackerdom.

Exhibit A? Writing comic book reviews at age 36 for no compensation.

Yes, leaving Seattle has come up, and Viv would like nothing better than to live within driving distance of her family; and what do I care? I mean, it’s not like I ever leave the freakin’ house.

Of course, I should really be applying to any grad school within arm’s reach, and I’d like to… but I have NO IDEA what I want to get a degree in, which makes entry fees, exams, and essays a mite tricky.

And my cat’s sick.

The night after we brought Mavis home, Dave picked up a copy of The Stranger, Seattle’s gen-x alternstive weekly, which has generally suffered at the hands of Seattle Weekly’s backing by Village Voice media and by a lack of staff turnover.

The paper still shows sparks of former greatess, however, and one such spark has been the inclusion of poster reviews since Seattle returned to the blessed state of well and widely postered.

Lo and behold, this week, they’d picked our neighbors’ lost pet flyer, featuring the protagonist of yesterday’s entry, the lost and lonely Mavis!

Mavis is doing well, her family reports. “She’s an indoor kitty now,” says Christian.