Creatures of habit

My cat is huge. He’s actually lost weight, as have I, with all the recent moving around and changes in our lives.  He could be called a rescue, but he found me. When I look at his blockhead and rolled mane of grey, I think ‘animal’. He is a creature-not a domestic cat. We have come to know each other over the years. Our relationship grows stronger with every adaptation we must make together in order to survive. So far so good. He used to get into fights, it seems he has retired from keeping up his ‘street cred’. I would give him a saucer of warm milk when he came home limping with large open gashes, which used to happen all too often back then. He has wizened or become secure. He is mostly an “inside kitty” now and right now he is likely sprawled on my Queen bed positioned directly under the ceiling fan lying on his back with his belly hairs being gently blown in the circular breeze. 

I have been allergic to milk since birth. I was forced to tolerate goats milk (which is blue-like blue cheese) before it seems the adults gave up trying to insist that a growing child needs milk or will become malnourished and die. A milk-less child is an unnatural thing. Hogwash. In fact, having juice instead of milk at school recess was a privilege-especially in the eyes of the other kids. They tried to trade with me, I usually made out with their dessert.

Break the mold.  This is what is said of only children. 

I thought families broke bread, not cheese.

My daughter loved milk as a baby. She was a hard one to take (pry) the bottle from. She is in college now and is currently working on a persuasive speech for a communications class about dairy and milk in our culture. She is a coffee lover like myself and now only drinks her fancy drinks with almond milk (like me). Our bodies needs change as we change. Variety is the spice rack of life. Is there really a need for our advanced society to resort to ingesting milk, to swallow tradition without checking the date, to consume ourselves with calcified and hormonal libations as if an elixir of youth? 

My own grandfather was a staunch milk advocate, insisting each of his three children drink a full tall glass of milk with every dinner. He didn’t know what to do about me. I challenged him (and his belief system) in many ways. We were close. Halfway through my life and I have never broken a bone in my body. I read somewhere that the proteins of milk represented by the chemical structure, are precisely the opposite of our own protein structures (I honestly cannot find the source so call this hearsay if desired)-but interesting if true. Habits are hard to break. My cat loves consistency. DNA changes-or do we change it?

The milk-man, where did he go? He doesn't deliver anymore. Do we cry when milk is spilled? 

No, it now comes in unbreakable cartons. Missing children? Did you check the cereal aisle? The ones with the toys inside are always on the middle shelf. 

Incarceration is an interesting and archaic concept. It is similar to grown-up ‘Time Out’. This old world approach of caging the ‘bad’ human until they can become ‘good’ citizens, docile and obedient humans has not yet resulted in a Utopian society. 

Exile inside. “Think about what you did.” 

Society and the way we operate has changed at a rapid pace over the last 2 decades, this recent decade even more succinctly with electric cars and cell phones. Who knows what’s next. I watched a documentary where a man was released from prison after two decades and had never known about cell phones. The way he described the whole populations' fixation on these devices (across the ages) is enlightening, terrifying, lightening, burdening, transformative-inescapable. Not being able to swim once thrown back into the stream is hardly a ‘release’. Some sentences are run-ons….and some calls just drop. 

They don’t serve milk in prison as far as I can tell. There have been no ‘Milk Riots’ in recent recorded history, perhaps a few of sips of warm milk has the same intoxicating effect as sedation, according to milk advertisers-Milk is a natural sleep-aid and an inoculant against nightmares. I had frequent nightmares as a child, now that I’m an adult, the real world is the nightmare. 

We are all creatures of habit, even those that deny being so. We like what we like, which can change, we want to predict-and more so, for our predictions to be true. 

But we are wrong sometimes and always refuse to adapt. 

Because we are animals bound by our DNA refusing to adapt to the changing climate. 

Time-out is up, ready to be good? It is time to go back outside and look around,  I say to my fat cat. He follows me warily and goes straight for his new favorite drink, hose water.  

Painting by Nikolaos Lytras [Public domain], 'The Milk' pre 1917 via Wikimedia Commons.