Eliezer 🇺🇲🚀🇮🇱 אליעזר

you may not want to read this post while eating. once, a cat that broke into my house got pregnant and had kittens. suddenly, i had a box of kittens. i'm not really the number one candidate for "person who would have a box of kittens". but now, i had one. each of them could fit in your hand, and people found them extremely cute. they only got cuter as they approached the size of a potato, a mango: people would come to my house to see them. i took on the task of watching over them. i'd be working, while on the floor next to me women, little girls, children, all filtered in and out to gawk and become emotionally warmed by this box - potentially, one of the cutest boxes and small arrangements of the physical universe possible: just a pile of kittens. eventually, i moved them into another space slightly separate from my house. here, they got fleas. this posed no threat to my normal home or family, but it got pretty bad. i suspect the fleas were in a bush, came in a window, and then had a population explosion once i moved these kittens there. the kittens were too young to treat chemically. they looked fine physically, but they were just totally covered in fleas if you really got in there to check. now, one of my "issues" with owning animals is that i'm unable to not do everything possible for them. i somehow feel that it's unethical for me, their steward, to leave anything undone where they have to bear the brunt of it and "just deal". this means that for several weeks, all this was solely my urgent responsibility and domain. i'd go out to the kitten space, put them all in a crate, vacuum their space, then wash them to get the fleas off. this didn't solve the problem entirely, but it decreased the number of fleas they had to deal with by a factor of 100x, at least. the most noteworthy feature of this was the bathing. once you start washing, the fleas know where to run on the animal. apparently it’s instinctual - then a small amount of soap just instantly kills them. i'd be just massacring fleas out here. just killing hundreds and hundreds of fleas a day. if there was footage of this, flea teachers would use it in elementary schools to trauma shock their students. just stacking up walls of flea corpses. a really noteworthy amount of death was taking place here. somehow, the fleas know that the face is the safest place to go. so, each time, with each kitten, i'd have this somewhat nightmarish visual where i'd look at their face, during the bath, and it would look fine and normal, but then i'd apply water to it, and a sea of fleas would emerge from the fur - almost like the fur was alive. black, crawling, and i'd carefully apply the slightly soapy liquid, avoiding their eyes and noses, and strip this living quasi-invisible sheet of death out from under the fur on their tiny faces. i did this so many times, man. they weren't visibly suffering, they had no cuts, marks, anything like that. they were fine, really. but i was the line. i was the boundary between the decay and true chaos of nature, and these half domestic beings - the embodiment of what is cute, what cute is: the kittens. since this time, my perception of "the cute" and what cute is has changed entirely. you see cute things, you associate it with little girls. that is not what cute is. "the cute" is able to exist because something - something unseen - is keeping it aloft, out from the forest floor of life - where the law is violence - up from the decay, the death, the chaos, away from normal life. now, when i see something cute, i see these invisible strings. what is allowing it to be cute? what is allowing this odd thing to be what it is? to be free? to float, to charm, to be soft, round, defenseless - how? what invisible wall is insulating this thing, allowing this strange flower to flourish? for a moment, that was me. i was that. my hands covered in tiny blood filled corpses. washing the death from my hands and clothes, so others could see and be: the kittens