morning shower

Yes, you're right: that's Walter Gomez inside the shower cubicle, on the shelf at the back.  He has a thing - shall we call it a fetish? - about licking my damp feet and ankles.  That's all you need to know.

I realize, of course, that very little - well, no - incisive political commentary accompanies my pictures of cats, or flowers, or berries.  In part, that's because of a sense of overwhelming inadequacy.  In part, it's because it would be a far stretch to get from Walter in the shower to Tom Price and Obamacare. But there is a way in which I see FTBL's deliberate, recurrent emphasis on the ordinary, and on attentive looking, as political, in the widest sense.  That is, it shouldn't be interpreted as escapism, but as a reminder not to take the everyday for granted.  We need to use it as a continual spur to recognizing the precarity of the environment, and of the daily lives of some of the people whom we live among and care about (and, yes, of our own).

And immediately - here's the problem.  I don't have the knack of writing about this, however deeply I care about it - because I care so deeply about it? - without sounding sanctimonious.  But know that feelings of anger, of apprehension, of fear, of a desire to fight, lie behind every apparently innocent picture of a fluffy grey cat.