Fezzik In Paris

Two Americans, three cats, and too many places named "de Gaulle"

Fezzik Returns to Tiger’s Place

Purrito

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March 9, 2022

Geep and I often talk about our Paris days, especially in comparison to our current existence. Dealing with global pandemics, wars, shortages, and hearing the word unprecedented way too many times, has added an extra glow to our time in France. Of course, it was not all glamour and baguettes, but it was good. Special. We keep it like a snow globe in our minds to shake and look at when we need a pick me up. Inside that rounded glass lives several little memories involving the cats. Our furry unsuspecting travelers, who never fathomed being shoved into a plane, were important puzzle pieces in the entire experience.

Aurora, who we sadly lost in 2019, discovered the wonderfulness of shelves located over radiators in the winter . She also enjoyed listening to her own shockingly loud meow resonating down the concrete-walled hall and running down it so quickly that the rugs would bunch at the end near the door.

Vorenus, who is still with us despite his bad Persian cat genes, met his scary crow handler that spoke to him daily through the open windows and scared us when we threw open the metal shutters, squawking at us madly. He also was pleased at what he considered offerings to his majesty: flowers, a 1 foot tall Christmas tree, any plant in general that came home with us. Peonies were a favorite and something he only experienced in Paris, as they don’t grow in Texas.

They were both boisterous, confident, troublemakers who took to Paris life with the same obnoxiousness they had at home, but enjoyed the novelties presented.

Fezzik was different. Fezzik was always different.

Fezzik was the largest thing in the house, even with a later addition of a dog, but acted like a mouse. Out of all of them, we were most concerned with him on the flight over. His gentle nature made us worry the stress would be too much for him, but he surprised us. A cat that would hide for days on end, stuff himself into cabinets and only appear for food, walked out of the carrier and stretched. He turned his softball sized head from side to side and decided to settle on the couch like nothing happened. We soon purchased a small cat tree that had ‘Tiger’s Place’ embroidered on it for them to look out the window and he quickly claimed the ground floor cubbyhole as home base. Our gentle giant, often overshadowed by the other two cats, happily spent his days lounging in the sun, merping at French pigeons…and not hiding. His solitary personality lead to him being more in the background of our day to day, but he still enjoyed his snuggles and pets when we settled on the couch in the evenings. Fezzik was happiest, his best self, in Paris. Just like us.

As Geep noted in the About page, Fezz had started to be braver in the months leading up to his passing. Standing up to the tiny tyrant dog, standing his ground when our newest cat addition, Bugs, annoyed him, and demanding attention from us on a regular basis. We commented on several occasions how he was always so slow to adapt and change, but it was finally happening and he was starting to thrive late in life. He was struggling with a new diabetes diagnosis, but was handling it well and would even get up on the couch for his insulin shots. He figured out that shots = pets and that was a fair trade off. He was our huge, chubby, a tiny bit arthritic but otherwise healthy Moose. So when I noticed something was wrong, we never expected it to end the way it did. So suddenly.

Geep mentioned that when Aurora passed, we had life events to distract us from the loss due to moving houses. Fezzik’s passing fell in the middle of a mundane week, with no distractions to pull our attention away for a while. We are stuck sitting here in silence with our sorrow. I’m grateful he didn’t suffer, that it ended quick, and that we were there for those final moments to cradle his giant head and kiss his ears. Tell him he was the BEST boy, after all.

As our little French crew of three dwindles down to one, the losses get harder. We get farther away from Paris. We get farther away from our little companions.

Thank you Fezzik for all the terrible pet names you let us call you: Big Moose, Mooski Mooski, Fromage des Fesses, Camembert, Mooseharaja.

Thank you for memory of the the French girl’s mother I tutored seeing a picture of you and asking “Why so big?”

Thank you for being the reason the Italian vet just about fell over when she met you and told us that Fezziks were a THING, letting us imagine small packs of giant European shorthairs running through a forest somewhere.

Thank you for trying to always sell us cars with your paws crossed and that silly shifty look., I’m sorry we never bought one.

Thank you for sharing your incredible deadweighting skills.

I hope you heard me when I told you you get to go back to Paris again, talk to the pigeons, and sleep in Tiger’s Place forever.

I hope you and Aurora are happy and know we loved you. She will be happy to have you there to steal your warmth once again.

an end

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December 30, 2017

The last two weeks have, without question, been the least pleasant weeks that we have spent in France; what we had thought was a well planned exit has degraded into a hasty retreat. Where I had envisioned the ability to visit our favorite places one last time, we have found ourselves overwhelmed and constrained; we barely managed to squeeze in an (abbreviated) holiday meal. Still, we finally seem to have finished, and after this post goes up, I’ll pack my faithful Surface Pro up and stick it in my carry-on in anticipation of our flight back to the States tomorrow morning.

I’ve written several vignettes; an epilogue for the cats (Fezzik can fly), a description of my last day at work, the sadness of our last visit to the Louvre, scattered thoughts about the latest Star Wars (let’s hear it once more for VoSTF); the time for those posts, however, has passed.

Sitting here, I find that I don’t really know what to say; I’ve had a version of a final post in my head since we first approached the end of our original contract. It has changed, as my feelings towards France and my willingness to return to the US has waned, and now that I’m writing it, I don’t know that any of the previous versions address what it is that I would like to say.

I’m happy that we were here (particularly when one considers that the original one year turned into nearly four). I’m sad that we have to go back. I’d like to hope that we can find a way to come back.

Fezzik can fly; I suppose that there is no reason that I can not do so as well.

This is quite possibly the most entertaining box that I have ever packed. Also, we have Marco-based projects in the works.
Found in the bottom of my desk drawer: the receipt from the first time we ate on rue Cler; our real estate agent took us to lunch, having sensed that the Purrito was slipping into a jet-lag-induced coma.
I know, I know; more pictures of the Louvre.
Boop.
Not sure how I overlooked this one on our previous visits.
Apparently that wasn’t a great high.
Woman on the far right: Monsters again? Are you fucking kidding me?
I started to take pictures of our abbreviated Christmas feast. This was a s far as I got.
One last look at la Tour as it looks when we come home late from one of our favorite restaurants.
Our final walk around our ‘hood took us to les Invalides.
Our wistful lion bids Paris adieu.
The water seems high.
We’ve been walking across this bridge for several years now, and only today noticed the chicken on the lamppost.

the fezzik chronicles xvi: madness

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December 13, 2017

This morning, at 0530, we found that we had dug too deep, that things had gone too far. A chamber was broken into. We descended into the darkness, the absence of light so oppressive that the darkness felt like ink on our skins. We descended into madness.

This is how it felt, anyway, as we loaded the cats into their carriers, stacked the carriers atop one another, and descended the elevator. Once outside, we helped load the cats into the waiting van and handed over their pet passports. They will be taken for a final checkup and will spend the night at a boarding facility. Tomorrow, they will head to CDG at some ungodly-early hour, where they will be held in the pet facility before they are palletized, driven out to the runway, and loaded into the belly of an aluminum bird that is powered by liquid dead things. At 1010 or thereabouts, the aluminum bird. calling itself Air France Flight 636 (because these beasts are regarded as normal, and the fact that they fly by burning long-dead-biological material is not regarded as insane) will race down the runway and lift itself into the sky.

In the briefest of instants, Fezzik will no longer be present in Paris. In just over two weeks, neither will we; what started off as a one-year hitch became more than three-and-a-half years of our lives. Now we’re being dragged, resigned, away from the life that we had built ourselves. It feels much like descending into madness.

It probably looks like it, as well; for the nth time this evening, I’ve talked to a shadow flicking through the corner of my eye, a shadow which should be a cat.

None of the cats, however, are there.

leoni

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December 6, 2017

Some three weeks have passed since we returned from our Italian adventure; flying into Venice, we then took a train to Florence, and a subsequent train to Rome.

It was a hell of a trip, and, as usual, I took a probably-ridiculous number of pictures (a thorough purge brought this number to just north of 400). This post does not contain those pictures.

I wrote drafts of three separate posts, one for each location, but I haven’t been able to go back to them, nor have I really had the desire to go through the photos with the intent of selecting and post-processing  those that are “worthy” of this blog. The whole memory seems oddly fragile, and I have been unable to move past the feeling that if I go back through and account for everything we did, the memory will simply recede, like a small village buried by a sandstorm.

When I flipped through the pictures for the third or fourth time this past weekend, I did find myself laughing at the lions. “Another leone” proved to be the motto of the trip, perhaps due to where we were, and perhaps because we “rescued” several more Marcos during our stay in Venice.

It is thus with this admittedly-unsatisfying backstory that I present everything that wound up tagged with the word “lion,” in all its disjointed glory.

While searching for a 12th century wellhead (with one of the oldest lions of saint-Mark on the side), we wound up lost and in front of a hospital which had a marble trompe l’oeil.
Lower left; from the church adjacent to the hospital.
The symbol on the water fountain.
No lions in this biennale installation, but they would probably be enamored with those massive balls of yarn in the background.
A lovely statue we ran across on our way to the garden section of the biennale.
Such a noble lion.
A column near the grand canal.
From an old customs building.
Unsurprising find in the Palazzo Ducale.
Surprise: the anthropomorphic version of Venice (the lovely lady with the crown) hangs out with a winged lion.
Architectural lions.
I’m not sure why he’s so upset.
This one looks happier.
The history of this statue is impressive; stolen, raised, broken, stolen again, displayed in Paris, returned in pieces, and refurbished several times. The core lion part apparently predates Christianity itself by some 400 years.
Moving on to Firenze, we find another noble lion on the façade of the Palazzo Pitti.
Ceiling cat is watching you.
Palazzo Pitti spoils their lions.
Yeah, let’s all get naked in the presence of a lion. That sounds safe.
As the Purrito noted, we hit the jackpot at Palazzo Strozzi.
What are winged lions doing in the Duomo museum?
Sing to the lions.
From the cathedral’s edifice.
Unhappy structural lions.
Lion hide-and-go-seek in the Uffizi.
A fresco in the convent of Santa Maria Novella.
Surely the Musei dei Vaticani‘s collection of Sekhmets count.
An Egyptian lioness.
A demonic lion.
Lions gonna lion (and eat things).
Yeah, you can eat that, too.
The sadly-roped-off animal sculpture room.
Lots of lions in there.
I’ll allow it.
Roman-era lions.
Blurry lions.
“Goddammit, don’t eat that!” – anyone who has ever owned a cat.
Checking out the buffet.
I’m sure Aurora and Vorenus consider this an accurate representation of their battles.
Hint: what’s the name of the plaza in which Rome’s typewriter is located?

performance art

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November 27, 2017

Owing to its proximity and imposing nature, l’eglise de la madeleine was one of the first churches that we wandered into when we arrived in Paris. When we saw that l’eglise was often used for concerts, our collective interest was piqued, and thus nearly every version of The List, The Schedule, and finally, The Calendar, have come with some version of “concert at Madeleine.”

It was thus with genuine enthusiasm that on Saturday evening, I tucked our tickets into my coat pocket, confirmed that my heat-tech vest was interfacing well with my overcoat (I’m typically neutral on the subject of layering clothes, as I loathe the tangled feeling that often results from multiple layers of sleeves interacting), and donned my gloves as we walked out of our building and into the piercing wind. Arriving after our brief ride on Ligne 8, I hopped up a few steps, snapped a picture of the edifice while telling the Purrito that “I’m going to need a header for the blog post,” and then headed inside. Madeleine has no glass and a bit of a non-traditional layout; I had heard that the acoustics were excellent. The music, Le requiem de Mozart, was something that I know and love, and often occupied space on my World of Warcraft background music playlist (in the olden days before the world moved on from raiding Onyxia, after which I departed).

I was prepared to have a great evening. I was prepared to love this concert. I was prepared for a repeat of our experience with Orféo at Versailles.

I was not prepared for the orchestra to be fucking terrible.

It may be of note that things didn’t fall apart, but rather they began already-broken; after struggling to recognize even the introduction, I asked the Purrito if something was echoing strangely, or if the music was a near-unrecognizable mess to her as well. She confirmed that an entire section of the small orchestra seemed to be mysteriously off-time, and that it was not just me. As the intro ended, we looked at each other; I said “maybe they’re just in need of a bit more time to warm up.”

Nine minutes into Le requiem de Mozart, we quietly snuck out. In the end, the evening was saved by the discovery of a “Roman” bar (replete with tiled floors, chairs that look like they were stolen from the set of HBO’s Rome, and reproductions of various Roman frescoes) and a nice bottle of Crozes-Hermitage.

We thus had a subdued wake for the not-particularly-dearly-departed Requiem, uncomfortable in our newfound knowledge as to how concerts in hell must sound.

être en retard

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November 11, 2017

On Toussaint, (now some ten days ago…) we found ourselves at Fondation Louis Vuitton for their newest exposition, être moderne: le moma à Paris.

So here are the pictures that have been, shall we say, fermenting in my Lightroom export folder for the past week and a half.

A metal banana. I think.
Broham forgot his pants.
Uh.
The Purrito says that it’s intentional, but I like to think that this guys is as lousy with perspective as I am.
I recognized this piece as important.
Shit. I managed to take a blurry picture of a Rothko.
The façade…
And the maquette (the UN building in NYC, if anybody is wondering).
I’ll admit to not hating Campbell’s minestrone.
A well-timed photo.
It’s a photograph of a photograph.
This man has good ideas.
The original emojis.
The underbelly of the roof.
La défense as seen through the roof of Fondation Louis Vuitton.

a return to saint-denis

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November 2, 2017

I burned a day of PTO on Tuesday (I already had Wednesday off on account of it being Toussaint) and indulged in one of my ongoing obsessions; I returned to la basilique cathédrale de Saint-Denis.

While it is true that I had entirely intended to go back, hoping to perhaps take advantage of some of the new perspective afforded by two additional years of absorbing French history and culture, I found myself inclined to fairly exhaustively catalogue this return on account of this post from 2015; this short, poorly-formatted post is responsible for a surprising amount of our inbound traffic from search engines, and upon investigation, I found that there does not seem to be a walkthrough of the church.

I thus present what’s being searched for, in hopes that someone finds it useful, edifying, or even an interesting way to simply kill a few minutes.

To shamelessly plagiarize myself from the Projects page:

So as to prevent vomiting on the part of the site, I’ve broken the pictures up into sections:

  • Gisants is probably the reason you’re here;
  • Chappelles should be self-explanatory;
  • Crypte is an unfortunately incomplete walk-through of the crypt;
  • Cathédrale is anything that happened to catch my eye.

Access can also be had via the menu under Projects.

low-fat rubens

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October 19, 2017

The name Rubens conjures mental images of soft, curvaceous women in various semi-historical settings; if clothed at all, at least one breast has broken free of its silken restraint, and the remains of the garment threaten to drop to the ground, the act of disrobing to be marked only the faintest of sounds.

Unknown to the Purrito and I, however, was the fact that Rubens had a nearly-decade-long stint as a mix of an artist a diplomat, and a spy. Further negligence on our part was in overlooking the title of the Rubens exhibition at le musée du Luxembourg; had either of us stopped to axctually read the damn title, Rubens, portraits princiers, we would have known that we weren’t about to see a series of gossamered women. Instead, we got exactly what was on the tin, which was a series of court portraits.

This is not to say that Rubens’ court portraits were not interesting; they were worth seeing in their own right, though I will admit to raising an eyebrow at the number of paintings which were only attributable to his atelier, as opposed to Rubens’ own hand.

Most surprising, however, was rounding a corner in what we both thought was the middle of the exhibit only to be greeted with a sortie sign; Luxembourg’s galleries are nowhere near the size of those of the grand palais, so one expects that the exhibits will be smaller. Our discovery of the exact magnitude (or lack thereof, to be more accurate) of the exhibit was met with disbelief. Had it not been included in our 2017 sesame+ pass, we probably would have felt more cheated and less blandly disappointed than we did upon exiting the museum.

The worst experience of the day, however, goes to the Angelina salon de thé that sits on the ground of the museum; the mont blanc may be their signature pastry, but I had no idea that I find chestnut cream as vile as I did. No weight would be gained there.

An angry goblin-child.
A princess.
The illustrations are slightly more along the lines of what I expected.
Angry lion tapestries are the best tapestries.

bagelism

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October 16, 2017

I had a religious experience on Friday.

Wandering through the Marais, our mission to procure more pants (ah, adulthood) complete, the Purrito stopped in front of the window of a Jewish bakery and pointed at a loaf of halle bread.

Having walked this road many times before, always refusing the offer, I was prepared to dismiss it immediately, but the bread called to me. Golden and shiny, I considered the rumbling of my stomach instead of dismissing it; we thus moved towards the entrance of the bakery.

The challah had served as my initial temptress, but upon crossing the threshold I found myself struck, like Paul of Tarsos, but it was a poppy-seed bagel that blinded to me, whispering only two words: eat me.

We paid for the challah roll, the bagel, and a pastry, and managed to walk a few meters from the shop when I bit into the bagel. Ecstasy overcame my tongue: this is a bagel, with this light texture, this almost layered inside, this more bread-like but still distinct taste? What the hell have I been eating all of these years?

The Purrito giggled as words failed me, as I struggled in vain to sing the praises of this newfound flavor, as the agony of the passing experience soon fell over my face: the bagel was now gone, its martyrdom complete as I finished chewing.

The enlightenment, however, endures.

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