When the Founder travelled to the Dirtlease park in northern New York recently, Mike, the manager, told him, ‘You know they are putting cat litter boxes in schools now?’
When Mike said that, the Founder was standing in a ditch next to Mike’s helper, Bob. The three of them were digging up some ground to expose a sewer line that had backed up. Bob was in the hole while Mike worked the excavator. Bob guided the bucket while the Founder pushed shovelsful of dirt toward the earth-face, so that the bucket could catch them. Bob is forty-five or so, pale and blond with a backwards baseball cap. He is an ex-marine, but comes across as a guy who blew his brain on acid when he was younger. That morning, Mike had told the Founder that he thought someone had beaten on Bob when he was younger. ‘He just never thinks he does anything right’, Mike said. ‘He’s always apologizing.’ Bob did electronics repair in the Corps, but after he got out, he drifted around the country doing construction work. A few years ago he came home to the North Country, got a woman pregnant, and settled down.
‘Lookin good, good buddy’, Bob said as Mike pulled the bucket back, scraping dirt off the surface. ‘You have four inches at least till you hit the pipe’.
‘That looks like five and seven sixteenths to me’, the Founder said.
If Bob had it in him to glare, he would have glared at the Founder. ‘I’m trying to be conservative’, he said.
The weather was low sixties, no humidity, clear skies. The Founder pitied guys digging ditches in red states where it is hot, like Texas and Louisiana. When Mike came down from the excavator to look at the ditch, he told Mike, ‘I think you’re shitting me’.
Mike looked miffed. He was not sure he liked having his boss act like a helper. It was hard enough telling him what to do without giving him orders. Now, he was accusing him of lying. ‘About what’, he asked.
‘About the cat litter.’
‘I swear to God’, Mike said. ‘I read it online.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Schools are putting out litter boxes for kids who identify as cats.’
‘You’re full of shit.’
‘It’s true! ‘That’s the problem these days! Anyone can identify as anything and nobody cares!’
As the men were talking, two women walked by. One was an older woman named Kim with early-stage Alzheimer’s, who had recently signed over her older single-wide to the park and purchased a newer double-wide. The other was her niece, who lived with her. On a short-term basis, Kim could pass the Turing test, but she tended to forget things, like her password to the park web portal and whether she had left the gas on in her home. The niece was neuro-divergent. The Founder thought it was dangerous to have Kim be the responsible one of the two, but the two had who they had.
‘Miiiike!’ the niece shouted.
Mike looked up. ‘Hi, Chloe’, he said.
‘You’re car?’, Chloe said, pointing at the machine that Mike was sitting in.
‘No, it’s an excavator’, Mike said.
‘What are you doing’, Kim asked.
‘Septics’, Mike said.
‘You’re cuute!’ Chloe said. ‘Hee, hee!’
Mike laughed. The Founder looked at Chloe. ‘What am I’, he asked her. ‘Chopped liver?’
Chloe avoided the Founder’s gaze and looked at Mike. ‘I love Mike!’, she said. Mike laughed again. ‘Thanks, Chloe’, he said.
‘I pick on him’, Chloe said. ‘Hee, hee.’ She blushed and hid behind her aunt.
‘Hey, Chloe’, the Founder said. ‘I think Mike likes it when you pick on him!’
‘Hee, hee!’
‘See you later, Chloe.’
Chloe beamed. ‘I love you’, she said, and then she and her aunt walked toward their home.
After Kim and Chloe left, Mike pulled away some more earth and found that the clean-out that had been overflowing did not tie into the sewer main. Instead, it tied into another pipe that ran parallel to and beside the main. It appeared that three homes fed into the parallel pipe, which joined the main about twenty yards down the run. All of the underground pipe – the main, the parallel pipe, and a riser that fed a phantom lot that was not on the survey map – was Orangeburg, and badly pitted.
‘Why the hell would someone do that’, the Founder asked Mike.
‘Common sense is not that common.’
‘You know what’s past this point that we have dug up’, the Founder asked. Mike shrugged. It was impossible, of course, to know what was underground. The whole park was a spaghetti-tangle of leaking utilities. Over the past five years, he had dug up a third of the land in the park to replace utilities. It looked like he was going to have to dig up the rest piece by piece. Today was especially irritating because the Founder had hung around while he was working, instead of blowing in, signing some checks and blowing out. But now he was really getting on Mike’s tits. It was bad enough that the Founder was indulging his navvy fantasies. Now he was asking stupid questions. Mike shrugged in a way that meant, ‘Fuck if I know’, and told Bob to pack up the tools for the day.
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The rumor that schools provide cat litter for students who identify as animals started in 2021. It has been debunked by every school that it was told about, but it persists. It has been picked up and spread by MAGAt politicians, including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Minnesota Republican gubernatorial nominee Scott Jensen, Colorado Republican gubernatorial nominee Heidi Ganahl, New Hampshire Republican U.S. Senate nominee Don Bolduc, and right-wing commentators including Chaya Raichik and Bill Cunningham. It is a backlash against the recognition of LGBTQ rights and gender variance – and it is bullshit. That is nothing new, of course. MAGAts thrive on fake news and bullshit. Their presidential nominee recently told a crowd that, based on his relationship to MIT, he knew that sharks attack electric-powered boats more frequently than they do diesel-powered boats. And electric boats sink, leaving their occupants having to choose between death by electrocution or shark:
“I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery’s underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’ By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that? A lot of shark … I watched some guys justifying it today: ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.’ These people are crazy.”
The cat litter rumor might have begun with discomfort on the right about people called ‘furries’. Furries like to dress up in Disney-like anthropomorphic costumes and get together at furry conventions. LGBTQ people are heavily represented in the furry community, but everyone is welcome. Furrydom is not a sexual orientation and furries do not, really, believe that they are animals. They just like to dress up as them, the way Civil War reenactors like to dress up as Union or Confederate troops, or people who go to Comic Con like to dress up as superheroes. For some reason, furries trouble MAGAts.
Q: Do furries have sex inside their suits?
A: Unlikely. The suits cost a lot of money and the owners don’t want to ruin them. The suits are heavy, hot and awkward. And they are, well suits. Clothes usually come off when people do bunga-bunga.
Q: But – furries have sex when they go to these furry conventions!
A: Well, they are adults. Sex is not the purpose of the conventions, but they are gatherings of like-minded adults with leisure time. Adults sometimes have sex when they get together. And – I will go out on a limb here – when sex is done right, it can be a lot of fun. Sometimes, it even produces little adults.
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After they were done excavating for the day, the Founder washed up and googled ‘Cat litter-school’. Several well-sourced articles from credible outlets popped up confirming that the rumor was, in fact, bullshit. Kids do not identify as animals. Schools are not putting cat litter in bathrooms to accommodate them. Furries are not dangerous. Sanity is not statistical. He forwarded a Wikipedia article on the subject to Mike, inflated the air mattress he sleeps on when he visits the park, opened a bottle of good bourbon, and drank himself to sleep.
When they prepared to dig further the next day, he asked Mike, ‘By the way – did you see the article about cat litter? You shouldn’t believe everything you read online.’
Mike finished tightening a Fernco fitting. ‘The media is just fake news’, he said.
‘Traditional media outlets are not perfect’, the Founder said. ‘Sometimes, they even make shit up. But they are more reliable than random people on social media.’
Up the run someone flushed their toilet and a mass of solids and liquids plopped into the ditch.
‘I don’t know’, Mike said. ‘You don’t know who controls them.’ Then, he got into the excavator and prepared to do some real work. The Founder reflected on the ignorance and polarization destroying the country. It even affected smart, decent, thoughtful people like Mike. The more you confronted them with facts, the more they made up their own facts, or accused you of fabricating the truth. He considered using his Jewish space laser to fix the septic problem. Then he thought better of it, climbed into the ditch and began to move clumps of dirt the old fashioned way.