Will Ludwigsen

Stories of Weird Mystery

Month: July 2026

Oscar, The Cat Who Lived

July 24, 2026 /

Many of you may remember Oscar as the patriarch of our cats or as the loud sneezing animal in the microphone of our Teams calls. If so, you know that he’s been kicking death’s ass for the last several months.

Today, he decided to let Death win, just as a treat.

Aimee and I took him to the vet where we learned that his liver function was shutting down, and we let him know that we considered his duty as our guardian fulfilled. After a brief goodbye, he returned (as my grandfather would say) to the Church Triumphant.

Oscar arrived in our lives in June of 2010. Our greyhound Patti hadn’t been cat-safe, so when she passed away, we filled her open position with Oscar. He soon became a key addition to the team, contributing expertise in lounging, napping, and box-sitting.

Oscar was also a constant companion during writing, and he witnessed many a story in all its stages.

He also had opinions on my other activities.

In January of 2015, we brought him to the vet after a fainting episode and learned that he had a heart murmur. The doctor’s prognosis was grim: Oscar’s heart was effectively a hand grenade, and if we wanted to give him Atenolol tablets every night for the last week he was alive, we were welcome to do so.

Oscar thrived for eleven more years, outliving five other animals.

He was a quiet and pleasant boy who governed the other pets with a gentle but firm aura of command. He rarely had to raise his voice, which was often gravelly in an old movie star sort of way.

He didn’t take shit from nobody, though.

He was quite a cuddly boy, though he preferred Aimee because she took care of him during an early illness while I was out of town. He never forgave me entirely for that.

For much of his life with us, Aimee and I both have checked on him in the middle of the night to make sure he’s breathing, and every time he had a hairball, I’d go running for the cat carrier to take him to the vet. He probably found that tiresome.

In reality, he was the Chuck Norris of cats.

  • Catnip gets high from Oscar.
  • Oscar no longer has a shadow because it was following him too closely and he smacked it with his mighty paw.
  • Oscar doesn’t chase laser pointers. They flee from him.
  • When Oscar knocks a glass off a counter, the floor rises to meet it.
  • When Oscar kneads your lap, you gain a +4 to your STR and DEX.

And the final one today: Oscar once had a heart attack…his heart lost.

Really, it’s our hearts who lost, though we had much longer with him than we ever expected. He bravely endured a lot of health issues to stay by our side for so many years, and I suspect he left us only reluctantly because he thought we’d fuck everything up in his absence.

Sleep well, good friend. My mother awaits over the Rainbow Bridge to take care of you.

Here he sits next to her ashes because Oscar doesn’t mourn. He celebrates…like we should.

Man, 250 Years is Exhausting

July 4, 2026 /

For a nation founded and populated by the world’s restless crackpots and malcontents (as well as their slaves), we’re doing better than one might expect.

Fifty years ago in Garden City NY, Karen and I celebrated 200 years of enormous American cars, if my father’s photo framing is anything to go by.

We’ll likely be seen by whatever civilization succeeds us as industrious people who liked building roads, landing on the Moon, burning witches of various figurative kinds, and following theory and moralism off a cliff. Most of our disagreements involve the higher tiers on Maslow’s Hierarchy, though we fight over those subtle niceties with the ferocity of badgers trapped in a sinking cage.

One of my favorite quotes about the United States (attributed without much evidence to Churchill) is:

Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Most take that as a backhanded compliment, but if it were up to me, I’d have it stamped on our coins. That sentence captures an endearing quirk of our culture, a tendency to stay in the game long enough to fix our initial mistakes. That span of time can be very long, but our failings nag at (some of) us until we come up with other ill-considered ideas that slowly approximate the right choice.

We’re certainly not afraid of being wrong, and we’re more persistent than smart. Perhaps in the long term that amounts to the same thing.

Our system of government was designed for what we could call “agile development,” the idea of fucking up fast and fixing it before someone important notices. In that fashion, we operate on a clumsy simulacrum of the scientific method: “Oh, shit, that didn’t work. Let’s try something else or at least the same stupid thing in a slightly different way.”

The men who codified that system (assuming we care what they think) would be puzzled at how frequently we cling to the specifics of their beliefs while ignoring the spirit of them. They never expected to become the holy ancestors we worship with a blind reverence that they fought against their entire lives.

Jefferson wrote that:

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

…and our coat is pretty frayed with sleeves that only reach halfway down our arms like we’re the Incredible Hulk. As much as I’m a “measure twice, cut once” kind of guy, there comes a time when you have to actually do the cutting, take the risk and the action to respond to a changing world with faith that you can fix it.

Once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Our great American flaw is acting on the world as we want it to be instead of as it is, and our great American strength is our curious tendency to make that work anyway. We could probably shorten that cycle and make it less painful with a clearer perception of reality, but that’s a level of effort we’d rather spread over decades.

In the middle of that slow evolution, we witness all the weird doomed orange-skinned creatures afoot with eyes on the ends of their tusks and fins growing from their necks. They’re shocking and awful and they feel like they’ll be around forever.

They won’t, and neither will we.

None of this is to say that we should patiently wait for justice to arrive. We are all part of the evolution, each of us nudging the good a little further at least to the length of our reach. We’re not a country that’s meant to be satisfied, but it’s easy to confuse dissatisfaction with disaster in the moment.

Sometimes it’s exhausting to exhaust all the alternatives.

© 2026 Will Ludwigsen

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