David McElroy

The sheets of rain lash down, almost maniacal in their resolve to pound everything in the way.

The lightning flashes blindingly. For a split second, there is silence, followed by the booming thunder nearby.

The water pounds and pounds. The thunder rumbles. The lightning comes again.

The storm is hitting my windshield and the wipers struggle to move the water. Their back and forth motion is hypnotic — and I wonder whether the storm I feel and hear and fear is really outside — or if it’s inside my heart.

It’s dark and it’s loud and it’s gloomy. The storm outside the car threatens me physically, but the storm inside threatens something far deeper. Far more existential. It’s pounding on my very core again.

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Although I haven’t been publishing much recently, I haven’t shut the site down. After this website became unreachable early Wednesday morning, I started getting emails from readers asking whether I had deleted the site.

The short answer is that nothing has changed.

The longer answer is that a buggy update to a WordPress plugin took me offline after a routine update around midnight Tuesday night. I wasn’t aware that the update caused the problem until I got emails from readers asking what happened, so thank you to the dozen or so who were concerned enough to ask.

I haven’t felt much like writing lately — for various reasons — but I’m still here. I hope to eventually be back on a slightly more consistent basic. Thanks for the concerned inquiries.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been reading a web comic that captured cat personalities in a way that I’ve never seen in art — and it just started running in newspapers nationally today.

“Breaking Cat News” captured my imagination from the beginning. The concept was brilliant and the execution was even better. Artist Georgia Dunn watched her three cats — Elvis, Puck and Lupin — and then developed a continuing story around them. She imagined them as the operators of their own television news operation — and she imagined how they would view and report the events of her own household.

If you’ve lived with cats and have a love for them, her work just might melt your heart, because she imagines her cats in ways that many of us have done. (Although I never got around to making the website for him, my Merlin ran for president last year on a platform of every cat receiving his dinner on time.) I immediately identified with the work Dunn was doing based on her cats — and I suspect millions of others who live with cats might feel exactly the same.

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