HEY, ALL YOU COOL CATS
Diane Redfern

Last night I dreamt of Carole Baskin again.

Except who says “dreamt?” Was it a mistake to watch Rebecca and Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre yesterday? Maxim and Heathcliff and Rochester and moors, moors, and more moors.

My mother called today. She wanted to know if I’d gotten any work done and I told her of course, being quarantined at home is the best thing that could have happened to me. I know she thinks I’m full of shit, but she feels guilty because I’m not allowed to come home since she has that “immune thing.”

She doesn’t have an immune thing, she’s the one who’s totally full of shit. She probably has a new boyfriend and she’s told him she’s forty instead of sixty so when her thirty-two year old daughter shows up, how’s she going to explain that?

I told my boss I have a bad cough and I might have a fever and he told me to take it easy. Do you think I’ve fucked myself over karma-wise? You shouldn’t pretend to have COVID-19 because of course that means you’re going to get it, the worst possible version of it, and you’ll be dead in a week.

I promised my boss the journal entries by the end of the day.

It’s hard working from home. Too many distractions. Like looking outside and admiring the deep blue, un-smoggy Los Angeles sky. Like baking, lots of baking. Bread and scones and banana bread. The apartment has never smelled this good before.

Like Netflix. Ozark and Money Heist and Peaky Blinders and Babylon Berlin and all 7,000 seasons of The Great British Baking Show and Tiger King.

Joe Exotic seems like a douche. Everybody in Tiger King seems like a douche. Carole Baskin seemed normal. Well, for about ten minutes.

How did Carole Baskin kill her husband? Okay - spoiler alert. If you don’t know who Carole Baskin is and did she kill her husband or not, you haven’t been quarantined for six months.

It is six months, isn’t it? Or does it just seem like six months?

Did she shoot him with a tranquilizer gun and drag his body to a tiger cage? And let the tiger do the real dirty work? “Good boy, Simba,” Carole told him.

Maybe she had a good reason to kill her husband. She was in quarantine with him for six months and he drove her crazy. He didn’t like baking or looking up at the sky. He wouldn’t watch The Great British Baking Show. Halfway through season six he googled the results online and told Carole who won (Nadiya Hussain, I love her). He ruined TGBBS, he ruins everything! Carole would sit by Simba’s cage, feeding him cow femurs and complaining about her husband. “I don’t know what to do,” she said to Simba, watching his giant jaws crush the cow femur to dust.

I guess the point is, sometimes there are legitimate reasons to kill somebody. I’m not a big Joe Exotic fan, but Carole did go out of her way to destroy him. People debate her sincerity about her Big Cat Rescue and she does seem as bad as the rest of them, exploiting exotic cats for fame and fortune. Yes, it was not the greatest idea in the world for Joe Exotic to hire a hit man to take out Carole, but he should’ve known better than to mess with a lady who fed her second husband to a tiger.

Meow.

Almost five o’clock. Got to get those journal entries going. There’s my computer. Right there on the table. Next to the remote. Investigation Discovery is going to do a documentary on Carole Baskin. I wish it was on right now. Thank goodness for Netflix, it’s like having a quarantine boyfriend.


I’ll work tomorrow. Time for Narcos, The Death of Stalin, and The Great British Baking Show Master Class.


Diane Redfern is a writer and model living in New York.