Cats on Fire in the Cosmos

Life is mostly gray, let’s not pretend otherwise. Not every day, not in a clinical sense, just as a baseline condition—the commute, the inbox, the sense that time is passing faster than anything interesting is happening in it. You reach for something to break the texture and more often than not you end up refreshing the same four websites in a loop, finding nothing.

Then someone sends you a link and there are cats. On pizza. In outer space. Riding burning unicorns that are somehow also producing rainbows while they combust. I found these through Kai-You, a Japanese pop culture site that traffics in exactly this kind of necessary absurdity, and I stared at them for longer than I’d like to admit.

There’s something about Japanese internet culture’s relationship to cats that produces this kind of maximalist, slightly unhinged output that Western meme culture never quite manages. Western cat content is ironic or cute. Japanese cat content is cats ascending into the cosmos on flaming mythological creatures. The register is completely different. One is detachment, the other is total commitment to the bit.

You can order these on Amazon Japan. Cats on burning unicorns, shipping to your door in seven to ten business days. I don’t know what to tell you. Sometimes that’s the only thing that makes sense.