I would like to offer the gentle suggestion that 2002 was the year when the bottom fell out of the cosmos, and the free-fall began. Maybe it was just me, of course, but it seems to me that the ticking of the doomsday clock got a little louder, if not in a geopolitical sense, then surely in a metaphysical and moral sense.

The abandonment of all standards opens certain possibilities. For much of 2002, I adopted an agnosticism that was radically liberating and paralyzing: I had to assume that anything and everyone I encounter could be the supreme ruler of the universe. How I treat this Taco Bell napkin or that person who just got on the elevator or some pine cone I find tomorrow could determine whether I spend eternity getting stung by flaming hornets or serviced by Victoria's Secret models.

After a year such as this, what hope is there for hope? What still stands? Consider the following.

Tootie the cat has spent the last few years wreaking terrible damage on our carpet. It is not strictly a failure to grasp right and wrong—she never, ever clawed the carpet in our presence, but dutifully waited until we were either asleep or gone to do so, on the correct (if misapplied) understanding that her carpet-clawing made us angry. New carpet shreds and ever-burgeoning wounds in the carpet greeted almost every morning, and almost every return from work. Around the middle of 2002, it became clear that the carpet had to be replaced, and part of the moral clarity came from how this plan focused our energies and resources, mental and financial and emotional, on a grand and totalizing new subject. It gave us room to distract ourselves from how intractable the rest of life had become of late—surely a positive mindset to open any home repair project. But we insisted the project was undertaken for the best of reasons, and who knows, maybe we believed it a little.

What to do about the cat? Wouldn't she destroy the new carpet? Hasn't she used those terrible claws against our carpet in the past? There are three broad schools of thought.

One, that we have no right to interfere with the natural behaviors or endowments of a cat. We have always been anti-declawing people on these grounds. Surgically altering another living being, for our convenience but not for hers, is wrong.

Two, that we bear responsibility for the situation in its totality—what we have is not simply a natural cat, but a cat we have presumed to integrate into human society. We didn't make the cat and her instincts, but we certainly did create the environment in which the cat and her instincts would find themselves flung together, with predictable consequences. On this view, non-intervention is a past and foreclosed option; we are responsible for bending the cat to fit the environment and vice-versa, in the most humane way possible. Declawing is a defensible act.

Three, the damn cat lives only at our pleasure, and its happiness and predilictions don't matter enough to override a few thousand dollars in carpet. We are in power here; any cat must accept the compromises that come with the comfort and plenty of the human world.

We entertained thoughts that the new carpet could be made to defend itself—that we could spray something on it, or somehow shield it. We considered dabbing oft-clawed spots with vinegar or some other cat repellant, thought about the most attractive location for the designated scratching post. But as the new carpet began to be laid down, and as the cat eyed it ever more greedily, we realized it was only a matter of time before a wound appeared in the new carpet.

Sorry to disappoint anyone who was awaiting a conclusion. 2002 was not a year to settle things, but to marvel at the damage to come. As 2002 closed, we found ourselves trapped ever-so-absurdly between carpet and a cat's claws. It was that kind of fucking year.