Well, one of my best friends got engaged this past week, and I couldn’t be happier for him. Jerod and Liz are both the kind of people that are good to the core and, as a couple, just short of sickening to be around. They’re all cutesy and lovey in that ‘sex is still good and we don’t have kids’ kind of way. I wish them both the best and am looking forward to the wedding… but I’ve never been a marriage kind of guy. I like to keep my commitments more manageable, so instead of a fiancee, I got myself a cat…
I grew up owning dogs and never in my wildest dreams thought I would venture over to the dark side, but I’ve learned that cats are actually easier to deal with. For one, they shit in a box without really needing a lot of instruction. That’s a plus… and since my house has a screened in patio and pet doors, it’s pretty simple for me to keep the stinking cat box the hell out of my house. Problem is, pet doors work both ways… they allow my cat out, and anything else that can squeeze it’s ass through them into my dining room. I found this out the hard way.
Apparently, a cat box is like a homing signal for wild animals. My back yard used to be a pretty tranquil spot, but lately, I hear a hell of a lot more rustling of the leaves than I used to. It’s not usually something that I pay much attention to, but a few nights ago, those noises got a lot more severe. I was sound asleep — it was about 2 AM — and I awoke, ever so slightly, to the sensation of my cat jumping into my bed. He was a little freaked out, and as I opened my eyes, his ears were clearly perked in a ‘holy shit, do you hear that?‘ kind of way. I thought he drug some wounded animal into my house, so I threw back the covers and walked half asleep into the living room. The sound wasn’t coming from there…
As I began to locate the source of the turmoil — and believe me, there was something struggling for its life nearby — I realized the sounds were coming from the screened in patio. I flipped on the light and saw a stray cat, absolutely shit-scared out of its wits, climbing up the screens like that baby climbing the walls in Trainspotting. HOLY FUCK, I thought… that stupid fucking animal is going to rip my screens down!! I immediately unlocked the door and proceeded to fly at the cat with an adrenaline-induced rage that insured that, regardless of how badly I got shredded, this animal was going to DIE. You see, the cat had found its way into the patio through the exterior pet door, but couldn’t find its way back out… and, in spite of my absolute determination to kill the damn thing, it immediately saw the opening door as an opportunity to get back to the wild. Problem was, that door wasn’t an exit…
Cats move pretty damn quick… and before I even fully comprehended what I had just done, it had rocketed past me and was in my living room. I have a lot of fairly expensive electronics that don’t mix well with cats, claws flying, losing their fucking minds… and this cat, in my bleary-eyed panic-stricken mind, was going to destroy ALL of it. I gave chase. Maybe that was a bad idea. I have a glass coffee table with V-shaped panes of glass holding it up. They’re about a half-inch thick and tempered to resist breaking. At 30 MPH, the cat had no chance of knowing it was even there… it smashed head first into one of the legs, collapsing the table, and spilling my laptop and other items onto the carpeted floor. Amazingly, the tabletop didn’t shatter… but if you think I was pissed before, I was now in a state of fury normally reserved for catching your wife in bed with another man. I wanted blood.
I opened the front door, offering an escape route in case my next plan backfired, and proceeded to gather random items from around the living room to hurl at the thing. Hopefully, I thought, I can corner it and then pull its head from its coffee-table-destroying body. It was now in my bedroom, and there was only one obvious place to hide — under my bed. Armed with an arsenal of, ironically, mainly cat toys, I proceeded to stalk my prey. There he was, the worthless goddamn thing — right where I expected him. The game’s up, shithead. I began hurling objects, laying on my side, underneath the bed with the velocity of a major league pitcher… but, as you may have guessed, cats can move pretty quickly even with a concussion and all I managed to do was drive it out of my bedroom — past the obviously open front door — back onto my patio where it began to, once again, claw the shit out of my screens. Back to square one.
At this point, I just wanted the drama to end. I was down one coffee table, but my electronics were still in one piece and I figured that this was a reasonable compromise. I squeezed through the patio door, not offering an escape route this time around, and proceeded to kick the worthless creature out while stringing together a chain of expletives that, if the neighbors were listening, will forever haunt their dreams. The exterior pet door was barred… the cat scurried over the fence in a labored, ‘holy shit my head hurts‘ kind of way, and I proceeded to pick up the pieces of my previously well organized living room.
Now, an adrenaline rush like this doesn’t just evaporate… it keeps a hold of you for a good hour, so I ended up washing the dishes, vacuuming the house, and cleaning the bathroom to put all that energy to good use. Once that was done, I figured I was clear to enjoy the last few hours of sleep there were before I had to go to work… but no. No sleep for me. The adrenaline was gone, but in its place were two mental images: one of my cat watching the whole thing unfurl with an unmistakable look of ‘dude, what the FUCK is going on?‘ on his face, and the second composed of an explosion of fur caused by a cat impacting a pane of glass at full afterburner. That, my friends, is straight out of ‘Tom and Jerry‘ and is easily one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. I kept laughing myself awake. Fuck the damage to the table, I thought — that was well worth it…
Needless to say, I keep the exterior pet door closed after dark now. You might say, hey, couldn’t a cat come through the doors during the day? Why sure it could… so could a possum or a skunk or any other creature, but during daylight hours, I have the upper hand. It’s called a Colt Model 66, and it fires .357 hollow-point rounds. I might not have much of a throwing arm, but with sunlight illuminating the target, I’m pretty sure I can score a direct hit…
More to come…
— Bingo