Musings On Who's Really in Charge

I came with two, she came with one. The new house had one left over from the previous owner.

Cats.

Just went through the evening ritual of loading up four food bowls, setting two down inside, quieting one little beastie outside with a helping and walking around the house like a moronic waiter with a bowl of stinking goodness looking to see if Miss Fussy Britches feels like a little repast.

We walk, talk, conceive abstract thoughts and contemplate our own mortality while they fill up boxes with shit and sleep on the average of twenty three hours a day. Yet once every month I dutifully load a pickup with cans of dead, wet fish so that I can fill the front end only later to scoop up the back end's recycling efforts.

Not that I'm a cat person per se. I love dogs and one of these days hope to take long walks with a shepherd I'll name Hero out of pure irony because clearly with my track record, my eventual dog will no doubt moisten himself at the sight of any passing gerbil.

But I digress. In the here and now and with my travel schedule I'll resign myself to a house o' cats whom I return to only to read their saucy messages urine-projected on the basement door.

Her cat is let out in the wee hours of every morning to roam. The neighborhood is quiet and safe and frankly the alternative is a one-sided game of Patty Cake featuring her paw and my nose. My two are enclosed in the kitchen-den area with access to the basement if they feel like sorting laundry. They never do, but we live in hope. Mooch is the wild card. Mooch (nee Oreo) is a little black and white stray who showed up in the back yard shortly after we moved in. Our neighbor let us know that she was an indoor cat who was shown the door by the previous owner when intellectually she began to show up her fourteen year old son in basic games of Husker Du. Mooch was just this side of starving so to gain her affection and trust, we began to leave bowls of food out for her. When she began to associate us with affection and food, we let her in the house where she jumped on the couch while inadventently a Jerry Lewis telethon was left on. It took months to get her trust back.

Mooch won't leave the bedroom from October to May and requests her services en suite. In the summer months she returns to the wilds of the rhododendron forest and only shows up for a meal or to drop off something she's kneaded and pawed to death and has died of comfort since she possesses neither claws nor teeth. Amazing we don't call her "Lucky."

Her cat, the one we let out every morning shows up for breakfast and announces that she's not seen food since she left Casablanca two months ago and the camel died somewhere near the Kazarine pass. Oh and she's certain that we're oblivious so she begins a repeating howl that makes us the favorite of the sleep-in crowd of the neighborhood and we scramble to stuff some sort of sustenance under her gaze before she wakes up the proverbial dead for we haven't enough folding chairs to accomodate them all.

My cat just pisses on the couch.

I swear I'm going to fit him with a catheter that runs back to his mouth.

So there you have it. While we wake at un-natural hours and spend the better part of our day at places we'd rather not be because we can't figure a reasonable ROI on a martini bar, then collapse for an hour in front of American Pickers trying to knock five bucks off of anatomically correct Barbie dolls, they await our return to see their every need attended to in lavish fashion.

Who's running this show?

Bunny on.