Cats

It's not that I don't like cats, it's just that we don't get along.

The thing is, cats are very independent animals. So am I. So when cats and I try to hang out, we have this sort of battle of independence. But the thing is, they rely on me for food and water. I rely on them for waking me up at four in the morning and crapping on my bathroom rug.

I don't really see the trade off there.

But this is a good example of how it is that I can actually like cats, as a species, but never actually want to live with them again. (I say "again" because I recently cat sat my girlfriend's cats for over a week and wanted on numerous times to punt them through the ceiling fan. I don't own a ceiling fan so it would've given me a great reason to actually go buy one. But the thought of my girlfriend's reaction when I told her that her little shits hit the fan prevented me from taking this action. Which sort of pissed me off because I really kinda wanted a ceiling fan.)

But I think I'm too stubborn to give these self-righteous, over-confident, jumpy little balls of fur the affection they want. But that's only because they want it when they want it. If I came home and felt like petting the cat, they had other ideas. Which meant that I had to lock them in the bathroom while I pet the cat. Then when I was done, I'd hold them and pet them too.

Of course, when they want to lick themselves for three hours while sitting right in the middle of the coffee table while I'm trying to enjoy a sandwich, that's okay. Because nothing can quite stimulate a man's appetite like the sight of a fat, fuzz-ball propped upright with its tongue treating it's crotch like it was Linda Lovelace in a past life.

One of the other things that really make it difficult for me to respect cats is the fact that they're so clearly insane. One night I watched as Annabel, the younger of the two cats, sat in the window and pawed at the pane of glass like she was digging a hole out of Alcatraz or something. Okay, so cats are stupid and she probably saw a bird out the window and was just playfully pawing at it, that would almost be cute. I could even accept that if it lasted just a few minutes. I'd even accept it if it lasted a half hour. But this little freakshow of an animal did this for almost an hour. And even worse, there was nothing out the window.

Why did I let her keep doing it for that long? I think I hoped she'd tunnel her way through the glass and leave me alone for a little while.

And did you people know that cat shit can actually make people go crazy? It's got these little thingies that live in it and they can get into your brain and cause you to go nuts. I could share other, more scientific facts that go along with this but it sounds more creepy my way and that's the effect I'm looking for here. They say that this is an evolutionary phenomenon so that a cat's prey (rodents) might become affected in a manner consistent to the behavior one might experience upon the ingestion of LSD. Apparently a tripping mouse is easier to catch and eat than a sober one.

Can you imagine tripping balls at the beach or in the woods or someplace when all of a sudden a cat swoops down and starts chewing on you? Talk about a bad trip, man. And I thought that thinking my friend died at a Phish show freaked me out. Dude, that was nothing.

So I guess what I'm getting at here is that I just don't want to live with cats. Is this ironic in some way, since my girlfriend's name is Kat? Hard to say. (Don't worry, baby, this isn't a long metaphor about you. I don't think your poop makes me go crazy.) But I do think that I can't make it clear enough how much I detest the smell of kitty litter.

To me, kitty litter infers that someone is taking a shit in my house and they're not doing it in the toilet. That happens to be something with which I have a fundamental problem. If you could train a cat to crap in the crapper, then maybe I'd be alright with it. Maybe. It's not a given. I mean after all, that's why they call the crapper the crapper. Because you crap in there. I don't take a crap in a big box full of sand and gravel and then let it sit there. Or maybe I'll slap a little sand over the top of it to sort of hide it. Even when people didn't have electricity or the ability to recognize that they shouldn't sleep with their relatives, they had the common sense to move the crapper out AWAY from the house. It is called an OUThouse, right? Not a lets all crap in a box and let it sit in the kitchen house?

On top of that, I don't seem to notice these litter boxes coming with little rolls of kitty toilet paper. I've seen some of the craps these cats drop in there. It's not like they come out hard and dry like cardboard. Some of these things are soft and steaming and have enough odor to knock my flatulent friend Derek for a loop. So I'm supposed to believe that this cat can just drop a meaty deuce in this little box of his and not leave some residue on my pillow when he makes a bee-line right for it from the litter box - or as I now like to call it, Mikey's facial cream factory.

Does no one else think this is a problem? Has anyone heard the term, dingleberry? It's actually in my Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Go look it up.

The dingleberry is not merely a human phenomenon. In fact, you find me a cat owner who hasn't witnessed a dingleberry on one of their little critters and I'll show you a person who's own ass is littered with debris.

I think I just made myself throw up in my mouth.