cat scratch fever
The cat and I have a ritual. Each night as I do a final walk through the house turning off lamps, locking doors, straightening the portrait of Charles Nelson Reilly and executing all the other activities associated with securing the perimeter of Casa Camino, the cat follows closely behind. He stealthily darts from chair to couch waiting for his perfect opportunity to strike. I like to think that he's playing, but he isn't. He is simply toying with me. He is patient. He knows full well that the day he finds me incapacitated on the floor with eventually come, and sweet victory will then be his.
Bear in mind that I feed and water the little bastard. I've even cleaned out the litter box a couple of times, and the task of stuffing his long fifteen pound frame into the crate and taking him to the vet for his yearly check up generally falls to me. Countless generations before me have spent millennia domesticating and caring for the beasts, and still they cannot pass up an opportunity to stalk and then jump us as if we were all slow-witted wildebeests.
Perhaps we are.
Anyway, I usually win these battles because I am larger and because I have thumbs. However, I don't have large thumbs...I just now noticed that...Huh...That's odd.
Well, what I mean to say is that the varmint got a good scratch on my forearm the other night. He had been waiting patiently under the coffee table for me to retrieve my shoes. I promptly cursed him and hosed him with a nearby water bottle, but any independent review of the fight would call him the winner.
Has the son surpassed the father? Am I getting slow, and has time dulled my quick reflexes?
Probably, but the bastard went right back to purring and demanding food the very next morning, and I couldn't help but detect a bit more confidence in his strut. However, I'm still the one with the thumbs.
By the way, one of them is actually larger than the other, and I never really noticed that before either.
posted by Rex L. Camino at 6:29 AM
4 Comments:
Heh! like boobs! One's generally bigger than the other. It just takes a bit of staring to notice.
Boobs.
If an epiphany can come during a drunken episode (and if they cannot, then my entire philosophical foundation is slightly less rock solid than I have come to believe--it is more like pudding), then I had one involving my cat.
I was snockered enough that the concept of the doorknob was troublesome, and I'd attempted to lie down on my bed, and missed.
I looked up, and saw my cat regarding me from the desk. The look on its face, made me smile. "Aw, it's disappointed in me," I thought.
As I clawed my way to a roughly upright position, I realized that the disappointment was not in me and my inebriation.
The bugger figured he'd just hit the Breakfast Bar of the Gods, and then I had the temerity to get up.
Our relationship has had a different feel since then. It'll look at me, like it's working things out. I've offered vague threats like "I'll eat you before you'll eat me..."
But the cat knows I'm full of it.
My only wish when I die is that I be cremated, and not be left to be eaten by cats.
If you've only emptied his litter box a couple of times and have a couple of years of this relationship, he could be trying to tell you something.
Post a Comment
<< Home