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12.07.2004 - 12:45 p.m.

Tuesday

Cat came into my life about 7 years ago. I was living in Corvallis at the time, by myself in a little house near the university, and I remember feeling sort of down and lonely and deciding that what I needed was some companionship. I missed my old cat, a childhood pet named Smokey who was a sweet-natured Burmese - the sort of cat that would sleep next to you at night, paw slung over your shoulder.

So I went to the local humane society, where I found a feisty black kitten who immediately sunk her teeth into my finger when I tried to pet her. "Aw," I said, and brought her home.

Cat was an evil, evil kitten. She raced around the house constantly, as though something were clamped to her tiny tail. She chewed everything in sight for months. Once, I came home from work to find that she had clawed a poster off the wall (how she levitated to the height of the print long enough to rip the entire thing down, I'll never know), shredded it into tiny pieces, and scattered them far and wide. She could turn her head, Exorcist-style.

I tried to keep her indoors, but it was impossible. The yowling, dear god, the yowling. When she finally got her way and started spending time outside, she developed her own method of asking to come back in: she'd claw her way up the front screen door and dangle there at eye level, bleating, until I'd go open the door, which would shake her free and drop her, plonk, to the ground, which would startle her, because her brain is the size of Bertie Bott's jellybean, and so she'd race off under a bush somewhere, only to repeat the entire process ten minutes later.

When I moved to my apartment in Portland, she was forced to stay inside, being as how we were 11 floors up and a ridiculously slow elevator ride away from the great outdoors. This made her even more evil. During the time I lived there, she:

- Tore open the top of a punching bag and devoured the foam padding, with apparently no ill effects

- Fished a massive sopping wad of kleenex out of the toilet and left it on the bathroom floor for JB to see on one of our first dates

- Batted a half-empty can of Diet Coke around the living room one afternoon while I was out, leaving the world's most annoying cleanup job

- Consistently missed the litter box when she took a crap, every. single. goddamn. time.

Then JB and I moved to Las Vegas together. Our plan was to each drive our own cars down, while the moving van tooled around the country with our furniture. For some reason that completely eludes me now, I thought Cat could just sort of ride in the car, sans cat carrier. The morning we started out, I put her in the backseat, started driving, and got exactly one quarter of a mile down the road before she shot under the brake pedal. Later, JB told me he could look in his rearview mirror and see a vaguely cat-shaped blur careening around and around the inside of my car. Once she was wedged firmly in a brand new cat carrier, she howled furiously for two days straight, hour after hour, while I drove through desert scrubland and hurled epithets in her direction.

These days Cat spends her daylight hours curled next to the space heater in the living room, waiting for JB and I to return home and feed her. At night she prowls around, killing mice, rats, birds, and once even a small rabbit (I know). She rips up the bedroom screen door at 5 in the morning, every day. She likes to sit in your lap and purr, then unexpectedly bite you. She gets on the kitchen counter and licks the dishes in the sink. She chews my knitting needles. She once barfed on the top of my PC monitor, right on the vent.

Cat! So evil.




Go ahead, laugh. Tonight, while you're watching The Amazing Race? I'm going to shit on your pillow.

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54 comments so far.

I have moved. - 1.03.2005
Obviously, a work in progress. - 12.27.2004
Happy holidays! - 12.24.2004
Listen, I am not a complete dick, it's not like I want Joe to die alone surrounded by cats or something. - 12.23.2004
Plus I am convinced my butt is extra big when it's upside down. - 12.22.2004

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