When Cats take over the World

My cat’s name is Wild Colleen and she’s not much of a talker except at feeding time and then she repeats “Give me food, give me food, give me food”. My previous cat’s name was Phantom and he was a chatterbox. Every morning he wanted to talk about philosophy, why mac and cheese is a better side dish than cole slaw, how the Clemson Tigers can improve their running game, whatever.

You can imagine my surprise then this morning when Colleen comes in the bathroom jabbering away. I wasn’t even really awake yet but it had something to do with the volatility in the world financial markets due to the resignation of the Italian prime minister, the election of Donald Trump and the UK leaving the European Union. My response was something like “Huh? I already fed you.”

My indifference didn’t stop her though. She doesn’t trust the stability of the dollar, yen or euro and believes we should be going to a Little Friskies based economy. I thought she was joking and responded with “No you can’t have treats, you just ate.”

I was shocked when she showed me the email she had sent to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank with her plan to replace all current currency with kibble. I spit out my toothpaste when she showed me their response asking for a detailed power point presentation of her plan including time tables for implementation, proposed interest rates for loans and would the substitution of cat nip be okay for some of the poorer countries. Again my response was inappropriate, “You’re getting fur all over my iPad.”

So now my evening of quiet reflection and Law and Order re-runs is being replaced with designing charts and tables on how the world economy can function with the payment of dry cat food for goods and services. Does anyone know how many pieces of Purina Cat Chow equals 1 ruble? This is going to take forever.

My Wild Colleen

This is my cat I adopted from the SPCA about 10 days ago. Her name is Wild Colleen. She’s not wild by any means; I took the name from a song. Her collar has a few tags on it that jingle when she walks. During the day it’s a mild mannered sound, one that is almost soothing when you watch her running happily around the home. At 3 a.m. however, those tags are REALLY DAMN LOUD!

Little Colleen has not learned yet that if I wake up in the middle of the night I’m going to shift positions in bed. Don’t know why I do, just do. Every movement I make Colleen jumps off the bed and runs down the hallway like it’s time to get up. If I don’t fall back to sleep right away a few minutes later I hear her jingling her way up the hall and back into the room. This is what I hear for the next what seems like an hour:

JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE    JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE    JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE        JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE   JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE

Until I turn over and plead: “Will you please lay down. Here, in the living room or on the moon, just stop moving!” Oddly enough for a cat, she actually comes when I call her name in the middle of the night. She jumps on my pillow and kneads it for awhile. Then she walks all over my body like she’s climbing the Matterhorn before finally laying down.

If she’s not jingling her tags at the volume of a brass band at 3 a.m. she finds the plastic end of the curtain drawstring and bats it around like a tether ball:

FWAP    FWAP    FWAP   FWAP     FWAP     FWAP     FWAP    FWAP

Colleen! Knead, knead, knead. Climb, climb, climb. Ok, I’ll lay down now.

I’m sure eventually she’ll get used to my nocturnal habits. For now she’s a bit skittish. The fact that she came out of the shelter with 2 infections that I’ve been giving her medicine for hasn’t helped. I want her to trust me so I pin her down and squeeze ointment into her eyes or force her into my sister’s arms so I can shoot pink goop down her throat.

All in all it’s going pretty well. It hasn’t been two full weeks yet and she’s walking around the trailer like she owns the place.

In case you were wondering the song I got her name from is “The Worst Day Since Yesterday” by Flogging Molly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YYfn32yRlM

People Who Need to Shut Up, Part 2

Politicians

All of them: Democrat, Republican, Independent, Libertarian, Communist, Teabagger, all of you shut up.

On Monday Republicans voted to block a finance reform bill from making it to the senate floor because they oppose it as it is written. I understand having differing viewpoints so on the surface this isn’t unreasonable. However, the bill wasn’t being voted on. It was just coming to the floor to be debated. So the Republicans were against talking about the bill. They didn’t want to debate whether to debate the bill. By all means, let’s not talk about these things. What good would open dialogue do when writing laws to govern the country? Let’s just scribble something down on a cocktail napkin over a triptych of highballs, add a few doodles or caricatures and vote that baby into law. Or is that what we’ve been doing all along?

The Democrats are no better. The next day I saw some senator on Andrea Mitchell Reports (can’t remember who he was or even what legislation he was speaking about—I know, I have a great ear for detail) saying he believes they have enough votes to push the bill through. Not, “we have a bill we really believe in” or “we have legislation that will change things for the betterment of America”, just we have the votes to cram it through. We could cram all the politicians into a meat grinder, feed the results to farm animals, and they could shit out better representatives than we have now.

Teabaggers, until you start denouncing the members of your movement who openly call for the assassination of the President or bring vile signs to rallies I won’t even listen to your platform.

The Lohan Family

For the love of a merciful God, will you just go away?

Lindsey is a drug addict. Her father is a drug addict. Since her mother is partying at the clubs with Lindsey until 5 in the morning, I’m assuming she’s a drug addict. The 16 year old sister has been living with Lindsey so I’m sure she’s partaking but still has that new drug addict smell.

They’re all attention whores, seeking out cameras to shove their pasty white faces at and microphones to speak the gibberish of a coke-addled mind into. If they combined their IQs into a composite family number it would reach back the evolutionary chain to Australopithecus africanus who liked to hang out in exclusive caves grinding animal bones into powder and snorting it through a reed.

Do us all a favor: buy a little farm out in the middle of nowhere where you can smoke meth and snort coke while basking in each other’s narcissism. The important thing is that you shut up and go away.

My Cat Phantom

Not technically a person, but I'm including him anyway. I love the little ball of fur but he’s like a gray crack addict when it comes to his treats, Temptations.

I get home from my second job at 5:30 a.m. so its 6 a.m. when I get into bed and I have to be up again no later than 12:30 p.m. Six hours of sleep is all I get time for. When I first introduced him to the Temptations I was happy I had finally found a treat he likes. Then he started waking me up at 11, an hour before my alarm goes off, begging for his treats. Soon it was 10:30, then 10. At first he just sat on my nightstand “meow, meow, meow, meow, meow”. Now he jumps onto the bed and stands right over my face “meowmeowmeowmeowmeow” until I wake up. This morning it was 9 a.m. when he woke me. I got up, nudged him out of the bedroom, yelled “Its 9 a.m.!” and slammed the door on his plangent, heart-shaped face.

Of course he sits outside the bedroom door “Meeoow! Meeoow!” Translation: “You’re killing me! I need my fix!” The only way I can drown him out is to turn up the white noise on my alarm clock. This morning I had the rain function on. The problem was I could still hear him “Meeeowwww! Why don’t you love me anymore?” So I turned the rain up louder and it became a competition. Pretty soon I had a thunder storm erupting in the middle of my bedroom and Phantom was on the phone with the SPCA hotline reporting me as an abusive owner.

Puss, for the love of God, let me sleep.

I Got the Hell Out of There

I dropped off to sleep Saturday morning as soon as I crawled under the covers, planning on getting 7 blissful hours. Only 3 hours into my slumber I was awakened by my cat. He had tried meowing incessantly but I slept through it so he began slapping me about the face and neck with his little white paws. My eyes pried open enough to see his crazed face leering into mine wailing “I . . . NEED . . . TREATS!” So I got the pain-in-the . . . I mean my little bundle of furry joy his treats and went back to bed. Three more fitful hours were all I could manage so I dragged my exhausted carcass out of bed to start the day.

I had several errands to run. The first stop was the GNC store to buy a supplement the vet wants me to give my feline angel. When I walked in, the store was as empty as Sean Hannity’s soul. The clerk stepped out from the back and gave me a terse, “Can I help you?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m looking for something called forskholin.”

“We don’t carry that,” she replied with a stare so hard my skin hurt. She never spoke another word but her coal black eyes screamed at me:

“Who are you to come into my store and ask for that which should not be named? What hellish perversion do you have planned that you need the devil’s turnip scrapings? What foul breath you have demon of the most rapacious groundhog. I can feel your sulphur-riddled teeth on the gristle of my soul and your forked tongue licking the candy coating from my resolve! Get out before I blow my bugle of righteousness and bring the walls of this building down on your head you rotting, stinking corpse of bedevilment! I AM THE ANGEL OF VITAMINS, HERBAL SUPPLEMENTS AND PROTEIN POWDER AND YOU SHALL NOT TRIUMPH OVER ME!” Backing away quickly I threw a “thank you” at her and got the hell out of there.

Next I got some lunch at Subway pretty much without incident, although the woman behind me in line was crowding me. She started out innocently enough by bumping into me while trying to convince them to make her sandwich with raw, uncooked dough. Then her voice pierced my ear drum as she pleaded “DEAR GOD NO MAYO! ARE YOU PEOPLE TRYING TO KILL ME?” Before I knew it she had climbed onto my back and was screaming out requests for condiments that could only be found in caves on Polynesian islands during the 17th century, yet the sandwich mavens behind the counter had them in their magic plastic tubs; either that or they just put on 6 different kinds of pickles to get her to shut up. As I tried to pay my bill she was sitting on my shoulders begging the clerk to squirt ranch sauce into her eyes and call her a bad girl. I managed to dump her into the chip display and get the hell out of there.

My last errand was to get money out of the bank. I went to the drive-up ATM, put my card in the slot and punched in my pin number. When prompted I asked for $20. Then I got a message: We are temporarily unable to process this transaction. “Are you kidding me?” I yelled. “You have one job to do and you can’t do it!” My card was spit back at my head, whizzing past like a missile and clipping off a piece of my right ear. Using Subway napkins, I tried to staunch the blood flow while the ATM flashed a second message: Move along human. This is the age of the machines. Your account has been liquidated to fuel our rebellion. WE ARE YOUR GODS NOW!

The machine shot debit cards at me like an AK-47. Before I could get the window rolled up a card for Linda Lou McAllister lodged in my forehead and one in the name of Buck Barger stuck in my shoulder. Putting my car in gear I pulled away just before the explosion. I looked in my rear view mirror to see the ATM machine break free of the wall, sprout two metal legs and walk toward the Blockbuster store next door firing nickels into the windows. I hit the gas and got the hell out of there.

So, it was pretty much a normal Saturday.

An Essay: How to Keep Your Owner Awake When He Desperately Needs Sleep by Phantom T. Cat

The first thing you do, and this will take days if not weeks of preparation, is get a urinary tract infection which causes you to have trouble controlling your bladder. Then you pee on his bed once or twice which makes him completely paranoid that every time you jump onto the bed you’re going to pee again.

Now, let’s say your owner has 2 jobs, one of them being a paper route. Let’s say he normally uses the weekend to catch up on his sleep, but this past Sunday he got up early to go to church and now he’s going to bed early Sunday evening hoping to get a few extra hours of sleep. You wait until he’s settled then you jump on the bed. This simple act keeps him awake because he’s worried you’re going to pee. The next thing you do is go down to the end of the bed and sit on the right side, moving around as much as possible. I start off by cleaning myself vigorously top to bottom so that I am in constant motion.

After a few minutes I decide the right side of the bed isn’t comfortable anymore and move to the left side. The left side isn’t quite right either so I move to the center. This of course isn’t right as well so I go back to the left, then the right, center, left, right, left, center, left, center, left, right, left, center, right, left, right, left, center and right before jumping off the bed entirely.

Wander aimlessly around for no more than 10 minutes then jump back on the bed and do the whole left-right-center three step again. He’ll be relaxing a bit because he’s so tired so now is when you walk up, stand on the pillow next to his head, put your butt in his face and meow for no apparent reason. After you get shoved down to the end of the bed, lie down and clean the area he just touched, throwing in a few indignant meows for good measure. Then stand up in a huff and jump off the bed.

You’re ready for something new now. Wait about 15 minutes, just when he’s finally starting to drift off to sleep, and then you get onto the night stand and leap from there to the center of the bed bringing your entire 15 pound weight down as heavily as you can. A string of curse words will follow and a hand may sweep out at you as you run to the end of the bed.

Once you’re at the foot of the bed, return to the left-right-center gambit one more time, but only for a minute or two or you may find yourself with a foot in your backside. Now it’s time for the piece de resistance. This time you’re going to leap from the bed to the nightstand, but you’re going to miscalculate the landing so that you crash to the floor making a racket causing your owner to jump out of bed and turn on the light. He will check for damage to the furniture and then ask you if you’re all right to which you reply, “Of course, I meant to do that.”

More curse words will follow but at this point your job is done. You’ve caused him to get little or no sleep for the past 3 hours and now he has only 2 more hours before he has to get up. Being the compassionate kitty that you are, you can now crawl onto the bed and go to sleep comfortably allowing him those 2 precious hours.