Big Daddy Paul

His name was Djibouti and he was, as cats go, pretty cool. He has not been doing well for a while, and the floors of our house received the business end of his unhealthiness.  The vet said that he had probably gone senile, and that we were lucky he wasn’t running around in a muumuu singing Ethel Merman songs.  I’m gonna miss that cat.

On the way home from the vet’s office, I was pretty sad.  He was 15 years old, and I thought about how much of my life that cat had witnessed. I thought about the times in college we would party at our apartment and have the cat dance to rap songs (Cypress Hill was his favorite.)  I reminisced about the time in law school when he walked over a scented holiday candle and burned off the left half of his fur.  I remembered when he first met Malcolm and realized that how sad that day must have been for the cat.

I explained what was wrong with the cat to Malcolm and he went with me to the vet’s office.  He understands death pretty well after the loss of (now) both our cats and two dear friends of the family. I am a little worried that he wasn’t more upset about the whole thing, considering how much of a stink he makes if I ever take away his legos or stuffed animals.  I kinda teared up on the way home, and I think Malcolm could sense my grief.  To his credit, he offered me some words of encouragement.  “Daddy,” he said.  “I think I like hot dogs.”  Truer words have never been spoken.

I am constantly looking for photos to include in my blog, so I do a lot of searches for images on Google. I have noticed that, despite whatever search terms I use, pictures of cats invariably come up. We have a cat, so it’s not like I am a dog loving, anti-catter. I just wonder why is it that so much of the internet is dedicated to the enjoyment of silly cat pictures.

Don’t think it’s a problem? While looking for pictures of “funny roast chicken”, I got this.

My search for “Jazz Hands” came up with a ton of cats, most of which looked like this:

Sadly, even my search for “absolutely nothing” returned this pearl:

I am not sure if Google is a dumb, cat obsessed computer, or if it is rather savvy and knows that people will click on cat pictures no matter what else they are doing. I do know that we are obsessed with the kitty pics, as there are even support groups on the internet for people who really enjoy looking at pictures of cats. Things have gotten so bad that a counter movement has started and 9/9/09 was designated as “Day Without Cats” day. And these are just the pictures. If you enjoy watching videos of cats, you can spend the next three years of your life watching the 965,000 cat videos on you tube. Luckily, I don’t have to deal with that, as my blog is not multi-media, yet.

Well, its happened again. Previously, I told you about the cats and other animals breaking into our house to use it as their own personal boudoir.  The good news is that the cats aren’t breaking into our house anymore.  So why does our house still smell like shit?

It’s wafting in from outside.  We keep our windows open, and there are a lot of them.  We do this to circulate Malcolm and I’s various odors.  Thank god Amy smells like a Cinnabon, or our house would be condemned.  However, the very thing that we rely on to give our house the level of freshness that it so richly deserves is now its biggest stumbling block.  With the neighbor cats seemingly relegated to peeing and crapping outside our house, they are getting us back by blanketing our immediate surroundings with evidence of their unhappiness.  They go underneath the windows behind our family room.  They go everywhere they can in our back yard (which allows the odor to find its way to our bedroom which overlooks the yard.)  I tried to outsmart the dirty little rascals by putting two large garbage cans/recycling bins underneath our kitchen window, but somehow every neighborhood cat has found a way to take a dump in the 6 inch gap between the two. Now, when I cook, I either have keep reminding myself that dinner won’t smell like turds, or close the windows and sweat up a storm. They even somehow go in the 2 inch strip of dirt next to the driveway fence, which gives a pleasant reminder of who’s in charge every time we get in and out of the car.

Walking anywhere near our house now is reminiscent of touring a waste treatment plant.  Of course, I shoo the little scoundrels away from our house every chance I get, but shooing a cat has all the long term effectiveness of warding off syphilis with a jelly donut. Like the syphilis, the cats will be back .  I really want to buy a BB gun.  I won’t, but I want to.  In the end, I am going to have to go out and clean up after them.  I can’t help but think that there is nothing else in the world that is as unfulfilling as cleaning up after someone else’s cat, even if it is done outside and with a rake.  Our previous idea was to build a giant cat box in a side yard that has no windows near it, but the cats seem to think it too easy, like it’s a trap.  Plus, I think they like to make things hard on us.  Little assholes.      

P.S. I like everything about that cartoon except for the expression on the guys face.  Or maybe his arms.  There’s definitely something weird going on with him though.

When we remodeled our house several years ago, one of the things that excited us most was the addition of a cat door. This two foot by one foot slice of heaven allowed the cats to go outside without us opening the door for them, and as a result, eliminated the need for the indoor cat box. Some might question whether it is wise to spend several hundred thousand dollars so that you don’t have to open the door when your cat wants to go outside, but anyone who has scooped cat diarrhea out of a box knows, this was pure bliss.

Actually, we had stopped shoveling anything and everything out of the cat box prior to the remodel, only because we found the job so revolting and frankly, beneath us. After a little research (google search: automatic kitty litter box), we purchased an automated kitty litter box. That thing was awesome, it looked like Darth Vader and used some combination of technology and magic to somehow scoop the poop, but not the litter, into a tray below. Cleaning this futuristic cat box required only that you clean out the tray every few days. Alas, this was too much for us to handle, and we took so much joy from the Darth Cat Pooper that we never remembered to clean the tray. This was unfortunate, because when the tray backed up, cat poop stuck to the outside of the giant globe, causing everything to stink and making Darth look quite unsightly. Things got so out of control that we eventually turned over the entire upstairs master bedroom, orange shag carpeting and all, to the cats’ boudoir. Enter an architect, constructions crews, a boatload of money, and voila, cats go out the cat door and start using the neighbors yard to relieve themselves.

This worked out well until I started noticing that on some mornings, the cat’s food bowl would be empty and that the water bowl was filthy. After a few weeks of this, I discovered what was happening. One night, as I was watching TV with my cat on my lap, I heard the cat door open and something enter the house. I got up to investigate, and lo and behold there was a mid-sized raccoon going to town on the cat’s food. The little critter turned, looked at me, turned back for a few last gulps of food and then retreated back through the cat door. I was shocked and outraged! I called animal control who’s advice was this: “Oh, you don’t want the raccoon coming through your cat door? Close up the cat door.” Obviously, this was not going to be the solution, as we had just remodeled the house with this important feature in mind, and we surely not going to going through another remodel just to come up with plan B. We tried to close the cat door only at night, and this worked well for keeping out the masked intruders, but also had the predictable consequence of making the cat’s shit inside the house. Poop covered Vader was no longer an option, so we decided to grin and bear a little raccoon presence every now and again, hoping that our cat was not being subjected to this.

Having resigned ourselves to the reality that semi-wild animals were welcome to enter our house and possibly chew off Malcolm’s face, I recently noticed that other cats have now started coming into our house. The other day, while we were sitting on the couch reading books to Malcolm, a nice, fluffy white cat jumped in the cat door and started goofing off with our cat. Our kitty seemed inclined to show the newbie around, so he did. He lead a little tour which went something like this: “Over here is the food and water. The bowls are usually full, but you probably shouldn’t eat late at night, or you run the risk of a raccoon coming in and chewing off your face. Here are the people sitting on the couch. The little one is dangerous, likes to pull tails and sit on top of you when you he gets the chance. The big one is nice enough, although he smells a little funny. This is my favorite blanket to sleep on, and I’m sure you’ll find it quite comfortable.” The tour continued for a few minutes, and then the white cat lied on the floor for the rest of the night.

A week or so later I went upstairs to get dressed and when I got up there, a different cat came bounding out from underneath our bed and ran down the stairs and out the cat door. I have seen this cat a few other times, and I have definitely noticed the smell of cat urine in our bathroom on a number of occasions. So, if you’re keeping score at home here’s the play-by-play, in order to eliminate the need for us to have a cat box, we have invited the neighborhood cats over and pee all over our floors. Why can’t all cats be potty trained? There is no justice in this world. Every time I see any of these other cats frolicking about the house I make a run at them to scare them into thinking I am about the place kick them through the cat door, but I don’t think they are scared of me. I think they enjoy pissing on my floors and then scurrying out of the house, knowing that I know what they have just done.

Things got worsened the other night, when Amy went upstairs to find a huge pile of hair in our bedroom. She originally thought that I had done some manscaping in anticipation of our trip to Florida, but the straight, oily hair could only have one origin. Fucking cats! Actually, to be more precise, these were shitting cats, because accompanying the large pile of hair was a large turd right in the middle of it all. I am not 100% sure what happened, I judging from the physical evidence I can reconstruct what occurred: Neighborhood cat comes into the house, to piss on the floors and then relax on our bed. Our cat comes home and catches him lazing the day away in our room with an empty bladder.
A fight ensues, with much pawing and kicking, and hair pulling. A brief time out is called so that one of the participants can squeeze a loaf off, then the festivities are resumed. Eventually, the neighborhood cat gets tired of pulling out all the hair on our (relative wimpy) cat and leaves to go have sex with the slutty short haired vixen across the street. Now I know what you are thinking, because I have already thought about it. I will not take this to CSI for an episode on cat mischief, as I do not want our cat to have to live a life under the microscope that fame brings.

I guess there is only one real solution. We have to kill out cat and cover up the cat door with cement. Actually, that will probably not work (I have stuck the cat in a burlap sack twice but have been unable to pull the trigger and whack the bag against the side of the house.) People get attached to their pets and I want our kitty to live a long and fun filled life getting its ass kicked and living in perpetual fear of the masked bandit breaking in at night. I guess we’ll just live with this too, so if you visit our house and use the bathroom and it smells like pee. Be mindful of the fact that it is totally the neighborhood cats and not just poor aim on my part.

As I write this, I am sitting in our kitchen which smells strongly of fish. Amy cooked fish last night, and the house still reeks of it. Why not just open a window you ask? Well, the reason why is that when the cats are not pissing and shitting in our house, they are doing it right beneath our kitchen window. When you open said window, instead of lovely fresh air, you get cat box aroma. Sometimes, I hate my life.