Now, don’t anybody get worried. I’m not going to try to emulate the brilliance of Sars or Pamie in talking about their cats. No. I know my own limits. It’s just that, well, I’m feeling a little sad right now, and there’s a lot going on in my heart and in my head, and the cats may be stupid, but I find it difficult to be sad around them. So here we are, talking about my cats.
“My” cats is probably even a misnomer…as they aren’t techically or legally mine. They belong to my friend, neighbor, and landlord, Deane. Okay, before I go further, I have to explain how our houses work. Imagine a street. Now, imagine another tiny, dead-end street connecting to that street. That tiny street is so tiny it might correctly be conceptualized as a very long drive way. On that driveway, imagine three houses, all on the left as you walk along. First house, with the nice garage and the big red door and the garden? That’s Deane’ s house. Hi Deane! My rent’s on the way! That’s also where Carl lives. Hi Carl! I left my bundt pan at your house, sweetie! Continuing on, we pass Wally’s house. Now that it’s light so late, Wally is probably out there picking pine needles off his front lawn with tweezers. No, really. Say hi. Wally’s very nice. Okay, now see the little blue house? At the end of the driveway, with the big lawn and the clothesline on the porch? At the dead end? Well, that’s me. Top unit. Downstairs are Chris and Jason. Hi Chris and Jason! No, your stereo isn’t too loud!
I give you and potential stalkers these details because this housing layout is integral to my relationship with the cats. When I moved in a year ago, they immediately learned that if they would brave the fifty or so feet from the red door to the white door of my place, there would be some milk for them in a custard cup on the floor, and that I would make them little catnip pillows out of polarfleece scraps from making my fuzzy. They also learned that in the summer when I had the front window open, they could jump out of it onto the hidden edge below the window, simultaneously giving me a heart attack while making themselves the envy of all the neighboring cats.
This is what allows me to call them my cats. Whenever I leave Carl’s to come back to my place (a distance of fifty feet, let me remind you), they get up from wherever they are in the house and come running over so that they can scratch up the carpet and hiss at each other. Sometimes they are waiting on the front step for me to get home. Sometimes, like last night, they will be waiting on the front step when I go down to see if they want to come in, and then they will scamper away into the night when they hear me coming. Having both these cats sleep on the bed, one on each side of my knees, is one of my life’s best and deepest pleasures. I come of simple folk, yes.
So, Ziggy is gray and white, with huge white feet and what we call his cravat. He’s rather a bulldog of a cat. He is clearly not the brains of the family, which is not saying much, as his sister, the aptly-named Spike (her middle name is Marie), is also a little dim.
time elapses. A day later
Okay, well, this is clearly the most boring and ridiculous thing I’ve ever written. Man! It’s not even funny in a crazy-cat-lady way. I’m sorry. I have stuff I want to write about here but can’t really, not right now at least. So I thought my cats would be a safe subject. And I wrote the stupidest entry ever seen.
But, um, just in case you’re wondering, my cats are very nice, and one of them is very stripey, and their names are Spike and Ziggy. In other news, I have no life. I was going to say here that starting next week, when I am unemployed and even more desperately looking for a job than I have been since, oh, I don’t know, June, I’ll be updating more frequently and I’m hoping to redesign the site. But now I don’t know if that’s such a good thing! Oh, yall…it’s bad enough that when I was having coffee yesterday with a social work mentor of mine, and told her I still didn’t have a job, she looked at me and said “But why?” And someone else with whom I was having lunch asked if I was dressing professionally for my few-and-far-between interviews. Well, um, yes I am. Those things are bad enough. But now…now I can’t even write about my own life because I’m not creative enough to write about anything else except the cats that aren’t even my cats? And writing about my cats isn’t even that interesting? At all? And writing about how uninteresting my writing is is less than engrossing?Siiiiiiiiggggggghhhhhh.
I don’t know. I’ll think of something. Someone do something interesting for me to write about, okay? It’s going to be tough for a while around here, I can just feel it.