I should have stayed in bed this morning. (Notice – I said “should have”, and not “should of”? Don’t know why I mentioned that. Must be the old English teacher in me.)
Monday through Friday, I roll out of bed at 5 a.m. I don’t turn on a light in the bedroom, because, being the nice guy that I am 95 percent of the time, I don’t want to disturb my wife.
So, anyhow, this morning I stumble out of bed and almost immediately, my right foot steps into something cold, clammy and wet. Suddenly my memory kicks into rapid rewind mode, and I vaguely remember at some point during the night hearing the sounds of one of the cats puking in the bedroom. “Gurk… Gurk!... Guuuuuuurrrrrrrrkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!”
Sweet.
When I got to the bathroom and closed the door behind me so as not to disturb Mary Ellen’s slumber, I turned on the light, and sure enough, there was an unworldly-looking blob of soggy Little Friskies kibble clinging desperately the calloused sole of my foot and to squishing disgustingly up between my hammer-toes.
Wonderful.
You know something? I don’t particularly care for cats. Not really.
When it comes right down to it, I’m a dog person. A BIG dog person. (By that, I don’t mean that I’m big; I mean that I like BIG dogs - German shepherds, golden retrievers, dogs that slobber and flop around and trip over their own feet as puppies.
But please keep the little, yappy rats away from me. If you’re going to own a Jack Russell or a Shitzu, you might as well own a cat. In fact, to my way of thinking, cats are better than those so-called “dogs” because they’re not so damned noisy.)
I really don’t understand cat lovers. I mean, what’s to love? They’re horrible, hateful, self-indulgent, arrogant, little animals!
And they are the Nazis of the animal world. Any creature weaker than them is captured, tortured for sport, and then systematically and unemotionally put to death. “You no longer amuse me. (yawn!) Time for you to die.”
Somebody once told me that the only reason that people like cats is because we are bigger than they are. So they don’t pick on us.
Another friend of mine is fond of saying, “I like cats. I just can’t eat a whole one.”
As for me, well, I have a hard time trusting anything that craps in a box.
I hate smelling the litter box when I walk into the house, and I absolutely despise cleaning it!
Speaking of kitty litter…I shop at wholesale shopper’s club. You know, one of those warehouse places with miles of fluorescent lights and forty-foot-high ceilings where everything is packaged and sold in bulk…I mean BULK! Like mayonnaise in fifty-five gallon drums.
I buy kitty litter at one of these places, and I have to buy it in plastic pails that weigh about 150 lbs. (I get a kick out of the cute little kittens depicted on these pails. The picture shows these adorable little creatures stepping on well-raked, clean, white-sand beds of kitty litter with little, sweet-smelling flowers filtering through the air around their paws as they walk. In reality, after kitty litter is “used” by the kitty, the stuff does smell like flowers – flowers that have been composting and rotting in some musty, moldy, gag-me-with-a-spoon basement since God was a kid.)
I hate looking at the upholstered furniture in my living room that these feline demons have shredded while sharpening their claws.
I hate finding the little presents of bloody, decapitated rodents and birds that they leave on the back steps. (They deposit these gifts there, and then sit and wait for me show up. When I find the dead carcasses, the cats are always sitting right behind them, looking and me with an expression on their faces that say, “See what we’re capable of? Remember that we know where you sleep. Just be careful.”)
In spite of all this, Mary Ellen loves them, and I love Mary Ellen. And it is because of this never-ending, all-encompassing love for her, I found myself in the shower this morning muttering something about wanting to try cat kabobs for supper while I gingerly scraping the cat puke off the sole of my foot.