Please wire money

Have I mentioned that Brewsky is the brains behind this blog? That’s right, he’s the dirty little drugged-out, lazy-ass, nihilistic, philandering atheist dip-shit who is an affront to all that is decent, whereas Peggy and I are perfectly delightful people who faithfully attend—and give generously to—The Church of the Holy Bejesus of the Misconception, Mississippi Synod. My sole contribution to this blog is to type what Brewsky tells me, and he only needs me for that because he hasn’t been able to locate a keyboard for cats. If he ever does, he says he will run his own affairs via the Internet and have us declared incompetent so he can take control of our money (if you want loyalty, get a dog).

  

However, I’m writing this post to ask for your help because Brewsky is in the hospital. We took him to the Pussy Galore Emergency Medical Facility and Sanitarium at 4:00 this morning when he sneezed slightly. His first vet demonstrated complete incompetence by asking about his other symptoms. “He sneezed!” Peggy screamed. “Would you ask an unmarried pregnant teenager who had been cut in three pieces by a train what her other symptoms were?! For God’s sakes, either save our cat or get somebody who can!” Let me tell you, that vet disappeared out of the room so fast you would have thought that she was being spanked with a veterinary board. Her last words were, “Don’t go nowhere; I’m sending in the clinic’s MMTB specialist.”  

We had no idea what she was talking about, but we really liked the next vet all the same. His name was Dr. Pander (one of the techs said that his parents named him after a Liechtensteinian Polar Bear), and he got right down to business by running a credit check and a discovery of assets. When they came back satisfactory, he started an IV, ordered a gazillion x-rays, a half-dozen blood-tests, three stool cultures, two MRIs, a CAT Scan (ha), a bariatric enema, and a couple of other tests that we had never heard of, a ScrLk and a PrtScn. Once he saw the results, he shook his head sadly and said that Brewsky had ACD (Advanced Cannabinoid Dementia) from second-hand smoke and would need a four-month hospitalization in ICU followed by a year of outpatient therapy.

We were desperate to know what Brewsky’s chances were, and were comforted when the doctor assured us that if we had the money to spend, he was 200% certain that he could save our cat. Now, we just have to raise $23,999.99 for a down payment on Brewsky’s treatment, and that’s where you come in. Please don’t make us beg because the moneys not for us; it’s for him. Otherwise, we would be glad to beg because that’s just the kind of people we are.

Cat wars

The worst one was over food, and it lasted for seventeen months. Brewsky would start crying two hours before each of his three daily meals and keep it up almost nonstop (Peggy thinks he's starving despite his 14-pound (6.4 kg) weight and insists on feeding him three times a day). Naturally, I enjoyed chasing him through the house with a towel in one hand and a squirt bottle in the other while yelling profanities, but it was clearly too much of a good thing. Near the end of this period, Brewsky ended one such chase by rolling onto his back and squirming slowly from side-to-side the way he does when he wants to be petted. I was confounded and disarmed by this behavior, so I got down on the floor and petted him with the thought that he had just better not mistake my softness for defeat. As it turned out, the defeat was his. He might still cry a few times for his food, but when I look him in the eye and say, "No, it's too early," he takes my word for it. So ended the food war. The laundry room war had a different outcome.

We lock him in the laundry room each night so he won't wake us up by yowling like a demon, running through the house like a rhinoceros, and scavenging in the kitchen like a hyena. I prefer to keep the laundry room door shut the rest of the time too, and this means that I don't want him going in there until bedtime because I don't want to be forever having to let him back out. He resists my determination with conviction, at least partly because the laundry room contains doors to the garage and the patio, and he has an interest in each, but especially the garage where the bulk of the cat food and the dog food is stored. Another thing he likes about the garage is that it gives him access to the attic (just try getting him out of there when he's not hungry). He's so successful at getting into the laundry room, concealing himself, and then getting into the garage or onto the patio when the door is momentarily open, that mine and Peggy's combined efforts to keep him out amount to very little. I have concluded that he is capable of psychokinesis, and having gone that far into woo-woo land, I'm practically to the supernatural, and might be leaving any day now to become a prophet in the Judean desert after having found salvation through my cat. Surely, this doesn't happen very often and could put a lot of preachers out of business if it did. 

Peggy had her own food war with Brewsky. It wasn't as bad as mine because I feed him most of the time. However, she generally puts him to bed at night, and she got into the habit of giving him a midnight snack to assuage her guilt for locking him up. He so looked forward to his snack that he took to biting her calves to hurry it along. Peggy has a hard time discipling pets because she thinks it's "mean." This results in them treating her like an equal, and in her and me getting into an occasional fight over her perception that I'm sometimes too mean. Anyway, her propensity toward "kindness" resulted in Brewsky's nightly bites getting progressively harder until one night he nailed her good. I lay in bed laughing as I listened to her chasing him through the house with threats and profanity. When she afterwards came to me for comfort, I accused her of being mean to her "dear, sweet, starving kitty who loves you dearly and never meant you any harm." This made her mad at me too, but he hasn't bitten her since, at least not until today. She came home this morning with the smell of a strange dog on her legs, and Brewsky sunk his teeth into one of her calves. I must confess that he once bit me too, but it was only once. He will sometimes grab my finger gently with his teeth when he's getting tired of being petted but doesn't want to get up, and I'll stop immediately, but it's even rare when this happens. He and I have come to a position of respect for one another's limits, so we don't run into problems much anymore. As much as it makes sense, I show him the same courtesies that I would show another person, although I think he probably deserves them more. 

When I finally put away the towel and the squirt bottle, I had the thought that if had I ever been as stern with a dog as I have been with that little cat, then I would have to agree with Peggy that it was overkill because it would have ruined a dog. I have often come down hard on Brewsky only to see him do the very same thing right before my eyes three minutes later, and every three minutes thereafter until we were both worn out. If there's a dog with that degree of stubbornness, I'm glad I haven't run into him, but if a person can't feel some respect for such determination in cat, he probably shouldn't have one. The problem with a dog being that way, though, would be that you couldn't take him anywhere, and he would probably be destructive at home. 

Yet, for all my sternness, Brewsky was never afraid of me except when I was actually chasing him. This was the opposite of how I thought a cat would behave, having imagined that they were skittish creatures that you had to tiptoe around and handle delicately. He is skittish in that he startles easily, but he's hardly delicate. I can pet him firmly, flip him onto his back and rub his belly, hold him under his front legs like a sack of potatoes, lift him above my head so that he's brushing the ceiling, and even roughhouse to a small extent. I don't know how people tolerate all these neurotic cats that have a flair for the dramatic if not the downright vicious, including the ones that are so timid that they hide everytime there's a knock on the door. If Brewsky is awake, he'll go to see who's at the door (he would open it if he could). Otherwise, he'll continue sleeping even if they sit down beside him. Now, that's a good cat. You've got to admit it. 

I don't know how much credit I deserve for the way he turned out, but I think it was a case of him liking what I will call manly roughness and of me wanting just such a cat. I've had a lifetime of dogs, and it would be hard to give up some doggy characteristics, and with Brewsky I don't have to. I handle him no less delicately than I would a dog his size. I do hope he will become lap friendly over time, and I would guess that he will because he seems to be leaning a little in that direction. For example, Peggy can hold him in her lap each night and brush his fur, and he has gotten to where he likes to lie in bed with us, as long as it's her bed. She thinks it's cute for him to like in my twin bed with me while I'm reading, so she'll often put him there, but he won't stay (maybe he's homophobic), and she seems exasperated by this. I don't really care if he stays or not, which is just as well because he would have to be shackled, and I can't imagine anything more pathetic than shackling my cat to pet him. I haven't mentioned this possibility to Brewsky, but I have laughed about it to myself.  

Sometimes, he seems more like a considerate roommate than a cat due to his seeming intuition about how to get along with people. What he does is basically this: he gives them almost nothing, and they go bonkers over him anyway (unless they don't like cats). I wish I could pull that off because I often think that being liked is just too much work due to the faults of the people I want to be liked by (meaning all of them). I often suspect that most people are on the fringe of insanity. Then I look at Brewsky and he looks at me, and we both realize that we're pretty sane, at least.

Photo courtesy of Jeff De Boer.

What to do with a catatonic cat

Peggy and I took Brewsky to the vet last week for the free check-up that we were promised when we adopted him. We had to wait a long time for the vet to finish his cigarette break, and when he finally did come in, we were practically in tears. He asked what the hell could be wrong since he hadn’t even done anything yet, and we said that he had recently euthanized our cat-hating old dog in the same room that he was about to examine our dog-hating young cat. He started laughing like a man who had positively lost his mind. Peggy and I were just a little completely outraged by this display of inappropriate jollity, so we sat with our arms folded and glared at him hatefully.

After what seemed like a half hour but was probably no more than twenty-seven minutes, we looked at one another, and we could each see in the other’s eyes that we too thought it was pretty funny—in a weird kind of way—so we started laughing with him, and in no time all three of us were laughing so hard that we were crying. It turned out to be a really great vet visit, partly because nobody had to be killed but mostly because it was free. I had much rather go home with a dead animal than to go home with a hundred dollar charge on my credit card.

When we told the vet that we were virtual virgins when it came to owning a cat, he took it upon himself to help us understand how cats think, but he used a lot of technical jargon about feline sexual fantasies, and we couldn’t follow it any too well, so he finally summed up everything he had said by telling us that all we really need to remember is that cats are sexual perverts, and that there’s no point in even trying to understand them. He suggested that we write this down for future reference, but neither of us had a pencil, so we just repeated it in our heads until we had memorized it.

He asked how things were going with our new cat, and we told him that we were having two problems. He said that he needed a smoke, so he would only have time for one of them, so while he trimmed his fingernails, we told him that Brewsky was keeping us up all night every night only to sleep all day—when we had to be up. The vet said that this served as a case in point for what he had said about how sexually obsessed cats are, but that we didn’t have to put up with Brewsky’s selfishness. He suggested that we embark upon what he called Feline Sleep Re-Programization (it goes by the acronym FELINESLEEPREROGRAMIZATION).

Basically what we’re supposed to do is to keep one or more battery operated squirt bottles in every room plus the garage, attic, crawlspace, front porch, back porch, front yard, backyard, vegetable garden, and flower beds. We said that we only needed nine bottles because Brewsky stays indoors, but the vet insisted on selling us 34 bottles plus 102 gallons of tap water just to be on the safe side. The brand name for these bottles is Deluge-A-Kitty, and they each have a gallon tank that’s good for two squirts. They also have a strobe light and an air horn (it’s not quite as loud as a train whistle) that come on automatically when you squeeze the trigger. What we’re supposed to do is to tiptoe all over the house and yard (the vet said that we might as well look everywhere since we own so many bottles) twice every hour, and when we catch Brewsky napping, let him have it. When we asked the vet if all that water isn’t a little tough on furniture, sheetrock, knickknacks, electronics, wall-hangings, carpeting, clothing, woodwork, books, elderly dogs, and so forth, he sold us a gasoline-powered blow dryer that can hit 650 degrees Fahrenheit on high.

We’ve only been using the bottles for three days, and Brewsky is already staying awake all day. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he’s staying awake all night too. He has also stopped eating and playing (he did drink a little water day before yesterday), and he will only shit in our shoes. Mostly, he just sits in the corner while staring at the floor and trembling. We’re starting to worry that he might have some hereditary psychological problem, because we can’t understand why else he would start acting screwy just when he’s showing progress toward staying awake during normal, healthy daylight hours. I’m not saying that we’ve given up hope yet because we’re more patient than most people, but if he doesn’t snap out of it in the next two days, we’re going to have him euthanized, and we’re going to ask the vet to do it in the same room he used for Baxter. Then, when we get another new cat, we’re going to have him examined in that room so we can see the vet laugh like that again. This was Peggy’s idea, and when I asked her why she was so enamored of laughing vets, she said it was because our laughing vet has a tight ass and nice dimples. Peggy might be old, but she’s not completely dead, I guess.