Wright’s Law of Cats: the perversity of cats tends towards the maximum – plus ten percent.
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Cats are irritating little bastards, aren’t they?
Take the chair routine.
Get up from your desk, go get a cup of coffee, and inevitably you come back to find Mr. Whiskers in your chair, curled up and pretending to be asleep. You dump him out, take the chair back - and the cat then climbs into your lap and parks on top of your bladder like a hairy codpiece. Try to move him, and he imitates a boneless chicken. It’s like trying to push a jellyfish with velcro on the bottom of it. Now after a while, you’ve got to get up (you’re drinking coffee remember, there’s a ten pound cat sitting on your bladder – try to keep up). So what do you do? You carefully pick the cat up, stand up, and place the cat on the chair. What’s the cat do? Yeah, gets down immediately and struts away. Fuck you, Pink Monkey, I’m not staying in the chair if you want me to stay in the chair, I only want to be in the chair if you don’t want me to be in the chair.
Perversity, see what I mean?
Then there’s the whole dive bombing your ankle.
You’d think that after the umpity dozenth (screw you, it’s a word, look it up) time of having a paw or tail stepped on, a cat would realize that walking under my feet is not a good idea. But no, at least once a day ShopKat decides the best place in the whole freakin’ woodshop to be is directly under my feet. Stomp. Squawk! And then I have to endure an hour of the “You HURT me, Pink Monkey, scowl.” Don’t think cats can glare? You don’t live with cats.
Then there’s the whole food thing.
The Comedian Leo Gallagher (The Sledge-O-Matic guy from the 80’s) used do this riff about cats: They can’t read but they can compare. They can look in the pantry and see what kind of cat food you got too many cans of – then they don’t want that kind any more.
Seriously, what kind of picky eater licks his ass? They ought to make ass-flavored cat food.
Cats will sit beneath your chair and mew piteously. Pet me! Pet me! I’m so lonely! My head is so itchy! How come you ignore me, Pink Monkey? So you reach for them – and they run away! Five minutes later, they’re back. Pet me!
A cat plays with its toys all at once. Bring home a new catnip ball, the cat will play with that bastard furiously for 30 minutes. Then the cat will leave it laying in the middle of the floor and never touch it again. There, got that done. Unless you pick it up and put it near the cat bed. The cat comes along and does a double take. What the fuck? How’d this damned ball get over here? Thirty minutes of furious batting later, and the ball is back in the middle of the floor – right in front of the last stair step. Just out of sight if you’re coming down the stairs with your hands full… Move my shit around, will you, Pink Monkey? I’ll kill you.
How about cat butt? In the face? Hey, Pink Monkey, check out my butt! In your face! Dig it, I just finished up in the litterbox. Check it out, my man! Then they do the cat butt dance and give you a little tail swish as a flourish.
If you don’t hack off their balls or their toes, how do they show their gratitude? Yeah, by either spraying your couch, or shredding it. What the hell is it with cats and couches anyway? It there some genetic feline memory, some ancient racial trauma of Paleolithic cats being hunted on the plains of Africa by giant prehistoric sofas? For God’s sake, Run, Fluffy! It’s a marauding naugahyde Barcolounger! Oh no! It got Snowbell!
Hairballs? No seriously, hairballs? Dude, you’d think that after swallowing gobs of hair, then choking a big nasty wad of it back up – you’d get a clue. Hair, bad, don’t swallow it. I mean, it can’t taste good (of course, there’s that whole ass licking thing again), ever come across your cat sitting by the window, trying to be cool and shit – with its mouth hanging open? The White One does this, and it freaks me out. The Grey One sometimes will sit with his tongue hanging out like he just completely forgot he was licking his balls in mid-stroke. I don’t know about you, but that’s something I’m not likely to forget.
How come a cat can remember to use the litterbox ten times in a row? Then one day hide a load behind the couch? Or leave a puddle in the clean laundry basket? Little surprise for you there, Pink Monkey. Have fun with that. If you need me I’ll be over here wiping my ass on your couch.
Don’t worry I’ll be by later so you can check out my fuzzy ass.
Cats. Yeah.
Hairball trick: put butter on the backs of their forepaws. They'll lick it off, then do a full groom, and the butter will make the hair not ball. ;)
ReplyDelete(Or so I've heard from a friend with a longhaired cat, who tried it after hearing it from somewhere else, and found it to work well.)
Dude, are you insane?
ReplyDeleteThe only thing worse than cat hair all over everything is buttered cat hair all over everything.
"The cat is always on the wrong side of the door."
ReplyDeleteNo idea who first said that.
I am lucky that my boys:
ReplyDeletea) do not hack up hairballs (occasionally I run across a colorless puddle of liquid with a couple strands of grass in it)
and
b) do not potty where they aren't supposed to.
Everything else, is pretty close to being on point.
And WTF is about the favorite place to hack up a hairball -- right on my bed? He couldn't do it on the kitchen floor, or even the carpet? Nope. My bed.
ReplyDeleteAnd you have a bye on your page for a short time, according to Husband. Don't get too used to it...
Crisco. Put a bit of Crisco on the tip of your finger and cats will lick it off. Nothing on their paws. Lubricates those hairballs.
ReplyDeleteDr. Phil
PS- they'll have their hairballs all over the place as usual, but it'll be easier on their little misbegotten internal systems.
umpity dozenth
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother totally would have used this phrase if she'd ever heard it.
Cats exist primarily because at some point they were kittens..
ReplyDeletehttp://mfrost.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2009/03/10/dsc03212.jpg
I know this is ages after the original post, but I used to be a vet tech, and the vet I worked for told clients that the reason cats hack up hairballs is because the cat's tongue is raspy. All those little barbs exist to a) lick tiny bits of meat off the bones of their prey and b) help groom the coat. But since all the barbs on the tongue point backwards, once a hair gets on there, they can't get it to move forward and have to swallow it down.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, though, yeah. Cats are perverse. I'm violently allergic and even antisocial cats come rub my ankles. "Here, Pink Monkey, have a nice asthma attack."
~Anissa Roy
Another thing to remember about cats: when they start to barf, just let them, don't chase them ... unless you want yuck all the way up every one of the stairs. Oh, and also, those fringed rugs? Tuck it under, cats LOVE to throw up on the fringe.
ReplyDelete