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Monday, July 28, 2014

WHERE IS THE CAT PEE


Okay I swear to god this realy happened: I went to retrieve my sneakers from the basement. It was dark. It was quiet. I tiptoed over to the light switch. A voice from the shadows said: "STOP. Don't turn on the light." The voice was eerily familiar. A purple laser beam temporarily blinded me. I was paralyzed with fear. I stepped back towards the door. "DON'T WALK THERE," the voice warned. That voice again. I had heard that voice threaten me before. Many times before. I realized it was my wife. What was she doing in the dark with a laser beam? "I'm looking for cat pee," she said. "Have you tried the catbox?" I asked. She said, "Someone is peeing down here, and the only way to find it is with an ultraviolet light."

So she looked all over with the blacklight, and there it was! Eureka! She found a tiny area of carpet in between two couches. This was the only area where there was no cat pee.

Apparently this is a special blacklight made specifically for finding cat pee, so it did not come with a Jimi Hendrix poster or anything (back in the 70s, blacklights were used for finding teeth and dandruff). Seeing the blacklight made me nostalgic for the 70s. All the great songs, like "Chick-a-Boom" and "Sylvia's Mother...." The great hairdos... the great sayings: "GROOVY! FAR OUT! LET'S BOOGIE ON DOWN!" Things that really meant something. I thought about how great it would be to live in a great place like Iran, where I read that people got stoned after they made a video of the song "Happy!" And another person got stoned after saying the word "bieber" in a crowded place. What a fun country!

Anyway, how do we even know it was a cat peeing in our basement? It could have been a mouse, or a bird. Do birds even pee? In all this time I have never seen a bird tinkle, and it's not because they are so modest; I've seen them do a bunch of other disgusting things.

"The cat is simply marking its territory," I observed, and the minute I said it I became terrified. If the cat had already annexed the entire basement, it was only a matter of time before it peed its way upstairs and took over the whole house. I was going to have to file for an easement just to use the stairway.

"I'm going to have to re-mark the territory as ours," I said triumphantly. "I am going to pee our house back! And I'm going to do it NOW!" Only I didn't have to go yet, and my wife made a move towards the phone, so I postponed the re-districting.

"They do this when they are angry with you for something," my wife explained. The cat is literally pissed off. This had me scratching my head. Shit! What if they are angry with me for not scratching their head? A cat could be angry at you for ANYTHING, because they don't share the same values as we do. They might be peeing on my tennis bag because I am not paying enough attention to them? Am I paying too much attention too my tennis bag? I immediately stopped allowing my tennis bag to sit on my lap. Shit- what about my laptop? If they see that thing sitting on my lap all the time they are going to get jealous and pee on it.

"You need to engage the cats more," my wife said. "Play with them once in awhile!" "CatS? We have more than one?" I asked. So I set up a weekly card game. Oxford stud, progressive pot, no limit. I lost about $120 the first two weeks, which made me really angry. I started thinking of ways to get even. I admit that I peed on some of their stuff.

Finally we went outside to escape the pervasive smell of cat pee and breathe the fresh air. "Do you smell something? It smells like cat pee out here, unless the cat peed inside my nose." I exclaimed. "No," my wife said, "that's a boxwood bush- the smell keeps the deer away." Which is probably the only thing that explains why there aren't that many deer in our basement.



Incidentally, ultraviolet light has a shorter wavelength than other colors visible to humans, although it looks taller in person. UV light has long been used in hospitals to disinfect surgical equipment. When the light hits the object it breaks down the germs, causing them to cry. The photochemical reaction renders the germs unable to reproduce. It would have been a great thing to try on the cat.

2 comments:

  1. You've had how many Super Bowl parties in that crib? And you're sittin' here blamin' the piss stains on the cat?
    I personally have sprayed in every room of that house, except for the bathroom which was always occupied and the TV is too small in there anyhow. I also erred in the hot tub with what was supposed to be a 'rising bubble from the deep'. It just didn't rise at all. At least I don't blame it on the cat.

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    1. Are you also the one that scratched up the furniture down there? I KNEW it!

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