THE CAT'S OUT OF THE BAG

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-24-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     You're probably familiar with the cat species from those little videos that show them doing adorable things around the house and playing with each other and chasing their own tails, etc. I saw a video where a cat steals a Swiffer duster from a broom closet, walks across a curtain rod, almost falls off three times, ruins the curtain rod and drags the duster over to the TV shelf. I had to side with the cat on this one, the TV shelf was gross. But it proves that cat burglary goes on all the time. Cats may look harmless but they have an unpredictable and sometimes violent side. A cat, without ever having watched one "mixed martial arts" fight, knows how to hold your arm with his front paws while kicking you with the back ones. Sometimes you'll look over and the cat is sitting there with his tongue out and his mouth closed, like he doesn't know his tongue is aimed right at you.

     We have these two cats, there may even be more of them, I've only ever seen two at a time but I've never searched particularly hard. They look exactly alike, all black. And one of them has taken to, well, how do I put this politely but, taken to doing a #1 on whatever strikes her mood at the time. If you don't know what #1 is, just go back to the beginning of time and it's the first bodily function done in chronological order after the first human drinks the first six-pack of beer. This cat has destroyed hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of personal property with this one simple act and it's driving us crazy. My wife thinks it's some kind of misguided protest that she hasn't gotten anyone else to go along with just yet. Like one of these dopey boycotts on social media where they get a bunch of people to get back at somebody they don't like by not purchasing something they don't like even more, like Brussels sprouts.

     Anyway, I have a loving relationship with the cat, meaning I stroke her belly which she enjoys for a while until she decides I'm doing it wrong and I come out of the experience with multiple lacerations, so that's obviously not the problem. She has a loving relationship with my wife, which means that my wife strokes her belly and in return she knocks all the salt and pepper shakers and pens off the kitchen table, so that's obviously not the problem either. We feed her every day, which I think is overdoing it, and like every cat we've ever had she's chunkily overweight and "body positive" about it in an unrealistic way.

     I'm not even sure which one is the culprit since they both look exactly alike. They are twins, but I guess all dogs and cats are twins, triplets, quadruplets, sextuplets, whatever. I never heard of a cat being an only child. These two are not the type of twins that finish each others' sentences, or go out on double dates and try to fool each others' boyfriends, or sit in a lump on the bed together that looks like a load of unfolded laundry. In most instances they seem to barely aware of each others' existence, so I find it hard to believe that there is any kind of conspiracy going on.

     I watch a lot of interrogations on TV, and I have a feeling I can pit one against the other by punishing them both, although if I had a better understanding of what they didn't like, maybe they wouldn't be trying to retaliate against me in the first place, if that's what they're even trying to do. It's all so confusing. I used to have an outdoor cat, and he would kill a mouse and leave it on my doorstep. I assumed it was a message, like "YOU'RE NEXT." Remember in "The Godfather," where the guy wakes up and there's a horse head sleeping next to him? Maybe his cat put it there? Then someone told me, no, the cat is giving you a present and you should praise him for it. I told him a card would have sufficed.

     My wife wants to pin down the whens and wherefores of this behavior so that she can psychoanalyze the cat. She thinks the cat is revolting, and I couldn't agree more. She bought an ultraviolet light which detects the presence of pee. It won't help you that much in a murder investigation but you never know. It was only strong enough to detect the presence of teeth, lint and argyle socks, so its application is limited. I considered swallowing it just in case it might protect me from the coronavirus like Trump says, and if I see a Jimi Hendrix poster I can shine at it through my belly button.

     So far none of these things have worked, and I'm entertaining suggestions about what to do in case mine haven't been entertaining enough. And if my cat ends up in a video it's not going to go viral on YouTube, it's going straight into the evidence room, exhibit "P." They say its' bad luck to cross a black cat, well I'm serving notice right here: it might be bad luck for a particular black cat to cross ME.