CATATONIC

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (11-21-24)

     This column is about The Joys of Cat Ownership, and every word in that phrase is laced with irony, with the possible exception of "of." I sometimes see photos of people with their cat on social media, and they're both having a great time, but I suspect the cat has been Photoshopped in. I don't know where we got the idea that a cat would make a good pet. Historically, it's been theorized that Pharaohs kept cats for protection, against people who kept coming over to borrow things. I read that the first known instance of a cat being domesticated was, well, never. 

     A cat is basically an elitist snob that wears fur year-round and poses as a pet owned by you, when in reality, it legally more resembles a future litigant who, by virtue of the fact that it lives in the same house you do, has squatter's rights, and merely tolerates you even though it has very different plans for the property. A cat is always looking down on you. Literally, because it jumped up to the top of a tree, which you climbed in order to rescue it, whereupon it easily rappelled down your back, jumped to the ground and licked itself while making no effort to rescue YOU.

     When will I ever learn that the cat has a different definition of "fun" whenever we play together? "I'm going to tickle you on your belly! Yes I am! Tickle, tickle, tickle! Ha, ha! Got you! You like that, don't you! Tickle, tickle, tick- JESUS! Your cat just tried to remove my nose." I finally figured out where the phrase "tickled to death" came from.

     My wife announced one day that the cat had killed a mouse. "THAT cat?" I asked. It's unlikely the cat would have done anything useful on purpose. "No way," I said. "The mouse probably died in a car accident." "That's impossible- there was no vehicle at the scene." "Well, the cat probably poisoned it with antifreeze over a long period of time. I saw it on 'Forensic Files.'" But what would be the motive? Also, the cat has never engaged in anything remotely resembling athletic activity, other than spontaneously exploding into a triple Axel and then suddenly tearing down the hall for good reasons of its own.

     My wife took the cat to the cat doctor for an annual checkup. After giving the animal a clean bill of health they presented me with an unhealthy bill of my own. What could the doctor's advice have been for the cat? "Just keep doing what you're doing: You should be getting a MINIMUM of five seconds of exercise each day. You should be eating a horrible diet, and vomiting as much as you can."

     If I added up the cost of all the cat scratching devices that have been bought over the years but never used, it would add up to approximately $43,000 dollars, or eight times the cost of the furniture it was supposed to prevent the cat from destroying. Which it did not.

     I bet you're going to say, "A cat is so clean! It goes right in the litter box! Then it covers it up!" Somehow, even though my sense of smell is not as refined as that of a cat, I was able to locate it almost immediately, then had to UN-bury it and figure out what to do with it.

     I've never had a cat that wasn't a little off in the cranial department. We once had a bob-tailed cat named Pookie, who loved my wife but was always secretly plotting against me. It must have read somewhere that a cat used its tail for balance, and she would walk out onto the 8th floor terrace and sun herself on the three inches of concrete just outside the railing. This proved how physically balanced she was, and how mentally unbalanced. I was charged with retrieving it from danger by chasing it around this precarious edge. She knew the trouble I would be in if the she fell off the balcony, so she feigned near-misses all the time. 

     "This pillow on the couch is WET," I complained. "Oh? Hmm. She's marking her territory." My wife is much more tolerant of cat transgressions than I am. "This couch is NOT part of the cat's territory. This is MY territory. It was bought as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Am I going to have to go around this house and re-mark the territory?" "No, please don't do that." I did it later and so far it has worked.

     Next time, why don't I convince my wife that there are so many other animals that would make a more suitable pet. A piranha, for instance, never throws up in the laundry basket. It's just as friendly, and eats less. An ant farm is educational, and teaches kids the value of working together toward a common goal, which is trying to get out of the damn thing. I know we don't have kids, but one could visit. Besides, maybe the ants will grow something on the farm, who knows. A bear is big, I understand that, but it lives in the den, which we don't use a lot, and sleeps most of the year. I saw a commercial that implied that it seems to know quite a bit about toilet paper. I'm just saying that there are other options.

     Yet, we've always had a cat. The darn thing purrs, sometimes even at me. It just jumped on my lap. Okay, now it's licking me, which I guess is kind of cute, so I don't even notice that it's systematically removing the skin from the back of my hand.

LET'S AGREE TO AGREE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (11-14-24)

     By the time this column reaches your mailbox, we'll have a different president. You may be pleased with the result of the election, you may be horrified by it, but one thing's for certain: Our political system is not very good at pleasing anybody. The Founding Fathers made a lot of mistakes when they sat down and figured out who should do what, and a lot more bad decisions were made along that got us where we are  today, which is, when all is said and done, a place where a lot of dumb things are said and nothing much is done.

     I know exactly what needs to be changed, and I could go on and on about that, but instead, I'll just say that Americans are fundamentally lousy at arguing. Our debates usually start at the polar ends of the spectrum, instead of finding a point at which we both agree, and making small steps where they diverge. It's like zipping up a zipper after you just ate an entire pizza. It seems impossible to get both sides together, but you keep working at it, and you get it zipped up, and it hurts for a while, but eventually you order another pizza.

     Let's start at the beginning: I think we can all agree that the Earth is round. Oh. We can't agree on that? Well, then let's at least say that it's not trapezoidal. I conducted my own experiment, set out by car in one direction and ended up exactly where I started. By doing so I proved that, a.) the earth is round, and b.) I'm not exactly clear on how to use my GPS. Let's just agree that the Earth is flat in Iowa, and go from there. 

     Can we agree on immigration? Maybe you are in favor of a more equitable system for the introduction of people from other countries. While immigrants of recent years often arrive seeking a better life by escaping economic collapse, or religious or political persecution, the original immigrants to this country thought they were in a place seven thousand miles away from here, looking for spices because the food was THAT BAD where they were. Perhaps we can at least come together on the fact that if we all went back where we came from, no one would have been born. 

     Climate change. Now there's something we can all come to a meeting of the minds on. Global warming is happening whether or not you believe the weather. You may think it's a conspiracy theory, a bunch of scientists getting together (well, pretty much all of them) and staring at computer models, something I also do in my spare time. Let's just agree on one thing: Due to climate change, Elizabeth Hurley is becoming inexplicably hotter.

     The economy is inflating, no one could argue with that. Or is it? Maybe everything else is just getting smaller. Food is more expensive, yet my waist keeps getting bigger, resulting in a rare double-belt-tightening. Should America espouse a "trickle-down" theory of economics, where we decrease taxes on corporations and politely ask that they spend the extra money on hiring more workers and not on robotics and artificial intelligence? Or should we rely on a "demand-side" model, where, through individual tax cuts and government spending, we rely on consumers to drive the economy by buying a lot of crap they don't need, like 800 pairs of shoes, size 7 1/2, that take up most of the damn closet? (This is purely a hypothetical example.) I did much better in home economics than economics, so let's get together on the importance of accepting cookies.

     Life is no bed of roses, and that's why health care is such a thorny issue. So you need a health care plan. My plan so far has been to do something stupid on the tennis court about once every three months that requires surgery, thereby financing another one of my orthopedist's children's education. I don't know whether you think that government intervention in the health care system is a form of socialism, and that that is a dirty word. But what I do know is that when something happens to YOU, and you find out that it's not covered, you will let loose a torrent of words that are MUCH dirtier. let's just concur on the fact that those never-ending commercials for health care plans are the very things making us SICK AND TIRED.

     Foreign policy is foreign to me- I don't know who we should pick as our friends and who are our real enemies any more than I did in high school. Let's just agree that it's fun to travel to other countries and visit our foreign policy once in a while, to see how it's doing.

     Are we so embedded in our own beliefs that we can't come together on simple programs that benefit us all? Maybe, but we could focus on baby steps. You have to learn to crawl before you can run for office. For now, just leave it to me: Can we agree that a pizza is flat? And can we also agree that it's round? There- I fixed us.

COVERING ALL THE BASES

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-31-24)

     It's October already, and America's summer pastime has blossomed into the Fall Classic. I love baseball, and this is the time I love it the best. The other major sports are fine, football for example. Football is fun because they play in the rain or snow, and when the football gets loose everyone chases it around like a greased pig. And I like the name of some of the penalties, "unnecessary roughness," for example. If you grab a running back and throw him upside down on his head, it could be considered a necessary amount of roughness, depending on how much people dislike him. But you can't use your own head to hit another player, even though it's just as likely to hurt you as him. It's like the word "criminal mischief," where you allow that a certain amount of high jinks is all well and good, but if you add too much tomfoolery and throw in an overabundance of monkey business or shenanigans, you could have a misdemeanor on your hands.

     There's nothing wrong with basketball as a sport, but it seems like a lot of trouble to go through to put things into a basket one at a time, with someone trying to prevent you from doing it. I've encountered the same thing when I attempt to sort the laundry in the same room as my cat.

     Hockey is kind of exciting, and just saying the word "puck" unexpectedly in mixed company is an end in itself. But it goes so fast on television, people chasing an object no bigger than a cake of soap. It's hard to follow, and one of these days they'll blow the whistle when they realize they've been batting around someone's cell phone the whole time.  

     Soccer? I know the rest of the world loves soccer, but those are parts of the world where watching paint dry is also popular. My brother says, "You just don't understand the game," which isn't any more true than "I don't understand people WATCHING the game." I could fix the sport in two seconds by widening the goal two feet, decreasing the field by 20 percent, and adding a poodle to each team.

     But baseball is unique in so many ways. The innings of a game unfold like the drama of a play with nine acts. Then there is a play within a play- the action of the scoring and defense within the inning. Drilled further down is the confrontation of each at-bat, the ebb and flow that can quickly change the tide of the outcome. And every singular play is, well... a play. It's an individual challenge within a team war. And, unlike a Broadway production, no one feels the urge to break into a song.

     There is no clock to determine if you have time to catch up. Take all the time you need. We can bake some cookies while we're waiting, or do our taxes. No one will say, "Hey, can you score any faster, please?" Like they might in real life. During the 7th inning, we'll stretch, and sing a song together. During the 8th inning, a nice nap. By the 10th inning, maybe the cookies will be ready.  Also, there are no designated dimensions of a baseball park; each one is different. And, it's the only sport I know of that will admit that balls might be foul.

     Baseball also has the most entertaining fights in all of sports. I'll describe one to you: The pitcher grows tired of the same guy repeatedly hitting home runs in the game, so to get even he throws a ball at a completely different guy, who is much smaller. He aims for a spot near his head, but misses and hits him in the back. The guy who was hit makes a threatening gesture toward the mound, the same one your Mom made if you caught a garter snake and it got loose in the den. The pitcher then performs a pantomime symbolizing the entire "You talkin' to me?" scene in "Taxi Driver." Which is the international symbol for everyone who is employed by either team to run onto the field, in search of someone to hold them back. By this time players are streaming out of both bullpens, but instead of fighting each other along the way, they slow-jog all the way to the pitcher's mound to give the fight more time to be over. 

     Players are pointing at one another and yelling, and here for the first time, is what they said: "This happened last week and both benches emptied." "Oh, that wasn't a fight, someone tried to microwave some Chinese food that was three weeks  old." "Well, I'm going to have to punch you anyway in case you were thinking of doing the same thing." "Sir, I am on your team." "Really? I don't believe I've ever seen you before." "I'm a pinch runner, just called up today." "Well, I saw you pinch my sunflower seeds before, and then you ran. I'm going to have to ask you to step outside." "We are outside, but we can step inside. I only took the sunflower seeds to put in the birdfeeder. The Orioles, Cardinals and Blue Jays are in town next week." The fight escalates from there, and ends up with dinner reservations.

     This should be enough to convince you to watch the World Series with me, and enjoy one of the few sports where the "World" is defined as two countries on the same continent.