Mind Your Own God Damn Business

About two weeks ago, my Mom brought home a stray cat. I guess that she was at a friend’s house, and the friend told her that one of her neighbors had recently foreclosed and had left their cat there, so my Mom took him and brought him home. So far, he’s a pretty classy guy – he appears to be litter box trained, he doesn’t claw, and he loves cat nip. The new addition to the household hasn’t been without his problems, though.

He Doesn’t Have  A Name

We’ve been fighting over his name ever since my Mom brought him home. I was originally calling him Chubbs, but that apparently wasn’t dignified enough, and he’s not fat. My brother has been calling him Socrates and my Mom has been calling him Dickens, but I refuse to acknowledge those names. He has a white stripe down his face, like a scar, so I started calling him Omar, but nobody liked that either. It seemed like we were never going to agree on a name, until inspiration struck:

Barry.

You see, I’m actually kind of a creepy cat lady at heart. When students tell me that I’m going to die alone in an apartment with a bunch of cats, a small part of me knows that they’re probably right, but a larger part of me thinks “Cats, you say? That doesn’t sound so bad!” Part of what comes with my Cat Lady personality is spending a lot of time talking to my pets and then having them talk back to me in stupid voices.

Is that more or less crazy than talking to myself? I guess that both are technically “talking to myself”, but I’m also pretending to talk for an animal in this case, so I vote more crazy. You know what, though? I talk to myself a lot too, so  I guess that it doesn’t really matter. Anyway, when my family had greyhounds, I decided that they sounded like  Triumph the insult comic dog. They spent a lot of time threatening to shit on my stuff and insulting me (at least in my head, they did). I decided that the cat should talk like Barry Gibb on The Barry Gibb Talk Show, so I started calling him Barry and then pretending that he was calling everyone around him a sorry excuse for a human being and threatening to humiliate their corpse. Here’s the skit, in case you haven’t seen it:

I have to say, I feel kind of insane talking for my cats anyway, but when I get a good look at my behavior in writing, it’s especially embarrassing. Anyway, I’ve just kept calling him Barry, and even though no one else seems to like it, it’s starting to stick. It doesn’t really matter, anyway; he’s a few years old, and already has a name he’s used to. Unless we stumble on the one that his old family used to call him, he’s not going to know what we’re talking about.

Not really related. I just think it's hilarious.

He’s Kind Of A Pervert

A few days ago, Barry was sleeping on my bed, and I was doing what I always do in here. Can’t guess? Let me give you some hints: I waste hours of my life doing it, I yell random video game lines when I’m done, and it rhymes with “plasterbating”.

So, I was “plasterbating”, and I suddenly realized that Barry was in the room. It wouldn’t have bothered me, but when I looked at him, he was staring at my junk. I tried to ignore it, but when I looked back a few seconds later, he was still staring at it. He was transfixed. After a few more minutes of trying to do my thing with Barry leering at me, I finally had to kick him out of the room. Whatever Barry’s into, that’s fine, but I don’t swing that way, and he needs to respect that. And not eye my dong like it’s made out of fresh salmon.

I suppose that it’s also possible that he was glaring at me. As in “Really? You’re going to do that while I’m in the room? I’ve been here all of three days, and you’ve decided already that we’re close enough that it’s okay to jack off in front of me? I AM BARRY F-ING GIBB! I WILL RIP OFF YOUR HANDS AND USE THEM AS BOXING GLOVES AND BEAT YOU TO DEATH!!!”

And, I guess, a third possibility is that he’s just a fucking cat, and he didn’t really have any clue what was going on. I don’t know, though. I saw that look in his eyes, and there was only one word for it: Catlust.

He Produces Roughly Two Times His Body Weight In Feces Every Day

Seriously. Every time that I walk by that fucking litter box, he’s shitting in it again. I’m several orders of magnitude larger than that cat, and I think he makes seven or eight times as much solid waste in a week as I do. It’s ridiculous.

He glares at me while he’s doing that, too.

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So there you go. Other than that, he’s a pretty nice cat. only 29 more to go, and I’ll be the creepy loner that middle school kids always accuse me of being.

I wish my OPEC paper could’ve been on a subject like this. I can get a much higher word count a lot faster when it’s on a subject that I’m truly passionate about, like the family pet eye-humping my wang when I’m “Browsing the Internet” in front of him.

Oh well.