Things are getting strange. Everywhere I go I can feel it. Cats are stalking me. Snakes are eye-ballin me. I saw a cat this morning crawl out from a pallet on the back of a trailer. I saw a kitten laying dead on the side of the road. I heard a meow. What's it all mean?(other than the fact that obiously we aren't living in Viet-Nam)
My mother tells me she has a cat. I've only seen it once. Supposedly it's black & really cute. Apparently it's not real fond of people, or at the least, it's not real fond of me (stand in line, cat). Seems like I have some sort of superhuman cat-avoidance technology that's built into my dna. It's not that I don't like cats, they just never give me enough time to really warm up to them. Dogs are different. They won't leave me the hell alone! But cats, well, that's a different story. A story that begins a long, long time ago...
When I was but a wee lad, we lived in a rambling (or ram-shackle, you decide) old ranch house, out, not directly in the middle, but close, to nothing (if you went through nothing and turned left, that's us). On the porch of said ranch-house, at any given time, were approximately 427 cats of various shapes, sizes and colors. Seems like we started with 2 cats to keep mice & snakes away, and apparently they never got the memo about over-crowding, and kept right-on having un-protected sex. Sinful really.
After a couple of years of this feline promiscuity, we had more cats than you could shake a snake at. Unfortunately, being the only male offspring in the house at the time, the role of feline enforcer fell to me. A bounty was placed on their heads, and sonny-boy needed him some dancin shoes, so cat bounty hunter I became. And I was good. Real good. It started out innocently enough, but before long, I couldn't even go to school without my morning fix. All I ever thought about was where they could be hiding. Who were they with? What crazy psychedelic cat-nip den were they holed up in?
I learned what colors they were wearing. What they liked to drink. Who their friends were. Where they liked to spend their free-time. I was in so deep, I was becoming one of them. Time didn't matter. Day blended with night. Cat's blended with rabbits. Chickens blended with horses. And snakes blended with, well, snakes didn't blend with anything, they just crawled around disgusting me.
I wore cat tags around my neck. I applied cat-camo and lived in the wild with them. I collected cat ears and sewed them onto my cap. Cats feared me.
Then, just as suddenly as it started, the cat population was under control, and there was no need of a feline exterminator. It left an emptiness inside of me. I struggled for years for a sense of belonging. Everywhere I went, I felt their eyes on me. I couldn't sleep at night hearing the cries of the wounded. The smell of the napalm hanging over the jungle...wait, different story.
I believe that because of my past, the cat spirits are now trying to band together and extract their revenge. The positive side of this for me is the fact that getting more than 1 cat to band together for a common goal is a little on the impossible side. My only hope is that the Lions & Tigers don't get wind of my past. Might make going to the zoo a bitch!
And the snakes. I believe they keep showing up because they understand, on some deep interpersonal level, that I HATE THEM, and WANT THEM TO DIE! I have discovered that the only thing worse than finding a live snake is finding a snake skin. You know he's there. You know he's watching you, just biding his time and waiting for his opportunity. They know that, given the chance, I will become the snake-dancer. I will wage all-out war against their legless society. I will live out my motto of "the only good snake, is a dead snake". I will weed-eat their asses, one snake at a time!
So there's something I need to say...Cat's, my apologies for my past behaviours. Snakes, get your burial plots paid for today, cuz I'm coming for you! And this time, I'm not playing nice!
No comments:
Post a Comment