Karl Klockars

Over the past few weeks, months, perhaps years, the constant cry from the internet audience towards bloggers everywhere has been:  “We want more cat coverage!  Write about your cats!  Cat Cat Cat Cat Caaaaaaaaaaaaaat.”

Who am I to stand in the way of such overwhelming interest in a small grey ball of fluff and meat that we call “cat.”  In fact, you wouldn’t believe some of the emails I’ve recieved specifically requesting an extended discussion of the cat that shares space with me in our apartment.  (I wouldn’t call Cat “our cat.”  Cat just tolerates our presence and allows us to feed her.)

Take a look at some of these:

Man, are there some dedicated kittyfans out in the world.  Hard to believe that there’s so much attention being paid on the cat of one lone internet voice in the wilderness.  Anyways.  You want cat conversation?  Fine.  I shall, under duress and because of public request, be the one person who writes about cats on the internet.  (Except for this one person, who despite the title of the website, seems to have a peculiar hangup about the marital status of Anthony Bourdain.  But hey, everyone needs hobbies.)

So, yeah…we’ve got a cat.

The little meatmound animal came into our life as a desperate attempt to keep pets in the life of She Who Would Become The Wife.  After spending well over a decade with the same family pets, her time with Limpy the dog and Edgy the cat was just about up.  In between the mourning for the loss of animals that were, minds turned to Pets that Might Be.  Eventually, these decisions turned to finding one little grey cat with white paws that could be called “Badger.”  (Don’t ask.)

Now, for the entirety of my existence on this planet, I’ve been a default “dog person.” Never had the boyhood joy of a child and his puppy on Christmas or anything like that, but tended to have dogs around, had relatives with dogs, and eventually in high school the folks decided to pull the trigger and get a chocolate labrador.  Apparently with 5 kids in the house, it took a while to get the children out of “animal stage” enough to where “dog” was an appropriate acquisition.

We as a family were never cat people.  In fact, to this day, my siblings tend to make reference to the way their new dog could quite possibly devour our little bundle of catmeat.  Funny, huh?  Then they wave their guns around and dive into their truck.  And drive to jail.  (Yeah, I’m not kidding.)  So when the idea of having grey walking fluff introduced into my worldspace wasn’t exactly a favorite idea when it was introduced.

But introduced it was – and you know what?  It took me a while, but I quickly became cool with it.  Did you know that cats don’t have to be taken outside like 8 times a day?  Did you know they’re not that loud?  Did you know they don’t go through a period of time where they shit all over everything and eat your stuff?  Why was I not informed about these things?

I was not.  And now I am far more informed.  And you know what?  I approve of existing with catmeat.  As someone who grew up never knowing the companionship of animals around me, I had fully expected to be able to tolerate the existence of a ball of fur around me at all times.  And now?  It’s kinda nice.  Sometimes I have terrible thoughts about what would happen were something, god forbid, to happen to my Human Life Companion and I’d be left with the cat.  I’d want to hang onto that cat.  That cat knew me back when I was single.

Should you want to get even more metaphorical into cat-ownership, one could make the point that kittyface is a little bit symbolic of me.  When I was 19 years old, living on my own in a run-down slum of a house with rotating punk band members, I tried to own a dog.  We named this dog “Anheuser,” which probably indicates that we should have been nowhere near animals at all.  I don’t know why I decided to raise a dog, and I certainly had no idea what the hell I was doing.  We couldn’t train it, couldn’t get it housebroken, fed it what it shouldn’t be eating and it was a horrible experience.

I, at the time, couldn’t take care of myself, was barely housebroken, was ingesting a lot of stuff that I shouldn’t have been ingesting and was barely human.  There’s a nice parallel there.  And now fast forward to a much more (dare I say) mature mindset, and I have an animal that’s neurotically clean and can take care of itself if it has to.  There’s a parallel there.

I could continue to make the case of the other girlfriend who bought a dog and brought it home without any warning or asking if I would be okay with a completely hyper animal.  Or her forced ferret exposure experiment which has scarred me to this day of the little useless rodents. All of these things were indicative of a worse version of me, someone who made bad decisions and lived with bad decisions and made worse ones.  And more bad pets.

And how now I exist in the world with a beautiful, thoughtful, caring partner who completely consulted me about the intake of a little shelter kitten and how it would impact our lives and if it would be okay to get a cat.  And I said, yeah.

More parallels.  It’s a brand new kitty-lovin’ world.

Now, internet world, quit asking.  I wrote about the ever-loving cat.