Life is Terrible For the Lint-Covered Breast Implant
Before Parker hopped up on the porch of my old art gallery two years ago, I had never spent significant time with a Siamese cat before. Persians, sure. Main Coons, a Himalayan, and plenty of Domestic Shorthairs of all sorts of colors. The closest I had been to a Siamese, though, was thanks to a neighbor when I was in high school, whose cat Champale loved to climb into my mother’s car to sleep and then freak out when the engine would start in the morning. I thought I was prepared for Parker, based on dealing with some of these obnoxious twerps. Oh, I simply had no idea. None.
One of the points that’s brought up by enthusiasts and detractors alike about Siamese is their very, erm, eloquent voices. No, scratch that. They talk. They yell. They scream. Worse, they’re cats who become horribly offended if you don’t scream back. None of these expressions follow logic in their use, either. Parker is just as likely to scream like a gutshot baboon when he wants an ear-scritch as he is to mumble the most pathetic mew to let me know that he’s out of food. Not only does Parker know and use a few English words (“No” and “Now” are his favorites), but those are atop a vocabulary that’s simply amazing for any other cat, and I once shared my life with a chinchilla Persian who came close to having conversations. Parker manages conversations, even if he’s absolutely single-minded as to what he wants to get across. And what does he want to get across the most? The fact that he wants to go outside.
Now, he’s not as bad as he was two years ago, but Parker fancies himself a wandering spirit, and probably would escape and never return given the opportunity. This isn’t out of any frustration about an abusive existence or a desperate need to return to a previous life: he just has a major case of horizon fever and lives for seeing everything he can. Considering that (a) the neighborhood boasts at least one pack of coyotes, including one that hopped the back fence last spring and hopped back out, and (b) he has no claws, front or back, even his prodigious cleverness would soon smack directly into the big bad outdoors to decidedly ill effect. Hence, we have a compromise. Parker gets time in the back yard every day, but only if I’m out with him and only before dark. (The only way he’s allowed out the front door is with a leash and harness, and the way he reacts to the outrage of wearing anything that restricts his movement in all dimensions, you’d think he had a paw staked to the ground.) He tries to climb the fence, which you’d think wouldn’t be possible without claws, or skip out the side door, and he doesn’t go outside again for 24 hours. Between consistent rules and his finally mellowing into adulthood, as well as his finally reaching his adult weight of 10 kilos, we have a detente, but I also know that he’d dash out the gate and down the road if I let my guard down in the slightest. After all, as my friend and former editor Chris DeVito puts it, he is cat.
Parker has plenty of reasons why he wants to explore, but one is particularly self-destructive. My next-door neighbors give plenty of reasons to enjoy living where I am, but one set of neighbors also have an absolutely gigantic yellow malamute, whom they themselves let outside when the weather is cool enough to let her. Most days, she camps in her own back yard, but when mornings are cool, they tie her to a post on a covered carport by the garage while they’re working inside, and she happily guards the garage door. She’s incredibly sweet, but she’s also very protective of Her People, so she gives one warning bark to interlopers before stepping up to settle issues. Since this dog is big enough to block out the sun when she steps up, people, other dogs, cats, squirrels, opossums, raccoons, coyotes, and the occasional bluejay all know better than to hang around when she finally gets out of her favorite sunbeam and stands up.
All, that is, except Parker. For the longest time, Parker’s main focus in life was to get past the fence, get over to Remmy’s sleeping spot, and give her a what-for. Never mind that she easily weighs ten times what he does, and he’s one of the top four biggest cats I’ve ever had in my life. Never mind that she could take him out just by sitting on him. Never mind that there is absolutely no chance of winning in any fight with this absolute Euclidean ideal of a dog. Parker was going to get a trophy, and he didn’t care about what he had to do to get his pelt. This only got worse the first time he actually saw her: the war was ON.
Well, he had two chances. The first was when I made the mistake of not treating my garage like an airlock while taking out garbage, and he squeezed into the garage as the main door started coming down. Most cats are terrified of the sound of an automatic garage door, but not Parker: he went sliding under the closing door like Indiana Jones, requiring me to run back inside for sandals and a flashlight. Thankfully, I found him in Remmy’s driveway, puffed up to where he looked like a Himalayan, ready to lunge and take her down. He rarely hisses except when severely offended, and here he hissed at me until he went hoarse. Three months later, he figured out a new way to get over the fence, with the same general results, other than my getting worse tinnitus than usual with the hisses in my ear.
Now, though, they have an impasse. Parker talks a bit through the fence if Remmy is there, and she even occasionally grunts in response, but it’s more about curiosity. Parker yowls over the injustice over not being able to get through, but not much, and he now accepts that their hanging out and playing Twister just isn’t on the schedule.
For the most part, his encounters with other lifeforms aren’t so bad. He loathes other cats, to the point of insensate howls in the middle of the night should a neighbor cat get into the back yard. He’s chuffed but not homicidal at the sight of the occasional opossum or even coyote. He stares down bluejays, crows, and mockingbirds, but knows he has no chance of snagging one, even by accident. He desperately wants to get out at nights to chase the rabbits that frequent the neighborhood, and the only reason I don’t worry for the rabbits is that while Parker’s chasing instincts are impeccable, his dispatching skills need a lot of work. He demonstrated this all summer with the annual emergence of cicadas from the roots of the big oak tree out back: when not chittering at the squirrels chittering right back, he’d snag cicadas out of the air, pat at them for a moment, and then carry them around in his mouth, looking as if he were especially enjoying a good cigar that buzzed. When they stopped buzzing, he’d drop them, giving them a chance to escape once the drool dried enough to let them fly.
With one exception, he has the same attitude toward the smaller vertebrates out back, including the indigenous rough-scaled earth snakes and Carolina anoles and introduced mediterranean geckos patrolling the yard. One big anole regularly challenged him from atop the fence by flashing its dewlap and rushing him, but that stopped when the anole got too overconfident over its escape skills and dealt with a half-hour saliva bath until Parker finally let it free. The one exception was a toad that appeared in the back yard last summer: I came across it as Parker was hovering over it, hissing at me in anger rather than annoyance. Parker wasn’t holding or injuring the toad in any way: he was protecting it, and he rushed over to guard it every time it emerged for an evening perambulation.
Well, even in unnaturally warm autumns like this one, the local reptiles and amphibians find spots in which to hibernate before cold weather sets in, and while the toad came out a couple of times after our brutal Summer 2023 ended, it eventually stopped after Halloween. Parker was unconvinced that I wasn’t just hiding his toad from him, and would demand to go outside for a quick run of toad-hunting, even when temperatures went below freezing. You see, he hadn’t checked everywhere, and that meant trying to dig underneath rocks and peer behind the gate in case it was hiding in plain sight. This kept going all winter and into the spring, and surprisingly the toad never returned. To this day, I don’t know if it died in the garden beds somewhere or if it escaped the yard, but only now is he no longer pining for his charge. The last grasshoppers of autumn have his attention at the moment: friends have offered to bring toads for him, but I don’t want to risk something happening to them if something in the yard isn’t amenable for their survival, and Parker doesn’t really need a toad pet of his very own.
The real challenge is ahead of us. Parker is already exceedingly miffed as to the shortened days as of late, expressing his severe disapproval over the sun coming up and going down two hours later than it was three months ago, and the end of Daylight Savings Time is only a little over a week away. Combine sunset hitting at 5:30 in the evening and his beloved summer heat being gone for another four months, and I’m not looking forward to his conversations when December hits with force and we start flirting with freezing temperatures. “Why, yes you CAN fix this. In fact, you’d better.”
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
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