The Dangers of a Cat That Produces His Own Event Horizon
We’re coming up on three years since a certain brown ball of spite walked up to me and decided “You’re cool. You’re feeding me every day until you die, capische?” It’s to the point where I’m copying the great Jeff Somers and singing to my cat: I’m still working on the lyrics, but “Paul’s Big Brown Tumor,” to the tune of Primus’s “Wynonna’s Big Brown Beaver,” is going to be a hit one of these days, probably only if Parker is in the music video from beginning to end.
Now that summer is over and the Great Kitchen Repair is pretty much finished, Parker’s life is now in something approximating a return to routine. It’s been a humdinger of a year, especially for the Lint-Covered Breast Implant: getting a soft spot in the floor fixed revealed all sorts of issues with the house, including an opossum that climbed into the foundation from a previously unknown gap and died, leaving a crawlspace that lived up to its name with the legions of fleas that vacated the opossum’s corpse. Clean that up and spray for insects, and one of the guys fixing the soft spot asks “Did you know about the leak underneath the kitchen. Mold mitigation, mold repair, and mold removal. Oh, the leak spread out from a blown connector in the pipe leading from the sink and spread out underneath the kitchen tile, gradually and slowly saturating the subflooring. Tile comes up, and then more, and now you can see the house’s bones. Rebuilt kitchen cabinets and replacement kitchen counter because the original counter surface was last manufactured at the beginning of the century, and replacement kitchen sink because the old kitchen sink went in back during the Reagan Administration. Replacement dishwasher, too, because that one personally shook hands with Elvis Presley, and it’s slightly more rusty than the wreckage of the Lusitania. New floor tile and backsplash, on both sides of the kitchen, and the cabinets need new paint. Plastic sheeting and more plastic sheeting, new sheeting to replace the sheeting airlock from the mold mitigation. Having to go outside and through the garage to do laundry, and then the whole laundry room needs its tile replaced, too. Paint and mortar and burning tile in the tile saw, and that’s after a month of filter fans trying to dry out the moldy areas that roared 24/7 for weeks. And should I mention having to stack the kitchen contents in storage tubs for three months and try to figure out, sight unseen, which tub has silverware and which one has pantry goods and why are the important ones always at the bottom of the stacks underneath a couple of hundred kilos of kitchen goods?
It’s been rough. It’s been rough for Sarah, Theora Jones to my Edison Carter, because we’d made great inroads on combining our kitchen hoards into something we could use and access for cooking, and then it all went into tubs. Most of all, it was rough on Parker, because suddenly big portions of the house were off-access. Not only was he forbidden to enter into sealed areas, but then we had to lock him in the bedroom when construction crews came inside and didn’t know that el gato monstro wasn’t supposed to go outside, even if he acted as if he had keys to the front door. Oh, how he suffered.
Most of Parker’s expression of the sheer injustice about being deprived of total freedom is typical Cat. Sarah was always a dog person, so she’s repeatedly running into and trying to understand cat behavior, and she’s now reasonably familiar with typical cat psychology and neuroses. Yelling about being fed three hours before the typical feeding time, for instance. She’s even a trooper about the typical cat routine of Parker wanting me to get up at 5 in the morning, realizing that I’m not getting up that early without a good reason, and deciding “Well, Dad may not get up because I ask, but he’ll get up if I walk all over Mom and wake her up.” Well, she says she understands and isn’t bothered by ten kilos of huffy feline stomping on her back, but I still rush up, with the same urgency as if I hear cat vomiting sounds coming from the other room, when he looks right at me, walks on Sarah’s back, and starts to pogo.
As has been the case for the last three years, Parker surprises everyone, even if he’s the perfect example of a quantum cat otherwise, and the latest example manifested itself when the kitchen demolition started. He’d already had a rather odd tackling move when playing with toys, where he’d roll and somersault like a truck tire when he grabbed something. He also already had a regular habit of checking in on me when he had bad dreams and climbing up on the bed to flop next to me in the middle of the night. No big deal: that’s typical Cat. The surprising part, was what he started doing.
Every cat I’ve ever shared my life with had different habits about sleep. My first cat would get between me and the wall and gradually shove me off the bed, which was particularly unfortunate for me as I was on the top bunk of a bunk bed. Then I had the chinchilla Persian who would crawl on my chest and lick my nose until I woke up, biting if the licking didn’t have an effect. There was the brother-sister pair who would curl up on the headboard and then wrestle, falling on my head. There was the pair of 15-kilo cats who would get on either side of me, pinning down the blankets so I couldn’t get my arms free, and then yell when the alarm clock went off and I fought the both of them to shut it off. (These two also used to tag-team me, one lying on the pillow over my head and batting my forehead with a paw, while the other would sneak like a vampire bat onto my feet, staying there to suck out every last calorie of body heat he could until the pain of having my feet flattened woke me up and I kicked him off.) There was the one who liked to lie on my head all night, and the other who would climb onto shelves and knock books on my head, snickering the whole time. Then there was my late cat Leiber, who loved to fetch and thought the best time for me to throw his favorite toy was at 3 in the morning. Compared to this, Parker would be surprisingly mundane, wouldn’t he?
Oh, if we only knew. Over the summer, Parker picked up his newest habit. Jumping on the bed, no issue. Meeping to see if I was asleep, no issue. Marching up and down my side before settling in, no issue. That’s when he pulled out his secret weapon, raising himself up on tiptoes and throwing himself at my side.
To get an idea of the sensation, get an old bowling ball. Wrap it in a blanket and assorted old towels until it weighs a full 10 kilos. Put your bundle in a pillowcase. Lie down in bed, lift that mass on your right side, and drop it on your ribcage. Love the feel of the air in your right lung getting squeezed out? Now imagine that happening while you’re asleep and you’re not expecting the impact. That’s my night, at least once per night and thankfully not more than thrice. Sarah no longer asks what made me make the particular whoof as lint-covered breast implant makes human rib creaking. She hears the surprised expulsion of air and she knows. I suspect that the rest of the neighborhood hears it, too.
So that’s Parker’s and my detente. He still wants to go outside, and he tolerates a harness and lead only because he knows he’s not going out without the harness. A couple of hours later, when I’m just drifting off, he exacts his vengeance. If you read a story on the newsfeed about “Man Killed By Monstrous Cat” and it involves “unknown Texas man who suffocated when a small leopard crushed his ribs,” well, it’s been nice knowing you.
(Added note since last installment: Mandatory Parker shirts and other ephemera are now available via Redbubble, so know that you can have great attire, but that attire can only be improved with album cover T-shirts. All sales go toward keeping him from eating my still-cooling corpse, so please buy mass quantities.)
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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