Mandatory Parker: “I Have A Cat and I Must Sleep”

The 10-Kilo Lint-Covered Breast Implant Has Plans

I’ll say it right here and right now: you do not want a smart cat.

Before anybody starts, I’m not disparaging feline intelligence. In my nearly 60 years on this planet, I have shared my life with critters ranging from earthworms to pigs, from savannah monitors to mantises, and cats generally take up residence at the far right of the bell curve of non-human intelligence near parrots and goats. (Trust me: goats ain’t dumb, but they get away with so much by pretending to be so.) Thanks to my girlfriend Sarah, Jeri Cale to my Russ Post, I have a new appreciation of dogs because of her late dog Kila, but I keep going back to cats. Until I’m in a position to keep kunekune pigs and crocodile monitors, cats are the default pet, mostly because they learn readily, enthusiastically, and on their own terms.

Ah, but there’s the problem. I’ve had a wide range of cats through my life. One could get across a slew of emotions just from how he held his paw, and he loved pushing me out of bed in the middle of the night. Another had the oh-so-charming habit of expressing his boredom at night by climbing on my chest, licking my nose until I woke up, and then biting my nose if I didn’t respond. There was the brother-sister pair that tag-teamed each other all night long, with the sister instigating matters by smacking her sleeping brother in the head and then yelling her fool head off when he came after her to clean her clock. I’ve had cats that yowled, and ones that squeaked, and one that barked. My late cat Leiber was an absolute sweetheart, but he was so dopy that I regularly threatened to rename him “Doctorow.” There was the one so traumatized from a previous life in a meth house that she would only allow people to pet her if she was wedged underneath furniture like a chuckwalla. There was the one who passed audible gas and who thought his perfect place in life was sleeping on my feet, which as he weighed 15 kilos meant lots of pain at night. All of them, even Leiber, were considerably more intelligent than comparable dogs or rodents. (I disqualify the common guinea pig from any discussion of rodent intelligence: after spending a summer in high school caring for a brother’s friend’s guinea pig, I am convinced that they allowed themselves to be domesticated solely because they have problems remembering to breathe.) But Parker…

Ah yes, Parker. Sarah regularly compares his life and habits to a comparable human, and regularly notes that like human toddlers, he’s very forceful in what he wants. From the moment he entered my life, he mastered the English words most important to him, namely “No!”, “Now!”, “More!”, and “Out!”, but now he’s expanding his vocabulary, and destroying my sleep cycles with it.

The beginning of January is especially tedious for the Lin-Covered Breast Implant. Even with Dallas’s unnaturally warm weather at the moment, it’s not his preferred temperature, and the sun goes down far too early in the evening to suit him. In response, he has thoughts about the state of affairs, and regularly tries new yells, yowls, and yodels to try to get across to us monkeys why we should put all of our mental and physical effort into rectifying it. He still demands to go outside in the late afternoon, but then trills to return as soon as the sun goes down. He still takes after his namesake in getting me up at dawn to discuss the bonus situation, but now he’s learned that if he bugs Sarah, he can get me up at just about any time. And he’s building a vocabulary.

Most cats have about ten to fifteen particular meows, yowls, chirps, and grunts to get a response out of us upright apes, although many only need about three to five. Big surprise, most of those involve food. At last count, Parker has about 35 different calls to inspire different responses, and worse, he’s experimenting with new ones. The last five “It’s 3 ayem: get your ass out of bed and play with me” plaintive screeches don’t work? The damn cat tries new ones that guarantee a response, if only the shock of thinking in the dark “Is that my cat? Or did someone let a wolverine into the house?” I live in Texas, where opossums regularly scream at each other and at their own asses underneath bedroom windows until persuaded to leave with a broom or rake (never enough to hurt them, but enough to annoy them into realizing that a human is in the vicinity), so this is a completely reasonable concern.

Ah, but it wouldn’t be Parker without his special touch to the situation. He knows at what time I should be up and moving during the week, and at what time I should be conscious on the weekend. He knows when we normally go to bed, and tries to herd us toward sleep when he decides it’s late enough. He trained Sarah to turn on her bathtub faucet to let him get ultrafresh water in the evening, and when she heads anywhere near the tub, he’s there awaiting his special tap service. He now knows all of the local cats and dogs, and when they’re out and about, and he knows when the sun is about to go down versus when it should go down in the summer. And the damn cat has a vocalization for each and every one of these.

All of this comes together in this horrible week after the holidays, when everyone other than cats tries to get back into the pre-holiday schedule. This does NOT work for Parker, and he lets me know this by yelling and bouncing his ten kilos of bulk on my ribcage when he’s bored, which is usually in the wee hours of morning. He now knows that if he trods on Sarah, this wakes me up enough to try to keep him from waking her, and that’s when he tries his vocabulary expansions the most.

And what does he gain from his vocalization improvizations? Well, he’s become bored with walking me to the food bowl just so I can watch him eat. Instead, now he herds me to the living room couch, gets up atop a nest of blankets, and expects me to watch him as he sleeps, following me back to bed to let me know that I get no sleep until he gets his. It’s his world, and he needs all of us monkeys to witness it. Sarah assumes that he might grow out of it, or maybe that Parker needs a cat of his own to keep him company. I’m already warning that with Parker’s natural dexterity, he’ll have a new cat using computers and phones before you know it, and the last thing I need is to be awakened to the cat version of the Tube Bar tapes. And so it goes.

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