Closet Cat Person

 I'm an animal lover. As normal pets go, I definitely consider myself a dog person. But even though dogs and squirrels have been at war since the two creatures have existed, I still root for the squirrels once in a while. Cos I love squirrels, too. They're pretty damn neat. In fact, a comic book hero named Squirrel Man would probably be pretty bad ass. He could climb trees real good, hang upside down and shout at you for no evident reason. Not that any of that shit would come in real handy in a fight, but the rest of us can't do it. Or at least we can't do it as good as Squirrel Man.

So I like dogs and I like squirrels. I also like cats and birds. They're delicious! But aside from being some of my favorite cuisine, I like to observe these animals doing what comes naturally to them. I also like doing unnatural things in order to get a better look at them. I'm not talking about Satanic rituals or anything like that. And I guess I'm more referring to the birds when I say I like to check them out in their natural environment. I can look at the goddam cat anytime I want, especially if I open a can of tuna. What I'm talking about is that I put a low-hanging bird feeder in the garden.

It was okay when I first put it there. The foliage was pretty low to the ground. The cat would hang out and stare at the feeder, waiting for a customer. The birds, who are often noted for their keen eyesight, wouldn't approach the feeder when the cat was on patrol. Now however, thanks to the garden's location on Earth, the plants and flowers have all grown to nearly reach the little seed-feeder. The cat isn't quite so visible to the birds and now the bird feeder also moonlights as a cat feeder.

The family was brought a gift this morning: a deceased but unmangled sparrow. I thanked him and took it away from him, but I was still in my slippers and didn't feel like burying it so I just took the bird outside and gave it back to the cat. Only now I feel like an asshole for inviting the birds for lunch just so they can get mauled by a Siamese. I reckon I should move the feeder to a more bird-friendly locale. Either that or I should just admit that I'm a cat lover.

Pete and RePete Part 1

I started writing this for a kid who asked for it but I have no idea what it's supposed to wind up doing. Anyway, I might as well put it here.

 “Hey, Pete!” said the peacock.

“Yeah, RePete?”, the cat replied eagerly.

“I said. 'Hey, Pete'”, the peacock repeated, this time louder and with a much clearer enunciation.

Pete rolled his eyes. This wasn't the first time he'd had this conversation, not by a long shot. RePete was a heckuva nice guy and he was ferociously hansome with his rainbow plumage, but he really just wasn't that bright. He was also from France and spoke limited English with such a heavy accent that he was nearly impossible to understand.

Asking RePete to repeat something happened fairly often, but whenever Pete asked he never ever once had said, “Repeat”. After all, who says that?

Anyway, Pete was no fool in the first place but he had also learned to field his dimwitted buddy's questions by simply talking about something else. Pete always wore sunglasses to hide the fact that he only had one eye. His glasses were dark so you couldn't tell what he was looking at, but you always imagined that Pete was thinking something deep.

What Pete's glasses couldn't hide though was the scar that ran from the bridge of his nose to his ear. The scar disappeared into one side of the lens and popped out on the other side. Pete always seemed to purr softly, always seemed to wear a smile on his lips.

Though Pete may have looked wistful and brilliant, he was really just smarter than the average cat. He was born without his eye. Then one time when he was a kitten he got in a fight with his sister over a ping pong ball. She swatted him and left the scar on his face.

“WHAT DO YOU NEED, MONSIEUR?”, Pete said loudly with a friendly smile that looked fake but which was really only partially fake. It was real because Pete liked RePete, but it was fake because he was sure that RePete could very well have already forgotten what he was going to say in the first place.

RePete turned to him suddenly as if he had just noticed him. His tail feathers perked up happily. “Monseiur Pete!”, he said, whereupon he continued on for a moment in indecipherable English.

Pete smiled as if he, too had just arrived on the scene, even though the two of them hadn't left each others' sight since they had been in the orphanage together. Sometimes RePete could be a real pain in the butt, but somebody had to look out for him. Pete never teased RePete, he just kinda corralled the conversation so that it would make sense. “You wanna get some ice cream, Monsieur RePete?”, he said slowly and clearly.

As little English as RePete knew, one of the few words that he knew was the word “repeat”. His expression became serious as he looked towards the sky and recited, “You wanna get some ice cream, Monsieur”.

Pete rolled his eyes. “Yes!”

RePete stared at him blankly, “What is it, Monsieur Pierre? What is so exciting?”

Pete took the opportunity to take the reigns on the up-till-now sensless verbal exchange. “I want some ice cream! How bout you, pal?”

RePete's tail feathers sprung up straight, flashing every color in the spectrum. He looked to the sun and emitted a loud and shrill gobbling noise and began shouting “ROCKY ROAD” at the top of his lungs, though with his accent it sounded as if he were at a Black Sabbath concert and screaming “ROCK N ROLL!!!”.

Pete's one eye surely shut behind his sunglasses in as his smile turned almost imperceptibly to a wince. He quickly shushed RePete, saying “I know, I know, pal. Yeah we'll get that kind.”

RePete had been hopping from foot to foot. He stopped and looked at Pete. “Bon jour, Monsieur Pierre!”, he piped cheerfully as he stood at attention, seemingly bubbling over with joy at some sort of news that he could barely contain.

“What is it?” Pete said, certain that he had ducked under a wave of confusion.

“Let us eat some ice cream, Monsieur Pierre!”, RePete blurted. He pronounced 'ice cream' like 'ass cream' and Pete thought about pointing it out but decided it would be better if he kept it to himself. He had done a good job of getting RePete to focus on ice cream and he didn't want to screw it up now by cracking jokes that RePete wouldn't have gotten anyway.

“Great idea, RePete!”, Pete exclaimed. “Maybe we could---”

His sentence was silenced by his rainbow-feathered friend loudly blurting “GREAT IDEA!”

The smile on Pete's face faltered for just an instant. He just as quickly regained his composure and said, “Thank you, RePierre!”. RePete stopped and looked at him with a look of total and complete nonunderstanding. Pete absorbed the silence for a moment before he continued. “YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT, MONSIEUR! DUE TO YOURS AND MINE ECONOMIC WOES, YOU AND I SHALL ROB THE ICE CREAM TRUCK!”, Pete declared.

RePete stared at him with all the intelligence of a bag of hammers. “Repeat?”, he gobbled.

Pete was so excited at his idea, he took off his pirate hat and put his arms around RePete in an attempt to dance as he sang, “We'LL EAT ALL THE ASS CREAM WE CAN! WE'RE GONNA STEAL FROM THE ASS CREAM MAN!”.

As Pete danced circles around him, RePete lolled his head from side to side and repeated, “Repeat, Pete?” repeatedly.

It's A Small World

I've gone underground. To the basement. I like it here. It's a little ratty but I like places to be a little ratty. I haven't done anything in the way of decorating so it's actually more than just a little fuckin ratty. If you wanna know the truth, it's currently more of a dungeon than a rat's nest. I plan on elevating its' status sometime from dungeon to rat's nest, but so far it doesn't appear that I'm in any big goddam hurry. I'm just hanging out in my little zone here, listening to tunes and stuff and it's okay with me. Except for the duct that runs along the ceiling.

I haven't measured it but I think the heating duct is about five feet and nine inches off the ground. I'm six feet tall and if I were to hold my head up and walk squarely into it, it would smash me right in the bridge of my nose. That would fuckin hurt. Of course I don't walk into the goddam thing like that so that's one point for me. After that I can only lose the game. I don't have any other defense against the aluminum ductwork.

Oh yeah wait, and the duct is also a wimp! It's corners aren't even sharp! That makes two points for ol Kevo. Or does it?

That pipe is pretty sneaky. I'll duck under it and then raise my head prematurely. This results in me basically head-butting the goddam ceiling with the top of my head whilst simultaneously wrenching the hell outta my neck. Honestly, it's not that big a deal when I do that on the heating duct. I've met some pretty vicious doorways like that though.

So it's not all that painful, but it happens. If it was painful, I'd fuckin remember not do it. Or maybe I wouldn't... Anyway, once you stab yourself in the forehead with some bullshit wrought iron chandelier or something, you are no longer an innocent threat to the light fixture. You're gonna avoid the thing at all costs. But being vaguely annoyed that you tapped your noggin on aluminum with some give to it doesn't do much to jolt my memory.

The other night I walked into it going at a pretty good speed. I thought I had given myself plenty of clearance. Nope. WHAM!!! GODDAMMIT!!! I've done that more than a few times against the corner of the rectangular-bodied metal snake that lurks along the joists, seemingly impartially guarding the basement from the unwary and the drunk. But this time I really gave it a good whack.

So I'm not even bothering to tally up the heating system's points. It's officially terrorized me. Hell, I wind up walking around down here with my head down even though it's only necessary to do so when walking beneath the goddam thing. It has me whipped like a puppy. Is that even something people say?

The Brief Life Of Comedy

It's hard to be funny when I'm all worried and depressed. I still say funny shit, I guess. Just not as often and whatever joke I make is probably morbid and/or cynical and bitter. Sometimes my ideas and opinions just sound funny to me the way I happen to word them and inflect them as I babble them out. What can I say? I crack me up. Still, I haven't exactly been a goddam barrel of monkeys for the past while. Whatever the hell that means...

How the fuck did “a barrel of monkeys” come to be synonymous with “fun”. A barrel of monkeys doesn't sound like a good time. It sounds awful! At best the poor things would be getting lice from one another, shitting all over each other and who knows what all else kind of implied terribleness. And there's a good chance that it'll just be a total bloodbath. From what little I've seen on Youtube, a lot of monkeys don't fuck around. If you jam no fewer than five pissed-off monkeys into a barrel and seal the top tight so they can't get out, they're gonna gouge each others' eyes out and pretty much tear one another into little pieces.

Everybody knows that.

Sometimes I think of different funny shit that's gotten said over the years and it'll make me giggle. I keep stupid little jokes. I don't know if everybody does that or if not, how many people do it. It's a nice thing to do, I guess. A little sad, but nice. I know I'm not alone in rehashing little impromptu skits and quick-witted one-liners that I've shared with my friends in my head that you might've had to have been there for. But I consider myself lucky to have been there cos some of that stuff was fuckin funny. These are treasures that would otherwise be lost forever, like a poem that you write and throw away or like the best goddam cheeseburger you ever had that you won't remember for much longer than a day or two.

Like the time we were waiting in the train yard and my buddy peeked up to see whether the vehicle driving around across the yard was a railroad worker or a cop. I asked him if it was a bull and he replied that no, it was just a beat-up pickup. So I sang “beat-up pickup” to the tune of “Get Up, Stand Up” by Bob Marley. Without missing a beat my friend finished it up with “beat-up pickup truck”. Holy shit that was funny. Maybe it helped that we were a little giddy from exhaustion and from having full bellies for the first time in days, but it still cracks me up when I think about it.

Or the time when me and all my fellow squatmates excused ourselves from one of our friends' place who payed rent so we could go back and work on our house. Our friend told us he'd stop by later. When we got home somebody had a couple of cans of spray paint and next thing I know we're all sitting in a pile of garbage in somebody's room and huffing paint. Our friend showed up after a while, as promised, and looked at us like we were a major disappointment. “Jesus”, he said, shaking his head. “I thought you guys were gonna work on the house?” My buddy gestured to the trashed-out room around him and said “We ARE working on the house, that's why it looks like this!”

Or the time I picked up a banana and answered it, talked into it for a second, and handed to my friend, whereupon he took the call and made a bunch of arrangements with whoever we were suddenly talking to on the banana, keeping a perfectly straight face the entire time. Or the time somebody asked me to call the cats and I got out my phone and started talking to Stripes on the phone, asking him when he and mittens thought they might be home.

Yeah, I guess you probably had to be there but I'm glad I was.

Soulless Bastard

Entry for my writing group. The topic is "ghosts".

Souls are stupid. So is Hell. Heaven’s even stupider. Though I don’t often feel that life itself is all that sacred, I’ll go ahead and give you that life could be perceived as being pretty goddam amazing. But souls? Gimme a fuckin break! We’re not that fuckin special. We don’t have souls, we’re just narcissistic, organic robots. One of nature’s mistakes. And if human beings have souls, then everything else gets one, too. Don’t tell me that I have a soul but that the cat that I telepathically communicated with while I was on Robitussin doesn’t have a soul. Not to mention that the Dalai Lama’s also gonna tell you to get fucked. He thinks everything has a soul, too. But who cares what the Dalai Lama thinks? Buddhists, that’s who.

For the sake of argument, I’ll say that humans have souls. But I’m not giving up on everything else having a soul. If I’m going to Heaven (which I most assuredly am not) then I better get to hang out with all my old dogs. And I’m really not gonna have that great of a time sipping on gin and tonics in Heaven knowing that plenty of halfway decent folks are getting anally raped by demons with razor wire penises while they’re being boiled alive and eaten by spiders for the rest of eternity. That happens, according to the Bible. Maybe it doesn’t say that. Who knows? It says a bunch of other insane nonsense so it might as well throw in the razor-dicked demon thing while it’s at it.

So maybe you go to heaven, maybe you go to hell. Maybe you come back as a hamster who belongs to a malicious 10 year-old. Perhaps you become poison ivy. You just never know. Somehow though, in all of this there’s a possibility that you won’t go anywhere, that you’ll be trapped in this world without a body or a voice. How long you’ll be sentenced to this is unclear, as is the whole goddam idea that that would ever happen in the first place. It’s kinda fun to think that it might. It’s also kinda fun to think that this isn’t the life you get and that when it’s over, it’s fucking over. We all want one more chance. Another shot. Some of us want vengeance, some of us want true love. Personally, I could totally go for some chili cheese fries.

But that is neither here nor there. I’m talking about ghosts.

I’ve gotten the heebie jeebies before, don’t get me wrong. And I’ve entertained the idea that there might be ghosts because it’s fun to do it. I’ve also talked into a banana and pretended that it was a phone cos it was fun to do. I didn’t believe that the banana was a phone any more than I believe that there are bodiless souls hanging around intent on bugging the shit outta everybody. Still, it was fun and I’m glad I did it. I won’t go to my permanent grave regretting not having talked to a ghost on a banana. Take that one off the bucket list.

So, okay. In the movies, there’s always an Indian burial ground or some schmuck who got killed cos he or she knew who the real killer was or whatever. And in real life there are folks who claim to have seen or been accosted by ghosts. I don’t have the stats on this, but do you have any fuckin idea how many people have died since homo erectus has existed? I would think that everywhere would be fuckin haunted by now. Christ… You’re just minding your own business, waiting for the bus, and all of a sudden you’re tapped on the shoulder by some putz who got clubbed in the head with a rock by some asshole 5,000 years ago. He tries to explain why he’s haunting the bus stop but you don’t understand his forgotten language. He makes you spill your coffee. You get on the bus and don’t even think about it.

How old is humankind? Who knows? A quick google search said 400,000 years. Holy shit! That’s a lot of ghosts! I’m assuming that right before that there were a lot of pre-humans. Neanderthals and what have you. That’s a lot of neanderthal ghosts! Where the fuck are they? And getting back to the idea that every animal has a soul, are the parks haunted by squirrel ghosts? When I get an inexplicable itch on my arm, am I being tormented by the ghost of a fly that was swatted by a wooly mammoth right in this very spot 20,000 years ago? For that matter, why are we not hearing the thuderous footsteps of that wooly mammoth who died and whose soul still stalks the earth? Are the oceans seething with the ghosts of jellyfish and tuna and seahorses and whatever the hell lives inside seashells? Wow! We’re fucked! Are the ghosts of bacteria that I killed with antibiotics still coursing through my system? Christ. Do you have any idea how many brain cells I’ve killed? Maybe I’m possessed by them.

Yep. I’m haunted by the ghosts of all the brain cells I’ve slaughtered. That would certainly explain all this gibberish that I’ve been going on about for way too long…..

Tennis Anyone?

This week's entry for my writing group. The subject is "Invasion of Privacy".

Well, I wrote a little essay or rant or something on the subject of invasion of privacy that had something to do with how a convicted felon can’t get a goddam job or an apartment cos every prospective landlord and employer just has to click a button and find out his or her criminal background. Christ, they even have my DNA. In that essay, I mentioned that it must’ve been cool to live in a time when you could rob a bank and outrun the cops and the only witnesses were scared people who could barely remember what you looked like. Nowadays, the police have helicopters and GPS and every asshole on the street records the whole experience on their iPhones.

I didn’t even think to mention Santa Claus. Fuckin A. He knows all kinds of secrets about us. Nevermind God. That fucker’s EVERYWHERE. He’s hiding in the Port-O-Potty. Watching.

Instead, I thought about this.

I recently watched an interview with Tom Araya, the frontman for one of my all-time favorite bands, Slayer. It’s a great interview. He’s being interviewed by a couple of junior highschool-aged girls. He’s old and grizzly, plus he’s fuckin Tom Araya, but he’s sweet as pie when he’s answering the little girls’ questions. At one point he reveals that he used to play the broom before he ever learned how to play bass. He asks the girls if they ever played the broom before and they look at him like they don’t know what the fuck he’s talkin about. He laughs. So do I whenever I watch that interview.

When I was 13, I could totally jam on the tennis racket. I’d be playing the opening riff of “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath like nobody’s business. Hell, I could play all the songs on the Sabbath tape that I commandeered from my big sister without her seeming to have noticed. One time when I was rockin out, my 17 year-old sister walked into my room without knocking. I froze. I looked up at her. She didn’t even bother to roll her eyes. She just looked at me like “you gotta be fuckin kidding me”, turned around and shut the door. I rigged up a way to lock my door after that so I could practice and hopefully one day become a star.

(I never post links but I will this time. If you wanna watch the interview, it's really cute and it's right here.)

All Dogs Go To Hell

I keep not writing a story (or a novel, really) about me and my old dog. I mean, I write stories about me and my old dog, but there are so many stories and there’s so much confusion and so much meaning and so much realization that I can draw from my years as a young dumbass with a big, smelly dog that I can feel a story brewing. Kinda like a zit that you gotta pop. Like the kinda zit you invite your buddies into the bathroom to watch you pop.

My dog was nothing more than that. He was a fuckin dog. An old friend of mine who I’m certain remembers me far less often and far less fondly than I do him had once stated that “All Dogs Like The Butthole Surfers”. He may not even remember saying this, but I remember it. Hell, I’ve adopted it as an idea of my own.

Here’s why:

My old dog wasn’t very noisy. Good dog. Fuck noisy dogs. The only time I ever heard that dog howl was when he’d sing with the violins at the tail end of “Creep In The Cellar”. Not being a howler, he’d kinda gurgle instead. And he’d get embarrassed. You had to kinda look the other way or leave the room, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. But he’d do it. That dog liked the fuckin Butthole Surfers.

And really, who doesn’t?