Home alone again, and I was reading an article about depression, whilst humming a Muppets song.
Schizophrenic, nous..?
The girlfriend was on one of her solo expeditions, hunting for souvenirs or face cream…, I think. I couldn’t remember precisely, since I had been watching the cat, while she was talking about her plans for the first part of the day.
The cat had been stalking the neighbour’s new Mazda - again. No idea why. To me the Mazda looked perfectly inoffensive but the cat had developed a passionate hatred for the poor car.
So, while the girlfriend had been talking about Dutch chocolate (or aromatic bath salts or something) I’d sipped my tea, looking out of the window, to where the Mazda had been behaving stereotypically inscrutable, ignoring the cat’s angry hisses.
I’d been hoping the car would kick the cat’s arrogant arse but it had not been in any hurry to oblige me in this respect.
Which was rather a pity, since the cat already had a very warped view of the world and its own place in it. The cat was, to put it very mildly, not exactly a stranger to feelings of grandeur – or grandiose delusions.
Anyway, done with the newspaper’s take on depression I took old misery guts Burton’s hefty tome from the shelf and opened it blindly – which is what I always do with that book.
Like Neil Gaiman’s Oracle, Burton talks to me in random fragments that almost always seem to make sense on some deeply solipsistic level. Again, Burton didn’t disappoint:
…and what proportion is fit for all calling, because private professors are many times idiots, ill husbands, oppressors, covetous, and know not how to improve their own, or else wholly respect their own, and not public good.
Right. I looked through the window: the Mazda was still in one piece but the cat was no longer in sight.
Prrrt…
Well, that explained why I didn’t see it outside anymore.
Prrrt…!!!
“Yes…?”
Ah, how cute: yet another partly dissected bird. If at cars you don’t succeed, and all of that.
Prrrt.
You want me to cook that for you?
Prrrt
Then you better go find yourself another chef. I’m not going to pluck or cook some damn, fat sparrow.”
“It’s a blue tit, you idiot.” said the cat, “Don’t you know birds?”
“I know the difference between a live and a dead bird – and that’s all I need to know. Now, if you haven’t come to bury the damn thing, go praise it - somewhere else.”
“Yes, boss.”
When cat and bird had left the stage through the huff side of the cat flap, I murmured:
“For every bird there is this last migration:
Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;
With a warm passage to the summer station
Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.”
Now, to take a shower or wait for the girlfriend and then take a shower together? Decisions, decisions…
Putting on the kettle for yet another pot of tea I looked outside. There the Mazda was peacefully washing itself (and looking almost cute in its florid shower cap) whilst singing Gloria Gaynor’s I will survive.
Nope, for the life of me I couldn’t see what the poor car had done to offend the cat…
Ah well, the ways of my cat were even more mysterious than those of Keith Richards in his wildest, drugs-fermented years.
Now, if only the girlfriend would return, then maybe we could forget about cats, Mazdas, dead birds or the sorry fact that there were only two more days of her visit left – and go play doctor and nurse for the rest of the day.
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