Glob-a-log

“I wish we had a garden.” I said.

The cat gave me one of those looks.

“Okay. I wish I had a garden.”

The cat yawned a Bored, bored, I’m very bored. Please someone, shoot that guy yawn.

“No, really. Then, when I’d like to go senile for a bit, I could potter about – potter, potter, potter – and talk to the flowers, admonish the leek, feed the birds…”

Swish, goes the cat’s tail; flubblub, goes the cat’s tongue.

“Okay, it would probably save both us some time if I fed you those birds directly. But then, when the girlfriend arrives…”

“What?!” said the cat.

“The girlfriend – when she arrives…”

“Yesss…?”

“Then you could stay out there, in the garden, till she went back to Tokyo again.”

“Over your dead body!”

“Ah, but I’m so much bigger than you. Over your dead body: now, that would be real easy, if we had a garden. And then I could plant some flowers on top of you. Or a bird feeder – yes, that would be nice: all those pretty birds visiting your grave each morning. Quite touching, really.”

(Insert some unspeakable cat noises here.)

“So, no garden then?” I asked the cat, when it had run out of expletives and out of the room, through the huff side of the cat flap.

Silence.

One Mississippopotamus – two Mississippopotamus – three Mississippo… and yes: one very annoyed and very paranoid cat’s head peeped through cat flap space.

“So, when will she get here?” it asked.

“Who?”

“That bloody woman, of course. You don’t want a stupid garden.”

“I don’t?”

“Not on your life. You’re much too lazy to want a garden.”

“True.”

“So, when is she coming?”

“Next week.”

“Right, I’m off. But I’ll be back!”

I firmly believe you should either do things properly or not at all. Most of the time that gives me the perfect excuse not to do things. Today though, I’ve made an effort:

- One illegally downloaded Stevie Wonder single (Happy birthday to you)
- One photo of the cat, taken while it was sleeping (so it couldn’t escape or make silly faces - or kill me…)
- Five cheese sticks
- A handful of mouse-shaped meringues

(Check – check – check – check. Yes, good and ready indeed.)

The cat sleeps through the early preparations, which is a definite plus. So, I’ve been able to pin its photo (with a silly cap and pink mittens picture-pasted – or whatever it’s called precisely – in the right places) to its scratching post, without the cat trying to scratch my eyes out.

Now, it’s time to bring in the cat’s breakfast: a cake-shaped mess of cat food, with five cheese sticks playing candle sticks on top of it.

I wake the cat by throwing the mouse-shaped meringues in its general direction. It opens its eyes, stretches, looks disdainfully at the meringues, curses when it sees its picture and frowns at the breakfast dish I now place on the floor.

“Many happy returns.” I say.

“Oh, grow up.” says the cat.

Then I put on the Stevie Wonder song and the cat gets really abusive. It disapproves mightily of the singer and absolutely loathes this particular song.

So, the cat finishes its breakfast as quickly as it can – which is quite fast, considering all the hissing & booing and plain evil cursing it manages to do at the same time.

When it has finished its meal – at the same time as the repeat thingummy kicks in for the third time – it gives me its hottest, murder-most-foul look and says:

“You… you… you…!”

I smile sweetly back and say:

“Oh, I forgot: I’ve invited all your little friends to come over later, for a proper birthday party.”

The cat growls, takes a swipe at my right ankle (but misses – I saw that one coming from a mile off, thank you very much) and then leaves the room through the huff side of the catflap.

“Just kidding.” I mumble, looking at the mess the little monster has made of its birthday cake.
As if I would have invited even more felines to the house. Not bloody likely, that.

Still, I reflect, while I clean up the mess, shred the stupid photo having turned off the music first (since the cat is not the only one who deeply disapproves of that nauseating song), here’s to a job well and truly done.

It’s not often you can mess up a cat’s mind and the start of its day so thoroughly. It will pay me back in any number of highly interesting ways later, no doubt but for now I feel rather pleased with myself and the world.

Sipping from my first cup of tea, nibbling on one of the cat’s abandoned birthday candles and still feeling rather victorious, I start to make a list of all the people I might decide to annoy & insult later in the day, per E-mail, letter, through the phone or in some snooty column.

Right:
Bush, the milkman, the paperboy, Blair, that computer idiot from work, our own prime minister, that TV quiz host, the Pope, of course…

Hm; busy, busy, busy.

I pour myself another cup of tea, finish off the last cheese stick and put on some Dead Kennedys.

The big K was right, I decide – in a way:

Ask not what the world and its cat can do to you; ask what you can do to them first.

There’s a guy on the TV, driving a car and explaining to me and the cat why we should also buy a Toyota - a Camry Hybrid, to be exact.

The car comes with lots of trees, an impossibly blue sky with an eagle flying through it and a lake that looks like it should have featured in some uppity mouth wash ad. The car also comes with a truly kidney-shattering, high octane & highly obnoxious kid in the back seat.

I look at the cat; the cat closes its eyes. So, no, sorry; we’d rather French kiss the hormonically enhanced adenoids of Sylvester Stallone.

Then the telephone: it’s the girlfriend. She says she missed me so much, she had to come back from Tokyo - and now she’s waiting for me to pick her up at the airport, wearing nothing more than a smile, two trunks of sexy underwear and a large bottle of massage oil.

(It’s not the girlfriend, of course. Just someone who wants to tell me everything I never wanted to know about mortgage rates.)

The cat yawns and tells me I should finally buy an answer machine or get rid of the damn phone altogether. I tell the cat to get lost.

It reminds me who owns the retractable claws in this relationship.

Just one of those days.

One of these days I will simply tell the girlfriend to come back from Tokyo and marry me or else. One of these days I will take the cat on a holiday to the Grand Canyon and leave it there on the business end of the longest bungee jump known to cat or man.

One of these days I will learn to speak Chinese, play chess, love my neighbour & my cat and flap my arms and flyayay awaaay.

In the meantime, I really must remember to buy new batteries for the remote, so that I don’t have to watch these stupid commercials all the time, stop answering the bloody phone - and just put up with that stupid cat of mine, I suppose.

Ah well, as some great sage once said: Such is life and it gets sucher every day.

I’m trying to sleep but the cat is reading from Leonard Cohen’s Book of Mercy:

“Here the destruction is subtle, and there the body is torn. Here the breaking is perceived, and there the dead unaware carry their putrid remains.”

I open one very tired eye. The cat looks back at me, too smug for words. That is, I can’t find the words. The cat continues:

“All trade in filth, carry their filth one to another…”

“Alright already – I get the message!”

The cat closes the book and starts to lick its page-turning paw in a highly annoyning, self-satisfied way.

I mumble-curse, get up and head for the kitchen. It is extremely irritating of course but the bloody animal does have a point: it’s been a few days since I put fresh litter in its box.

Two hours later. Showered, dressed, fed the cat – got fed up with the cat, left for the park.

It’s a beautiful day: dry, not too sunny; no people, so no boom-boxes, babies or dribbling dogs. No pigeons, pterodactyls or other flying pests. Quite simply, it’s one of those odd, perfect points in time…

…so, of course, like some demented Tardis, a barrel organ noisily appears out of nowhere and starts screeching like Siouxsie giving birth to a quintuplet of Banshees.

I look in the general direction of the sky-box and do one of those Why, God, why??!! half-sighs, half-moans.

Then I strangle the organ grinder, grind the horse, set fire to the barrel organ (okay, but in my wilder dreams I do) and head back for home.

There I find the cat, sitting in my lazy chair, smoking my pipe and perusing my much cherished copy of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

(The cat adores Hobbes; it’s got the T-shirt, the coffee mug and the bed spread.)

It’s very wrong to kick your pet, so I don’t. I just put on some Dylan instead, which annoys the cat much more than any half-hearted kick could have achieved. It disappears through the huff side of the cat flap.

(Two years ago the girlfriend painted directions on the cat flap. Coming in it reads ‘hug’; going out it spells ‘huff’.)

With any luck the cat will go to the park, cross paths with the organ barrel and strangle the man, grind the horse etcetera. With my luck though I’m sure the evil little bastard will just return with a dead pigeon – or pterodactyl.

The guilty undertaker cries,
the lonesome organ grinder sighs;
the silver saxophones say I should refuse you…

Nice. Some people get a streetcar named desire. Me, I’ve got a cat that sings old Dylan songs in my dreams, until a very early garbage truck comes around to murder sleep.

Bad: I don’t like waking up to the sound of screaming bin bags and a handful of irritating early birds, on a Monday morning at the tail end of a sheer endless & utterly boring winter.
Good: the cat is no longer mauling Dylan.

Bad: Now I have to feed the bloody animal.
Good: I can make a nice cup of tea while the cat is still preoccupied with its food.

The cat now sleeps on my bed. My tea has gone cold. Gmail tells me I’ve got spam: nine more Viagra ads - how nice. No new E-mails from my beloved - bugger. I could try to draw conclusions from the respective presence and absence of these mails. I could also go outside and kill a few of those irritating birds and try to find meaning in their still steaming entrails. I could even, just for the Hell of it, throw the cat in front of the garbage truck, bringing both to a screeching halt.

I can also shut down the computer and go buy more cat food. Man is but a slave to his pet. Before I close the door behind me, before I will be swallowed whole by Monday morning’s embarrassing embrace, I decide to get my own back. Unwise, I know. I will pay for it later, for sure. Still, it’s done – and I cannot help but grin madly, when I hear the machine wake up slowly and scrape its throat, while I tiptoe out of the room.

Behind me now the bleak morning sun; behind me all thoughts of online erection salesmen and fickle, faraway girlfriends; behind me the sound of a still hungry garbage truck moaning its way through Monday’s moody streets; behind me too, no doubt, a very angry cat. I imagine I am now inhabiting its dreams, singing:

My cracked voice and washed out horn
blow into the cat with scorn…

until it wakes up to the fully tanked up power of the music machine and the sound of master Bob’s cranky voice, singing I want you – over and over and over again.

The cat is not talking to me; the girlfriend is still in Tokyo. She did send me a nice Kafka quotation though:

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Only problem is: the cat shares the room with me and the cat is in a serious bad arse mood. Right now the Sistine Chapel wouldn’t be big enough for the both of us and my room – with its slightly pathetic thirty square meters – ain’t exactly Sistine Chapel material. No Michelangelo hanging from the ceiling to cheer us up either.

No idea why the bloody animal is in such a foul mood. Not that cats need that much of an excuse to sulk or wave disgruntled banners. Your average cat does not hang Forrest Gump posters in its bedroom. It might go online and buy a T-shirt with a dementedly smiling Jack Nicholson, maybe – but a smiling Tom Hanks: God forbid.

Anyway, whatever Kafka says, the cat is most definitely not rolling in ecstasy at my feet. It would probably cheer up if I turned into a cockroach though.