Cat divination

By Juli

There’s a stupid anthropologist stuck inside me. Without real effort, I lean toward ethnography. My days are two steps back, one off to the side, down on my haunches waiting for the natives to do something interesting so I can scribble in my little notebook.

This gets tricky when the indigenous population wants to interact. Say, like during meal times. We have a no-fat-animal policy in this house (after nearly going to debtor’s prison because of two new dog knees, but that’s for another time). Anyway, the zoo animals FREAK OUT during mealtime. Hungry, hungry, hungry. There’s fur flying everywhere, and while a good “Get the hell outta my way!” will send the dogs running out of leg swiping distance (like that euphemism?), the cat is a wholly different entity. He's all offense.

The cat, in my little world of observation, gives me such great fodder for reflection and self-learning. Now, I usually have this strange but not uncommon tendency to think “the natives,” with their simple ways and paired-down existence and such, have it all figured out. It’s that whole, “you know everything there is to know when you’re born and then spend the rest of your life forgetting everything” way of thinking. The self-hating colonialists indulge themselves in. Yeah, that’s usually me. And for the most part, it works. If I could be more like the kids or the pets, I’d probably tack on a few years in “Real Age” due to stress reduction if nothing else.

But anyway, then there’s the cat. The godforsaken cat. Sometimes, he's just plain stupid.

Here’s the deal. Mealtimes, I’m juggling a couple of slimy dog bowls, heading toward a narrow rickety staircase that leads to our basement wonderland of storage, treadmill, the cat feeding zone, and the animal food vaults. The SECOND I pick up the dog food bowls the cat is on high alert. RACING around the house, meowing obscenities, knocking over things, running in to me, the dogs, the kids, the husband. He one-hundred-percent loses his shit.

So, my first step on The Stairs of Death, he comes zooming around from his last loop of destruction around the first floor, and he cuts me off at the ankle, racing down ahead of me. And if I don't give him a good hiss and a gentle physical reminder that I outweigh him by a whole helluva lot, he will try to trip me down every last stair all the way down. This happens every single time. Without fail. The odds are against me. One day I’m toast.

Now why, my post-enlightened, Starbucks-swilling, opposable thumb self wonders, why in the hell would you try to kill someone who is just about to give you what you want? WHY? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to explain this to the little “Id,” but if he trips me down the stairs and kills or paralyzes me, the little fucker is NOT going to get fed.

I lift my pencil for a moment and apply this object lesson to myself, looking inward. Am I too guilty of this same irrational behavior? Gripped by whatever unbridled emotion that takes over when I realize I’m finally, finally, finally about to get what I want. . .do I, meaning to or not, try and trip the Great Benefactor down the basement stairs?

I’ll have to think on that for a bit. I’m sure I probably do.